Forgetting, as we have been shown by Freud, can be a violent act of obliteration. We forget because we are afraid, guilty or confused, and go to great lengths to achieve the erasure of inconvenient or troubling memories, writes John Waters.
The 89th anniversary of the Easter Rising, which falls in a week's time, will have no meaning in our collective consciousness. This is in part because of the movability of Easter, which conspires with our undeclared interest in forgetting. Fuzziness about when the anniversary properly falls has resulted in none but the diehards honouring it at all. For 30 odd years we have avoided the issue, but soon the centenary will be upon us to test our amnesiac mettle.
Reading an engrossing essay by Eoghan Harris in the British Council's publication, Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined, it struck me that if 1916 has any meaning, it must surely offer us the right to our individual truths.
Harris's essay, My Secret Life, deals with the complexity of his family background, with its labyrinth of contradictory loyalties and paradoxes. Since boyhood, he writes, "I have been besotted by an imagined England as well as an imagined Ireland". He describes most beautifully the interlacing of these imaginations within the psyche of his own family. In 1916, he writes, they were "probably the only family in Ireland with four blood relations under arms".
Yet, his mother, a Roscommon woman, loved England, rejected "the victim-version of Irish history" and introduced him to the "genial ghosts" of the British Empire.
It occurs to me that his story has an echo in most of us, and is probably a more accurate emblem of the whole than anything you might arrive at from a departure in patriotism or historiography. Perhaps this is why we have such difficulty with remembering: there is no single, clear strand of memory, uncomplicated by contradiction, and the bloody conflict of living memory has, for many, made untenable the option of evasive sentiment.
But help is at hand in the form of a gaunt and mordant German named Jochen Gerz, an artist who specialises in commemorative "anti-monuments" of an engaging kind. Several of his projects are directed against amnesia, such as the Monument Against Fascism in Hamburg, a 12-metre-tall lead-coated column which, over a period of seven years, was covered with the signatures of passing citizens and gradually lowered into the ground.
Gerz has lately been working in the transforming Ballymun, the great sociological pratfall of "modern" Ireland, with its seven towers of Babel named after the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. Designed as a showcase of the new, developing, industrialised Ireland, it became a social nightmare of poverty, hopelessness and addiction. Now, one by one, the towers are being toppled. First Pearse and MacDermott, then MacDonagh and Ceannt, soon Connolly, Clarke and Plunkett. With the aid of high-powered explosives, this unintentionally ironic monument to our obsession with modernity is being returned to dust.
Commissioned to conceive a monument to announce the new Ballymun, Gerz proposed planting 600 trees in the vicinity, with the names of the donors engraved on the pavement of the new town-centre plaza. He cites a local survey which found that, despite the overbearing presence of the towers, over 50 per cent of locals under 30 could not name a signatory of the Proclamation. So he is extending his concept to construct what he calls a "national memory grove", a hectare of ground close by in which will be planted 400 oak trees to commemorate the patriots whose stories have disappeared, like the towers, from public view.
Gerz invites us to be authors of our own story. "Life is authorship. I don't say everybody is an artist. I say an artist is an author like everybody else." The choice of trees as a motif of commemoration has many facets. To begin, a tree is a living entity, like people and culture. "People are not an image", says Gerz. "We live a process life, we do not live a statue life." The trees will also, in a sense, return Ballymun to nature. Eventually, the trees will die, and with them all they mean - as it should be. "Memories, oblivion, come and go," says Gerz. "The need for art comes from the loss of life. It does not come from the size of archives, length of shelves, walls and lists."
The National Memory Grove is not a nationalist project, nor a sentimental one, nor an attempt to further anyone's sense of victimology. "It's too late for victims," Gerz says. "The victims are all dead." The sole objective is truthful remembering. It is an exercise in free expression, not a place for the promotion of agendas. There is room here for Eoghan Harris's monarchist mother, as well as his republican grandfather.
The sod-turning will be next Easter, and the project is now open for donations: €60 a tree, each with a plaque outlining the donor's reasons for subscribing. The text on each plaque will be by collaboration between artist and donor. Inquiries to: Axis, Main Street, Ballymun, Dublin 9, or amaptocare@hotmail.com