I spent last weekend touring Washington, D.C. and was inundated by the superabundant national pride and plethoric memorialization to a degree I haven’t experienced since visiting Rome.
There are myriad points of comparison between the two capitals: the marble, the memory and the lookers-on girding the famed monuments — monuments which one nonetheless experiences with the intimacy of a personal recollection or a trip to see grandparents.
This is not surprising, because we were reared in the context of the stories these effigies echo and we forge our values as citizens of nation and world in light of the unknown soldiers, the gravitas of Lincoln, the dream of King, and the selfsame eye to the golden haze of memory which influenced the actions of our forbearers so palpably.
In my own reading and rambling I have encountered conflicting reactions to the grand memorialization of the national past. Some see it as a form of propaganda or nationalistic myth-making. Lincoln, for example, was not the only or even the most important agent of unity standing astride the chasm of civil war.
Memorializing a single narrative reduces lived complexity and imposes a deceptive linearity the readiest side effect of which is a sense of national exclusivism. At the very least there is an eye-roll toward the sentimentality with which the histories are admired or a look-askance at the moral shortcoming of the enshrined individuals.
Such skepticism is important and not without merit. However, the repudiation of the sublimity of cultural memory as ignorant, tendentious or propagandistic cheats the critic out of a distinctly human, almost poetic pleasure.
Consider the epics of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their refractions in the arts from Hellenistic Greece to the Renaissance. Few deny the troubling chapters of these tales, be it the treatment of women or the subjugation of slavery or the obsolete religiosity grounded in sacrifice.
But few deny their worthiness as art and memory worth preserving and discussing. They, too, were produced in patronage systems and served political interests, and any serious scholar of these monuments needs to consider that in a discourse on them.
Perhaps we ought to take the stance of a scholar when admiring and reflecting on the idealized objects of our cultural memory. Be circumspect, but preserve the polychromy of emancipation, the tragedy of war and the elegy of death.
If poetry is, as Robert Frost wrote, what is lost in translation, then let us translate carefully yet without lamenting the grace notes of our own improvisational narratives.