Iraq: T-Wall as Monolith

I'm a fan of Space Odyssey 2001. It is a love it or hate it kind of film. Still, most are surprised to learn it was made in the mid-sixties rather than the 1980s, and no matter how one feels about the abstract and somewhat over-long movie, it paved the way for Star Wars which came 15 years later.

Everywhere here, these Stonehenge-headstone-monolith T-walls that block scenery even as they provide protection create islands, safety zones, and subsequently contain and become targets. They go unnoticed until an artist stops with his/her pallet/spray can, or these slabs of concrete catch your eye when damaged by explosions. Unseen for now, like trees for the forest, these t-walls, seen first in this conflict and none other, industrialized human separators, may just become a deeper symbol over time.
The Wall, the '79 album, and '82 movie by Pink Floyd held symbolic meanings pertaining to WW2, War itself and the Berlin Wall, but led to more abstract conclusions as the Kubrick Monolith did. These days the Berlin Wall which separated east and west Germany is something that seems to have left the zeitgeist altogether. Most college students would know little of it even though pop culture adopted the dilemma in the 80's. It was perhaps President Reagan presiding over the walls destruction, at least in a single ceremony, that stole the thunder from the standing advocates of "tearing down the wall."

mono·lith·ic
Function: adjective
Date: 1825
1 a: of, relating to, or resembling a monolith : huge, massive b (1): formed from a single crystal, a monolithic silicon chip (2): produced in or on a monolithic chip, a monolithic circuit
2 a: cast as a single piece, a monolithic concrete wall b: formed or composed of material without joints or seams, a monolithic floor covering c: consisting of or constituting a single unit
3 a: constituting a massive undifferentiated and often rigid whole, a monolithic society, b: exhibiting or characterized by often rigidly fixed uniformity, monolithic party unity

A Monolith is often the symbol for concepts that suggest a single and indivisible truth. Platonic concepts of synthesis rather than analysis. Something like the scientific paradox of quantum physics and string theory, a seamless unified field between things that exist in opposition to each other but independently. What is the commonality? Throughout the country of Iraq there are thousands of monoliths, like hadiths, separate and singular, unmoving, and waiting to be broken.


When I visited ancient Sumarian ruins here in Iraq with my unit (see: Temple of Enlil, Versa Vice, June), I actually thought about Space Odyssey 2001. The scene where the scientists descend a ramp onto the site simultaneously representing the distant past and the not too distant future. It was a real and terrestrial version of this movie scene, costumed with digicam body armor and helmets, sifting and drifting through ziggurat halls, and squinting at cuneiform, it felt a lot like being from another planet.

Simple and lost, but right in front of us, in all of our histories of war an theory, the individual. The unescaped existentialist format of pleasure, pain, and daily living. Peace and war world over, with everything in between, every human at any age remains an island, walls, often unmoving monoliths, pretending to be forever.