UPON EASTER ISLAND

I.
Memory refers to; a personal ability to store memory on the one hand; and the actual memories; but then there is also the technological definition of memory in which pure information is stored digitally inside a computer for retrieval.

II.
George Santayana has said two interesting things about memory; that memory is an internal rumour; and that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

III.
Let us consider Easter Island then, specifically as a symbolic representative of Atlantis to the modern world, in this role it is something integral to the collective unconscious make-up of humanity. It is modern, in the grander scheme of human history; the first settlement of the island only dates to 300 AD, at the earliest. Which places the island inside a very different timeline to that inhabited by the rest of the world. It exists outside of all the traditional Judao-Christianic-Sino historical narratives that we normally consider when tracking the large scale developments of human history, Easter Island subsists in its own unique teleological progression, that of the mini-history.

For a people so historically insignifigant they created a system of beliefs that centred on the worship of a series of non-existent ancestors and the Ariki kings, whom they built the famous ‘Easter Island Heads’ in tribute too. In praise of their birdman god they harvested all the forests on the island, history has a way of throwing a curve ball at people, and as they set about destroying their delicate ecosystem they were attacked by raids of Portuguese slave traders. Twelve islanders managed to escape from captivity and upon brought smallpox back with them upon their return. The smallpox began to kill off a large numbers of Easter Island’s inhabitants; this rapid population decrease and the deforestation ruined the island’s eco-system and drove their race to the very brink of extinction. Amongst all this, they started to wage genocidal clan wars between the survivors for the remaining land. Almost all of those who hadn’t died because of the famine that followed the destruction of their eco-system had now been killed in sweeping merciless acts of tribal warfare.

In the space of 1500 years (the great disasters that befell Easter Island happened in the 1800s) they had created their own history that encapsulated the macrohistorical timeline of the rest of the world; war, disaster, famine, disease, extinction, stupidity, religion.

IV.
Easter Island is a memory bank, a totemic summarisation of grand histories of many different cultures in one tiny place, adrift in the world’s biggest ocean. The Rapa Nui people who inhabit it are only part-human; or more correctly they are genetically homo-sapiens but are defined by their lack of human contact and historical socialisation in the creation of their society. Yet still they are engaged in the acts that classify human endeavour and civilisation, in them we can actively see the creation of the human artifices that we use to define ourselves as being more than animals. We see the creation of religion, (nature triumphs over man), we see the destruction of ecological systems that humans rely on to survive (man triumphs over nature), we see ware (man triumphs over man).

The birdman god whom they worshipped is symbolic of the freedom they are geographically and historically excluded from; set apart as they are on their tiny, remote island from a human history that doesn’t exist for them. Their invented ancestors, the Ariki, are the creation of a history that doesn’t exist. Their mini-history shares many parallel motifs with our macro-history, the creation of the human from the homo-sapien in the worship of god and in violence. Here we see humanity engaged in the actual creation of a history and the invention of a collective unconscious memory in order to give a meaning to the id that allows them to be human.

Easter Island is a modern Atlantis, geographically and historically. The larger activities of humanity happen there at a sped up historical rate, the passage from the creation of gods that give meaning to life, through to destruction and almost extinction, happen entirely within the larger narrative of modern western human history. What haunts modern man about Easter Island is what is left behind, a series of sculptures in praise of forgotten gods, they are incomprehensible, artistic religious iconographic artefacts. They come to symbolise a memory of humanity, they make us ask ourselves what we will leave behind and thus what will be found of us.

V.

He invented a face for himself. Behind it, he lived, died, and was resurrected many times. (‘The Other’, Octavio Paz)