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Post-Incident | Sep 19 2001

Here in New York, everyone has a story of where they were when it happened – how they heard, what they saw, everything that followed. The first time you speak with someone “post-incident,”1 you trade these stories; or if you’re not particularly close with this person, you provide a brief summary, a few highlights, and leave it at that. Everyone has such a story, and everyone exchanges them. Moreover, if time permits and it seems appropriate, people share stories they’ve heard from others – these being, inevitably, of the more dramatic, more horrific variety. The one that comes to mind, and this is hardly the worst I’ve heard, is of a middle-aged man whose panic-stricken son called to say that terrorists had crashed two commercial jets into the World Trade Center where his sister, the man’s daughter, was employed. Immediately the man called his daughter on her cell phone. She told him that the building was being evacuated and that she was alright. But then the man turned on the television and discovered that the Pentagon had just been hit by a similar attack and was on fire. The man’s son, the one who originally called, worked in the Pentagon. (Brother and sister both survived, which puts this story in the “less horrific” category.)

My own story is horrific in its own way. Although I must admit that after so many tellings, it has began to lose its reality. Stories do that. You tell them and they go away. Or they become something different. Well, no, stories don’t change; reality changes, becoming a story after so many tellings.

No, this is wrong as well. It’s not reality that changes, but one’s relationship to it. Which is another way of saying that reality changes, I suppose.

I admit to some confusion in the matter.

But I do know this: the more I talk about what happened, the more story-like it seems. Story-like meaning unreal.

Notably I have gushed over Muriel Rukseyer’s line that the universe is made of stories, not atoms – making it the tagline of this web site, ending my bio with it, and using it in my email signature. Obviously it means a lot to me, and I suppose what it means is that the relevant universe, the one we occupy, is constructed in our heads. Yes, something exists outside of our heads, but that something must be experienced from the inside out, it must make sense, in some sense, within the universe inside our heads.

Of course atoms are like this, as are quarks with their “flavors” and “spins.” Each is a story to us. And each is relevant or “true” to the extent that it fits into our larger universe, which is itself a story.

I don’t know why I’m going on about this stuff, because the fact is, you either agree with what I’m saying or not, and nothing I say will ever change that. Moreover, it feels paradoxical, at best, to argue for the objective truth of subjectivity.

But here’s something interesting: In this last week, I have found myself searching for a story that makes sense, if sense is the right word, of what has happened. Many people have been saying that the world is now a different place, and I suppose this is true, provided enough people believe it. The world is what we collectively believe it to be.

Or not. Here I think of the world constructed by our media and government. Is that the world I live in? No, it isn’t. But plenty of people believe in it, and that affects me. My world is filled to bursting with extraordinarily stupid people, some of whom are also extraordinarily dangerous. None of this changed on the 11th; it only became more apparent.

My fear, characteristically, is that there’s something here I’m not seeing. I think of the fire chief at the base of the towers, the one who made the decision to send his people into the buildings. Was there a moment as the south tower began to crumble, more or less on top of his head, when he realized he hadn’t understood something?

Yesterday my friend Gary, a die-hard New Yorker, the most “New York” New Yorker I know, asked me if I thought we were in denial. Another call came in for Gary just then, so he never heard my response, but what I was about to say was, “Of course we’re in denial. The best offense is a good defense.”

And the best defense, I would now add, is a convincing story, one that explains what could not previously be explained while also aligning with what one already believes.

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1I still haven’t heard a decent name for the damn thing. The problem, in part, is that targets were hit in two different cities, with a fourth plane crashing elsewhere. Thus “Pearl Harbor Day” fails as a model, as does “The Oklahoma City Bombing.” One is forced, I think, to use the date somehow (“September 11 Attack”?), which though blander than bland, avoids such sensationalistic dreck as “Attack on America.” Of course one could link it to the day and call it “Black Tuesday,” but that sounds like an attack merely on the stock market. “Terror Tuesday” has the ring of a regularly scheduled slate of programs, while “Tuesday Terror” smacks of neurosis. Perhaps we should call it the “Bin Laden Attack,” since our government is convinced that he masterminded the thing and since we’re about to spend billions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives (how many, in the end?) in an attempt to bring him to “justice.” The “Bin Laden Attack” would work, I suppose, only, hey, what about the earlier attacks on the USS Cole and on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya; wasn’t he behind those as well? Do we go to numbers then? “Bin Laden Attack 1,” “Bin Laden Attack 2”? Or do we ignore the earlier attacks, given that they were less impactful? It’s a puzzle. And until that puzzle is solved, we will be stuck with awkward, vague phrases such as “the incident” or “the attack.”