Light at the end of the tunnel?

If I haven't blogged much for the last two years, it'll be because my first preoccupation has been chairing the Media Education Association. Tomorrow I resign as Chair and start getting my life back - at least until it all gets swallowed up again by the PhD I'm planning to do (more about his later - I hope). Meanwhile I've been enjoying myself today sorting out the 103 pictures I took when TAS and I were in Belgium from Sunday to Tuesday. This was a long-planned trip on his part to see his grandfather's grave, but along the way it accumulated loads of research on WW1 and the Ypres Salient in particular.

In various visits to Belgium - mainly Brussels, but also more recently Antwerp - I've tried to understand what the differences are between the French and Flemish communities, and never got very far: people in European cities have more in common with other people in European cities than can ever reveal their roots. But once we were in West Flanders I was into the kind of country I recognise: cabbages, potatoes, leeks and strawberries coming along nicely in the fields and not yet completely ousted by eurosubsidy maize; big fat working horses (I recall Henry VIII and his "Flanders mare") and white cattle meditating in big meadows; long empty station platforms and quiet cobbled streets. It's deeply rural, relaxed and cosy, despite the thriving industrial estates that pop up here and there, and there's nothing to tell you what it was like 90 years ago. Only a queasy sense of dread generated by what I'm reading: Forgotten Voices by Max Arthur (Ebury Press 2002) makes it seem not quite like train journeys from London to Devon or Shropshire or Sussex. So that's why the city folk in Brussels smile a little when they talk about Westhoek, and why I think Hmm, I wouldn't mind coming back here to see more, learn about a place that English wool merchants once knew better than they knew London.

But at the same time I wanted to get the bus to Passendale, or go and stand on the Mesen Ridge: not so much to wallow in the glutinous swamp of remembrance that's churned out for the coach tours and the packed ranks of school parties at the Menen Gate, but trying to wrestle with the vertiginous recognition of non-remembrance and the gulf between Now and Then. The thing about coming to places like this is precisely that we can't remember: how could we? Even those who survived could mostly say nothing about it. I kept thinking of Walter Benjamin's amazing image of the Angel of History: "His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." ('Theses on the philosophy of history', Illuminations, Schoken Books 1969, pp257-8, with thanks to Brian Winston for the reference in his Media Technology and Society, Routledge 1998). So we communed with the dead in the rain at Dadizele (see the link above), noted their ages, and collected their epitaphs. And then we went home.