Arendt suggests that memory, as elaborated by poets should always be an exercise in education. For ‘the very fact that so great of an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence’ (Arendt, 1958: 197). In The Republic, Plato, in his Socratic dialogue called Homer’the educator of Hellas’, for immortalizing the events of the Trojan War (Arendt, 1958: 198).
Although Socrates remained highly skeptical of the legacy of his work. Homer’s memorialization of the Trojan War in The Illiad was not to memorialize the good deeds of actors, but to educate the reader one way of life which he would have no other way to know. The work of memorialization serves not only the purpose of producing deeds to be emulated, but moreover to pose a situation of interpreting, engaging and thinking. Thus, memorialisation in the polis as a space of organized remembrance encourages the engagement of citizens through an exercise of interpretation.
By allowing any person to become that narrator of a story, the polis encourages reflection upon a given subject. Thus, I suggest, that the limitations stem from the ability of the individual to cultivate their own individual reflection outside of the polity. Arendt encourages this work, not utilitarian, but reflexive and malleable. And poetry becomes an asset for the exercise in memory, for deeds, only when reified into narrative can outlast the limited lifespan of human beings – to understand the true purpose of democratic and revolutionary thought. Thus, Arendt encourages interpretation, and the object most open to interpretation is art.
Art will only be reified in the realm of the polis so the individual can return to the city able, and better be able understand the injustices of the existing city (Rose: 1996). Thus, we require a deeper interpretation of the meaning of action and remembrance in the face of one of the deepest processes of thought: interpretation, lest we risk exclusion. Observing the elaboration of certain memories and the omission of others, I will suggest that the ANZAC Day commemorations demonstrate the ‘one-sidedness’ of modern social and political thought (Rose: 1996).
However, I will argue that organized remembrance does hold the possibility to improve the human frailties – yet its limitations stem from the aberration of mourning not private nor public, which separates the individual from the public, and public from the individual. For, only when given the opportunity for these narratives to manifest the space of organized remembrance manifest can we improve the frailty of human affairs. Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem was a poem that was not written, but committed to memory.
Discussing Akhmatova’s struggle within Stalin’s regime, I will offer Akhmatova’s poetry as an example of inaugurated mourning I will suggest that Rose’s poetics of law can help the individual to understand reflection as a social activity. Weaving spaces of organised remembrance with reflection will help rediscover politics within the city, not as a realm of domination but of redemption. Rose’s challenge to memory: ‘Melancholia’ versus ‘mourning Poetry and thought are often interpreted as too lofty for the realm of politics, a realm dominated by power (Berlin: 2004).
In Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose denounces the duality of modern political thought, and argues this distracts from the difficult work of what she calls ‘the broken middle’. Rose celebrates Holocaust literature which does not distinguish between victim and perpetrator, for it reminds the reader of both their complicity and responsibility in the atrocities of War (Rose, 1992: 294). For Rose, mending the broken middle is necessary for building a bridge back into ethical and political life. It is “always in error: institutions and practices are always imperfect; they always do some amount of harm.
In the absence of an absolute, the way we react to what is left, to the ‘broken middle’, is with anxiety’ (Lloyd 2007: 699) an anxiety which requires deeply personal reflection on the atrocities of War. To understand the injustices of the city, we must develop the ability to navigate the space between oppositions – good and evil, innocent and perpetrator. Instead, she encourages the acknowledgement that living in the world constantly involves being implicated in power and violence (Rose: 1992). The collective work of mourning remains abberated and cyclical, it remains too far separated from reality.
It is ‘no work, no exploring of the legacy of ambivalence, [nor) working through the emotions aroused by bereavement’ (Rose, 1996: 70). Rose is a polemical thinker – she is deeply opposed to any memory that exists in stasis. For without constant engagement with the purpose of their reification, we risk memory becoming a singular, totalising entity, and thereby diverting our attention from ‘hard work of the middle, [and] the actualities and possibilities of concrete existence’ (Lloyd, 2008: 205). Thus, the process of remembrance can highlight the difficulty of’working through’ trauma.
Working through’ trauma is central to reconciling the what Rose calls ‘the broken middle’. Reconciling the brokenness of theory and actuality which ‘comes to know the contours of loss and suffering that emerge under the domination of formal law, but it does not remain frozen in it’ (Schick: 2012). The project cannot be realised in a narrative which is transfixed in abberated mourning, unless civilians can confront their memories in private spaces, to work through the difficulties and impossibilities through the exercise of disclosure in the realm of the polis.
Ethical life, for Rose should be difficult: it is too easy to deny the traumatic experiences of suffering. Rose explains the omission of memory as the denial of the difficult process of ‘working through’ in relation to her Grandmother’s experience of the Holocaust: When Cousin Gutta came and told my parents that she [… ] was the only one left – that fifty members of Grandma’s family were killed. Nowadays my mother denies this – she denies that it happened and she denies her mother suffered from it.
This denial and unexamined suffering are two of the main reasons for her all-jovial unhappiness – the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair’ (Rose, 1995: 19). Through the constant and reductive processes of commemoration we deny the possibility of working through trauma. By memorialising war without performing the difficult work of the middle we remain in a static, cyclical work of remembrance which aims to keep the wound open in the hope of some later utopian redemption, [by] understanding ritual and repetition as a placeholder for future happiness’ (Jay in Schick, 2012: 47).
The legitimate authority which differentiates between the individual and the city results in the diremption between the individual and the political. For Rose, it is too easy to view the world through these deceptive dualisms – ‘individual versus community, mind versus world’ (Lloyd, 2008: 4). The individual is the political. Only by reconciling the reflection of the soul within the city can we mend the broken middle, encouraging the difficult work of inaugurated mourning.
Inaugurated mourning is difficult because it encourages us to question our complicity with unjust political regimes. Too often the city of Jerusalem is presented as the ‘sublime other of modernity’s atrocities, emphasizing ethics and community becomes problematic, modernity becomes something ‘dangerously distorted and idealised (Rose, 1996: 26). Rather than finding comfort in Athens or Jerusalem, she encourages an uneasy, anxiety-filled journey to the third city, to New Jerusalem: ‘an imaginary community… dedicated to difference… hich overcomes the fusion of knowledge and power in Old Athens’ (Rose, 1996: 21).
Rose suggests the political work of mourning should be intimately woven intensely personal reflection. The soul suspends the political towards comprehension, towards ‘understanding the intensity of subjectivity by denouncing the sentimental and sacred within the boundaries of the city’ (Rose, 1996: 10). The Poetics of Law In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose boldly suggests that Arendt ‘died at the walls of the third city’ (Rose, 1996: 39).
The ‘Third City’ she describes as ‘the city in which we live, where no easy stories can be told’ (Schick, 2012:3). Against ‘innocence’, she encourages the ‘anxiety-filled pursuit of comprehension of ourselves and our relations with others, the structures of power in which we are embedded and our complicity in creating and sustaining those structures’ (Schick, 2012:3). She acknowledges that out fail world can never be fully mended but instead, suggests that we should be ‘trying, failing, learning and trying again’ (Schick, 2012: 53).