The Trouble With Bronze Men

A few years ago I was in Oxford, the guest of an ancient college whose name I’ll pretend to be too polite to mention. Pimm’s in a courtyard garden sanctum gave way to luncheon on red velvet chairs in an oak paneled room. The exquisite flavors of the food befitted the subtly opulent setting, and the conversation was likewise wholly expected on such a well-endowed plot of earth. 

I was seated next to a historian who was giving me an earful about why the idea of removing statues of historical figures was ridiculous. It was 2019, and the nearby city of Bristol in southwestern England was deep in debate over a statue commemorating the city’s native son Edward Colston, a 17-18th century merchant who amassed enormous wealth as a slave trader. Voices were raised to tear it down. Others shushed that a plaque can simply be added. 

This historian posited that if “we” were to pull down Colston’s statue out of the same revisionist zeal as he understood to have motivated the recent removal of some Confederate statues in the U.S., then both nations–and indeed the world–would be a sea of empty plinths and wiped memories, a holocaust against history motivated by base emotionality. 

It was not the first time in my life that I wished I had the ability to summon up a reply as witty as Oscar Wilde or persuasive as Aaron Sorkin. That sort of reply needs to be a zinger–smart and devastating. “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,” spake Wilde in 1891. Pity I need Google to get the quote right. Pity I need to rely on a quote at all, instead of my own words.  

You see I’m smart, but emotional. I’ve not trained myself sufficiently to subdue my emotions and opinions in favor of brutal intellectual argument. I can’t rise above and verbalize five-paragraph essays with aloof abstraction, the only sort of reply deemed worthy in a room as thoroughly oak-paneled as that one. 

And I’m not even grappling with imposter syndrome. I went to college–not Oxford, but an excellent liberal arts institution for women that empowers minds and voices like mine through critical thinking and vast quantities of writing. Likewise, I’m a native English speaker with no difficulty comprehending the argument or, theoretically, composing my retort. And the quietly assertive luxuries of the room–its oak paneling, lead glass windows, fine china, bright pomegranate seed salad–weren’t enough to undermine a lifetime of privilege stemming from white middle-class stability and a family history that includes a few barons of industry. Nah, I felt the right to be at that table as anyone. 

But I still froze, unable to interject amid the torrent of content and confidence from this white, male apologist of small-C conservative history and memorialization.

Oxford, it seemed, had taught this man the dark arts of speaking without end, asking questions upon which to build more of his own answers, and cast aspersions on any who cannot or does not debate according to the rules set by the dispassionate set at Oxbridge.

 The very emotionality of the protesters drawing attention to Colston’s tarnished legacy as an enslaver and human trafficker, seemed to this man in this room grounds to expel them from the debate. “Cooler heads only,” should be posted at the entrance of the oak-paneled room. Wait, no, of course, how vulgar. Dispensatio solum. That’s better. 

Not much of the content the man was arguing seemed to me any less emotional. He was the one after all worried about a holocaust of historical memory. If that’s not emotional language I don’t know what is. But how to engage someone who is arguing on an emotional level if they eschew the concept of any emotionality?

And as the unwilling captive of this man’s endless pontificating, I began to ask myself why he disliked emotions so much. 

I knew why I, as an emotional person, can dislike them. Emotions are messy. Emotions are so easily influenced by such mundane sundries as sleep and hormones and food and weather that they can seem no less reliable than the medieval theory of humours. 

What’s more, the emotion you feel tightening your throat, or setting your chin to wobble, or bringing warmth to your heart might actually be a secondary or tertiary emotion–anger that is actually sadness, love that is actually loneliness, fear that is actually love, and so on. 

Even when emotions are given their due credence and thoughtful examination they can fall flat. Who among us has ever listened to a friend describe a breakthrough in therapy and not felt some ugly sense of dispassion. Worse still, if you home in on the supposedly universal, primal, indisputable emotion of pain, there appears to be an even greater breakdown in communication. Though the pain gap, or pain bias–the assumption by medical providers that women are quicker to complain of pain than men, which is even greater when assessing pain in black women–has recently become increasingly validated, the gap itself is certainly nowhere near resolved). 

I recall a piece John Green wrote in 2018 on viral meningitis, and the difficulty of conveying to others how painful it was, even for a best-selling author such as he. Relistening recently to the piece (it was on a podcast, like all the best writing is), I looked up one of his sources, a 1985 book by Elaine Scarry called “The Body in Pain” and found this passage: 

“So, for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that "having pain" may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to "have certainty," while for the other person it is so elusive that "hearing about pain" may exist as the primary model of what it is "to have doubt." Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.” 

//

A week before the oak-paneled room I was in Athens. Though a great deal more arid and less expensive, Athens has something of Oxford about it (by conscious design by the English, of course, rather than retconning by the Greeks). Though oak-paneling was scarce, marble served as a more than adequate substitute to assert the long-enduring learnedness of the city through its architecture. 

I had remarkably little free time–I was in Athens to be in a classroom observing a study abroad institution–and only had a few hours to myself to take in the sights. Fortunately it was summer, and bright late into the night. After work around 5 I set off by foot towards the Acropolis. It was just ahead of me and to the right. I figured it wouldn’t be so hard to navigate my way to the rocky outcrop that foists the ancient citadel into view from practically every neighborhood. 

I’d not gone very far before I stopped. To my left, through the shag of some scrubby peripheral trees, I glimpsed a massive structure. More negative space than structure, but undeniable structure nevertheless. I felt like Lucy pushing back fur coats in the wardrobe and spying a lamppost in a snowy wood. I stepped back a few paces and saw an entrance. I paid the admission and walked forward, enthralled, in a daze like that which most of us hope will spontaneously seize us while traveling. I do not recall signage, but then again I am certain my gaze didn’t seek any signage, trained as it was high above my eye level. I stepped out from the scrubby trees and beyond a few demure remains of walls into a clearing of space and time. I took in a scale of a monument I’d never encountered before: more than a dozen colossal columns, many still bearing the remains of its massive architrave. Even in its state of significant ruin, I felt…… 

I felt awe, the truest awe I have ever felt at the sight of such grand magnificence and antiquity. 

I felt astonishment that such a mighty structure could be made by fragile human hands such as my own. 

I felt giddy gratitude. Hardly anyone else was there and I felt that I had been let into a secret museum after hours. 

I felt grief, of what I still can’t quite say but in this grief I felt immersed in my humanity and I saw no need to turn it away. 

Just as with pain, there’s a certain uselessness to trying to describe euphoria, that most ancient Greek of words that actually originally signified more than health than happiness but English is a living language and I’ll do with it what I please except for what I can’t because it’s too emotional to find words for. 

So I sat there, at what I later learned is called the Temple of Olympian Zeus, in the golden light of the Athenian summer evening. I took a few pictures and pulled out my journal, but no words came out. How could they? I was in the realm of feeling, and realized I was in no rush to break the spell with any wordy fragments. Anway, Keats and his urn beat me to the good stuff 200 years ago.

And so I sat, looking up the marble bridges to the heavens, and just felt as I looked up. Eventually I walked home, never pausing even for a regret that I’d not made it to the Acropolis. For how could I possibly feel any more connected to this ancient city than I already felt. 

//

I took the train from Oxford to London. At Paddington Station, I reunited with my daughter who had been staying with friends in Scotland while I was in Greece and Oxford. I swooped her in my arms and then hurried her into a cab headed for the West End. I had a surprise for her and I didn’t want us to miss it. 

We stepped out of the cab immediately into a throng of theatre-goers pulsing into the Victoria Palace Theatre. Her eyes lifted up from my face to the marquee above us both. “Hamilton!” She squealed. “Hamilton!” I beamed. I couldn’t catch her gaze again, too busy was she taking in every detail of the theatre’s ornate decorations and soon I joined her in skyward observation and appreciation. We stumbled up carpeted stairs to a second level box; moments later the house lights went down, we squeezed hands, and the show started. My daughter snapped in time with the Schuyler sisters and I mouthed along with Burr. 

A few songs in Samuel Seabury stepped up to deliver the song of the loyalists, “Farmer Refuted.” If you somehow missed Hamilton or need a reminder, it’s the one that goes:

Heed not the rabble who scream revolution / They have not your interests at heart

Chaos and bloodshed are not a solution / Don't let them lead you astray

This Congress does not speak for me / They're playing a dangerous game

I pray the king shows you his mercy / For shame, for shame

At last Hamilton can stand it no more. He doesn’t wait politely for the Englishman to wrap up; he jumps in asserting more intellectual and lyrical complexity than the simple royalist knows what to do with. After a verbal trouncing, Hamilton’s then-friend Burr urges “Alexander, please” to which Hamilton replies “Burr, I’d rather be divisive than indecisive, drop the niceties.” I caught myself thinking back to Oxford. I made a mental note to add both Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda to my list of come-back ghostwriters. 

//

Come back with me for a moment to Oxford. Because I did eventually manage to pipe up. It wasn’t a trouncing worthy of Miranda lyricising or putting in the mouth of President Bartlet. It wasn’t published and, honestly, wouldn’t be recorded at all, if I didn’t mention it here. 

But Miranda ends Hamilton with questions, and not just those upon which to build more of his own answers. He asks–us–“And when you’re gone, who remembers your name? / Who keeps your flame? / Who tells your story?” I love these questions, and I love that they are asked throughout the play but ultimately asked of us not by one of the “great men” of the play, of which there are many, but of one of the great women, by Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. Eliza gets it about memory and the historic record. Despite burning her letters to let “future historians wonder how Eliza reacted,” ultimately, she tells us she has decided to “put myself back in the narrative.” And the show ends with her telling us she story of the rest of her life, how she used it to honor the memory of her husband and his cause but also to pursue her own passions and victories. 

Every time I listen to the show I feel what a gift it is Miranda let’s us end the show with Eliza. For too often the littler stories don’t make it in the records, especially the stories of women and their passions and victories, even as they themselves are preserving the lives of great men in death as they had in life. 

I always cry at that point in the play. Of course I do, I’m an emotional person. 

I’m building it up….or maybe I’m stalling. No more. This is what I said to the historian, so emotionlessly fraught in his oak-paneled room at the idea of the rabble pulling down bronze men. 

“I agree with protesters. Bring down Colston. Bring down Lee. It’s not the bronze that makes the statues important. That makes them valuable. What makes them important is that we have put them up high. For, a person we look up to, we look up to. So when there’s a statue of a wealthy slave trader, or a Confederate slave owner, it’s not enough to add a plaque. It’s not even enough to pull it down. We should take away every plinth and dig a hole in depth of its former height and lower the statue into it, so that every passerby can take heed to avoid the hole, and appreciate as they walk by how much the birds have pooped on their heads.” 

//

The current of adrenaline carrying my words along was such that I remember very little else of this exchange. In my head I’d like the story to have ended there, the lights went down and then a bow and… but I’m pretty sure that after a brief pause following “pooped on their heads” he was back at it. 

But I had said my piece. I definitely finished my pomegranate seed salad.

And I felt glad that I’m an emotional person. I think the pain caused by these statues is, to some, unfathomable because the pain cannot be intellectualized into certainty. The pain of others, therefore, remains forever a point of doubt. 

As great as the scrutiny of science and scholarship can be to analyze the world and remove doubt–I am happy, for example, that we’ve moved beyond the medieval theory of humours–sometimes I wish folks would just sit in the presence of history, eyes off the signage. I wish they would look up and allow themselves to feel. History is not set in stone, or in bronze, or in plaques. And it’s alright if we allow our feelings today to affect our reading of history. Tell me what society, ever, hasn’t done that?

As Oscar Wilde said, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” And did you know, he went to Oxford? They don’t have a statue of him though. No surprise, I suppose. But if you ever get the chance to go to Merrion Square Park in Dublin you’ll see a fantastic sculpture of Wilde. The plinth, so to speak, is a rugged bit of greyish boulder, upon which a lifesize Wilde lolls, lying back propped up by an elbow, one leg open and spread long, long the other bent at the knee. His jacket is carved of the brightest green jade, with pink accents along the cuff and collar of some other stone, and he smirks. And there he sits slightly above eye level, but not much. 

What a statue.