Yesterday, Acculturated’s own Abby
W. Schachter reported
on the dismantling of the “Blood-Swept
Lands and Seas of Red” art installation in London, a flood of red ceramic poppies
serving as a poignant memorial to the nearly 900,000 British lives lost in World
War I. As it happens, I had just read
about a sort of modern upgrading of the Colosseum in Rome. In their different
ways, the two monuments reflect a vital connection between memory and history.
Even though the United States
participated in the nightmarish conflict that Henry James called “this abyss of
blood and darkness,” it’s very difficult for Americans today to grasp the
impact that the Great War had on Europe. It marked, in an unprecedented way, a
traumatic break with the world of the past and the beginning of our modern era.
Artist Paul Cummins’ installation, a temporary sea of individually hand-crafted
and -planted poppies filling the moat surrounding the Tower of London, conveys
that bloody chasm probably more effectively than any fixed monument ever could.
Now it’s being taken down despite
calls and petitions to extend, or even make permanent, the display. Cummins
insists that the installation should be transient, like life itself and the
lives of the War’s victims. Abby Schachter believes that this is an appropriate
gesture, and I agree – with reservations.
Memory tends to be transient too.
We are constantly rewriting the past, literally in our history books and
mythically in our minds; it is human nature to be unreliable and self-serving narrators
of our own stories. So we are constantly in danger of losing not only the past,
but the meaning of the past in the
fog of time. Monuments are sometimes all that keep our link to that meaning
alive. By their permanent presence, they serve as powerfully impacting echoes
of the past for forgetful future generations. The “Blood-Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation has had such an
effect on literally millions of visitors. Its impermanence has been part of its
draw, but I would hate to see it gone forever. Perhaps it should be recreated –
reincarnated, if you will – every decade.
Meanwhile in Rome, the Italian
culture minister is backing a proposal to restore the floor of another
testament to blood and darkness: the extraordinary, nearly 2,000-year-old partial
ruins of the Colosseum where gladiators and animals once stalked each other to
the death. This could lead to the building being used again as an arena – not
for blood matches, of course, but for pop
concerts.
An archaeologist suggested building
a new stage to cover the ampitheater’s central section, which currently exposes
the haunting subterranean tunnels and chambers where the gladiatorial participants
waited. The point of the proposal is to encourage the public to help fund the ancient
building’s substantial preservation costs with concerts and other performances.
But as Daisy Dunn remarks in The
Spectator, reviving it as a concert venue would be less like a
restoration and “more like the beginning of the end.”
“To experience the contrast between
the expectant [ancient Roman] spectators and the slaves summoned to ‘perform’,”
she writes, “you need only cast your eye between the sun-bleached seats
stretching into the sky, and the dark shadows in the arena’s bowels below.”
Once a stage is constructed over it and you lose that view, warns Dunn, “you
lose the view of the cross-sections which divided Roman society,” and our
connection to the meaning of the Colosseum itself is broken.
Attending a performance there by,
say, Sting or Andrea Bocelli, would transform our experience of the building
and with history itself. As respectable and sensitive as those performers might
be to the venue, the ultimate effect would be no longer to memorialize the past
but to trivialize it.
A new Colosseum stage should not be
built, Dunn correctly urged, “at the expense of its spirit.” That spirit lives
on in the echoes of cheers and screams from the arena, just as the horrors of
war come alive again in a sea of red poppies in London. The former is an
ancient edifice in the heart of the Eternal City, and the latter is a
temporary, modern expression, but both are true to the spirit of the past that they
honor.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 11/19/14)
