The Secret of the Cenotaph
His first idea had been for a huge bronze sphere, but he eventually settled on the Great Stone, a finely proportioned horizontal block with a simple inscription. The form of the Stone is more sophisticated than it appeared at first sight. Its faces, which seem flat, are, actually parts of a sphere with a radius of nine hundred feet.
Kundera's aphorism in mind, I passed the cenotaph (or Cape Town War Memorial) on Cape Town's main thoroughfare, Adderley Street, after "...British M.P. Mr Adderley, who championed agitation against importation of convicts to the Cape Colony."
Synonymous with the conflicts of our parents' generation, i.e. Palestine, WWII, and Korea, it struck me how few people remembered it; how few knew it existed, and how few knew its history. Mindful of Berlatsky's words, I did some research.
There's little to be found on the Web. Yahoo!'s short description of the memorial is replicated by virtually every site listing it, usually as being of interest to tourists.
Created by Vernon March, this memorial honours the South African soldiers who died in the two World Wars and the Korean War. It is situated at the bottom of Adderley Street a few steps from the Van Riebeeck statues. Inscribed on the stone is information about the wars and the names of the brave men who fought in them. Representing freedom and peace and those who fought to protect it, the memorial is of an angel flanked by two soldiers.Well, yes and no. This is cornflake history. Bar adding the Great War (WWI) to the narrative, it yields little of value besides the sculptor's name.
I needed to visit Ottawa's National War Memorial, The Response, a tall granite arch with bronze sculptures, to find a smidgen of information pertaining to Vernon March.
Entasis, a refinement of Greek architecture in which surfaces are imperceptibly curved and verticals angled slightly out of plumb, best known from its application to the Parthenon, has been the subject of much study and speculation. The slight distortions it introduces are very hard to see; as with homeopathy the effect is so diluted that one may reasonably doubt that anything is actually happening.
Andrew Crompton | The Secret of the Cenotaph
The Death of History
"Beside that same East Sutton church in Kent, there still stands an English tombstone which I would read each time I panted past it in my Sutton Valence school running shorts on wintry Saturday afternoons. I don't remember whose body it immortalises, but I remember the carved verse above the name: "Remember me as you pass by,/ As you are now, so once was I./ As I am now, so you will be./ Remember Death will follow thee."
And I do recall, exhausted and frozen into my thin running clothes, that I came to hate this eternal message so much that sometimes I wanted to take a hammer and smash the whole bloody thing to pieces. Yes, somewhere in our dark hearts, perhaps we are all Talibans.
Robert Fisk | An urge to smash history into tiny pieces
His war memorials are remarkably similar. I suppose, much like those who carve tombstones, his art was constrained by people's expectations of what a war memorial should look like and "say". Nevertheless, the snippets of available information led me to incorporate WWI into the carnage memorialized on Adderley Street.
More interesting to me was Vernon March the person, a native — like Robert Fisk, of Kent.
Although most high-profile ceremonies are today held to commemorate those killed during the wars of the mid-Twentieth Century, March did not live to see them. He died an "untimely death" in 1930, nine years before WWII plunged the West into an orgy of internecine strife, and his six brothers and sister completed the memorial for him.
Time has lent the weight of ceremony to this side of March's creation, and it intrigues me — lending added mystery to our "sense of truth", that we remember past wars at a memorial created by a man long dead before they took place. To Vernon March, who did not see his cenotaph completed, unveiled, or used, history was another story.
"Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection."
Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.
Robert Fisk | It is the death of history
Gates of Eden
Let's take this a step further. Yahoo! tells us the Cape Town War Memorial depicts "...an angel flanked by two soldiers." I'm sure that's no angel. Anybody with an appreciation of the female form can tell she's the hot chick who dishes out halos to those arriving at the Gates of Eden.
Today, our warriors are our monuments to commerce. Surrounding us, they boast halos and some, line drawings of angels.
Heaven it is said, is not for the meek, the faint of heart, or those without Beemers and blue cotton shirts.
What hope history?
