Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 96

I’ve been thinking about the toppling of statues and feeling into my own relationship to the erection of the representation of (mostly) dead white men in public spaces.

I can’t remember the first time I came across a statue but my guess is it was in early childhood in Boston. There is a famous statue of Paul Revere is in a churchyard in the North End that comes to mind.

He’s riding a horse and wearing the suit and hat indicative of the Revolutionary War era. The statue commemorates the moment America was literally awakened to action.

I don’t know much else about Paul Revere except that he was the one who, legend has it, rode through the night warning everyone that “The redcoats are coming!” He was referring to the British Army.

Did he own slaves? Was he an abolitionist? What role did he play in the slave trade?

We know that there was slavery in Massachusetts at that time, so chances are he’s implicated.

I don’t know whether that statue should come down. What I do know is that the first time I saw it, and other statues of men on horses or wielding weapons or holding crosses, I always felt an immediate sense of awe.

There is something about building iconic, three dimensional images of people that immediately evokes wonder. You want to know - who is this very important person admired by enough people that they were willing to put up a permanent shrine to their existence?

Sadly, my wonder is quickly dampened when I get closer to these statues. I have never felt satisfied with the limited information available on nearby plaques or kiosks explaining who they are and what they’ve done.

I wonder if that’s because there has always been a part of me intuiting that there must be more to the story.

I know it is also because I am not an old, white, man. I do not see myself represented in these statues. I do not relate to the version of the world they represent, and I am not moved by the only shrines to bravery being ones commemorating war victories or the attempts of missionaries to shove their belief system down other people’s throats.

Another place statues show up is in the shrine room. Here they are also mostly men and are meant to represent the potential we all have to wake up.

In the process of awakening, one of the first hurdles to overcome is an over-reliance on rites and rituals. This includes any external representations of what it means to be a practicing Buddhist. My teacher framed the mental state behind such overidentification as superficiality.

I really like that word. There is nothing of inherent value or meaning in the statues that are being taken down. Their meaning comes from what we project on to them and in turn what they evoke within us.

For many, especially as we learn more and more about the WHOLE of our collective history, these statues, looking down on us from on high in all their projected glory, evoke the pain of our ancestors, the denial of our humanity, and the brutalism of those who remain in power to this day.

I’ve been noticing in myself a complicated response to the toppling of statues. Part of me wants them down and out of sight. Another part wants to know what is going to replace them.

Part of me wants to line them up and tell the world what they all did that wasn’t ok, isn’t ok, one by one like a row of naughty children.

Part of me wants to imagine new shrines, round ones with no one at the centre, oval, swirling, descending shrines, to love and community and the earth and her gifts.

Part of me wants that sense of awe to be met with grace and beauty and the promise of a representation of the best of us that isn’t about violence or dominance or supremacy.

Part of me wants to look up and see a form and a face and an action that looks like me and something I might do. Or at least something I aspire to do.

In order to imagine a world without statues first we must imagine a world without dominance. Then we can dream of how we celebrate the ones who will build that world.