A Fitting Tribute at Ground Zero by Erik Inglis This op-ed piece originally was published by Newsday.com and reappears here with permission.
Related Links: • Oberlin College Department of Art		SEPTEMBER 22, 2003–Americans are uncomfortable with dead bodies. Ted Williams' saga exerts a ghoulish fascination by violating our expectations that dead bodies will be neither disturbed nor discussed. Thus some were startled by recent news that the anonymous or unclaimed remains of Sept. 11 victims would be preserved within the planned memorial at the World Trade Center. There was actually little new in this news: The preservation of the victims' remains at the site was mandated in the guidelines for the memorial competition announced last April. What was new was the technical decision to dehydrate the remains, in the hope of future identification. But the prosaic announcement sparked a surprised recognition: The memorial will be a cemetery. Cemeteries themselves are not particularly troublesome. While no cemeteries have been added to lower Manhattan since the 1800s, there are several old ones. Saint Paul's Chapel has had a graveyard since the 18th century; it borders Ground Zero and was damaged on Sept. 11. A few blocks north and equally old, the African Burial Ground endured two centuries of oblivion before returning to light in 1991. Designed as cemeteries, these places became monuments with the gradual passage of time. The planned memorial is different: From its inception, it will be both monument and burial ground. This dual function is rare in American memorials. Our nation's major monuments in Washington for Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Vietnam veterans do not shelter bodies. While Washington's tomb can be found at Mount Vernon, few visitors seek it out, preferring to tour his house and garden. At the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a monument thematically akin to the World Trade Center memorial, the arrangement of empty chairs on a grassy green may suggest a cemetery but no one is buried there. New York City has one major exception to the rule that monuments and graves don't mix: Grant's Tomb on Manhattan's Upper West Side. This exception reveals the problem. The tomb's long struggle for respectful attention, renewed in the wake of Beyonce Knowles' performance July 4, is due not only to contemporary ignorance of Grant and disfavor for his monument's grandiose architecture. It stems also from the monument's dual role as tomb and memorial, a puzzling status that gave rise to the trick question: Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? As the World Trade Center memorial departs from the dominant trend of American monuments, it approaches other traditions. There are echoes of sites of martyrdom, like Canterbury Cathedral, where Thomas à Becket was killed. He fell near an altar now marked by a crucifix shaped of jagged swords. After his rapid canonization, Becket's body was enshrined and his cathedral rebuilt to welcome pilgrims who came to pray near the saint's relics. Martyria like Canterbury derive much of their power from the close proximity of body and event: It happened here, to him. This comparison suggests that the World Trade Center memorial has an explicitly religious dimension, and the competition rules refer to the site as sacred. It is, however, a nondenominational sacrality that welcomes religion but does not mandate it. American history provides two important precedents for this approach— precedents that provide even better comparisons than religious sites like Canterbury. Civil War battlefields frequently serve as both monuments to the war and graveyards for those who died in it. Even more pertinent is the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, which still shelters the remains of many of the 1,177 men who died on the ship. These comparisons point to the scale of Sept. 11. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans at home have only rarely had to confront a large number of the dead in one time and place, one reason we've traditionally managed such a clean separation of memorials and cemeteries. At Antietam and Gettysburg, at Pearl Harbor and Ground Zero, however, the losses were enormous, and complete recovery impossible. Sept. 11 was the most violent day on American soil since the Civil War. No matter which design is selected, the presence of bodies at the site, underlining the absence of the towers above, will be the memorial's most necessary, appropriate, and sobering reminder of what was lost on Sept. 11.
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