memorials

I.

Saturday morning broke clear and cool.  For the first time in a long time, I woke up with nothing in particular to do.  Reflexively, I sat down to make a list, but my pen stalled above the paper.  Slowly, it dawned on me that I need not be "productive," that I could simply enjoy the morning, the whole weekend, even.  The Gardens.  I live near the Botanic Gardens. 

Here I found the grounds already given over to fall maintenance: grass resod, freshly mulched trails laid down in the Bluebell Wood.  Other parts were overgrown and shaggy, and I was surprised to see purple morning glory roaming freely on the hillside behind the museum.  The Cranford rose garden was full of people taking photographs, despite the weak September display.  (For me, roses are like chocolate: an inexplicably popular aphrodisiac that I find easy to resist.)  I sat on a stone bench under a tree until I could no longer fend off the amorous attentions of the ants, who kept clambering up my shirt.  In the Japanese garden, karp trolled the water's surface, mouths agape, waiting for visitors to throw them scraps, and the pavilion slashed crimson into the water.  Across the path, kale glowed an otherworldly purple.  Farther along, the Lily Pool Terrace was an explosion of crying children and harried parents.  Above the water, the lillies shuddered delicately in the wind.  Ugly, snoutlike flower buds poked through the surface.

II.

I study memory academically, historically: narratives, monuments, memorials, ceremonies, commemorations, holidays, re-namings, "traditions."  And yet it is always a slight surprise to me to encounter memory in real time, like the fossil that comes to life.  But here it was: a wreath hung on a stand, a cluster of small rocks painted with American flags.  Laid out at regular intervals along the paths were plaques, some still waiting for their inscriptions. They commemorated marriages, beloved siblings, Engine Company 280 and Ladder Company 132.  A small plaque announced that even the red oaks themselves had been planted as an act of memory: they were "Liberty Oaks," planted in May 2002 to commemorate the events of the previous September.  But the layer of memory on the site was deeper still, the practice of planting trees itself a self-conscious nod to tradition.  "The Norway maples that grew as the first generation of trees on this site," I read, "were planted in November 1918 to commemorate the WWI Armistice." 

III.

By their very nature, most memorials wage a fierce fight against forgetting, and attempt to defy oblivion. (One notable exception is the Shinto shrine at Ise, which for more than a millenium has been deliberately destroyed and completely rebuilt at twenty year intervals. In the ceremonies, known as Shikinen Sengu, impermance is simultaneously glorified and denied.)  Among people who work with memory - the scholars who study it, the designers who work it like clay - it is a truism that nothing is so easily ignored as a statue.  At most, a statue eventually becomes a mere landmark, a convenient place to meet your friends in a large park or plaza.  It fades into the background; you stop seeing it; and in any case, the significance of the event or the person is lost with time.  Accordingly, people have spent the past several decades attempting to come up with new, interactive ways of commemorating events; and while some succeed, usually these attempts fail, miserably and bombastically.  In the boro where I grew up, town officials recently created a memorial park to replace the outdoor plaque at Town Hall which listed residents killed in wars or terrorist attacks.  On only half an acre, the new memorial park includes a plaza, a flagpole, a fake gas lamp, an oversize iron clock on a pole, a reflecting pool, two or three flimsy-looking metal gazebos, random piles of white stones, and many trees and shrubs planted, volcano-mulch style, without any apparent plan.  I consider it to be an unredeemable failure.

The idea of trees as memorials is not new - see above - but it's an idea to which increasingly I turn when considering how I might design, not just study, memorials.  Like labyrinths, which I love, rows of trees force you in on yourself, on your own reflectiveness; but unlike labyrinths, there's no specific religion linked to memorial trees.  Many ancient cultures, whether in Germany, Japan or the Pacific Northwest, practiced some form of nature worship, or saw the presence of deities in nature, and many modern societies have retained some idea of trees as a sacred space in a way that translates well to memorialization.  Trees require occasional replacement, and in the replacing, force you to question what it is you're commemorating.  And then there is the purity of green leaves or bare branches overhead, the simple geometry of the paths, the calming regularity of the planting.  Over time, trees grow and change, as human memories do; they last a lifetime, maybe two, maybe less, just as long as "memory," properly speaking, will.