Who, after all, am I?

I begin to wonder whether I'm smart enough to write this book.

I was completely knocked off balance when I wrote the Buddhas of Bamiyan chapter (in revisions now). I questioned the value of public art in the first place, especially in its relationship to other, more immediate, needs of humankind.

I have, at core, a visceral relationship with public sculpture, even the dreadful Victorian tributes to whosits that appear all over our great cities and the so, so, soooooo pedestrian suits in bronze that folks take to honor successful 20th century pols and tradesmen. (Even the JFK in front of the statehouse in Boston, if I didn't know the romance of Camelot and his era first hand, would be terminally boring and egregious.)

Still...

Why does it hurt so much when public statues are victims? The most horrifying photo book I ever saw was Cocteau's "La Morts des Statues" which documented the melting of Paris' statues during WWII. I wanted to grab them, to save them from tumbling into the burning abyss where they would lose their character and become bullets...

Maybe this is why I'm writing this book. To ease the pain. To remember the dead and, in doing so, to atone for making them then savaging them with so little regard. Or just to understand it all a little more. It takes longer than downing a drink, but, in the end, the relief may last a little longer. Who, after all, besides me, cares?

At the end of the Buddha chapter, I wrote "Are they not, after all, as Mullah Omar said, just stones?"

There have been stories all through history of statues being animated, of people falling in love with these faux humans or animals. Obviously, they were on to something, these story tellers. What man creates, man identifies with and if it's in 3 dimensions he holds even closer to him. These are as close as we ever get to playing the creator god... We can't give them souls, but we can give them our hearts and whether they be realistic forms or our concepts made flesh, they tug at us...

Or perhaps it's just because I have the flu...