THERE IS an awkward sort of moral accounting going on in the post-victory sadness about Iraq. All of us, I suppose, are gripped with a sense of dismay and an urgent feeling of wanting to do something about the frightful scenes of human pathos that rise from the pages of our morning paper and hover so disturbingly above the toast and marmalade and the lovely spring sunshine slanting across the coffee cups: the ruined, stoic children; the premature babies curled as though still in the womb; the angry, weeping adults.
Then again, most of us feel the same mysterious sense of doom — as though this isn’t merely something we are watching, but in some way our shared loss — when we read about the ruined treasures of Iraq’s museums: the 26 statues of Assyrian kings who had kept their intricately carved heads on their shoulders for 2,000 years but now are all decapitated; the gold bison-headed harp of Ur, the marble head of a woman from Warka, carved 3,000 years ago with the blank gaze of a tragic mask and the soft, ambiguous mouth of a French film star — Juliette Binoche, say, or Emmanuelle Seigner.
Where are these things now? Smashed and ruined like the human debris of the war, or spirited away to be sold to rich, acquisitive collectors, the proxy thieves who can never share them with anyone, on account of their tainted past, but must admire them — gloat is probably the proper term — in private, with a furtive joy that must surely compromise the beauty of something made, as art generally is, to give pleasure freely to whoever happens to look at it.
Still, they are only things, these things. The loss of their heads may be ruinous to their looks and their value, but it doesn’t affect their sensibility because they haven’t got one. Unlike the dismembered children, they are not inconsolable with grief and bitterness at the loss of their extremities and their companions. They return unmoved to the chaos from which they were formed.
Dust to dust, they don’t care.
This being the case, does the loss of them really matter? This week, the Times recorded that Professor John Russell, of the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, shed tears over the devastation of Iraq’s lost treasures, mourning as though over lost souls. Is that all right? Is the loss of a marble head as sad as the loss of a set of arms made of flesh? And is, say, the theft this week of a couple of bits of Marilyn Monroe’s jewellery — a gold bangle and a ring with an initial “M” in diamond chips — from an exhibition at the County Hall gallery in London as sad, or sadder, or less sad than any of the above?
What makes all this even more complicated is that the sack of Iraq was carried out not by the invading hordes, who seem as far as one can tell to have adhered both to the spirit and the letter of Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Colllins’s poetic pre-conflict admonition to his troops to respect the ground on which they trod. Obviously, we all mind hugely if invaders smash an indigenous culture — vandals aren’t called that for nothing. But perhaps there is a certain shift in entitlement if the smashing is done by locals?
It is perfectly obvious that no one in the coalition, with its high moral tone and its explicit claim to be the forces of civilisation, thought the things at all important. The Times reported Eleanor Robson, of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, as saying that the British School of Archaeology in Iraq wrote repeatedly to the British Government, prewar, expressing concern, and received no answer. Now the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, insists that the Government could not have predicted the destruction.
Perhaps some of this ambiguity exists because of the uneasy relationship that prevails in all cultures about the power of things. Even on the frivolous level of the lifestyle pages there exists a disquiet about possession. “Get rid of your clutter” is the axiom of feature-page spirituality. It isn’t just a media quirk. There was a report this week describing the ring-road hermit of Wolverhampton, Josef Stawinoga, an 83-year-old Polish war veteran who lives in a tent on the central reservation, where he is tolerated with unusual humanity by Wolverhampton City Council, and venerated by some of Wolverhampton’s Asians, to whom his distancing himself in old age from material goods and reliance on the kindness of strangers is a natural spiritual progression.
But even Josef Stawinoga collects litter. Which brings us back, in the maddening loop often described by moral conundrums, to things and their significance. One of the lost treasures of Iraq is a small stone sculpture of a bird’s head, from 8000 BC. It was found in the hand of a skeleton in a burnt building. That is, someone identified so strongly with the beauty of the stone bird that in the moments before he died, it seemed as valuable as his own life.
In The Story of the Amulet, E. Nesbit’s Edwardian children’s story of time travel, she sends her four young heroes back in time to Babylon, where one of them takes the cheap bangle off her arm and gives it to a Babylonian girl, whose eyes light up with the “joy of possession”. That joy of possession is a universal human desire. Two weeks ago I opened my birthday presents and found among them a pair of spurs and a netsuke carving in the shape of a mouse. Before April 3 I didn’t know that these objects existed. Now the loss of them would cause me real pain.
The British Museum has offered to go to the rescue of Iraq’s ravaged museums. Its own recently opened 250th birthday exhibition on the themes of memory and identity anatomises the conundrum of possession in exquisite detail. One of the things we may learn from it, perhaps, is that in the looting of their own past, the Iraqis may be, half-unconsciously, seeking to hurt us, their assailants, in the only way remaining to them. Which might be rough justice, of a kind, if only it didn’t hurt them more.
