Disconnected Statues

In an earlier post, I wrote about my experience with statues in the Catholic church in contrast to some headless mannequins at the shopping mall.

Recently it has occurred to me that the Catholic church has no monopoly on the use of statues in America. I am referring, of course to the many civil monuments that include the use of statues (war memorials, historical figures, local leaders, etc.) that dot our American landscape - Lincoln's monument and the statue of the marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima to name just a few - plus countless thousands of others with more localized significance.

It sometimes seems to me that, in these times, these civil monuments are succeeding at everything except their intended purpose - namely to call to the mind of the observer some remembrance of the noble character or deeds of the one depicted. Rare is the case where, after I go up close to read an inscription at the base of a statue monument, that I have ever even heard of the subject represented, let alone have any qualitative sense of their spirit or what they were about. Oddly, enough, this is particularly true with respect to statues that depict people of local significance. This is so odd to me. It's kind of like all the lines in the Old Testament that we moderns considering "boring". Do we have any sense of the human effort that the scribes and monks put into copying those verses over and over, by hand and candlelight, so that they could be successfully handed down to bore us? They weren't just Xeroxing. There was no "clipboard". Why would somebody go to that trouble? Why don't we even seem to have a sense that there was trouble gone to?

In regards to these civil monuments, I sometimes feel like I someone in possession of a very finely crafted leather-bound book written in a language they can't read: I open the cover and see the all the beautifully scripted foreign characters inside. I close it again and think "Well, I have no idea what this says, but look how pretty the writing is! Look at the binding! What a beautiful cover! Oh, it must be a very important book to be made so well!"

These statues are for me little more than "mannequins of history" - trying in vain to get me to buy that which has been draped on them - as I stroll by with no more interest than a casual shopper.

My ignorance of history, especially local history, seems at times like an impenetrable fog that denies me the gift that was intended for me by the ones who erected these civil monuments. I am reduced to looking at the style of the clothing and the posture to see if I can intuit something of what is supposed to be conveyed. "Boy, that General so-and-so sure looks stern. I bet he wasn't somebody to mess with." or "Why did men always wear those goofy looking knickers back in the day?" or "Maybe I should wear a goatee like that?".

All of this has given me a sense that there is somehow a warping in my identify. I am something like a plant that is tried to grow by flinging its first roots as far as it possibly could. My identify is gaggle of "furthest reaches" and I am not rooted in the soil over which my center is actually physically situated. I am somehow more connected to things further away than things close at hand. I am more influenced by things thousands of years ago than things 100 years ago.

Weirdest of all, I feel like the only one looking at the statues....