LOCALITIES 7

By mieladmin / On / In Localities

Jez Noond:

Childhood amended (part 2):

09_MIEL
(Outside, the pathways that lead to the munitions storage areas are old concrete, laid down originally after World War II as the airfield expanded and became home to part of the UK’s nuclear defence project.)

Personal geographies form important aspects of our identities. Landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes, even lunar landscapes mould our psyches and our psychoses. Memories of places and spaces linger like way points over shoulders on the narrative journeys we call our lives.

Current thought on cognition and memory focusses on the notion that there is no central ‘hard-drive’ in the brain where memories are somehow stored and retrieved. There is only ever one copy of each of our memories in our brains. Individual memories are fragile texts, and when one is called into what we term consciousness it is read and then rewritten.

10_MIEL
(The paths snake their way through earthworks which protect the arsenal buildings. Further along, much of the earthworks themselves have receded or have been taken away for some other use. New growth has replaced large volumes of soil and grass like giant flower boxes. Between these concrete structures lie the munitions storage buildings themselves.)

 

Memories change. They are fluid, liable, under conditions of joy or trauma, to be recast in new forms.

11_MIEL
(The angles of the concrete supports are specific and replicated throughout the UK’s airfields. The angles themselves are like memories. They are a distinctive feature of this type of blast reduction fortification.)

Childhood memories are rewritten as we age. Each time we remember a place from our childhood it fuses with new perceptions and new locales. What we call déjà vu can perhaps be seen as an indication that memory exists partly as sensory stimulus in the physical world around us.

A walk down any street may suddenly trigger a memory of a childhood event: the time you were bitten by a dog; those red sandals you wore to school. A particular arrangement of colours, buildings, avenues of trees, a quality of light, the sound of a bell, the smell of market stalls trigger synaptic pathways in our brains that stimulate the memory of a place that is similar.

12_MIEL
(In between the concrete walls, sunlight casts angular shadows over the dense growth of decades.)

As we walk on and enjoy this uncanny sensation (and enjoy the words we have that name these sensation events) the memory that was triggered has been amended; new experience has been tagged on.

13_MIEL
(Small trees have grown up over the years to produce elegant barriers to further exploration. The growth is beautifully framed by the concrete blast structures. At a few points though, it is possible to venture to the doorways of the munitions storage buildings themselves.)
14_MIEL
(Fantastic details await: a beautiful spider’s web spun right across a doorway. The spider at the centre of its web.)

My childhood has been amended.

This may be one reason why memory fades; the specific replaced by the generic. Perhaps this is why we seek the individual and the unique in a world that is increasingly modular and the same in feel.

16_MIEL
(An exquisite rat’s skull. Picked clean by insects and bleached by the seasons. Moss grows through the tendon and muscle points, slowly claiming the bone.)

My memories of growing up on an airfield are amended by these images. The photographs may not speak directly to you in the way they speak to me—these images send whispers to my ears and bring tears to my eyes. RAF Newton has taken me back down the Fosse. Back to my childhood Kemble and the anxiety of war.

The Fosse as runway to pacifism.

 


15_MIEL

 

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(All images & text by Jez Noond.)

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