Walls and Memory
A Futurist View column by Barton Kunstler appears regularly in The Metrowest Daily News

Do you remember the future? Absurd! Memory is about the past. Of course, without memory, without a past, we would have no idea who we are one moment to the next. This is as true of entire societies as of individuals. Yet some memories are so powerful, they overflow the past to claim the future as well.

In Washington D.C. last week, I was reminded of the ancient links between memory and walls. The walls of Troy and their destruction, immortalized by Homer and Virgil. The countless walls left behind for archaeologists to excavate, deepening the memory of human experience even as the ruins bespeak its futility.

Walls are very important to memory in our nation's capital. There is, of course, "The Wall", Maya Lin's astonishing tribute to the more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam. The Wall speaks to futility as well as sacrifice and, by extension of its bleak, haunting form, to all war's victims, living and dead. What's in a name? The Wall's 58,000th answer to that question resonates no less solemnly and powerfully than its first.

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, too, walls represent the substance of memory itself. One wall lists every destroyed Jewish community, a shocking density of names. (What's in a name?). From the Tower of Life's three-story walls dangle 1,500 photographs chronicling the pre-war shtetl of Eishyshok. The last surviving segment of the Warsaw ghetto wall. Slatted walls of the cattle car you are free to enter. Here the notion of museum as collection is transcended. A visit to the Museum is a wandering through the mind of an all-seeing witness, through the cells in which memories are perpetually relived.

Memorials are monuments to Memory itself as much as to the events and lives they commemorate. Memorials memorialize themselves, saying, in effect: "We proclaim the primacy of Memory. Without Memory, there is no Holocaust, no dead of war. What is Memory but a series of memorials engraved upon the mind?"

Who among us remembers the future? We all do. At the walls of memory we foresee the darker inevitabilities of our own lives, our own cities, our own memories. The past is gone, but its patterns and rhythms are welded to the future by our memories, all we ever truly own.
Human beings tend to presume we own the future; hence, we're always planning. After all, the future belongs to no one, so we may as well claim it. An exhibit sign at Washington's Natural History Museum trumpets "The Conquest of Land", referring to 450 million years ago when sea creatures first wriggled up a sandy beach. Why "conquest"? Why not "The Land Welcomes Refugees from the Primeval Oceans"? Will we "conquer" the future? Better ask, "Will the future welcome us?" Let's not be too sure we know the answer.

The Walls and their memories hold the answers. We stare at the walls of memory and feel things: a sinking in the stomach, a lump in the throat, a memory, a tightening chest. Images flash through the brain. From these feelings and images, and those associated with other experiences and the memories that retain them, we construct who we are and who we will become. Our futures rise out of our memories like forests from the ground. The Walls remember the future: they remind us that, like a malevolent comet, history's darkest dreams are fated to return once more by the light of day.

There is an escape clause. Because, if in some sense we do remember the future, then in fact we know a great deal about it. If, as a society, we could reach beyond remembering, beyond testifying, beyond analyzing, and create a living engagement with the past, we will begin the mighty work of rerouting the fatal patterns of human cruelty and folly.

The key is in recasting education and public discourse to explore what memory reveals about the future. And few resources could be as valuable in this regard as the walls of Washington. None of us will ever fully grasp their message, but each family, school group, busload of tourists, or lone contemplative willing to engage these walls on their own terms, somehow transforms our collective memory of the future into something more hopeful and bright. Such memories have a way of becoming reality, a fit memorial to those very walls dedicated to the lost and the trampled and the dead.

Pause a moment. Regard the surrounding walls. Every wall memorializes the lives it enfolds. Every wall also proclaims, "I'm still standing," and as such, is truly a memory of the future. What do your walls memorialize? What memories of the future might be revealed in the patterns of the past?