Day 13 Thursday 4th June 2009 Meeting with local people

by Conor Kelly, 6 Jun 2009

I have been meeting a number of locals over the last two weeks to discuss my project. Many of those I have spoken to have been quite elderly and due the creeping years have been wrestling with memory in a more personal, specific and practical manner than the ideas I am broaching. There is a certain irony contained in trying to frame the question of memory sitting in living rooms and kitchens with men and women who can no longer remember because memory is failing them. They cannot remember whilst I am considering if another monument is constructed, if it will be brutalised and destroyed again. Clearly if this thought exists then there are some who do and will remember, and some who would actively enforce a certain mnemonic manicure. Perhaps perversely this is what James E. Young (when discussing the German counter monument) refers to when he claims that ‘the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution. Instead of a fixed figure for memory, the debate itself – perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions – might be enshrined.’

One could erect a monument on a Thursday and have it destroyed on a Friday. This relationship between the object and the viewer/public seems a somewhat troubled encounter. It would probably be unfeasible to supply enough monuments to fit this particular demand. It feeds the question of whether this divisive memory will prevent us from ever reflecting back on the events that have shaped and changed society irrespective of political maps.

Lucy McDiarmid writes in The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement that the epnonymous individual remains, ‘the ubiquitous subject of an unendable argument or long national dream, She describes Casement’s legacy as ‘disturbing, entertaining’ and ‘irresistible’.

The Ghost of Roger Casement – WB Yeats

O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea’s roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his day,
The country thinks no end of him,
For he knows how to say,
At a beanfeast or a banquet,
That all must hang their trust
Upon the British Empire,
Upon the Church of Christ.

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has gone to India
And all must pay him heed,
For histories are there to prove
That none of another breed
Has had a like inheritance,
Or sucked such milk as he,
And there’s no luck about a house
If it lack honesty.

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.