ABSTRACT
Outside the town hall in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a roughly fashioned adobe monolith commemorates the massacre of a local Native American tribe. It is some 10 feet tall; stuck into the 4 foot plinth on which the monolith rests are fragments of everyday life: children’s plastic toys, a sock, a toothbrush, a tattered teddy bear, chipped plates and cracked cups, a family photograph behind broken glass with the frame partly obscured by sandstone. The shocking poignancy of these familiar little objects scattered in and by the enormity of the memorial conveys at a glance a meaning that words alone must struggle to contain. How does one simultaneously describe the personal losses and the vastness of such an event? How does one fit one’s understanding of the individual survivor into the larger picture of the catastrophe without losing sight of that individual’s own struggles, without objectifying them in some way? How does one keep the individual’s plight in mind without submitting to the mind-numbing enormity of a catastrophe?
