I visit the dead.

   I do not visit the war dead.

   This is not a political statement or a protest – it is merely a fact. I do not visit shrines or temples or chapels or other stone monoliths or mausoleums built for those who have died in the glory and the carnage of war, those who sometimes have not even left physical remains behind.

   I’ve been in Washington, D.C. more than once, but have not yet paid respects at the Viet Nam Veterans’ Memorial, although I’ve heard it is a potent experience. Arlington Cemetery has not yet made it onto my itinerary. My family has in it a number of good and true who have served their country. However, they served and came home.

   So visiting the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne was sheer coincidence on an afternoon that was to contain other stops to shops, cafes and notable homes along the Number 8 Tram route. As it happened, I had no patience for premier residences and beautiful people lining sidewalk cafes after seeing the Shrine.

   The monolith stands on a hill, visible from St. Kilda Road, a pyramid that could be a Victorian formal garden monstrosity or some sort of memorial, a big stone something-or-other whose presence is inescapable yet repellent. These places tend to be austere and solemn, providing only the most basic information – this nation did this, that leader did that – they are temples to Mars, not Athena.

   I enter through a low door, a courtyard and a hall full of medals symbolizing in their count the number of Victorian Australians who served – for each medal, 100 served and six died. There is a sign that directs me to the garden courtyard, the crypt, and/or the sanctuary. I haven’t any idea where I am now, but it is a dark place with a concrete floor and red brick columns a meter square that disappear into a black void. Banners hang on each column, they are muslin with paintings simple as a child’s drawing, elegant as calligraphy. Each depicts a scene from World War I, and a poem. By the artist? No, by soldiers who were there, Englishmen, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, writing in a trench or between marches.

   The columns are too close together, the room is too dark. I can’t get a photograph that would allow me to walk through with efficient speed on my way to the next tram stop. I must sit now, write it now, feel it now, not distance myself from this place where a child’s trantrum echoes, a cell phone rings, an Asian voice answers, one of the two women who were a pain in the ass on the tram. The child is sitting on the floor, leaning against one of the long banners while his mother cajoles him and takes a flash photograph. Before I can scold them for touching the art and using flash photography, they are gone, as if they felt the wrongness of that and are uncomfortable in this place with no convenient photo ops.

*

   Now I have become a pest; either that or the staff and volunteers here are well above what other volunteers I’ve met. I asked for a catalogue of the exhibit – one does not exist. An older gentlemen with brilliant white hair, mustache, side burns and aged ivory  teeth approaches me as I’m watching the orientation movie that I ignored on the way in, gliding past on my way to  – what? I didn’t know until I got there. He tells me that the curator is coming to speak with me, and I’m amazed and immediately self-conscious. Really? The curator? Sheesh. I really have put a bee in someone’s bonnet.

   Neil Sharkey, curator, walks toward me. I’d love to know the origin of his family name. He is thin as a rake, dressed in long, square-toed shoes, skinny jeans the color of sand, a black (of course) shirt, black mop of hair with bangs that flop over his eyes. He keeps brushing them away, or tossing his head. He tells me that no, there is no catalogue of “Everyman” available, largely because there is not an extra $5,000 or so lying around. (I think to myself that $5,000 sounds like a bargain to produce a quality catalogue.) There must be someone with five grand – maybe five someones with one thousand each to put together an amazing piece of this art. Really? Seriously? After working at an art museum I know that there is a story that goes along with this catalogue drama. I would have purchased one. Fifty dollars. Easy.

   I tell Neil that I keep a blog, that I really want to write about this and use images – that I would have taken photographs, but it’s too dark, my little iPhone won’t do it, I can’t get far enough away to show the whole image because of those wonderful brick pillars. Neil phones Craig Barrett, the artist.

   “Listen Craig, there an American woman here who is really interested in “Everyman” and wants to use some images on a blog … yeah. Yeah. Well, I suppose we could … Yeah. I have images of everything. Mmhmm. I have her right here.”

   He covers the mouthpiece.

   “Kimber …?”

   “Kimbel.”

   “Right.”

   “Kimbel. Here she is.”

   I love speaking to artists about their work. Most of them are approachable, unlike the people who represent artists. Craig Barrett tells me that he returned from Spain to Melbourne in 2002 and looked at the new area just opened at the shrine and immediately wanted to create something specifically for the space that he saw as a cross between catacomb and cathedral. He said he didn’t know how gas worked, so he researched it. He said that the first tanks were used in the first World War, so he researched them. He immersed himself in the details of trench warfare.

   Craig Barrett created this work because he wanted to make artwork specifically for that site. The staff and board of the Shrine loved it, and after the exhibit opened, he gave the entire set of work to the organization. This is the fifth time it’s been displayed. Well over half a million people have seen it. I wonder if I’m the first person who wanted a full catalogue?

   Four men from Barrett’s family served on the Western Front of what was once called the Great War, the War to End all Wars. His great grandfather and three great uncles fought at the Somme and at Ypres. One great uncle remains there. The others lived to return home.

   I, like Barrett, grew up knowing little of what these men had witnessed. My hormonal yearnings during American History distracted me from the relevant information, no matter how earnest Mr. Money was about imparting his knowledge.

*

   I am given permission to use images of “Everyman” on this blog, and thank Craig and Neil profusely. Then I wander through this Hall of Columns, as I have learned this room is called, to the Crypt where the fighting units of World War I are commemorated, where the colors representing 25% of Victoria’s regiments have been retired, where the elegant folds of forty-six Light Horse regiments’ guidons drape. No air current stirs them here.

   I want to reflect, look more closely at “Father and Son,” the bronze sculpture that represents the two generations who fought in the First and Second World Wars, silk poppies mounded at its base.  A clear shot of the sculpture is all I want, but I am surrounded by a horde of Asians with cameras. A toddler fiddles with the poppies, pushing some to the floor. She watches them fall then walks away. The other kids race around the perimeter of the room, touching all the brass plaques that commemorate the ships lost. I step forward involuntarily saying, “oh, nononono…” No one hears me over the chatter and clicking of Nikon shutters. I want to tell them that this place is sacred, now that I understand.

   Finally, they are gone. I place the fallen poppies back on the statue’s base. I take one with me.

   One of my grandfathers fought in The Great War, shipped into France in a boxcar, The 40 and 8 they called them because they had a capacity for either eight horses or forty men. He came back, raised a family and died of a stroke before I became an adult. I hear that he sat with me at Disneyland after Mickey Mouse scared the crap out of me. But I heard no stories of France and the Western Front, and probably would never have been old enough to even think to ask questions.

    What of the glory of war – does war give some sort of meaning to our otherwise small lives? War is at once dehumanizing and humanizing, brutal conflict breeding a love between brothers in arms that defies the understanding of one who has never experienced foxholes and mortars. For most of us, bombs bursting in air is only a 4^th of July event. And for most of us, that’s all we want it to be: the melodic romanticism of a mythic battle.

   Barrett says that he created “Everyman,” “as homage to all those who have witnessed such events, to the poets and soldiers Owen and Sassoon, and to (his) Great Uncle George whose name is written along with his brothers in the Books of Remembrance here in the Shrine.”

   I visit the dead. I visit the war dead.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. —

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.