September 29, 2009
The Shenandoah Valley has a devotion to commemoration that simultaneously delights and horrifies me. This weekend I found it impossible to travel for more than a handful of miles without a brown metal historical marker beckoning from beyond the blacktop, testifying to the existence of a nearby cemetery, farm, battlefield or church that for one reason or another is deemed differently significant from its peers.
I spent the weekend wandering the rural roads between Lynchburg and West Virginia, and from my observation there are four arteries and veins coming from the heart of this particular patch of earth we call the American South. Four memorials. Four monuments. The farm, the church, the cemetery, and the battlefield.
At five weeks into a four month international tour of fellowships and residencies, I have the admittedly dubious luxury of full-fledged obsession: of experiencing an experience for its full trajectory, within a state ripe with solitude, contemplation and creation.
I continue to be relentless in my obsession with the intersection of place and memory, which means memorial and monuments.
In a highly mobile, nomadic globalized civilization, memorials and monuments seem even more powerful – every corner of the world is full of newcomers who are displaced from local knowledge. Generations of Virginians may have known the location of Lynchburg’s most recent lynching, but the Senegalese here to study at Jerry Falwell’s university, and the Connecticut management executives here to work at JCrew Corporate certainly don’t.
When embarking down a Southern road, the traveller is moving through time, but space remains steady. On this site, the Battle of Appomattox. On this spot, the birthplace of Stonewall Jackson. On this spot, the body of Jubal Early.
On this spot…while time moves ever forward, we claim a patch of earth for something permanent that we can stand on, and stake a claim against time. Take a position about something we decide is important to us all.
A place whose resonance causes us to pull the car over and stop – essentially, causes us to mark out a spot of time to experience this spot in space.
On this spot, a million Jews perished. On this spot, the first school was integrated. On this spot, the lightbulb was invented.
On this spot.
Not now, but definitely here. One single coordinate in our infinite universe is secured, and somehow we feel more secure.
While time moves ever onward and as yet cannot be delayed or contained, we can grasp at place quite tangibly – pinning it down in the vortex with a signpost and brochure, saying this point is fixed and immobile. Stand here and experience this experience.
How do we interact with the idea of a spot, a coordinate, a finite tangible location in the universe – how do we assign meaning to that spot? We say, here is a bit of earth where we come and bring our feelings about patriotism or grief or freedom or injustice or pride.
Monuments are events – they involve relationships, and odysseys, and pilgrimages. Donations. Wreathes. Anniversaries for commemoration. They hold and they release. They contain and they let go.
When I travel, I am always curious about which symbols and ideas particular communities set aside land to commemorate. What emotions are formally observed? What events are selected to honor?
I am operating with the conscious, calculated artistic strategy of connecting first, and protecting myself second. Liberating myself from the instinctive response of fear and protection has allowed me to explore difficult places one comes across in the course of creative work – places so difficult they don’t even have memorials because just the idea of remembering something seems like a dangerous idea.
If they are joyous, then that’s fabulous. We all like monuments to success, valor, heroism, empowerment – these are important.
But oftentimes, I think we absolutely must be sure to create memorials to painful things because without them, we humans would hide in self-protection. Since we humans often behave like animals, we tend to seek pleasure. So we avoid sad places because we don’t want to feel sad.
A brown marker saying pull your car over immediately may be what is required for people to see what it feels like to stand in a field full of the bodies of teenage boys.
Maybe human heartache needs a place of significance somewhere close to us, and yet outside our skin…a place to set a stone, or lay a flower. A place to experience the unwieldy.
A memorial guides us through those feelings in a way that is controlled, and ritualized, and officially condoned. Pull your car over immediately. It is okay and even appropriate to feel angry, griefstricken, and bereft at this place.
In that spirit, I propose a new series of memorials to the emotions our society does not commemorate. Monuments to the unwieldy, the uncomfortable, the shameful, the unsightly.
A new series of monuments to events that our society does not admit to having occurred.
I found a few already…granted, they are in a bit of disrepair, since public funding for these issues remains scarce.
But surely that will be corrected, and soon.
absolutely taken by your language and musings and art…beautiful and creative and brave and compassionate and soulful as always.