Category Archives: Memorials

DEAD AND BURIED

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Hardly anyone dies these days. They pass away, or simply pass. But to where? I wonder. What Bali-afterlife or Tahitian-Elysian Fields is awaiting them? 

For believers, I expect the answer is heaven, hell or purgatory. But for those of us who have dispensed with the religious afterlife, where do the ‘dearly departed’ go when they are said to pass away?

The nonsense doesn’t stop here. 

After a person has ‘passed away’ they are then ‘laid to rest’. For those who have been cremated, a bowl of ashes whether cast to the winds or stashed in a mausoleum niche, cannot possible signify rest. And there is nothing restful about the dark interior of an over-priced coffin where the body gradually rots. As for the incorporeal soul, unburied and unburned, there is no proof whatsoever of its existence as anything other than a poetic trope. 

The issue here is of course death, or rather, DEATH. It’s such a terrifying prospect that the very mention of it – death, dying, dead – is shunned. Death is so abhorrent that a new area of medicine that regards death as a treatable illness – euphemistically titled ‘regenerative medicine’ – has recently emerged in the United States. I cannot imagine anything more horrible than a world filled with very old, very rich people with plastic skin and stem-cell and/or digitally-produced organs who spend their life in the time-consuming and very expensive pursuit of not dying.

So many euphemisms to escape death – but not, I would suggest, particularly effective in easing the widespread death-fear. In my 1986 Macquarie Thesaurus, ‘Living’ and ‘dying’ are both key words, but the entry for ‘dying’ is twice as long as that for ‘living’: curtains, demise, sticky end, release, the dearly departed, casualties, the loved one, the fallen, the list goes on and on. So many ways of side-stepping the inevitable end. It’s as if the words themselves, dead and death, will tempt the evil eye and toss us in the ring with not-at-all easeful death. In the 2007 edition of the Macquarie Thesaurus, the keywords of ‘living’ and ‘dying’ have been replaced by ‘life’ and death’, and in the same nod to reality as the earlier edition, ‘death’ is more than twice as long as ‘life’. 

The Thesaurus notwithstanding, the preferred nomenclature, whether on reality TV, in the tabloid press, the ABC, the serious press or just general conversation is ‘passing away’. The best that can be said about ‘passing away’ is that it’s not as grating or as misleading as ‘pass’ and ‘passing’; after all ‘pass/passing’ can be used to refer to traffic, to a horse-race, to a person passing as someone they are not.

One reason for the widespread death-fear is that life is well, so vivacious, and the idea of not living, of not being here, of missing out on the future, is deeply distressing – like a fabulous party to which you were not invited. But the fact remains, as Epicurus pithily stated: Where life is, death is not. And where death is, life is not. And that is the immutable case whether amoeba, wombat, narwhal or human.

A possible solution to the death fear might be to down-grade life, to stop preferencing it over death. Henry James referred to life as a predicament before death, while Ted Hughes in his reworking of Euripides’ Alcestis wrote of death as the birth-cry/… the first cry of the fatally injured. Birth as a death sentence, and life as a rather engaging filling in time would place death as the goal of every moment, every experience, every love affair, a step closer to the finishing line of a long and stimulating Tour de Vivre winding through the Alps of life.

‘Passing away’ suggests a peaceful, easeful leave-taking, like a cloud floating out of sight. Cataclysmic death as a result of insurgencies or semi-automatic weapons or an aeroplane crashing into a skyscraper runs counter to the whole purpose of a euphemism like ‘passing away’. And as it happens, big death doesn’t shy away from the truth. 1000 dead. 3000 dead. No euphemisms here. And mass deaths that occur in numbers that defy comprehension (six million Jews dead in the Holocaust, nine hundred thousand Tutsis dead in  a single month in the Rwandan genocide, hundreds of Sudanese dying right now) also don’t shun the language of death. Similarly with large-scale natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, raging floods, prolonged droughts – where the dead number in the thousands and tens of thousands, no gentle passing away for them. Another exception to death evasion is the war dead – although after the fact: at the time of both world wars, there was a very particular protocol to be followed in reporting the war-dead. While those who have died in wars are often referred to as ‘the fallen’, more commonly the dead are spoken of as dead. Recently, I visited the Western Front and some of the several hundred cemeteries marking the deaths of the tens of thousands of young men killed there during the Great War. So many of these young men were ‘cannon fodder’ – a very evocative metaphor which adds a moral dimension to their deaths – and so different from the euphemism of ‘passing away’ that actually obscures death and drains it of meaning. But then, that’s what euphemisms do. 

It is death that is close, death in the hand, touchable death, that we shy away from; this is the death that doesn’t want to acknowledge itself. These deaths disrupt the weave of family of friendships of daily life, these deaths make living lesser. 

For the dead, death is the end. For the living, death is the great unknown, and, more uncomfortably, the great uncertainty. Death as the great uncertainty? An oxymoron if ever there was one. And yet death need not be so hard. I am an ardent stroller of cemeteries. All those epitaphs are like mini-biographies – the lives of strangers shared with you. And death has inspired great art and literature; from Dante and Shakespeare through to Dickens to contemporaries like Sandra Gilbert, Julian Barnes and Lisa Appignanesi, so many writers have sought to explore death, have portrayed its richness and complexity. And music too, more than 2000 requiems, and numerous smaller enlightenments like Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). These works of music, of painting of writing bring you up close to death.

            In 1973, Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. It became a best seller. Becker showed why we deny death and why immortality was so attractive. I find myself wondering if Becker’s book was one of those unread bestsellers like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, because the denial, in the English-speaking nations of the west is more entrenched than ever, But if all these stupefying euphemisms were to be discarded, death might be seen not as a threat nor as the great fear to be avoided at all costs, but rather a fact of life,        

Starting All over Again (2). The Genesis of Invented Lives.

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There’s a residue left when a novel is finished. You rarely recognise it at the time; only later, when the next novel is nearing completion do you see a connection with the one that preceded it.

While writing The Memory Trap I was vitally interested in monuments, in particular, how voluble they were about political and social currents. Following the break up of the Soviet Union, there was an avalanche of falling statues and monuments throughout central and Eastern Europe – as if the communist years could be so easily shattered. And, more recently, there’s been a rise of new monuments exemplifying a revised perspective and understanding of the Soviet years, including a number of monuments erected to the victims of communism.

The Prague Monument to the Victims of Communisms (Photo by Serje Jones.)

 

 

 

 

 

The Memory Trap was finished and in production when I found myself reaching for books focussed on Putin and contemporary Russia. Apart from the usual Russian novels (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pasternak, etc) and the poets (Pushkin, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva) I’d read nothing about Russia. I did not bother to analyse this new direction in my reading: a novel was finished, I needed to fill up again, I know it to be a hapahazard business. I quickly realised that to understand Russia today required a knowledge of the Soviet years; and to understand the revolution and the years that followed required knowledge of Russia under the Czars. So back I went. My reading petered out around 1880.

I read the stunningly informative and always engaging Orlando Figes. (They are all good but The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is unique, compelling and unforgettable.) I reread Nabokov novels and autobiographical works, and I read biographies of both him and his wife, Vera. I read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s autobiographies Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned, both extraordinary documents of Stalin’s terror and beyond. I read Russian fiction and Russian poetry, I read one book after another. After a while I realised all this Russian reading must be taking me somewhere. Familiar with the need to fill up again when a novel is finished, and well-acquainted with the uncertainty that accompanies the writing of a novel, I was not too concerned to understand where these Russian books might be taking me.

At the same time as I was immersed in Russia of the past 140 years, the media was full of the Australian Government’s policy towards asylum seekers. Turn back the boats. No one who arrives illegally by boat will ever be permitted to settle in Australia. Politicians actually boasted of the success of the policy. Either they did not stop to think how cruel and brutal it was, or they did think about it and simply didn’t care. Desperate displaced people were seeking asylum, seeking safety with us, and we were treating them like criminals. As for the queues politicians and their supporters kept referring to, when your very life is being threatened, queues don’t matter. Queues won’t save you. Queues won’t protect you against rape, against mutilation, against rampaging soldiers intent on killing you and your family.

It seemed self-evident to me that no one would willingly choose exile. No one would willingly separate from one’s culture, land, language, friends and family, unless one’s very life was threatened. Why were we demonising these people? The politicians were whipping up hatred, and much of the press was following suit. Where, I wondered was our compassion, where our understanding? And why this fear of difference? Aboriginal Australians are the only indigenous Australians, the rest of us are immigrants. We were welcomed and yet now we refuse to welcome those seeking our help.

I was reading about Russia and the Soviet Union and I was thinking about exile and I knew that from 1979 to the break-up of the USSR, many Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate – to Israel, to the US, to Canada and to Australia. And so the character of Galina Kogan started to form. Born in Leningrad in 1961, Galina travels to Australia alone in the mid-1980s.

It occurred to me there might be advantages to setting a novel in the recent past. A little bit of distance not only eliminates any of the bias directed at current political and social circumstances, it also provides a clearer view of these circumstances. Reading about the recent past almost automatically prompts a comparison with today.

It was in thinking about the 1980s that I created my married couple, Sylvie and Leonard Morrow, both born in the 1930s and married in the 1950s. Two people who experience exile – nothing to do with moving country, but exile from their own true selves. And their son, Andrew, an intensely shy young man, in exile from the social community that others inhabit with such ease. And so I started to write a novel that in a very deliberate sense, democratised the experience of exile.

The novel grew, the drafts mounted up. It was very late in the process when I realised the novel was also exploring the notion of self-invention. I came of age at a time when Erving Goffman and R.D. Laing were required reading. Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Laing’s Self and Others are still on my bookshelves, while the ‘Looking glass self’ theory of the sociologist Cooley, is etched into my memory. All the characters in Invented Lives shape their personas according to the particular environment in which they find themselves. This is what we used to do prior to the digital age and social media. And back in those days you would receive immediate feedback from others in the environment through facial expressions, gestures and/or utterances, and make adjustments accordingly.

I knew very little of this at the beginning of writing Invented Lives. But that’s the magic of fiction. And now that Invented Lives is finished, I am filling up again with books about death. I wonder where that will take me.

 

IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING

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I have always been captivated by the idea of memory. While it has been a theme in all my novels it was THE theme in The Memory Trap. In this novel, memory in all its forms – personal biographical memory, national collective memory, memory and obsession, mementoes and memorials – was explored through the lives of the characters.

ABR coverThe American writer and film-maker, David Rieff, has made memory the subject of his past two books. I have reviewed his latest for ABR and reproduce it below

This month’s ABR has a stunning cover to accompany the announcement of the 2016 Calibre essay prize to Michael Winkler. Check out the issue at

http://www.australianbookreview.com.au

 

 

 

IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING
David Rieff
Yale University Press, $36.95 hb, 145pp.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18279-8

Over the past three decades, and particularly since the prime ministership of John Howard, there has been an extraordinary growth in the number of young Australians making the pilgrimage to Gallipoli. Most of these people have no ancestors among the ‘fallen’, but rather are following what has become a rite of passage for patriotic young Australians.

Lest we forget, they intone. But what exactly is being remembered? And to what purpose is it being used? After all, until recently, few young people visited the site of this appalling military failure in which Australians were used as cannon fodder by their colonial masters. For that matter, until recently, flag-waving nationalism and loud-mouthed patriotism played little part in any aspect of Australian life.

Memory and its more structured form as remembrance are considered to be positive and desirable attributes. Personal memory is thought to be the primary vehicle by which individuals define themselves, while collective memory helps define a nation. Collective memories, like Gallipoli, act as the struts and foundations of nationalism, uniting poor and rich, urban and rural populations alike. As for history and memory, they are regarded – if thought about at all – as almost exactly the same, rather like identical twins.

In his excellent new book, In Praise of Forgetting*, David Rieff questions the commonly unquestioned: namely the purposes and effects of collective memory. He shows how easily history can fall prey to morally contingent, proprietorial and emotive memory. Ranging across the Irish troubles, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, Israel and Palestine, Stalin’s Russia, and the Balkans’ internecine battles Rieff reveals how collective memory invariably follows a political and ideological agenda, which is itself underpinned by specific moral imperatives. He makes clear that structured, state-sanctioned memorialising is in thrall to contemporary goals and aspirations and not the past it is purporting to preserve. As well, he points out ‘that exercises in collective historical remembrance far more closely resemble myth on one side and political propaganda on the other [more] than they do history.’ Rieff will always see the elephant in the room.

In advancing his arguments, Rieff draws on a wealth of work about memory and remembrance including that of the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz, Theodor Adorno’s classic Minima Moralia, and most particularly the Israeli political philosopher Avishai Margalit (The Ethics of Memory) and the social philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (Hope and Memory and Memory as a Remedy of Evil). Rieff sets up a dialogue of sorts with these latter two luminaries in which there is acknowledgement and agreement, as well as argument and disagreement; crucially Rieff extends the analysis of both men. As a thinker, Rieff is fearless and devoid of sentimentality. To take on those you admire is a difficult task, but if done well, as it is in this book, it yields far richer and nuanced arguments than if you were to pit yourself against a thinker with a diametrically opposing view.

Individual memory degrades very quickly while official memorialising is a tool in service to ideological and cultural currents. Rieff refers to Shelley’s pithy ‘Ozymandias’, as well as David Cannadine’s memoir ‘Where Statues Go to Die’ about the ‘inglorious fate’ of colonial monuments in India. My favourite monument story concerns the Bremen Elephant. This ten foot high red brick elephant was erected in 1932 to celebrate Germany’s colonial conquests, especially in Namibia. By the 1980s this particularly brutal colonisation had become a matter of shame; the monument was an embarrassment and there were calls to pull it down. In 1990, when Namibia gained its independence, the Bremen Elephant was re-dedicated as an anti-colonial monument, and in 2009 a new monument was built adjacent to the old to commemorate the lives of those Namibians who perished in the colonisation. Rather than an enduring truth about the past, monuments rise and fall depending on prevailing political and social concerns.

Official remembrance is big business these days. New monuments, memorial gardens, entire museums are popping up all the time. Rieff is rightfully critical of a number of these, including the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, where the atrocities portrayed have been book-ended in kitsch. (For an excellent book on kitsch in memorialising see Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History, 2007.) My complaint with the U.S. Holocaust Museum is in its use of experiential exhibits. The underlying premise of this fashionable trend in museum practice is that by promoting a personal involvement in the (long-past) events being portrayed, visitors will be motivated towards a better understanding. So it happens that on entering the U.S. Holocaust Museum visitors are issued with an identity card of a real person who existed during the Holocaust. As you walk past the displays of horror, as you watch the videos, as you linger in the (real) cattle car, you clutch your identity card wondering if your person – your surrogate self, after all – has survived. You have been inserted into these horrendous events. As for the imagination as a means of understanding, it has fallen out of fashion. What this might mean for memory in general, given that memories involve an imagining of past events, is anyone’s guess.

Rieff, in highlighting past atrocities and the way they have influenced current conflicts, recommends forgetting as a means of facilitating individuals to move on. Many Holocaust survivors did exactly this. They had survived and it was incumbent on them to live fully – not only for themselves but the millions who were denied a future. They did not consult counsellors or psychiatrists, rather they drew on their own resilience and determination to separate from their terrible experiences and steer themselves into the future. In many instances, It was their children and grandchildren who insisted on dragging them back to Auschwitz. It seems that the parents’ very productive forgetting interfered with the children’s demands for remembrance – a peculiarly narcissistic remembrance. The therapeutic has indeed triumphed as the author’s father, the sociologist Philip Rieff, predicted in 1966.

Rieff sees more value in forgiveness than do I. I am of the belief that some acts and the policies that allow them to occur are unforgivable, such as the atrocities under apartheid, those committed by the Nazis, and the slaughter being carried out by ISIS now. Nelson Mandela recognised this when he established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and not a Truth and Forgiveness Commission. There can be understanding and reconciliation, there can be a future where past enemies live together in peace, and this can occur without having to forgive the unforgivable (and thereby act in bad faith).

In Praise of Forgetting explores the powerful and often brutal effects of the seemingly benign and beneficent processes of memory and remembrance. It forces scrutiny of what has long been complacently accepted. Over the past half century or so, there has been a sacralising of memory both at the personal and collective levels. For the former it has often lead to a life of victimhood, for the latter entrenched hatreds and shocking brutality. If remembering truly were so therapeutic then such undesirable outcomes would not occur with such distressing regularity.

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*In Praise of Forgetting grew out of an earlier monograph Against Remembrance (MUP, 2011). I am hoping Rieff is planning a third volume titled ‘Against Forgiveness’.