Posts Tagged 'society'

Text and photography by Roderic Gill. Click on photo for larger view

In cities, towns and villages, the architecture and character of a Place is the statement of those who live there. If I live in a street, and I paint my house fluorescent green, the character of my individuality is subsumed and dissipated as the individual statements of every other resident merge, coalesce and flatten like beads of colour merged into mud under an artist’s plate knife. Zoom out and out further, and the violence of my own demented colour choices disappear as we merge across the individualities of more and more people. At the level of a city Place, my contributions remain to be noticed only by my immediate neighbours (who will probably lobby the local authorities to repaint down to a statement less likely to assault the exertions of their own, more subtle, statements of urban individualism).

But you can still detect the imprints of individuals, in this time and through times past, in even the deepest urban collage. Despite the press of numbers, our urban landscapes are a living collective identity. As I walked down this lane in the town of Segovia, Spain, the pressing presence of the Place through which I passed has manifested through an enormity of time and population. The towering cathedral overhead reminds us of the cultural binders that have shaped this place for a thousand years. That most of us walking here are tourists is indicative of how the accumulative timelines of identity can attract and impress. But it is hard for an individual, any individual, to make an emphatic statement out of the context of the Place as a whole; other than via an act of sabotage or via a feat of outrageous individualism (like erecting a statue of oneself right in the middle of the street). These places are places of large scale, collective, accumulative identity-making where the mark of specific individuals is hard, though still possible, to detect. Perhaps that might make many feel content; less spotlighted, less exposed.

When a statue is erected as a statement of individuality, it’s usually of someone that the collective identity-makers of that Place decide is someone of singular importance. Like this statue of Juan Bravo in a square further down that same Segovia street.

Perhaps it’s comforting to people to be a part of but not to be above the collective individualism expressed in our larger urban places. To be part of the story but not beyond it. That would provide a sense of belonging and contribution without the discomfort of spotlighted difference. Perhaps many of us are attracted to cities as a place to blend identity rather than to stand too far apart. We have the potential to stand out, but not the necessity to do so. That’s consistent with the tribalism of our species. Large urban places are, though, dangerous to the project of identity-making. They are places that can fall too easily into the apparent allures of bigger-is-better mega place blending; the temptation is to seedbed the contemporary plague of globalised placelessness that dislocates the heritage of our cultures and of our capacity for localised self-sufficiency. Small and beautiful is blended and shredded into the manic uniform grey of the economic rationalist’s monochrome vision. In our increasingly globalised world, will any who pass this statue of Juan Bravo even remember who he once was? Do they now?

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In the country things are different in so many ways. These are wilder, remoter, more human-individualistic places; places where the family unit becomes a distinctive constituent. Here, there are not enough of us to blend out all the spikes of our more exposed identities. The monuments we construct as individuals are partitioned from the monuments our neighbours build via moats of space. The road, out here, is a key part of the identity of Place. The road not only connects, but is a part of the social design of a rural Place. Some of these local roads were, indeed, built by those who live there. Cart tracks became the foundation for cars. Which explains the confusions many from outside these rural Places experience when they visit. Public roads merge into private tracks. Navigating these roads is like a local cultural dialect; intelligible to those who live there and frequently intimidating to those who don’t. Ownership blends and blurs. Roads are for transport; and for the herding of sheep. Matters of ownership and permission to proceed matter only to those from outside. To those who live there, these roads are part of their social landscape.

This is a road right through the core of a Place known to the locals as ‘Scots Corner’. This is a Place with a 160 year tradition of Scottish rural settlement; a Place where the Scots who came attempted to adapt the lifestyles they once knew to the similar, but distinctly different terrain with which they had elected to reconfigure their lives. As it happens, this particular Place is at the core of one of the most resilient and most famous superfine Merino wool growing regions in the world. The families who first settled here, unlike many other parts of Australia, are still here, generation down from generation. This is a Place that has resisted the corporate takeover of rural Places that has blighted so many other parts of rural Australia. This is a Place where families still prevail, as a counterculture to the economically rationalised corporate takeover of agriculture we see virtually everywhere else. These are families who struggled, survived, thrived, adapted to and genuinely loved the Place they now called, and will continue to call, their home.

Perhaps the most evident sign that a place is a Place is its possession of both a Church and a cemetery. Better still if both were hewn out of the ground by the efforts of the ancestors of those who live there now. The character of a Place is rarely as evident as in these two cultural landmarks. The cemetery presents a reminder of the linage and resilience of those generations that have persisted, to this day. A reminder of when those lineages commenced, the journeys they have sustained and the character of the Place as it is now. This is the Kilcoy cemetery. Remote, silent, exclusive to the families who have made this place through generations stretching back to the limits of living, collective memory. Cemetery’s tell the story of the Place that these monuments sometimes cryptically recall. A line of same-shaped, same-dark granite gravestones crossing a span of 150 years tells a tale of a single family that has stayed. Read more intently and the connections between the different family groups are plotted out like an historical record. Nuanced by the tribal gathering of family groups in sub plots. Intrigues are recalled by the distance between some of these plots. Like the remote stones way off to one corner, all by themselves. Neglected, collapsed, forgotten. Like the stones maintained, sustained; continuously repaired. Look closely to note the repairs to pillars broken in the wild storms of the past. Gravestones assaulted by howling winds and the erosion of time. Look closely to see how those stones are maintained as part of the living memories of those who still connect to this Place as blood in living veins.

These monuments line up like an array of marble chairs; all facing into the valley these families have worked and loved for generations gone and, under their vigil, for generations to come. Those who have gone lie at rest here maintaining a vigil of memory over the very places where they once lived. Those who still live there connect back to times past as they meet this stoney gaze. They remember the generational heritage that has given them this gift of a lifestyle from which they could never be separated. Cemetery’s like this are not only a statement of the riligious beliefs of those who meet there through time. They are a place were the lives of those who have gone continue to cross into the lives of those who remain. This is a time stilled outstretched bridge from times past to times to come.

Apart from the homes the people have built, and the roads they crafted to connect, the only other expression of collective identity is the local church. The parallel between this local kirk (a Scottish Presbyterian kirk of the most expressively, emphatically simple kind) and the grand cathedral towering over the streets of Segovia is their manifestation as an expression of collective local Place making. These churches are markers of the social fabric that mark places as Places. Grand, outrageous opulence for a community with mighty grand pretensions contrast with but continue to serve the same purpose as this simple timber kirk crowning another windswept hill: to mirror the cultural character of those who cooperated in their construction. Consider this simple timber building, now overgrown and teetering on the final throws of white-anted decay. It’s no longer used for the religious purpose to which it was once applied. The building still remains, just like the headstones in the cemetery. Ten years from now, the building will be gone, after 140 years. But for now, the kirk and the cemetery watch each other across the span of the valley that separates one from the other; the valley where those who built both continue to live and work.

The kirk will decline as the roads the outsiders have built ease access to other, larger, less organic places to go – like the buildings for religion the centralised religious bureaucracies have built. The people now go to buildings outside this Place to pray. They go to other places to give thanks where thanks for the heritage they share does not reside. This is a metaphor for these globalising times. Even though I do not share the religious connections for which our kirk still, despite all, stands, I consider its decline to be a wound that will finally and ultimately bleed the lifeblood out of this Place and render it, eventually to be just another place defined by commerce alone. The defiant, extravagant pious protestantism of those who built this Place was grafted into our lonely kirk. That was a protestantism not just in a religious sense; but in a sense of making a life in a quiet, dedicated, unassuming way that would reward that dedication with a Place-connected life for generations to come.

This small and beautiful Place as a Place that has organically evolved through the self-sufficiency and persistence of those who have lived here is a Place struggling, just like this decaying kirk, to remain a Place under the dislocation and ecological-economic insanity of the new globalised religion of conformity and market-amenable uniformity. So too for the cathedrals towering over even the larger Places of the world. Their fate is to become mere tourist attractions to outsiders seeking in vain to connect with the character of Places that persist now only as cultural exhibits to be consumed. In these globalised times, we consume our needs for heritage rather than contribute our lives to the living entity a heritage always used to be. The more emphatically demonstrative bigger city Places are as much under the onslaught of white anting as is our local kirk. In both cases, the real decay is the white ant like colonisation of all our Places by the culture of one-size-fits-all asserted through the globalised cult of economic rationalism that has taken all our tribes to the edge of no-place at all.

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