Giant Easter Island Heads
Huge Easter Island headsThe same picture is at the end of the first Planet of the Apes movie - the uncanny realization that our most appreciated memorials in the far future are just foreign remains of a civilisation that nobody can comprehend. This feeling of the uncanny is what motivates our emotions when we see sculptures as enigmatic as the huge heads of stones of the East Island off the Chilean coastline.
Stonehenge in England is just as enigmatic, both places convey the strange feeling that something is lacking, that we do not even comprehend why these memorials are there. The culture-critical, politicist Mark Fisher has written an encyclopedia entitled The Weird and the Eerie, trying to elucidate why we feel so often estranged in our own worlds.
What is uncanny, Fisher asserts, is "the feeling of nothing where something should be, or the emergence of something where nothing should be. "Let's portray these ideas on Easter Island. We are amazed at the simple fact of their presence in the case of the huge stony heads of people on Easter Island. Why, on this big, big, grass-covered island of little importance, are these big sculptures here?
This unexplained existence of something unsuspected seems rather weird. Then where there should be an explanatory statement or a kind of contexts for these minds, there is nothing. There are no writings of civilisation that explain what this is, no ceremony, no easy cause for the existence of these heads of stones. Stonehenge has the same grounds.
It' not that we don't even get these sculptures. It is a set of arched stones and turrets or a huge statue of a mankind. Remember the Statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes - who would ever know why we, the Americans of the twentieth century, did import and raise such a thing?
There is no way for foreign civilisations to comprehend this, so in the end they would think as much about the Statue of Liberty as we do about Easter Island and Stonehenge. When we cannot grasp these purposes, the things they create just don't seem strange. You seem both strange and creepy.
One of theories for the purposes of Stonehenge and Easter Island is rich, but some loosely based consent has emerged around the notion that they are both graves. The heads of Easter Island are memorials to the deceased, a great elevation of the shape of the man's mind, a last farewell to their faces and looks.
There is no historical text book on these memorials, not a word about why they look the way they are or where they are. All we need is the humbleness to realise that our great statues, from the Eiffel Tower to the Statue of Liberty, will one of these days also be regarded as foreign and unfamiliar.