The Eds, Take 1

While I was in Laramie, I didn't get a lot of academic-y stuff done.  Most of the people I had hoped to chat with were gone for the July 4th weekend, and after some bad planning and some car troubles, I only had a few short hours to make use of the university library before they closed up for the 4th of July weekend.  

But my time in Laramie wasn't a loss by any stretch.  I spent a lot of time with my brother Coyote, who let me see this community for a weekend through his eyes, and for which I thank him.  I spent a lot of time lost in the wilderness trying to learn how to be alone with myself again.  And I got three whole hours in Coe Library, where I spent my time digging in the basement and looking at the microfilm.

And what I found was really interesting.  I only had a short time to look at the Boomerang's coverage of the original beating and the ten-year anniversary, but it was extremely revealing, and I'll be talking about that in more detail later.  But the best gems I came back with were some editorials from the current Boomerang staff.  After 10 Years Later, we all learned about one snarky editorial on their Opinion page; as it turns out, there were two.

The first editorial (which I highly encourage you read) doesn't get a mention in the play from what I remember, and it's pretty interesting.  It was entitled "Ten Years Later, It's Time To Move On,"  and it's a bit of an over-the-top emotional argument about why the community needs to let the specter of Matthew Shepard go.  For one, I noticed that this one is actually attributed to the editor personally.    She's also asking a legitimate question: why do some stories of murder remain and get memorialized and others don't?  That's a great question, actually.  What I don't like is using that question to dismiss any attention paid to Shepard.

In the editorial, the editor gives a litany of other murders and tragic deaths which happened in Laramie (of which Cindy Dixon, Russell Henderson's mother, is one) and complains that none of them are given the same recognition.  She's not quite right about her examples of forgotten tragedies, however.  There was a memorial marker erected at Tie Siding where the members of the cross-country team died (and note the evasive wording in that statement).  This white cross stands near the location where the accident occurred.   Nothing, however, stands on the ground where Shepard was brutally murdered, not even the fence on which he was tied.  One location has a white cross marker to help establish the memory of a tragedy while the other has been wiped clean of all bad memories.  I'm not saying that this is a problem per se-- that landowner has the right to have peace on his or her own property-- but it does complicate her point, which the editor tries to paint a little too much in black and white when this is an issue that by definition requires shades of gray.

I also find it interesting that, in her litany of tragedies in her editorial, she chose to skip over Kristen Lamb.  That was the tragedy that had so many people in Laramie steaming (her murderer's trial roughly coincided with the Shepard beating) and is often cited as justification for those who resent the media attention over Shepard's death.  Perhaps some things run too deep, and too painful, even to be used as ammo by an angry journalist in a newspaper editorial.   Maybe there are other tragedies she would like to see remain at rest, and unmentioned. 

Anyhow, I guess that would be my main complaint here.  Sure, Deb, you're asking a legitimate question, and it's one that I (and many others) are interested in, too.  But you're not asking it in order to get an answer.  You're simply using it as an excuse to complain about an event that has left Laramie feeling bruised.  If you'd stop and explore that question-- why some stories are remembered and others are not-- you might learn something really fascinating about the nature of collective memory and human nature.  That's a lot more productive than trying to wish away a memory of an event that stings to remember and isn't going to go away.

Whether we like it or not, Matt will be a part of this community's memory.  The only real question, in my mind, is whether or not we incorporate that memory in a positive way or not, and an attitude like yours makes that difficult.   And it makes it impossible for everyone to "move on" from this tragedy like you want.  No one can "move on" from a story like this until it is confronted and you reconcile yourself to its existence.  That's the only kind of positive healing this community can ever have, and if you don't do that, you will continue to be haunted by this memory which will never leave.  The more you try to "move on," the longer he's going to be with you. 
 

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PHOTO CREDIT:

1)  The roadside memorial at Tie Siding, Wyoming, taken from gregor_y's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregor_y/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The bench: Matthew Shepard's memorial and its landscape

In The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,  we learned about the Shepard memorial bench on the University of Wyoming campus, which is parked at the front of the Arts and Sciences building.  (That's A&S there at the right.)  In addition to holding the university's main concert hall venue, A&S is also home to the Political Science department (Matt's university home) and a lot of administration.
A&S holds a privileged location on campus, too: of all the enormous buildings which ring Prexy's Pasture, the functional center of the university, A&S occupies the entire western end, and the pasture in front of it sometimes feels like a grassy mall leading up to its front steps.  (The bench is basically right behind that maroon van.) 

So, without any further ado, here's the bench, with a closeup of the plaque:

It really is a sweet gesture, I think. It gives Matt an important place on campus to permanently commemorate his life, and it's both right in front of the A&S college and in a high traffic area when the A&S auditorium is being used.  I especially like the positive message of the plaque.  It commemorates Matt, not as a victim, but one who made a positive impact.  After so much bad press after his murder, I think reminding the campus that Matt was a person, and one who has made a positive difference on everyone there is important.  And, doing it on a piece of furniture means that people will actually interact with the memorial is a great way to set the right tone. This isn't a cumbersome monolith that forces an ambivalent memory upon a campus still covering its scars. Rather, it invites remembrance to those who stop to enjoy its presence.

So, yes, I rather like the placement and wording of the Shepard memorial, but if someone took a brisk walk around camps and even around town, she would realize that Shepard's commemoration is hardly unique.  For instance:

 Here we have an identical bench dedicated to former UW president Phil Dubois and donated by the Trustees. It's located a little farther up Prexy's pasture, on the side nearest to A&S.   

This one is dedicated to former president Dubois' mother (complete with crow droppings from the flock of crows roosting on A&S):

This one was paid for by the Dubois family, as she passed away in 1999.  The former Mrs. Dubois has her bench only about seventy-five feet from the plaza in front of A&S, sort of between A&S and Merica Hall just to the south.

There are lots of these benches around campus, and I'm willing to bet at least a dozen of them have memorial plaques, to everyone from beloved former professors to admins.  (I think one I saw was for a donor, but I have no idea, really.)  So, at this point I bet you're thinking, "Wow, the Shepard memorial bench isn't unique at all!"  I'm afraid so-- in fact, these benches are not just a campus phenomenon.  Here's one dedicated to Cal Rerucha, the former DA who prosecuted both McKinney and Henderson in 1999-2000:

You can tell from the picture that these are not the same kind of benches; I think they're part of a city rather than a university project.  These benches, which sit on the north (Ivinson Avenue) side of the county courthouse, are not really reserved as memorial markers, judging by the presence of a bench with a plaque for Wal-Mart stores (I think it's the one just past the upper left-hand corner of this photo.  Rather, they're more like tiny billboards.  I think that's the point of the Reruchas' plaque on this one: it simply names himself and his wife as "attorneys at law."  What better place for a lawyer to hang out his shingle than in front of the courthouse, eh? 

So, I guess there are two different ways to look at Matt's bench in the context of the surrounding environment.  The negative one might complain that Matt's memorial isn't really all that special, and the only way they managed to get on campus was to sneak it in under a campus beautification project.  It's almost like saying, "Okay, we'll actually let you mark the campus with his memory, but his memorial can't draw attention to itself..." Honestly, I suppose that's how I felt about it when I first wandered about the campus that afternoon, but I think that there's a second, positive way to think about the bench. 

What helped me change my mind?  On the way back to my car one afternoon, I was walking back towards Prexy's in the direction of my car when I saw this fellow chatting on the phone:

Seeing this student casually tracing his hands down the bench as he talked on his phone made me stop to think: what are the chances that this kid will look down and see the plaque? Maybe he will, but he might not, either.  Even though this student's act of remembrance isn't what most people think when they try to picture commemoration, this interaction with Shepard's memory on his own terms shows how the bench incorporates Matthew's memory into the very fabric of UW's landscape.   This is unlike a normal memorial marker, like the one for the Challenger explosion on the west side of campus.  When I lived on campus, the Challenger astronauts' stone and bronze marker only really got any attention when someone used it as a hole for Frisbee golf.  Then some of us felt a little queasy about the idea of slapping the Challenger astronauts in the face with a golf disc, and eventually we moved the hole.  After that, none of us really even noticed it anymore. 

 In contrast to the Challenger memorial, Matt's bench gets a lot of daily interaction because it's designed for interactive experience.  As students look for a quiet spot to read and bask in the sun, they seek it out.  And, since it's part of a larger network of memorial benches to other beloved people, the bench presents who he really was to the campus:  someone who was a part of the UW community and whose life has indelibly left its mark on us all.

One evening after photographing Old Main, I stopped to have a seat on the memorial bench myself.  As I sat in the lengthening shadows of A&S, I could gaze upward to its highest floors dressed in sandstone, or the huge, stately pines which dominate the green spaces on the north side.  To my left was Prexy's Pasture, with its diamond pattern of walkways leading to the family/unity statue in the center, and the flagpoles for the university, state, and nation beyond.  It's a good place to sit and ponder, I decided, and as students do that, they meet with a little piece of Shepard's life.  And every time we do, we remember a little piece of Matt.

Twelve years later: tu benedictus in die natalis sis, Matt...

Another October the 12th is passing, which means one more year to look back on Matt's lamentable death, one more year to get all moody and self-referential, and yet another opportunity to lapse into a misanthropic grouch-fest and hate the whole world because it's such a downer.  I seriously need a more positive way to remember this person whom I had never personally met but who has changed the course of my life in ways I didn't expect.  I need to find a way to commemorate this day in a way that does justice to him and celebrates him in a positive light, not simply as a victim. 

So, where can I go for a different perspective?  Since I'm a medievalist, I guess that my natural impulse is to look backwards to the past for insight, and so pondering my problem eventually brought me to thinking about medieval memorial practices.  In medieval Christian society, for instance, monasteries often kept a calender or roll of their brothers and associates (called a liber vitae or "book of Life") in order to remember their passing.

Although a name in a Liber vitae was an act of commemoration in of itself, sometimes calendars of names organized by death date were used so the community could read their names aloud during the prime hour service as they performed the "work of God" in the cloister.  In those lists, the death date of a person is recorded as their dies natalis-- that is, their "birthday."  It makes a lot of sense from a medieval perspective, as Christianity often talks of that as the day that we are finally and truly freed from the bondage of sin and attain our real home with God when the soul is "born" in heaven.  It's the date of our heavenly birthday. 

This kind of commemoration was important in the monastic setting because it reinforced the sense that their brotherhood was an eternal bond, and that those who passed should continue to be recognized as a part of their community.  It reinforced that death really cannot sever their social, religious and personal ties, and that the departed who served the community in life are still a benefit to their abbey.   

And so, in my struggle to find an appropriate way to remember this day,  I think I'll do it with a celebration of Matt's continued presence and life within my community.  From here on out, this will no longer be for me a time when I'm forced to revisit a horrible, brutal crime that has scarred so many and ended a human life; instead, I'm going to mark this day as Matt's dies natalis, to recognize the part he still plays in my communities: in Laramie, in the states, and in the lives of those who loved him.  Is this the sensible approach that everyone will accept?  Probably not; all I know is that it helps make all of this make sense to me. 

Happy 12th birthday, Matthew Shepard.  You are still very much a part of us all.     

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PHOTO CREDIT:

Okay, so I couldn't find a picture of a liber vitae under a CC license, so the above picture is a leaf from Yale University, Beinecke Library MS 923, an unusual travel foldaway calendar and prayer book, which is available for CC use via the library's Flickr photostream. This text lists the feast days and/or dies natalis of popular saints (marked with giant, stretched out N's) in October.   The pic of Matthew's memorial is mine and very much free for use.

If you'd like to see what a liber vitae looks like, you can follow this link to one of the more famous manuscripts from the time period I work with.  On this single page of the Durham liber vitae, there's literally dozens of names written in hands at least three centuries apart, and it's remarkable.  

On a side note, October 12 marks the dies natalis for two of the more famous Anglo-Saxon saints:  Wilfrid, who tended to stir the muck, and Edwin, who was the first Anglian king to take up Christianity.  One of the most famous passages of Anglo-Saxon prose comes from his conversion, as recounted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History 2.13.

Lost in Translation

You'd think that, as a literature major, I wouldn't be as resistant to symbols and abstraction as I am. I live in the realm of abstraction; it's a comfortable place, they know me here. I'm getting a degree in it, even. I'm so used to dealing with the realm of the metaphor and story, actually, that it can be really hard to turn that part of my brain off sometimes. "Will you just sit back and enjoy the movie?" my husband occasionally smirks at me. (Other times, he's worse than me. We laugh it off.)

It's not really myth or symbol itself that bothers me. It's seeing that process of myth-making firsthand that's been so disorienting. When a deceased person passes from a living, imperfect being to a myth, to me it almost feels like an annihilation of the individual who once lived but now can't speak for themselves. And yet, I'm a medievalist, for crying out loud, I've read saint's lives.  Sanctification, many times, is a process of forgetting; when the imperfections that made them a mere person are gone, then someone writes a text to exemplify their holiness. And that's how you make a saint in the early Middle Ages: forgetting, coupled with a narrative. No wonder that some of my favorite holy people are often the tenacious ones, the royal pain in the asses who spoke for themselves or left a record of their frailties: Perpetua, Augustine, Boniface, Leoba; Thomas á Beckett; Julian; John Donne. 

Abstraction anxiety?

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And a lot of it is my feeling that the media is portraying Matthew Shepard as a saint. And making him as a martyr. And I don't think he was. I don't think he was that pure.

-- Sherry Johnson, in TLP (2001): 64

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Although thinking of what has happened to Matt as a translation to sainthood is admittedly anachronistic, the process that Sherry dislikes above is nevertheless a good fit: forgetting, coupled with a story, makes Matt something more than human and less than human at the same time. He's a symbol or a myth. When that happens in a story like TLP, where's the real person? To where, and as what, does he get translated to?  And I also wonder: where does that very human impulse to translate the flesh and blood of a real person to symbol come from? Sherry Johnson fears that impulse, I would say, for all the wrong reasons; she merely believes that Matt isn't a good candidate based on the slander and hearsay she's picked up around town. I'm just as hesitant, but I'm more concerned about the ethics of making a man into a myth in the first place. Is it fair to the deceased? Or, is it what they would want?

Fences, cont.: Memory, Tragedy and Entropy

The fence is gone.  

I can't really explain my feelings when I found out.  I saw in a photo essay shortly before watching Ten Years Later that the buck fence where Matt Shepard was beaten had been torn down, and I gasped.  From the picture I saw, it looks like it had been replaced with a single-rail,  low, log zipper fence just to mark the boundary, something I hadn't actually seen much out west.   It was a weird sensation; I had never specifically been out to the fence (I didn't want to be one of the gawkers) so I had no personal frame of reference.  And yet, taking it down felt like an affront, or admitting defeat, or something-- I don't know what.  All I know is that I didn't like it. 

My husband and I had a long conversation about the fence that evening when we were getting ready for bed.  When I told him about it, I was a little offended; it seemed like a deliberate attempt to efface Matt's memory from that area.  My husband, however, disagreed.  "Well, why shouldn't the landowner take down the fence?"  He asked me.  "It's his property." 

"Well, because he's just trying to forget what happened there,"  I grumbled.  "That's not right.  There are too many people trying to just forget it." 
"But when does the landowner get to move on?"  He insisted.  "He didn't have anything to do with this.  When can he stop having people show up unannounced on his property, respectfully or otherwise?  Does he ever get to stop having that crime brought to mind when he's on that property?  Does  that spot ever get to be something besides a memorial?"  I gave him a glare.   "Moving on doesn't necessarily mean forgetting," he insisted. 

I still don't know for sure what I think, but my husband has a point.   Just because the fence is gone doesn't mean that Matt's memory is lessened, and it might have honestly been necessary.  Let me see if I can explain to you why...

"a balladeer" Gives Tribute to Shepard: Um...

So, on my way flipping through BlogCatalog this afternoon I ran across a post on the class blog of the Hans Christian Andersen Class of '09 about a tribute song for Matthew Shepard written by a Dutch band called "a balladeer."  Naturally, I decided to take a peek at the video, and my natural, lazy curiosity quickly turned into something else, more like being a horrified rubbernecker on the scene of a car wreck. 

Okay, so I know this band is trying to be very respectful.  And they're trying to set up a memorial to Shepard, and the actual film of the town is nice.  The way they focus on the bicyclist is interesting, literary speaking, I suppose..  

But I have to be brutally honest: this left me feeling horrified.  Is this in fact a strange, creepy tribute to Shepard, or is it just that I'm too darn close to the event to appreciate the gesture they're trying to make? I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but my utter horror won't let me. 

I'd be interested to see what you all think: