JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004 Page: 470

                                
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departure and presence that is interactive and personal enough so that
those in mourning can manipulate the details of the memorial and at the
same time experience it as a meeting-place for lost loved ones to
communicate with them.5
It can of course be argued that physical memorials also act as sites of
departure and mourning that give a presence to death, and that, perhaps
unlike online memorials, they are more affected by the public's need to
rationalize and maintain power. In physical memorials, loss and absence
take root in the concrete and the physical so that their intangibility can
take on a shape and form that is known, sensed, and understood. In such
ways, we stave off the possible nothingness and unknowingness of
mortality. We live with a shared "museal consciousness" that "under-
stands the significance of collecting, ordering, representing, and preserv-
ing information in the way that museums do" (Crane 2). As James Young
notes, certain varying narratives (political, national, aesthetic) emerge
when we look at the diversity of sites of memory. While traditional
physical monuments are usually read as relieving us of the burden of
remembering, counter-monuments, in which the monument in various
ways foregrounds its own impossibility of containing memory, defy our
impulse to write presence into absence and to domesticate death through
narrative.6 That is, some physical memorials highlight the
unrepresentability of death and the amnesia of memorialization, and
some do not.' Crucially, unlike online memorials, all physical memorials
have spatiality, and present a sense of lived space that retains a
distance between the observer/visitor and the memorial. This distance
serves as an enactment or reminder of what lies outside signification;
that is, it indicates the silence and absence of death. When we visit a
physical memorial, the boundaries of our body always serve as
reminders of difference and otherness. Even in a highly interactive
memorial such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
where visitors are architecturally removed from an American space
and encouraged to enter an alternate experience and space, the gap
between self and other (the past, death, nothingness) is retained.
Physical memorials or museums realize the limits of representing ab-
sence, and in lending a physical dimension to remembrance, they are
always asking themselves, "What kind of architecture could do justice to
an event that resists profound aesthetic expression?" (Linenthal, "Locat-
ing" 220-21).
The political debates surrounding the design of Maya Lin's Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, and the public responses to the Wall, also show a

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