THE NEW
GROUND ZERO
By MICHAEL
KIMMELMAN
THE capitalized words printed just above these, which you may have
read or maybe your eye skipped over them, are my first and last names. In the
cafeteria of the building where I work, a similar name ó Jay M. Kimmelsman ó
appears on a plaque commemorating New York Times employees killed during World
War II. Jay M. Kimmelsman worked in the department of outgoing mail. When I
pass the plaque, I think of him. I feel a connection.
What is it about a name? Its power is palpable but mysterious.
Without thinking, we say we know someone when we know his name. "Do you
know who that is?" "Yes, that's Jay from outgoing mail." But how
much do we know? We react to names that resemble ours, or resemble the names of
people we know, in the same vague way that we scour other people's family
snapshots. We hunt for clues to what they tell us, often idly. We look for
something of ourselves.
But names, like photographs, unless they are ours or those of our
friends and family, say much less than we expect.
The competition guidelines for the memorial at ground zero require
that the design "recognize each individual who was a victim" on Sept.
11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked.
It's a safe bet that many of the 5,200 submissions interpret that as some kind
of list of names. By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of
reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to
connote "memorial," just as minimalism has come to be the presumptive
sculptural style for memorial design, the monumental blank slate onto which the
names can be inscribed.
During the past week the news broke that the remains of more than
1,000 of the 2,792 people who are missing from the Sept. 11 attack will be
buried at the memorial. Investigators cannot identify more than 12,000 body
parts ó the DNA is too badly damaged ó and so the remains will be dried and
vacuum sealed, preserved, like ancient mummies, in white opaque pouches, in the
hope that technologies of the future can decode who is who. The Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation, in addition to requiring recognition of each victim,
instructed entrants in the competition to include space to store remains, just
in case.
So now the memorial becomes a literal cemetery, with the oldest
form of human identification, names, most likely testifying to victims the
newest science can't distinguish. The ethos will be different from that of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial. There are no bodies buried at the Vietnam memorial,
nor any unaccounted-for remains. That memorial is a list of names, a neutral
place to meditate abstractly on the war and on the dead and missing, who are
elsewhere.
By the afternoon of Sept. 11, people were already taping
photocopied fliers with the names and pictures of their dead or missing friends
and relatives at makeshift shrines around the city: instant, homegrown
demonstrations against the anonymity of mass killing. The fliers, which were at
first missing-persons posters, quickly became private memorials, reminding
everybody that the people who died at the World Trade Center were not numbers
but someone's husband or sister or son.
This isn't new. The impulse to name names already became
commonplace with World War I. Partly, it democratized war. Foot soldiers were
recognized not as nameless peons but as individuals, like the generals who sent
them to die. The war had made many people cynical about everything except the
doughboys in the trenches. These men emerged as the everyday heroes, if there
still were any heroes, instead of the military leaders or lone Paul Revere
types who had traditionally been singled out for memorials. The listing of their
names reduced the distance between the recruit and the officer but also
represented a tacit protest against the anonymity of modern warfare. Names both
stood for the individual soldier and, correlatively, pleaded for a more humane
approach to battle, which is to say they gained both literal and symbolic
value.
World War I also inspired tombs of the unknown soldier. The tomb
tried to reconcile two conflicting ideologies about war: the dehumanizing
anonymity of death and the nobility of personal sacrifice. The unknown soldier
symbolized both the masses of anonymous dead and each missing soldier, whose
name we were implicitly meant to attach to the tomb.
To this morbid history, World War
II contributed lists of innocent victims. Fifty years after its founding,
Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, which in Hebrew means "a monument
and a name," is still recovering the names of the Jews who died during the
Holocaust, a vain and fruitful enterprise in that all the names will never be
accounted for, so that the process of trying to remember cannot end.
By the time of Maya Lin's Vietnam
memorial in 1982, the idea of names, engraved simply and identically ó a visual
equivalent to the monotone roll-call of the dead, which has also become a
standard memorial ritual ó achieved Platonic form, more moving for being so
spare. Minimalism proved itself there as the sculptural language of the
memorial sublime, combining the abstraction of the memorial's physical form
with the absolute specificity of the names of every dead and missing soldier.
It was the inverse of the tomb to the unknown soldier, which had become nearly
obsolete, thanks to improved forensic science and record keeping, or so it
seemed until Sept. 11.
Ms. Lin's memorial, which carefully
took no side in the debate about Vietnam, was made out of polished black
granite so that people would literally see themselves reflected in the names on
the wall, a mirror of perception. The Vietnam War was an unresolved issue, but
the dead and missing from that war could be listed. Names seemed morally
neutral. They were a compromise in a society that could not decide where it
stood. Today, it is too early to know the historical lessons of the attacks on
the World Trade Towers, but the casualty list can be drawn up. A world that
does not seem to agree about anything can settle on the names of the dead.
Lists of names promise closure, a conflict-averse path to catharsis in an age
of instant gratification and short attention spans.
But written words, as Shimon Attie,
an artist of memorials, has said, are images, and images have an aesthetic
component and a political one. A long list of names is, first of all, an
incantatory sight, the length of the list implying the scale of the event
memorialized. Seeing 57,000 names is not the same as seeing 168 (the number of
people killed in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City) or 2,792 or 6 million, by which point a list becomes almost
unreadable. Numbers suggest the enormity of loss but are a dubious measure of
history. Not many people died at Lexington and Concord but what happened there
changed the fate of the nation.
And names only seem morally
neutral. Ms. Lin's Vietnam memorial made names the basic irreducible fact of
this episode in history. Names were all that was left after the pomp and
flourish of old-fashioned memorial design were stripped away. In hundreds of
years, when the historical debates Ms. Lin studiously sidestepped may be
forgotten, the names of the men will be what remain written in stone. Picture,
for a second, that memorial without the names: a plain black tombstone, an open
wound on the Washington Mall, which was how Ms. Lin imagined the design
sculpturally. The message about the war would be very different.
Names animate space. They are like
ghosts. We read into them. The ethnic variety of names on the Vietnam memorial
summons up an image of a diverse population, a model democracy, a political
portrait that belies the rifts of the culture. One nation. One family.
The Vietnam memorial is also shaped
like a book. Ms. Lin purposely chose a small typeface, unheard of in monumental
design, so that reading the names would seem more intimate, like scanning a
printed page. The memorial is supposed to be our national story. She also listed
the 57,000 names not alphabetically but chronologically according to when the
soldiers died or went missing, an artistic device. Imagine all the John Smiths
who died in Vietnam listed alphabetically. Now imagine that your father or son
or brother or husband were one of them. Which John Smith on the wall would you
touch or pin a photograph beside or leave flowers underneath?
The engraved style of these names,
sans pomp and serif, is now standard. The names on the 168 chairs that, like
headstones in rows, represent the dead in Oklahoma City are graphic descendants
of the names on the Vietnam memorial. But names are fickle signifiers,
containers for information that can be filled differently by different people,
depending on what they know or think or hear about the person named. In
Oklahoma City, some parents, unhappy with their sons-in-law, wanted their dead
daughters' maiden names on the memorial, not their daughters' married names.
Names are loaded. A list of the dead SS officers buried at Kolmeshohe cemetery
in Bitburg, Germany, would have a different effect on their relatives than on
Jews.
We engrave the names of donors on
walls of museums and other public buildings. Your money or your life. Lists
democratize veterans in battle, but they are also signs of difference. At
Oklahoma City, a committee needed to be formed to decide who qualified for a
list of survivors. If you were injured and went to a hospital, you would be
eligible; if you went to a doctor's office, you might not be. If you lost
friends and colleagues and your life was turned upside down but you had left
the Murrah building for a dentist's appointment before the explosion or had
stayed home sick that day, you were not a survivor, although of course you
were. Just not in name.
Edward Linenthal, who wrote a book
about the memorial in Oklahoma City, has described memorial hierarchies.
Resolving them ó who gets named and how ó is, he argues, part of the process of
setting history right, a service
to the dead, the essence of what
memorials are for. In Oklahoma City, there are the names of the dead on the
chairs but also a museum, in which anyone can tell his or her story. Ground
zero may consider something similar: the museum as egalitarian bulletin board,
a repository of consolations to survivors, who can decide how they want to
remember their dead. Families of the firefighters who died in the World Trade
Center, for example, have pleaded publicly that their dead relatives be
identified as firefighters in the memorial. The families said the men lived and
died as firefighters. Their ladder units were their other families. It isn't
that they were greater human beings than the stockbrokers and restaurant
workers who died, only that the dead men would want to be remembered as
firefighters. They belonged to a community. Their names should be accompanied
by F.D.N.Y., maybe even grouped separately. But then how does a list not rank
the dead?
The memorial at ground zero, with
its unidentified remains, will be a special kind of memorial. It is partly a tomb
of the unknown victim, with the abstract language of memorial design, if it
ends up being abstract, that much more in tension with the literal: in this
case not just literally lists of names but parts of bodies, the corporeal and
the symbolic. Many people may think about these bodies when they stand there
reading the names: about their own inability to connect the remains to names,
about the insufficiency of names to conjure up and stand in for the people who
are lost.
What's in a name? Memorials are ultimately
local, as the historian James Young has said. They are above all for the
families and for a community, common ground to grieve. There are many ways to
enshrine and recall the dead. Memorials can be places of contention, which keep
alive history through debate. Names, foreclosing political conflicts that may
be the real unhealed wounds of the event memorialized, provide instead the
possibility of solace for the relatives of the victims. Strangers show up and
may be overwhelmed by the sight of long lists of people they did not know, with
whom they can only try to identify, just as we all greet unfamiliar names,
whose meanings remain elusive.
Finally, only the families and
friends of the dead can really know what those names mean.