Memory, memorials, remembrances
Jan. 27th, 2007 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustToday is Holocaust Memorial Day: I wasn't planning to post about it, because, after all, what could I say? Then I read an article in yesterday's Guardian, in which Jonathan Jones reflects on contemporary memorials - interesting, thought-provoking, off-target at times. Throughout the day - a day spent walking on the muddy banks of the river Wear - I kept returning to these themes, and seeing connections with other things I've been meaning to post about, and this is the end result: not a reasoned argument, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but a sort of snowball which has been rolling downhill, growing as it gathered more snow, but also picking up stray twigs, dead leaves, maybe the odd feather...
Jonathan Jones is the Guardian's architecture critic, I think. He describes visits to a number of modern memorials - Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, in the same city, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington - fully aware of the oddness of this tourism of grief. It is precisely his complaint that his purpose, and his response, is primarily aesthetic. He describes being moved by experiencing these constructions, but moved as you are moved by a work of art. The memorials convey, as they were intended to, sorrow, regret, loss. They are not history lessons: they can't be. And yet, at the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington:
Last night we heard poet Cynthia Fuller reading from her collection Jack's Letters Home. She grew up knowing that her father had had an elder brother lost in the First World War, but knowing little more than that. Then, in 2000, she found a collection of some 50 of his letters home. The poems are her adaptations of those letters, still in the simple, colloquial language of a boy of 18, keeping a brave face on things, trying not to upset his mother - and interspersed among these are the mother's imagined responses. The reading was immensely moving: it is an idiosyncracy of Colpitts Poetry that the readings take place by candle light, with a single lamp for the reader: this setting suited the poems well, Cynthia Fuller's soft voice speaking of longing for home, of suffering from trench foot, unable to walk and lying on a waterproof sheet on damp straw
Jack went missing in May 1918. His mother refused to believe he was dead, writing letters to the papers, to the generals, trying to trace him. His body was never found, and his name is one of the many engraved on war memorials in France - for in this respect Washington Wall is not so revolutionary: the Menin Gate, for example, provides a focus for those families whose lost sons have no known grave: He is not missing, He is here.
Back to Jonathan Jones. He contrasts the modern memorials he has been visiting with the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and asks:
What seems different in the memorials Jones describes is the scale, the ambition, the desire of well-known artists to work in this unexpected field (or perhaps not so unexpected. If, as Jones says, memory "has become the last sacred thing in a world that holds nothing sacred", how could an artist stand apart from it?). Large scale work involving large reputations and, indeed, large sums of money - plenty of reasons for ambivalence there.
What does strike me as new - well, comparatively - is the urge to create shrines to our dead. In old novels, people visit the cemetery, weed the grave of their loved one, see that there are always flowers there. Modern bereavement ties bunches of flowers to lamp posts, to railings and road signs, still in their cellophane as they came from the florists, so that they fade to wisps of straw in a bright litter of wrappings and ribbons. It is no longer enough to sponsor a seat to be placed where someone liked - or would have liked - to rest and admire the view: now this too must be festooned with flowers (which rather defeats the object, as you don't quite like to move them aside and sit down). On New Year's Eve we walked along the cliff top at Marsden, and clearly this was the season for remembering the dead, for every other bench had its bouquet: the one in the picture is an extreme case, with a wreath, a miniature tree, even a teddy bear for a teenager who had died quite recently.
It felt odd, not what you expect from the English, this public celebration of grief. But if we are to consider the huge public memorials, consider this too, these spontaneous, untaught gestures.
Jonathan Jones is the Guardian's architecture critic, I think. He describes visits to a number of modern memorials - Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, in the same city, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington - fully aware of the oddness of this tourism of grief. It is precisely his complaint that his purpose, and his response, is primarily aesthetic. He describes being moved by experiencing these constructions, but moved as you are moved by a work of art. The memorials convey, as they were intended to, sorrow, regret, loss. They are not history lessons: they can't be. And yet, at the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington:
I find Lin's masterpiece captivating but there is an absurd, mad lack of fit between the beauty of the monument and the squalor of what it remembers. Its seizure by patriots must surely reverse the artist's intention. At My Lai in 1968, more than 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed by American soldiers who - to give the most sympathetic account possible - were crazed by months of exposure to booby traps. Sound familiar? Some of the men remembered here surely had innocent blood on their hands. So do all soldiers in history, which doesn't mean their deaths aren't worth mourning; but it makes any war memorial mythic. When it was unveiled, the Wall was praised as an art of "healing" - and so it is, if healing is the right word for helping Americans believe again in the old lie that it is sweet and good to die for one's country.
Last night we heard poet Cynthia Fuller reading from her collection Jack's Letters Home. She grew up knowing that her father had had an elder brother lost in the First World War, but knowing little more than that. Then, in 2000, she found a collection of some 50 of his letters home. The poems are her adaptations of those letters, still in the simple, colloquial language of a boy of 18, keeping a brave face on things, trying not to upset his mother - and interspersed among these are the mother's imagined responses. The reading was immensely moving: it is an idiosyncracy of Colpitts Poetry that the readings take place by candle light, with a single lamp for the reader: this setting suited the poems well, Cynthia Fuller's soft voice speaking of longing for home, of suffering from trench foot, unable to walk and lying on a waterproof sheet on damp straw
but it's ever so much better
than being up the line.
Jack went missing in May 1918. His mother refused to believe he was dead, writing letters to the papers, to the generals, trying to trace him. His body was never found, and his name is one of the many engraved on war memorials in France - for in this respect Washington Wall is not so revolutionary: the Menin Gate, for example, provides a focus for those families whose lost sons have no known grave: He is not missing, He is here.
Back to Jonathan Jones. He contrasts the modern memorials he has been visiting with the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and asks:
Why have war memorials been rebranded as something for everyone, no longer just for veterans or survivors, no longer the dead expressions of state patriotism, but popular, and even somehow spontaneous, contemporary, urban places to be?Perhaps the answer is in the question: the assumption that war memorials have hitherto been the exclusive preserve of politicians and of veterans' parades strikes me as odd. Perhaps for urban professionals the Cenotaph in Whitehall is so familiar that you don't notice it unless some Remembrance Day event is obstructing the traffic: but if you drive - or better still, walk - through rural England, you notice how every village has its war memorial. In the north east, many of them have memorials to men killed in the mines, as well. The lists of the dead, often the same names recurring again and again, the naïve or stiffly conventional sculpture (or the absence of decoration, or even sometimes the art which works as art): each village tells the visitor this fragment of its history.
What seems different in the memorials Jones describes is the scale, the ambition, the desire of well-known artists to work in this unexpected field (or perhaps not so unexpected. If, as Jones says, memory "has become the last sacred thing in a world that holds nothing sacred", how could an artist stand apart from it?). Large scale work involving large reputations and, indeed, large sums of money - plenty of reasons for ambivalence there.
What does strike me as new - well, comparatively - is the urge to create shrines to our dead. In old novels, people visit the cemetery, weed the grave of their loved one, see that there are always flowers there. Modern bereavement ties bunches of flowers to lamp posts, to railings and road signs, still in their cellophane as they came from the florists, so that they fade to wisps of straw in a bright litter of wrappings and ribbons. It is no longer enough to sponsor a seat to be placed where someone liked - or would have liked - to rest and admire the view: now this too must be festooned with flowers (which rather defeats the object, as you don't quite like to move them aside and sit down). On New Year's Eve we walked along the cliff top at Marsden, and clearly this was the season for remembering the dead, for every other bench had its bouquet: the one in the picture is an extreme case, with a wreath, a miniature tree, even a teddy bear for a teenager who had died quite recently.It felt odd, not what you expect from the English, this public celebration of grief. But if we are to consider the huge public memorials, consider this too, these spontaneous, untaught gestures.
