Memorials

What are memorials for, what are they about?  Take Abe, above.  The stern, but probably not quite admonitory gaze.  The impatiently clutched left hand seemingly intended to suggest the impact of those fabled emotional and intellectual burdens which, nevertheless, have failed to degrade the subject's posture or general aura of rectitude.  All wonderful, as far as they go.  Likely accurate, and therefore evocative.  But is that it?  Mere evocation?  Isn't that a bit obsessive, the constant imperative to remember, remember, remember?  Remember what?  It almost doesn't seem to matter.

Viewing several of DC's memorials last night with friends who were visiting from, well, Lincoln (NE), I couldn't help sensing a desperation behind our society's drive to remind itself of everything horrible and astonishing.  Why?  Are we really afraid we'll forget?  I don't think so.  I think it's more complicated.  I think we're afraid we'll lose control of the meaning.  We're terrified that what we think we understand today about Abe Lincoln, or the Korean war, will be undermined or reinterpreted.  So we try to fix the significance of people and events in time and place.  Memorials--always made of stone, or steel.  Right?

It's insufficient, of course.  People are dynamic, wars unfathomable.  We have to know them as we know everything--conditionally.

Ultimately, I don't suppose any of this amounts to a defensible objection to memorials.  Indeed, their very insufficiency is probably important.  But why can't that insufficiency, then, be our starting point?  Why aren't memorials about the insufficiency of memory?  Or are they?