The Momuments.

Monuments

Monuments are immutable, yet protean in their unlimited operation. There is one that I know of, whose symbolic and diverse nature permit the generalization of the submerging history. Here I stand, on the edge of the island that once fell, in the fire of grudge and agony. It is now the land of retrospect, the land of moments retrieved in memories of numerous individuals. Visitors fall in thoughts, in recollections of their loved ones, whose names were craved, as victims of war, onto the monoliths of the monument, while others, like young students, are in attempts to recognize and rouse an intuition from the indirect experiences from the history to instruct them. I have visited this place a few times, and I always get a sensational impression, which in this particular space is through the enigmatic beauty of the artificial constructs in the realm of external beauty that keeps us with awe. We see this in any other monuments.

The monument stands on the cliff under which lies the beautiful coral ocean that stretches beyond the horizon. Above the ocean are the colours of the infinite sky with fragments of pure white scuds swimming across the sky. All of these attribute to the magnificent picture of this one sacred space, frozen and unchangeable in our memories.

Time elapses slowly in this silence. And in the stillness of the place, the atmosphere constantly moves. Only the wind creates a sense of movement and the whistles that thrust us back to the track of time. But this time (unlike many other times I visited), one man, who turns out to be the keeper of the monument, breaks the distorting delirium. Let's not his stout figure deceive you. From a later story he tells us, you can assume he is in his early fifties, although it cannot be exact. The unexpected acquaintance with this stranger seems somewhat peculiar and abrupt in manner but my attention is immediately drawn to his pragmatic lines of thought, delivered in the medium of his refined colloquium.

I suppose it has become one of his daily routines, a habit or a part of his job, to tell a story of his experience to whoever is interested in. I am invited through the door into a plain reception room and the tea is being poured into a teacup in front of me. It is cool inside the room , totally unaffected by the unbearable summer heat outside. He starts talking, and continues his story. It is certainly interesting, but his familiarization in the same monologue over the last two decades operates in a monotonous and mechanical tone, and I'm listening to it for a couple of hours. Yet there you can discover numerous hints to the complexity in the ways with which any perceptive human beings operate to formulate what we call "history".

He has been a child of a large family. He was named Shouhashi, after a famous character from the indigenous history, and was born about a decade after the war had ceased. In the war everything was literally burnt down throughout the island, where 200,000 victims in total, and 150,000 local population was killed, most of them were unarmed civilians. The casualties accounted for a quarter of the total population. He did not exist back then, but the successive efforts by the local individuals and communities have kept the tragic story/memories in tact lest people forget this tragic experience; yes, it was one of the deadliest moments of infernal nature that human beings have ever foolishly invited in their history. A few fierce descriptions of the war-scene would suffice for your rough comprehension of the situation. The battle in Okinawa was a losing battle, and played out for buying a time: a strategical sacrifice. Local people were forced to abandon their homes and evacuate to numerous naturally formed caves existing all around in the island. Those caves could be understood as the tunnels to the underworld, where people hovered between life and death for months. People starved to death. They were hurt and mutilated from battles without any proper treatment, and afflicted with diseases and killed in internal conflicts. Military authorities issuing orders to their officers and citizens in the caves, but without any discipline. All was chaotic and wretched; crying babies were separated from their mothers and executed. So was anyone who attempted to surrender to the enemy.

Long before the battles had taken place, the locality and identity of this once unique island was almost lost in the thorough attempts of the mainland Japan to assimilate them all, in all possible ways; from their cultural beliefs to their administration system. Some might have questioned the rule, but none could resist the change. Many young generations were of course brainwashed by the compulsory education. They were patriotic and believed in their duties. But the majority of the population, having no comprehension whatsoever in sacrificing their own lives to something so obscure, something so distant from their own cultural backgrounds, died in the deepest misery and despair.

Shouhasi did not experience the war himself. So there was no profound and relevant reason when he applied to the post was accepted to be a keeper of this monument. There were not many jobs back then, in the war-torn economy. To serve in the American occupational base were not easy. He would have done anything he could do to feed himself. After all, he himself liked his job very much; it was nothing too difficult a job since no intense physical or technical labour was involved. The wage was decent. The work-hours were consistent.

Time elapses slowly in his duty. The decades of the ballast seemed very valuable for him today, after living through the age of convulsion, in which the chance of contemplation of anything beyond the immediate needs of survival was impossible, . In this place he has seen many visitors and tourists flowing in and out. Over twenty years of his observation on them led to a series of conjectures. Those who kneel at the name of their loved ones on the monoliths, They repeatedly returns to this place, and grieve for hours in silence. What do they grieve for? What is the meaning of this unreasonable, fast sentimentality?  Why do they come here, to be unhappy? Why they want to remember the sadness? He could not completely understand in his first decade what reasoning accounted for these behaviors of people. Nevertheless the place still held a special meaning and solemn air that could not be comprehended by him concretely, but they remained in him in the most abstract sense. He assumed that an imagined picture of a dreadful past signified present-day beauty, that otherwise would not exist, without by contrasting to this certain point in the tragic past. They do not come here to remember their loved ones. They remember regardless. They are here for a greater reason, perhaps unknown even to themselves. This sense of unknown force operating behind people's consciousness was almost mysterious, venerable. It requires a will to surrender to the complexity of the world that operates behind even the keenest comprehension of mankind.

A few years ago, he lost his wife at age of thirty nine. She was killed in a car accident after she left for work in the morning. The memory of the moments he spent with her since then never left his mind and it recurred repeatedly with emotion, especially when he recollect the last conversation he had with her. It made him suffer many times, yet he would never let himself stop remembering. It was when he understood the hearts of visitors who grieved through many years: a sense of sympathy and of empathy that could only be understood by him with his own imagining their sorrows in relation to his own sorrow. There was one finding and teaching from this experience. Most experience cannot be directly experienced with his one finite life. That he could understand those people in sorrow was rather accidental. It may not have happened if his wife did not die. And what about the sorrow of other kinds that are irrelevant to war, death, and so on? What about other kind of feeling, like joy, anger, or fear? One cannot experience every possible events or situations. But this does not mean one can remain indifferent to other's feelings. Because experience must be imagined. The imagination facilitates the indirect understanding of the world as a whole. What keeps mankind in the unending tragedy is this very deficiency of imagination. With a little bit our imagination, we could easily experience how they feel, and come to the most reasonable and logical conclusions. But we are in denial of our own capabilities.

Yet, imagination does not occur randomly. The imagination is possible only when something triggers it and establishes the relation between him and the (will-be) imagined. This is why,  Shouhashi believes monuments are the highest, the most functional forms of art that can foster our imaginations, and evokes solidarity among mankind.

The sun is already setting. I wish to linger but I remember a plan for this evening with one of my old colleagues who lives on the other side of island. I need set out early.

Thanking for his hospitality, I shake his large hand and bid farewell. I am now walking toward my car. I would never forget the spectacle I am witnessing at this very moment; the lucid sky and the vast horizon, the setting sun illuminating the alignments of the mysterious monoliths of the monument.



As I'm driving through the highway on the shore toward my friend's house, I am being struck by one thought. The last conversation Shouhasi had with his wife was unforgettable to him until today and will always be. You might know from your own experience, the last conversations with any persons would usually go unnoticed at the time, because eternal partitions are often unpredictable. If this was the case, this last moment he had with his wife megalomaniacally recurred in his mind. Being trapped in this one particular moment when she was alive, retrogression to which is the simultaneous resistance against the unstoppable, inhumane force of a eternal loop in memory that would eventually lead to the recognition of  the impending conclusion of his own life. Such prospects can bring great despair to some who fear death. But at the same time, this force of looping of memory is what creates the sense of beauty and ugliness, ballast and convulsion, war and peace, light and dark, future and past, life and death and all other complimentary sets of terms mankind has created in order to make a sense of existence comprehensible, in the complexity of the arcane universe. These terms can only be measured with the scale of time. The relative comparisons between difference experiences and imaginations must be made in the medium of time. Happiness and Sadness, or death and life, cannot exist in the same moment.  But what is dissappoing to me, despite this findings is that time itself is an artificial concept that never is absolute.

We should certainly learn from the history and make use of it, but this seem to be only a pragmatic advice; there is no definite measurement for the values we hold and the directions we choose, as nothing is explicable. But I fear that this realization will make my life no longer existent. That is why I listen to and believe his pragmatic words, to surrender to the ways we conceive in our imaginations, the beauty, the veneration, and time. Each monument (and all other reminders) in the world can evoke infinite interpretations and perceptions. I chose to remain unaware all of them. As it is impossible, and of course the interpretations and perceptions made by mankind will forever be definite as we are not the omnipotent and unable to conceive and express them in all possible ways. Less important, but significant is that the reminders themselves may not indefinite. As the universe may have its limit and may not last eternally. Yet it is clever to conclude that, the end of the physical existence of mankind does not mean the end mankind. Why? Because it is  possible, that other creatures that may exist in this semi-infinite universe, there are almost certain chance they will imagine us, beyond time and space. They can be us, only by imagining us.

It was then I began to realize the essence of the world: the fused manifestations of indefinite perceptions and interpretations of the external world by all intelligible creatures in the universe. There are, further questions to contemplate. For now, my inquiry goes no further. Here in this island I have found a moment of little peace, why do I want to interrupt this comfort against the will of my earthy, familiar aesthetics?