memorialisation

From the Nameless Dead blog:

A 10-meter magnolia tree is planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet in 1973 imprisoned thousands of political prisoners who were tortured and killed. After planting the tree, the stadium doors are open to the public as a park; offering a space to stop, look again, and remember. An impossible, cathartic soccer match played before 20.000 people, closes the project after a week of activity.

See the amazing sequence of photos here.

Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this. Wonderful, isn’t it?

Most people think of a memorial as a sole-purpose ‘something’, there to do exactly what the shot-blast lettering says it’s there to do. A headstone, for example.

Headstones are self-absorbed, stand-alone symbols. They add nothing to their surrounding headstones, neither do they detract from them. They do not beautify the landscape; they may uglify it. They are contextualised only by their massed-ness in an area decommissioned and set aside for the burial of the dead.

A memorial doesn’t have to be such. It can be architectural, like the mausoleum at Castle Howard, above. It can take its place in what James Leedam likes to call ‘the vernacular landscape’, so it can be an obelisk, a shrine, a tree, a cairn. Or a bunch of flowers at the roadside.

We are not confined to just one memorial, either. We can, both, mark the spot where the dead person lies and also keep the memory alive at another location or in other ways, privately or publicly. When I was writing the GFG I came up with: “A memorial can also be a folly, a charitable trust, a web page, a campaign, a horse-race, a half-marathon or a drop-in centre.”

My list was far from exhaustive. For, as Pat McNally made me aware in his post the other day about the Memo Project, “Public memorials can take the form of libraries, concert halls, schools, endowments, and even airports and battleships.” He makes reference also to heroic equestrian statues which “interest pigeons more than people”, and to memorials to the many, not just the one: the Vietnam Memorial, the Holocaust Memorial.

Reading Pat’s post I wondered what we’d missed, what’s new, what’d be appropriate and what wouldn’t.

Veuve Cliquot champagne commemorates Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin very aptly. So the world of food and drink offers opportunities for memorialisation – though it’s unlikely that this could be appropriately accomplished by a new pasta sauce.

What else? What memorialisation opportunity can you think of? What have we missed? Think, think, think! Then hit the comments’ box below.

Thank you!

Here’s the story condensed from a Guardian report, 27 September ’07:

John Joe “Ash” Amador, a 30-year-old American, was executed for the 1994 murder of a San Antonio taxi driver. He went to his death, still protesting his innocence, with an armful of lethal sodium pentathol and the words, “God forgive them, for they know not what they do. After all these years, our people are still lost in hatred and anger. Give them peace, God, for people seeking revenge toward me.” To which he added, as he slipped away: “Freedom … I’m ready,” and, finally, “Wow.”

During his final weeks as a resident of Texas’s death row, he had been in touch with Baroness Von Carrie Reichardt, a ceramicist who operates out of a studio called the Treatment Rooms in Chiswick.

“The Baroness”, as everyone seems to know her, has long been campaigning against the death penalty in the US and has been in correspondence with Amador for the past year or so. When it became clear that all his appeals were likely to be turned down, Amador asked her if she would join his wife and family as one of his five witnesses when he took the long walk.

The Baroness is a friend of Nick Reynolds, a sculptor who specialises in death masks. So when she said she was going out to witness Amador’s death and make a film about it, he suggested coming along and making a mask, so that the person whom the Texas justice system was about to snuff out would have a sort of life after death.

“It is very hard to put into words what it’s like,” she says of the execution. “It is totally surreal. You have to try to smile for them and he was trying to smile for us. It’s very hard and it took him nine minutes to die, but when he said ‘Wow’, he was looking so serene, it was as if he was looking at the angels.”

Once Amador had been certified dead, his body was taken to the local undertakers, but they were not too receptive to the idea of a cadaverous Englishman making a death mask on their premises, despite the wishes of the family … So Reynolds and the family carried the still warm body out and placed it in the back of a hired car for a one-hour trip to the woods near a town called Livingston, where Amador’s widow, Linda, had a small cabin. “We just put him on the back seat, unzipped the body-bag and took his arm out so that his wife could hold his hand,” says Reynolds.

At the cabin, Reynolds set to work. “It only took about two hours because we were paranoid that the police would arrive and ask what we were doing with the body,” he says. “So there we were, hiding out in this little wooden bungalow in the middle of the woods, like a Friday the 13th movie. I don’t normally talk to the bodies, but I did on this occasion. He looked so young because, although he was 30, he had hardly been outside for the past 12 years.”

Read the entire article here.

Here’s the film. I can’t embed it, so click here.

Hat-tip to Rupert Callender for this.

Marvellous, isn’t it, the feats of ingenuity those of an entrepreneurial bent are capable of in dreaming up schemes to part the bereaved from a pretty penny?

I love Eternal Voicemail. They transfer a dead person’s mobile phone voicemail message to a voicemail box. Anyone who’s got the dead person’s phone number can call, listen to the dead person’s message, and leave one of their own.

Just don’t expect a call back any time soon.

Check out the website here. Any takers?

Interesting piece in USA Today on mass graves in Haiti and the importance people attach to marking the spot where their dead are laid – a physical point of connection. “We are hard-wired to want to know where our dead are, whether we believe in a superior being or not,” asserts Curtis Rostad, an Indiana funeral director. Even Neanderthals, he reminds us, buried their dead with flowers.

Curtis, we remind ourselves, has a commercial interest in burial. And when he uses that seductive metaphor ‘hard-wired’, is that how human brains really work?

We pride ourselves on having evolved somewhat since the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth. We’ve done that by suppressing many of our Neanderthal impulses. We value reason over instinct. It’s what makes us civilised.

Or does it?

Read it here. Don’t miss the link to a sprightly piece on orphan-napping.

I enjoyed a long chat with Ieuan Rees this morning about a logo I want him to design for me. He’s a lettercutter, a calligrapher and a sculptor. In case you’ve never heard of him, he is a major celeb in his field. I have long admired him and I am not ashamed to admit that, in the early part of our conversation, my tongue was frequently tied by hero-worship.

I have always revered lettercutters and calligraphers, not only because I haven’t the aptitude to be one myself, but also because it’s one of those crafts you cannot master unless your heart and your head are in the right place. The making of beautiful letters is a spiritual exercise requiring discipline and stillness, craft and virtue, and a long, long apprenticeship.

Ieuan told me something which heartened me. He’s getting more commissions than ever for headstones. People are fed up with the fare offered by so-called monumental masons, who sound as if they are craftspeople but they’re not; they’re completely mechanised. People are fed up with the lack of personal service and the sterile options the monumental masons present them with. They want something unique and beautiful. They want to work with a craftsperson who listens to them. They want to drop in from time to time and see the work being done (by a human with a chisel, not by a sandblasting machine).

A few days ago I had an email from Frances Hook at Memorials by Artists. Here is an organisation which can put you in touch with an artist who will create your headstone or memorial. It also publishes two useful books, a guide to commissioning a memorial and a guide to choosing a memorial for a young person (under 30). It has a sister charity, The Memorial Arts Charity, which nurtures “Britain’s long tradition of fine lettering and memorial art”. From 3 April until 1 November this year it is holding an exhibition entitled Art and Memory in the gardens of West Dean, near Chichester. It’s a must-see.

If multiculturalism and meritocracy have undermined or overwhelmed Britishness, I have to confess that I’m all for it. We’re not the country we were twenty years ago, and all the better for it. Now that discrimination is taboo, barriers between us have fallen and we all appreciate, enjoy and indulge each other so much more.

Did the British invent snobbery? They probably can’t lay exclusive claim, but they’ve always made an especially good fist of it. Does it live on in this new Age of Diversity? Well, it may not arch its eyebrow quite as disdainfully as it did, but it’s always been subtle and insidious and, yes, its delicate sneer is still detectable.

Where, for example, do you stand on the decoration of graves? Especially children’s graves? I’m talking solar-powered angels, windchimes, smiley plastic flowers, twee-wee cherubs, big-eyed teddies—you know the stuff. Where do you stand on all that?

I’ve heard people who should know better wrinkle their nicely-bred noses in revulsion, then launch into a diatribe about roadside shrines, Dianafication, trash, we never used to do all this—AND NOW WE’VE GOT BLOODY JADE!

Gnomification is Cynthia’s word for it. She, like me, is wholly indulgent. We enjoy it.

Simplicity. Restraint. Decorum. Are those virtues? Or are they merely the obverse of repression, inhibition, an undeveloped heart? Why bother debating it? Can we not agree just to suspend our critical faculties and let others do their thing? In the immortal words of Mehitabel, wotthehell wotthehell.

There was a good and moving piece about this in the Spectator at the end of January by the eminently humane and inclusive Matthew Parris:

I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings hugging this corner were a mass of flowers and paper.

That irritated me. Presumably a memorial to somebody who had died nearby. Sad, no doubt, but we never used to make roadside shrines like this in England and the habit has always struck me as mawkish and somehow pagan. Getting closer, it became clear that the whole corner had been turned into a crematorium-style display, with masses of blossoms, trinkets, letters, soft toys and the like. My grumpiness increased. ‘Sweep it all away,’ I thought. ‘Death is a private thing. Let people mourn privately. Whatever happened to our English reserve?’

He stops to read some of the cards:

The longest tribute was stuck to a lamp-post, a whole letter, written in an unsophisticated hand, addressed to young Kane — an outpouring of affection and grief, starting with: ‘Kane, we can’t believe your acctually gone everybody thought you was going to pull through…’

He discovers that Kane was 15 or 16. He was riding his moped when it was hit by a car and burst into flames, trapping him.

I took a closer look at the whole display. There were crash helmets, teddy bears, T-shirts, letters, cards, and a good £100-worth of flowers. You could hardly see the cruel steel railings beneath. Feeling now too moved for comfort, and resolving to return and make some notes, I walked on … As I fumbled for the keys, and thought of Kane Theodore, and the flowers and cards … my eyes began to well with tears I simply could not control. I had to turn away quickly from a passing jogger, open the door and dive inside. Those tears were not for Kane, whom I never knew … They were tears of self-reproach and — admit it — of shame. Shame not for my behaviour, which is usually fair, but for my feelings, which are spasmodically unfair and unkind.

Read the whole piece here.

And then see what hot water the public officers of Stockton have got themselves into after attempting to impose their own ghastly good taste on the ghastly good taste of the owners of the children’s graves in the local cemetery. Thanks for this, Cynthia. Read it here.