This will be the second essay on ‘Learning About Landscapes’ written by J.B. Jackson, as published in his 1980 book ‘The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics’. In the previous essay I looked at his presentation of landscape from the point of view of a traditional tourist, someone who, back in the day, was known for touring.
In summary, it’s worth reiterating that unlike the contemporary mass tourist, the traditional tourist is a man of property, i.e. man of privilege, someone who has the necessary dough to spend wondering about his surroundings, learning about this and that, about those little differences between places and the people who inhabit those places, while enjoying the view. He points out that this early tourist view, dating back to the 1800s and early 1900s is no longer viable, not because he can’t see it that way himself but because, for him, the world has changed so much that the corresponding view, that traditional landscape of this and/or that place, just simply isn’t there anymore. I countered this by pointing out that it seems to be the case, but only so and so, because what is considered traditional isn’t necessarily only agricultural, but also industrial, meaning that this view he is fond of can actually adapt to changes, even more than he seems to think is possible.
What I forgot to mention, to include in my previous essay was that I actually quite happen to like the things that supposedly aren’t worth seeing, the parts of town that contain no Sehenswürdigkeiten. For example, when I was in Regensburg, I quite liked the bike ride through a neighborhood that had these, sort of out of place feeling, 1970s looking apartment buildings. Certainly not a match with the medieval part of town, nothing to see really, but I reckon they had their own vibe, as we made our way through that area on a sunny day. Now I wouldn’t lament if one day they’d be gone, but the point being that not everything that you find interesting has to have that Sehenswürdigkeiten.
Anyway, there’s a whole other story contained in his text, which I’ll cover in this essay. So, the topic for this essay deals with what he calls the military landscape, based on his experiences serving in the US military during World War II. Without going into detail about what he saw, specifically (as I’m sure you can check it out yourself), he (11-12) notes that what he came to see was all kinds of streets, rail lines, canals and buildings. It’s what you’d generally expect in urban areas. For him (12) the interesting part of this is the contrast between the peacetime landscapes:
“In normal times I suppose the streets would have been crowded with men and women going to work on bicycles or in streetcars, and coal smoke would have floated from the tall chimneys.”
And wartime landscapes:
“Bombing and artillery fire soon reduced the towns to ruins. The streets were choked with rubble, and what there was of open country showed mile after mile of sagging powerlines. Everywhere there were craters full of black water that trembled after an explosion.”
In other words, during the peacetime there were buildings and streets crowded with people, while during the wartime it was hard to make sense of the scene as the buildings appeared to merge with the streets as the rubble from the buildings was what now crowded the streets. For him (14-15), much of this seemingly endless pile of rubble was the countryside of the military landscape, in the sense that there was nothing remarkable or grand about it, much like in the countryside during peacetime (…there’s just more of it). Now, you might be asking, what is he on about? I’ll let him (12) him explain:
“Armies do more than destroy, they create an order of their own. It was strange to observe how both sides superimposed a military landscape on the landscape of devastation.”
So, in summary, people are gone and things have turned into a pile rubble yet it isn’t merely disorderly. In his (12) words:
“It was even more strange, I thought, to see how the military landscape resembled the old pre-technological landscape, especially in the way it organized space.”
He (12) goes on to explain this in great detail, how you can see this by studying maps which all these markings that remind him of medieval administration and heraldry, central fiefs and their subordinate dependencies which also have their own relevant markings. In other words, the wartime military maps indicated to him that the military landscape is remarkably similar to what one might call the feudal landscape as the space is strictly hierarchical with matching territorial divisions. It’s a (pre-)Renaissance landscape, when things were just about to change. Properly old school in any case. He (14) likens the centers, i.e. headquarters, to cities:
“In the military landscape it always seemed to me that the important headquarters, even when concealed in a forest or a ruined manor house, played the role once played by the city – the focal point of power and knowledge and display, a place where everyone wanted to be. … There was the same profusion of important public buildings next to one another (tents with signs in front of them and a guard); the same profusion of insignia – on staff officers, clerks, MPs; the same important men to be glimpsed.”
Now, as you may know, if you’ve read my essays, I’ve served in the military, albeit I have never seen action, nor am I keen to ever see any. Anyway, I concur. There is something about the headquarters, some profusion of importance to it, as he characterizes it. I also agree with his (14) further elaboration:
“A spotless jeep arrived a celebrated battalion commander, spic-and-span in a clean uniform but resolutely macho with his carbine, and hand grenades taped to his combat jacket, and his shiny combat boots. There ensued a rigidly correct exchange of salutes. Everyone, performers and spectators alike, enjoyed the display of military etiquette.”
Erm, oddly enough, I remember this happening to me, albeit the officer, mr-whatever-his-high-rank-was, never even stepped out of the vehicle. He was making an inspection visit to our position. As my unit consisted of specialists, set out to do certain duties, we didn’t have this normal setup where you’d have guard posts and/or patrols. Anyway, our driver had returned with firewood (yes, we didn’t chop down trees because it’s peacetime, otherwise the forest wouldn’t be a forest in a couple of years) and I was ordered to go and get some of that firewood from the truck. Yes sir, on it. On my way back, returning with pieces of firewood in my hands, in front of me, so that I could barely see in front of me as the wood was in a tall stack, I managed to catch a glimpse of a vehicle. It was not ours and someone was sitting inside, so I went to check it out. I can’t remember how it went exactly (this was over a decade ago), but the gist of it was that this officer was not happy with my conduct, that I took too long to arrive, did not acknowledge his rank etc. Anyway, all I was doing was getting some firewood because it was winter and all the sudden I had to deal with someone in a mint uniform, sitting in a warm car. You get the gist. Anyway, back to Jackson (14) who explains how cities came to be:
“It was in fact the 16th century military engineer who helped give the city its modern form. He not only fortified it, he devised the grid of rectangular spaces to accommodate the various military units according to their standing in the social hierarchy of the times, and the placed a square in the center for drills and parades – a design still used in every army encampment, and in almost every modern town.”
Erm, who can forget that square at the garrison? That giant empty space that was there only for that purpose, for drills and parades. I can still (almost) feel drops of sweat pouring down my back as we were doing parade drills at that square, in parade gear, on a particularly hot summer day. There’s also another everyday feature that he (13) brings up, one that surely anyone who has served can remember:
“[I]n fact the military landscape was a place where dress, as in the old days, had great symbolic meaning. No matter how dirty or tattered a uniform might be, it revealed by means of a shoulder patch, a stripe, an epaulette, many details about a man: his special skill, the unit he belonged to, and his rank; it was not necessary to know more.”
Ah yes, everyone had the same haircut (except women because out of tradition, women are expected to be like women, even in the military), the same matching clothing, hence the word uniform, only to be differentiated by the insignia for one’s rank, typically placed on the collar of one’s jacket and/or on the right arm (nowadays dead center in the front of the jacket). There were some differences besides that, for example, in my unit, specialists wore berets instead of caps, so everyone could see that you weren’t part of the rabble, even though you were of equal rank with others in other units. Jackson (13) calls this pageantry, the display of signs and notices that pervade the military. Everything is labeled, but very simplistic and, most importantly, uniform. This had an interesting effect on people, something that Jackson (13) captures particular well:
“The men identified themselves not by where they lived but by who their leader was. They rarely knew the name of the town, and when out of touch with their unit, they felt lost.”
Only to reiterate this a bit later (13-14):
“In the military landscape they served an added purpose: they reminded us that we were part of an immense organization, that by being able to decipher them we proved that we had been initiated into a group secret, that we were bona fide members of the military society.”
Again, I concur. Now, as I pointed out, I was not out there, engaging in combat, yet, this is familiar to me. We often went to places, somewhere, in some forest, in some remote area of the country, driven there, sitting at the back of the truck (old school, basically on crates and what not, totally not safe, hence it’s no longer done during peacetime). Basically you had no idea where you were as your only frame of reference was the road behind you, the only way your could see out in transit, assuming it was day time (which it often wasn’t). In essence, you often had no idea where you were or what the place was called. Actually, it didn’t even matter because you had no choice but to be there. So, indeed, your sense of identification was with the unit, your team and your team leader. Oddly enough, I also agree with that if you were alone, for some reason, and had to work that way, you did feel a bit lost because you worked better as a team and if things didn’t pan out great (as they often didn’t), you at least had a sense of camaraderie to it. Anyway, while I was reading this passage, it made me think of nomadism, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, in the sense that in the military your sense of place is tied to the unit that you are part of, not the actual place.
Right, back to where I was with this, contrasting the headquarters with what is always outside. So, Jackson (14-15) likens the headquarters to the cities, and, I guess, you could say castles and monasteries function that way as well, but adds that what is outside the headquarters, the great wide open, the largest element of the military landscape is very similar to the countryside, the grunts being the peasants, the people whose life is very tactile, here and now. He (15) argues that life out there, outside the headquarters is very different:
“What really distinguished these men from their colleagues at headquarters was their greater awareness of the environment.”
To be more specific, he (15) adds that:
“In a very short time the men learned to rely on their senses for guidance; whether they were in a town or in the open country, their sense constantly picked up information – the smell of cordite, the smell of dead bodies, even the smell of the enemy, for each army had a characteristic body odor.”
While I cannot claim to have been exposed to the smell of dead bodies, to my knowledge anyway (albeit I suspect that I may have, as there was this rank, foul smell coming from my neighbors’ apartment once, so perhaps … albeit it could have been just food left to rot on a kitchen counter for days or the like … I can’t be sure), nor the specific smell of cordite (a noodle looking propellant that was around up to the late stages of WWII, it seems), I get what he means. There’s that body odor that kicks in after a while, after spending a lot of time without the opportunity to get a shower, especially when you run out of clean clothing. On one of the field assignments, in some forest, somewhere in Finland, we had the luxury of being able to go to a sauna to clean up, but then, it being winter and all, it got so cold that the officers forbade that because cleaning the sweat and dirt off one’s skin apparently makes the frosty conditions worse for the skin. I don’t know if that has holds or not. Anyway, what matters is that when we finally got back to the garrison, you could not only smell the sweat but also swipe it. My hair was like grease. Another common smell was smoke. All the tents had that distinct smell because they were kept warm with wood burning heaters. Anyway, he (15) continues:
“There were the sounds of different gunfire, the sound of shells flying overhead; the sound of footsteps, the sound of vehicles. On comparatively silent nights men on patrol learned to listen for the sound of ration trucks bringing food to the enemy, miles away. Any bright or sudden light was enough to rouse the soundest sleeper.”
It would be possibly to expand this list, quite a bit, but that would add much value to this. The point he makes is that in the military you learn the importance of all your senses. It is a matter of life and death, so quickly recognizing all that and being able to distinguish between this and/or that can quite literally be a life saver, to you and/or to your fellow soldiers. This is, of course, largely useless during the peacetime, as he (15-16) points out, noting that we really don’t need to know much about the “weather, topography, the soil, density of foliage, ‘the phases of the moon’” and the like under normal conditions. Anyway, what I like about this discussion is how he (16) doesn’t dwell on these memories and seek to glorify them. It’s instead what can be learned from it all. He (16) elaborates:
“These sensory responses were rarely of an exalted kind: loathing of the taste of C rations, the luxurious feel of clean clothes, the warmth and light of a roadside fire – all those hands stretching out of the darkness toward the flames! – their joy at the coming of sunny days in the spring; these were simply commonplace ways of participating in the world through the sense, but sharing them, recognizing them in others, made men remember their humanity.”
In short, it’s about the little things that you learn to appreciate when they matter. While I’ve probably been pampered by way better field rations, I still concur. Field rations aren’t exactly known for their taste, their consistency nor their look. The everyday equivalent would be like a steady diet of only instant food. Sitting by the fire (if that was permitted, mind you) or by the heater in the tent (more common) when was cold was particularly enjoyable, albeit, under normal conditions, it isn’t that memorable. It was very here and now, very tactile. This is exactly what he (16) would like to take from the military and make it part of the everyday life outside the military:
“This is how we should think of landscapes: not merely how they look, how they conform an esthetic ideal, but how they satisfy elementary needs: the need for sharing some of those sensory experiences in a familiar place: popular songs, popular dishes, a special kind of sport or game, played on here in this spot.”
So, as I keep stating, it’s this here and now, let’s do this, whatever it is that we are up to, that should matter, not engaging with the world in some distanced and aestheticized manner. It might be that my memory fails me, that it’s selective after all these years, but I reckon it was like this in the army. You were always doing something, always in a hurry, always engaging with the world, even if it wasn’t exactly glamorous (it sure wasn’t; sweeping the floors of the living quarters, mopping the washroom floors, keeping your locker in order, carrying heavy boxes from one place to another, followed by carrying other heavy boxes from that place to another place, re-coiling cables etc.) and at times hardly uplifting (spending your days in some forest, not having any idea where you are). There was an abundance of sensory experiences but vision was never as central as it is in civilian life. Landscape didn’t play a role, at least not in the way it does otherwise as a way of seeing the world, as discussed in the previous essay. At least on the ground level, among the grunts, the world was ordered very differently from what it is outside the military. This is what he (16-17) would like for everyone, not just the soldiers:
“A landscape should establish bonds between people, the bond of language, of manners, of the same kind of work and leisure, and above all a landscape should contain the kind of spatial organization which fosters such experiences and relationships: space for coming together, to celebrate, spaces for solitude, spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them.”
To be clear, this is what he (16-17) thinks we should learn from the military, the good aspects of it, as exemplified by the camaraderie between soldiers. There’s plenty of what you don’t want to import from the military experience, as he (17) goes on to elaborate:
“[T]he military landscape provided us with a spatial order dedicated to sudden and violent movement, a set of relationships based on total subordination and anonymity, and a sensory experience based on death and the premonition of death; it was the ugly caricature of a landscape.”
That said, as he (17) goes on to add, it’s a bit ironic how the military can teach you how to reconstruct the way we come to experience the world, considering how negatively the military tends to be portrayed. I remember others saying this as well, that be it as it may, while you certainly didn’t want to prolong that experience, keep living that way, it did give you perspective, a new horizon, or so to speak. In his (17) words:
“Nevertheless, [the military landscape] functioned, and even its horrors instructed us in what a good landscape, and a good social order should be.”
In summary, what I like about Jackson’s discussion of his own experiences in the military is how he can make use of it outside the military. I realize that it may be hard to understand how the military has anything to offer outside its confines, but if you don’t get it, that probably has to do with not having ever served in the military. There’s nothing glamorous about it, except, perhaps, if you happen to be some high ranking officer who spends his (or her, likely a him though) days in the headquarters. Even if it makes sense to those who haven’t served in the military, I reckon this take on landscape is still quite unexpected. I certainly didn’t see it coming. What I like about this text is exactly that, how it does the unexpected, how it takes something that is generally considered destructive and spins it into something potentially productive. Oddly enough, the military can give you new perspective to life.
References
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Jackson, J. B. (1980). Learning About Landscapes. In J. B. Jackson (Ed.), The Necessity of Ruins and Other Topics (pp. 1–18). Amherst, MA: University of Massaschusetts Press.