Speak, Memory
A monument may become a visual landmark long after we’ve lost sight of what it commemorates, part of the public realm we share with others, although its shifting temporal meaning can suddenly make
it a flashpoint. If monuments are often memorials, memorials are not necessarily monumental. Just as monuments blur into civic buildings that are really artifacts, as Aldo Rossi pointed out, long-lived because adaptable, memorials can be exceptionally modest and sometimes ephemeral. If monuments are markers, memorials trigger memory.
Both are bulwarks against forgetting. If I stress the marking character of monuments, it’s because forgetting is fundamental to our species. Monuments and memorials are tied up with death, sometimes in propitiation for squandered lives but also to honor the prominent. (Even a few ultra-loyal dogs get their due.) There’s always an accompanying story and keeping it alive is challenging (easier perhaps for the loyal dogs). Museums display Greek or Roman antiquities with chipped-off noses and other bodily parts. Contemporary urban life sees sculptures pulled down and monuments hacked. Post-facto infractions lead colleges to be renamed and commemorations erased. Alt-histories abound, so warehoused statues of Lenin and Stalin are making a comeback. Removing WW2 monuments causes friction between Russia and its former colonies.
In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, a marker was discovered from several such events back. “Build west of here,” it read. It was ignored. Not far from where I live, a sign reads, “Fire Zone.” My block was untouched by the 1923 fire that burned most of northeast Berkeley, but in last year’s centenary, I saw a map that showed how miraculous it was that my 1902 house is still standing. Only the fire insurers remember, canceling homeowner policies left and right due to the “density” of our wood-shingled houses, popular then. They evoke the era of Charles Keeler and the early Bernard Maybeck’s “simple houses,” and the Arts & Crafts lifestyle Torstein Veblen skewered, writing about nearby Palo Alto. This remnant is its local memorial.
Fame also figures with monuments and memorials. It slips from view so quickly that we either forget the famous altogether or remember them inaccurately thanks to propaganda’s implanted memories. A talk by Heidi Gustafson, a Seattle area artist focused on ochre, brought me to the Oakland Columbarium, originally designed by Julia Morgan. A mashup of secular religious architecture, references to libraries (the ashes of the dead were initially kept on shelves as “books”), and 1960s-era airport terminals with walls of polished stone, the Columbarium speaks to the effort we make to extend ourselves into an earthly future. Cemeteries, now lawns with grids of dead-flat grave markers, were once alive with sculptures and mausolea. Some are now famous — people visit to leave flowers to Jim Morrison or Karl Marx. Guidebooks are available. It’s as close as we get, other than emperor’s tombs or the pyramids, to the “lasting fame” for which so many hunger.
The everyday is a stream of intention, habit, and association. A lot of memory’s triggers speak a local dialect, including the changing landscape of trees, bushes, gardens, and planting we encounter that reflects each household’s interaction with its street and block. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for half a century, so I’ve acquired a local knowledge that reflects its seasonal patterns and my responses to them. Some writers try to capture local knowledge — the way a place is best understood as a vernacular particular to itself. One intention of such writers is to share this particularity with others. Literature is a medium for this, as is film, and both convey the unfolding world we join as infants and eventually depart. We’re aware it’s transient, yet we build monuments and memorialize people and events. We want to be seen and remembered, since it’s what we do in our everyday. Triggered by the chard of wildfires, the lights and sirens that follow injury and crime around, and other signs of precarity and stress, we need to find our bearings. (In Paris, some monuments name their Métro stops and surrounding neighborhoods.) Yet spring’s blossoms and buzzing bees recall us to ourselves, bring to mind the regeneration inherent in life, its fecundity and promise. We forget and then we remember.
[My introduction, as co-editor, to ARCADE 41.1, “Monumental.” Credit to Vladimir Nabokov for the title.]
