After a tragedy we feel compelled to build memorials, to remember what happened, and to make it all meaningful. Whether a monument at Auschwitz or Ypres, inscribed with what Siegfried Sassoon described as “intolerably nameless names,” we make our mourning something material to make it immortal. Oral tradition may decay and become corrupt but Arlington Cemetery lasts forever, or so we have convinced ourselves. With the aid of a memory palace, an AIDS quilt or a piece of the Berlin Wall, we can recall a terrible history we might otherwise be tempted to forget. And even once we have dismissed that fantasy of perfect remembrance, we persist in erecting the names of the fallen and the lost because we feel it is right and just. Memorials map out our cultural memory; they form a guide to our communities and create a sense of belonging. In turn, our culture demands the memorial as a kind of second skin, a raised tattoo that lets a community imagine its own flesh. There is an ethics of memorialization that reproduces itself.
When violence erupts into our everyday lives, as it has seemed to with increasing frequency this past year, we seek a forum to express our grief. Although we still set up physical memorials—for example, the 26th mile of Boston Marathon was dedicated to the Newtown victims—the Internet is our most immediate public sphere. When today’s Marathon was interrupted by explosions, when the race stopped and the tragedy started, we took to the web to search for loved ones, to spread the news, to read the rumors, and to say something about how we felt: helpless, exhausted, indignant, sad, anxious, and confused. Why is it that we tweet our grief? Why do we say we “have Boston in our prayers?” Or rather, who do we think we are talking to?
Facebook statuses and Twitter updates are like flowers rested against a grave. They wilt and brown in the sun and mold in the damp evening, rot and curl into the earth again. There the headstone stands, resilient against the days, but in its own time resigned to crumble, too. I visited a cemetery in rural Kansas last December and walked on markers collapsed into the prairie sod, unaware of who was underneath. But I think those physical signs of grief last far longer than digital memorials, at least of the social media variety. An update or a tweet lives forever in cyberspace, but disappears in a matter of minutes off the bottom edge of a newsfeed. A moment of social media grieving seems to confirm our ultimate helplessness in the face of horror. For what does it mean that I have said to no one in particular, my 602 followers or 819 friends, that I am saying a prayer for Boston? Why do I feel a compulsion to report my prayer to the void?
The cynic in me wants, very badly indeed, to indict those public prayers as social tokens, a coinage that degrades the death it intends to commemorate. Yet I cannot help but detect a faint hopefulness in those pleas. A catalogue of tweeted grief does not inspire hope that we can or will make it all meaningful. It accepts the emptiness of loss without a furious desire for filling cavities, for patching fissures and mending wounds. Instead, it wishes for a community of caring people who read and respond with their own unaddressed petitions, who can find meaning without reaction, reciprocation, and hate.