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The Australian archeologist, Roland Fletcher, has stated that every major culture creates “Monstrous Visual Symbols”, or MVSes to record, magnify and ennoble their human experience and to establish their connection to what they consider Divine.These monuments are sometimes made of stone — the Great Pyramid of Kufu, the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacán, Stonehenge, Mount Rushmore, the World Trade Towers, the Great Wall of China, Chartres Cathedral —
And sometimes out of words — the Bible, the Torah, the Upanishads, the Koran, the Mayan codices, Dante’s Divine comedy, the plays of Shakespeare.
The largest monuments that our civilization is building are debris piles, like the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Our culture’s Monstrous Visual Symbols are dumps. We are also building vast agglomerations in the slums of mega-cites, filled with the refuse or refugees of marginalized or displaced human beings, and this includes the gender marginalization of so many of the world’s women. The power of the feminine has globally been relegated to the dump.
In addition, the pop culture propagated by the internet, television, print and films constitutes an enormous mindfill, a dump in which everything is momentarily prized, only to be quickly rejected, the entire process having no organizing principle except the reverse alchemy of making treasure trash.
Because of our collective beliefs about style, the new, the fast, the latest, we are collectively rejecting our former lifestyles at a stupefying rate, and in the process transforming a living planet into mounds of lifeless refuse. We live on the crest of a vast tsunami or material and psychic debris, and the curl and crash of that tidal wave is what we call progress.
The premise, the themes, the structure of A Monument of Wonders all work to reclaim the trash of the discarded as the poetry of the prized.