Shrines and memorials

What an interesting discussion over on the good old GFG recently, as you will discover if you hover your cursor over the title above.

Read it? Good. On we go, then.

I'd like to take up a couple of points made by Thomas both in the post and in his comment. He is as thoughtful and eloquent as ever.

He seems to me to be saying that memorials need to imply "hopes of a continued existence in another (world)" if they are to avoid disrespecting the past and losing our bearings in the present.

I'm not taking sides here (supernaturals vs materialists, as it were) but surely it is possible to make meaningful commeration for people with no such beliefs, by people with, apparently, no such beliefs? People still go to Highgate to see Karl Marx, and Communist leaders are famous for being stuffed and mounted post-mortem for the public gaze. Nasty, you might think, but it is, or was, meaningful, presumably even for the hordes of Russian visitors to Joe Stalin's embalmed and mustachiod fizzog who were Christians in their hearts and hated the old tyrant.

Even if Russians' attitudes to Stalin's tomb have changed, that change is surely part of a huge historical and cultural shift which is itself resonant?

More trivially perhaps, John Lennon was, I think, an atheist, yet his fans still gather at various shrines to him, whether in Prague, New York or Liverpool.

As for the scattering of ashes being devoid of meaning, and transient - to you, good Thomas, maybe, but not necessarily to the people who do the scattering.

I know a piece of rocky foreshore where ashes were scattered and a small plastic plaque affixed (quite illegally!) to a rock only exposed at low tide - it says that Dad will still be able to look over to the mountains he loved. I don't think these people were necessarily running away from anything, they may well not have believed in an afterlife in other than a "perhapsist" sense, but I think we can be confident that the view of the foreshore and the distant hills will serve them well as place full of symbolic meaning and personal resonance, maybe even some comfort. Hope so.

As someone said once somewhere, a society without a sense of its own history is like a man without a memory - but at the family level, a memory, and a sense of history, does not only depend on public memorials. I don't agree with Mrs Thatcher's infamous comment that there is no such thing as society, only families, but it seems to me that society starts at the level of family interaction and family history. A shrine is a shrine, whether it is a low-tide rock, a winged angel, or a bunch of photos and a candle once a year. Who are we to define how people define who they are?

As it happens, I don't much care for ashes-scattering either - a bit of Granny in the eye on a windy afternoon does not, in my book, make for a meaningful event - and when someone said to me recently that they would be bringing Mother home from the crem whilst they decided where she should rest, I of course didn't say "that won't be your Mother, she's gone; that's simply what the flames can't consume of her body." That's me, not them. Each of us creates post-mortem meaning in our own ways.

We are chucking out the wisdom of the past when we show our children and young people, by our own behaviour, that we can't be bothered with understanding the past. Classical music, classical literature, real jazz, old paintings - hard work, aren't they? It's not that Vermeer is "better" than Shrek, or that George Eliot is better than Robert Ludlum, it's just that if you only do Shrek and Ludlum, a world of feeling, a range of understanding, is likely to be shut off from you. (And vice versa, no doubt, but on my desert island....)

Family history may be harder to "do" without public memorials, but I'm not sure we should extrapolate this into deciding that we are chucking out the wisdom of the past because we are not building substantial public memorials. And no-one loves a classy memorial more than me - one of the pleasures of lurking in churches.

One of my favourite memorials isn't a substantial object at all, yet for me it rings out down the centuries. It is also one of the shortest, to a famous person, and it still moves me with its implicit denial of time's obliterating hand and its restrained celebration of genius:

"O Rare Ben Jonson"







(ps OK, I'll come clean - of course George Eliot is better than Ludlum, and there's more in Ben Jonson than there is in Shrek, it's just harder to get to. Walking up a fell is harder work than sitting watching BBC3. Well, in the physical sense, anyway.)