From Eternity to Here: Remembering Pearl Harbor
The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
Summoning Pearl Harbor is a slim, unique work by the renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov that delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and redefines remembering in the process. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past? Nemerov raises fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Below, an excerpt:
When I and the entombed remains of its crew, I observed that the ship is still leaking oil. Silvery-blue and orange tie-dye pools spread on the water’s surface, floating all around the crusty turrets creaking in the air and the pale patterns of battleship steel shimmering a few feet under. Here was the past still emerging in the present, taking an aquatic form like breath spooling up from below, a psychedelic exhalation as though the state of being dead, and being dead right under a never-ending stream of tourists, required a streak of showmanship, a never-ending colorful wound, extending in a slow ectoplasmic leak, a kind of never-ending guitar solo, that would play out the souls of the chiseled dead in incremental liters until the end of time.
