September 2001
30 September 2001 | Messages
Michael Ventura once observed that our culture (which is to say our media; the two being more or less indistinguishable these days) offers us the same two messages over and over, in nearly ritualized fashion:
1. We’re dying.
2. It’s alright.
Recent events serve as an apt example of this, both in how they were reported and how “we” responded. Repeated images of planes flying into buildings and heartbreaking stories of relatives seeking the “missing” = “We’re dying.” Repeated images of old glory and rousing tales of everyday heroes and Americans joining together = “It’s alright.” We’re dying and it’s alright.
The national pastime isn’t baseball; it’s forgetting. Which is why the media rules the roost: it helps us forget. It’s alright that we’re dying because we keep forgetting the fact that we’re dying, if indeed that message ever really hits home, despite (or perhaps because of) its ubiquity.
28 September 2001 | Fantasy
There is no single word in the English language that means “nightmarish fantasy.” One must either use “fantasy,” a word with misleadingly positive connotations, or suffer one or another adjective-noun combination. The verb form is worse still. Take a look at the following sentence and tell me which word or combination of words could possibly replace “fantasized”:
He fantasized that when he turned the corner to his street, he would see his house ablaze.
“Imagined” is perhaps the best of the bunch, yet it fails to convey even a speck of dread. One is forced to use a much longer construction such as “had the horrible thought” – itself a horrible thought to those of us who like our language concise.
This morning I had the horrible thought that a nuclear bomb had destroyed New York. I am in Cambridge now, which explains how I was able to imagine such a thing and still imagine myself alive. In my imagining (I dare not call it a fantasy), everyone I know in New York had been killed. This included Rachel, of course, and many beloved friends, and also Mayor Gulianni and the woman who owns the Chinese take-out on Marcy, among millions of others. All dead. Moreover (and I’m embarrassed to have thought of this), my computer would be destroyed, along with all my programs and files, which meant that I would need to begin everything again from scratch, assuming that the internet would continue to exist post-bombing and that I would one day return to making websites.
I haven’t a clue how television programs are transmitted, or from where, but I imagined that since the networks are in New York, the entire system would go down. The internet, too, would be severely damaged; although if I understand correctly, the destroyed hubs could be circumvented. Not that it would matter: recent events showed that the web can’t handle the crush of traffic generated by a national crisis. Telephone service, too, would be knocked out or jammed up, further sentencing us to a terrifying silence (though less terrifying, certainly, than the truth).
How then would the world learn that truth? I decided that the first and best witnesses would be the pilots of commercial jets flying in the vicinity of New York. They would initiate a chain of communication that would lead very quickly to the military and the president, who would … well, I had no idea what he would do; something more horrific still.
I’m staying with a friend, Anne, who’s Canadian. “We’d go to Canada,” I thought, “to Nova Scotia, where her aunt lives.” The comfort of this lasted but a moment as I realized that all hell would have since broken loose, making a drive up to Canada impossible. (Could we buy gas? Could we use ATMs? Would our money still be worth anything? Could we cross the border? Would people try to kill us? Would Anne be raped? …)
You see my point, don’t you? The word “fantasy” just doesn’t cut it.
26 September 2001 | Face
Noticed again the vertical crease, perhaps three-quarters of a inch in length, that begins at the inside edge of my left eyebrow and goes up. It is the sort of crease that forms when one furrows one’s brow and that appears on either side of the vertical space defined by the bridge of one’s nose. Except that this particular crease is permanent, etched into my face by decades of furrowing. Oddly, the parallel crease on the right is half as deep and barely noticeable; evidently I furrow lopsidedly.
I only just noticed the crease a few months ago. Had I failed to notice it previously? Evidently I had, although in my defense it must have been less obvious then. I saw it when it could no longer remain unseen.
Sometime in my early twenties I discovered that my ears are different, that the left, lacking a fold possessed by the right, sticks out. For twenty-plus years I missed this. But then once I saw it I realized that I’d seen it countless times before, in mirrors and photographs, and that it had registered as unease—something about my face had always made me uneasy and here it was.
I’m on the subway now, heading to a friend’s dinner party. I’m feeling apprehensive about this dinner party because of what people might say, or rather because of how I will feel if people say what I expect them to say. I have imagined a scene in which I “get into it” with someone I don’t know and stupidly say what I really think, whereupon I “get into it” with several other people, friends this time, whereupon more bad things happen that I have not yet bothered to imagine. Fortunately, none of this is likely to occur, in part because I’m not one to “get into it” with people, but it’s interesting that it concerns me so.
Earlier today Rachel and I took her nieces, ages two and half and nearly five, to the Children’s Museum in Manhattan. The girls have been staying with their parents and infant brother in a midtown hotel while waiting to return to their Battery Park apartment, which was evacuated on the day of the attack and remains off-limits. The whole family has been stressed – shuttling from one place to another, scrambling to buy replacement clothes, dealing with the emotional fall-out, etc. – so Rachel and I offered to entertain the girls for a few hours and give their parents a breather.
The museum was fun. We sat in a room packed with kids and listened to a hyper-enthusiastic three-person group perform upbeat songs about spaghetti and dinosaurs. Then we indulged in a succesion of arts & crafts projects, all of which involved glue in various forms and brightly-colored bits of paper and fabric and plastic. Can’t complain, really, and the girls were precious.
Well, I can complain, because one of the projects involved the production of a “badge of courage” for a local police officer or firefighter. Don’t get me wrong: the fact that over three hundred and fifty police officers and firefighters died on the 11th is unspeakably tragic and horrific. This said, I found the “badge of courage” idea offensive, seeing it as the indoctrination of sentiment, and a particularly superficial sentiment at that.
Not that police officers and firefighters lack courage. In fact a few of the former have courageously beaten the shit out of some of my closest friends. (Okay, that was sarcastic. Without question, all this flag-waving and hero-making and heartstring-pulling is starting to wear on me.)
Back in the “badge of courage” room, a thirtyish father sat at the same table as us, making about the nicest badge you can imagine, with evenly drawn red and white stripes and lots of little silver stars and the words THANK YOU written across the top with what I took to be his own personal blue marker. Perhaps coincidentally, several similar badges were prominently displayed in the middle of room, hanging on a string strung in front of a sign that said THANK YOU in big letters.
The girls sat there blithely glueing things to other things. The oldest, Sydney, announced that her badge was for her mother, so her sister Hannah announced that hers was for her father. Then each requested another piece of circular paper so that they could make one for the other parent. When the badges were done, Rachel and I punched holes in each and tied blue or red string through. The girls had us attach them to their wrists, so that they could wear them like bracelets. As we were leaving, one of the museum people noticed the bracelets and asked Sydney if she wanted her badges hung up with the others. She declined, saying that this one was for her mother and this one for her father.
In the cab on the way back, Sydney correctly identified various New York landmarks on the map screwed to the back of the seat in front of her—the Statue of Liberty, LaGuardia Airport, the Empire State Building. Then she put her finger on the World Trade Center and said, “These are the buildings that crashed.”
Sydney was at kindergarden when the planes hit, just a few blocks from the towers. When she pointed at them on the map, I thought of something she told Rachel about that day: “That was my worst day of kindergarden ever” (it was her fourth). I wanted to ask her what happened to make it so bad, only I wasn’t sure if this was something you talked about with other people’s kids. Probably it wasn’t, I decided, so I didn’t.
I am tempted to say something about kids, something redeeming, but will resist the temptation. I’m not sure what to say and would like to avoid any last-minute heartstring-pulling. I’m feeling at a loss right now, and angry, and that’s about the sum of it.
No, wait, here’s one more thing: I can’t remember what the Cowardly Lion got. The Tin Man got a heart-shaped watch and the Scarecrow (I was about to write “Straw Man”) got a diploma, but what did the Cowardly Lion get? For the life me, I cannot remember. What do you give a coward to convince him he’s courageous?
I went online and looked it up. The Cowardly Lion got a medal; a very large gold medal in the shape of a cross with a red and white stripped piece of fabric on the end and a blue band that reads COURAGE.
24 September 2001 | Again
September 1, 1939
– W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Several nights back, Rachel woke me in the middle of the night to say that her throat hurt. We talked it over (I have the strange ability to engage in seemingly intelligent conversation at the moment of waking) and decided that she should go to kitchen to see if there were any cough drops in her utility drawer.
When Rachel returned, she said that the cough drops were stale but that a stale cough drop was better than no cough drop. I asked her, not being a regular cough drop user, what a stale cough drop tasted like. “It’s soft and chewy,” she said, “which is weird for a cough drop, because it makes it difficult to suck on.” Then she mentioned all the dead people, saying how sad she felt about them.
We spent the next hour imagining the last moments of the people who died in the stairwells. How long, we wondered, did it take for the buildings to collapse once they began collapsing? Ten seconds? This means that if you were in a stairwell near the bottom of the building, say the fifth floor, you had perhaps ten seconds, probably less, to contemplate your fate – assuming you knew what your fate was.
What exactly did you know? What exactly was happening around you?
I said that there must have been a great rumble, and screaming, and that the walls and floor must have buckled. Actually the rumble and screaming probably came first, joined by the buckling.
About the screaming, we realized something important. The screams didn’t intensify over time but diminished, as less and less people were alive to scream. But the rumble, we agreed, grew louder. How loud exactly? What does a 110-story building sound like, from the inside, as it collapses on top of you? We didn’t ask ourselves this question and I’ve no guess now as I write this.
Fucking loud. So loud you couldn’t hear any screams.
Last month Rachel and I visited Rye Playland, an old-fashioned, wind-worn amusement park about an hour north of the city by train. We purchased a limited number of tickets (they were surprisingly expensive) and negotiated which rides to use them on. Rachel wanted to go on the Ferris Wheel twice, but I insisted on using one set for the House of Mirrors.
I’m a bit of a House of a Mirrors aficionado, so I feel qualified to say that this particular House of Mirrors sucked: you always knew which way to go by looking at the floor. But the experience was redeemed halfway through by a room filled with what I think of as “circus” mirrors, the kind of mirrors that distort your body – your reflected body – in various bizarre ways: first inhumanly skinny, then impossibly squat.
I reminded Rachel of those mirrors as we discussed the people in the stairwells, saying that the walls and floors must have distorted like this. However it occurs to me now that no one actually saw this happen since the lights probably went out the instant the rumbling started. Or did the rumbling start first, followed by the lights going out? To answer this question, one would need to be an electrician and also know how those towers were wired – and even then, I’m not so sure one would know the answer.
And anyway, what different does it make? Either the lights went out immediately or they didn’t. Either the walls and floors distorted or they didn’t. Either you could hear the screams or you couldn’t. Whatever way it happened, people were killed in a few short, unimaginably horrific seconds, crushed to death in a collapsing mass of concrete and steel and other people.
There was more that Rachel and I discussed that night; this is merely what I remember. But then finally, after at least an hour of this, it seemed that we had covered everything, had talked it all through, all the possibilities and impossibilities, and could give it a rest.
We spoke for a moment then of returning to sleep, only we both recognized that this was ridiculous. How can you return to sleep? You can’t, you can’t and you won’t, so there’s no use even trying.
Instead we started in on the people on the planes.
After my parents broke up for good, my father began a practice of visiting each Sunday and spending three or four uncomfortable hours with me and my sister. Unenthused (to put it mildly), my father would invariably arrive late for these visits, often hours late, and would sometimes call long after he was due to arrive to tell us that he would be there shortly – and then appear later still.
It sounds awful, I know, and I suppose it was awful, but the one solace in it was that it was PREDICTABLE. My father was ALWAYS late. The specific amount of lateness varied, but at least one knew with certainty that he would not arrive on time. This helped tremendously. Rather than wait around, I would go outside and play with my friends.
My sister was another case. As the appointed hour approached, she would drag a chair to the dining room window and sit there staring into the street. She chose this particular window, if it isn’t obvious, because it afforded the earliest possible view of his car.
This sounds pathetic, I know, and it was pathetic. Moreover it angered me because it seemed that my sister was deliberately hurting herself; and for what? I could never understand this. Why expose yourself, time and again, to certain heartbreak? This struck me as an act of grave stupidity.
Two nights back our president spoke on television again. I went outside and played, more or less (actually I stayed inside and worked). Then I visited the handful of websites I enjoy, all of them personal sites, and caught up with what folks had written that day. Leslie Harpold began with a paragraph about the president’s speech, comparing it to a pep rally.
This pissed me off, not so much because of Leslie’s observation, which I’m certain was accurate, but because it reminded me of all the statements of astonishment I’ve been hearing about the sensationalist dreck being churned out these days by our media. Could any half-thinking person have expected something better? I find this difficult to even imagine. Similarly, I cannot fathom how anyone could express surprise, as many have, by the degree of hatred that these “cowardly” terrorists must have felt for America. The issue of cowardliness aside, America is despised by huge numbers of people around the world. We knew this already, just as we knew the reasons for it.
Just as we know, by the way, that the industrialized world, led by our own country, is rapidly depleting and destroying the earth’s resources and ecosystem.
Bringing in the ecosystem may seem beside the point, but it is not. Our collective way of life – which was attacked last week, according to our president – is predicated on destruction and denial on a massive scale. And our government is committed to preserving this state of affairs, both here and abroad, at any cost.
All of which you already knew, just as you know whose interests it serves.
But here’s something you may not know: 15,000 years ago, the American West had about as many large mammals, proportionately, as the Serangetti plains of Africa, including elephants, horses, lions and camels. It took the first humans on this continent a mere 1,000 years to pretty much wipe them all out. I learned this today from a book called “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a few pages of which Rachel read to me on the subway. Rachel wondered why people didn’t domesticate some of these animals – a far superior long-term strategy – so I pointed out that these folks had no reason to think beyond a single season, if that. Why think long-term when one can simply walk outside and kill some big, delicious animal? (The killing was particularly easy then, as humans were new to town and thus unfeared.)
We are no different than our predecessors. Why think long-term when one can simply walk outside and buy some big, delicious automobile?
Um, I seem to have the lost the thread. Wasn’t I speaking about my sister? I believe I was. And then I digressed into a rehashing of what every thinking person supposedly knows, capped off with an anecdote about extinction and short-term thinking. Frankly, this piece is beginning to resemble the workings of my mind these days: one thought leading to another without any hope of conclusion.
How does one end such a thing? I have no idea. Fortunately I must leave for a dinner party in twelve minutes and have resolved to post what I have, in whatever shape it is in, making the question moot.
I apologize for hurrying off and leaving you with the mess. I will return when I can and try to make sense of it, if sense can be made.
Or not. Probably not. Probably I will move on to other thoughts, other pieces, and leave this one as it is, unresolved.
Don’t wait by the window for me.
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.
–
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.”
A week ago today, sometime after nine in the morning, my friend Andrew called to say that terrorists had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center. There were gaping holes in both buildings, he said, with smoke pouring out. We discussed the possible political ramifications of this, while also speculating, guiltily, how it might impact traffic in downtown Manhattan. (We had plans later this morning to move his things from his mother’s apartment in the West Village to his new place in Brooklyn.)
Andrew went outside see what was happening on the street and I called my girlfriend Rachel, remembering that her sister’s family lives in Battery Park City, about five blocks from the south tower. Rachel reacted rather lightly, I thought, but promised she’d talk with her sister.
Then Andrew called back to report that scores of people were milling outside his mother’s apartment building, watching the towers burn. In the middle of his description of this, there came a roar through the phone and Andrew shouted, “Oh, no, one of the towers must have collapsed! I have to go!”
I immediately called Rachel, who was now hysterical. She’d been talking with her sister and there’d been this loud noise on the line and her sister had cried something like, “My god, the tower’s falling…” at which point the phone had gone dead. Rachel was certain had been crushed beneath the fallen tower. I asked if she wanted me to come to her. She said she needed to keep trying to reach her sister. I said, “We should be together.” She said, “I have to call my sister.”
I tried to reach Andrew but couldn’t get a dial tone. I looked online for information; all the major sites were jammed. Then I heard my next door neighbor in the hall and went to see what he knew. He had been watching television, he said, when one the towers collapsed. Also, terrorists had flown a plane into the Pentagon, which was now on fire. Also, a fourth plane had crashed outside of Pittsburgh. I put on my sneakers and headed for Rachel’s, about an hour away on foot, assuming I could figure out how to get there (the trains, I correctly assumed, would not be running).
I live on the border of a large Hasidic neighborhood, a neighborhood of people who spend much of their time pretending that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. On this day, though, the charade was abandoned, as hundreds of Hasidic men were gathered in the street, gazing in the direction of downtown Manhattan, shrouded now in smoke and ash.
I walked south along the service road that follows the big expressway around here, the BQE. Above me, on the BQE itself, a long line of cars were parked on the shoulder, their drivers perched at intervals along the guard rail, looking out towards Manhattan. Traffic everywhere was at a near standstill, yet no one seemed to notice. Instead they sat in their cars with blank expressions, following events on their radios. I caught a few words here and there, but understood nothing, exactly, save for the tone. The tone was scary.
At the corner of Flushing and Kent, I stopped to consult my map. Under normal circumstances, I would have avoided showing vulnerability here, at the edge of a somewhat dicey neighborhood, but this was a day in which the normal rules didn’t apply.
A few blocks later, a car pulled up and my friend William leaned out the window. He was driving around Brooklyn, he said, trying to find a route to his apartment in Carroll Gardens. Since Carroll Gardens is close to where Rachel lives, I joined him.
William and I barely spoke, and it was then that I realized that I was in a kind of shock, for lack of a better word. The radio reported that the second tower had fallen, which prompted me to tell William about Rachel’s sister. He assured me that she was fine: he’d seen the first tower fall, and it went down accordion-style rather than toppling over.
We drove for at least a half hour and got almost nowhere. Streets were blocked off in a seemingly random pattern. When we reached Bergen, William said that walking would be faster, so I headed off on foot again. A few blocks later, I noticed a policeman standing in the middle of the pavement, apparently guarding something, although it wasn’t clear what. As I approached, he asked me to cross the street. This revealed what he was guarding: he was guarding the pavement along the west side of Bergen Street, just north of Flatbush.
I crossed the street.
Flatbush itself was closed to traffic, and thousands of stunned-looking people were walking east. They had come, it was clear, from Manhattan, having walked across the Manhattan bridge, and were on their way home, wherever home was. I was struck by the sight of a man in a business suit covered head to foot with gray ash.
A block away I spotted Rachel’s roommate Jessi. I ran to her and she told me that after a panic-stricken half-hour, Rachel had spoken finally with her sister: the tower hadn’t fallen on her; everyone was safe.
The rest of that day I did what most people did, which was to watch television. I haven’t the strength to try to describe that, nor see any reason to: you saw what I saw.
Ah, but here’s something I forgot. While walking along the BQE, I sang a song I’d heard for the first time the previous day – the Junior Wells blues classic, Messin’ with the Kid. Actually, I didn’t sing the entire song but just a single verse and chorus (this being all I could remember), repeating these over and over with increasing fervor:
Now the kid plays hot
And hot don’t pay
I say what I mean, I mean what I say
Hey, hey
Tell me what you did
You can call it what you want
But I call it messin’ with the kid
The identity of the “kid” kept changing as I sang. First it was me, then our president, then the leader of the highjackers. All of us were pissed and wanted the world to know about it.
Oh, and I didn’t walk so much as stride, as befitting one who doesn’t appreciate being messed with.
It was weird.
And every now and then, I would reach a street with a view of downtown Manhattan and I’d sneak a peak or two at the mountain of smoke, and stop singing.
Found myself reading poetry a few days back. I don’t remember taking the book from my friend’s shelf and opening it, but there it was, in my hands, being read. How else could it have gotten there unless I myself put it there?
I almost never read poetry anymore, having once read it all the time. In fact, I used to write poetry myself once, and even called myself a poet. Yes, back then, when people at parties asked what I did, I said, “I’m a poet. I write poetry.”
Which was true: I really was a poet! I really did write poetry!
And most of the people I knew were poets, and together we would attend poetry readings and host poetry readings and of course give poetry readings – reading mainly to an audience of our fellow poets. And then when these readings were over, we would go to a coffee shop and gossip about people we knew and maybe discuss poetry for a while, after which we’d head home and write more poems.
But as I’ve said, that was long ago, and feels longer ago still – so much so that I almost never read poetry these days, or even think about poetry, and certainly don’t write any.
Which is why it felt odd to find that book in my lap. It was by Ron Padgett and had a French title. I’d never read it before. I liked it. It featured a long poem about the author’s high school yearbook in which he provided a few juicy remembrances of each person pictured. Fortunately he had a small graduating class, perhaps forty students. He included his phone number in the poem so that one of his former classmates, a girl whose attractiveness he had inexplicably failed to recognize at the time, could call him. I laughed.
And then yesterday an old, dear friend, someone I met when I was still writing poetry, sent me a poem by Pablo Neruda. I know Neruda’s work well and immediately recognized the poem as his, although I’d never read it before. It’s called Keeping Quiet and it moved me – not to tears but to something else, a thing that only poetry can move me to. What is that thing? Tell me if you know, because I don’t know and never have.
I believe it’s related to music, to what music does, but it’s also different from music in some way. That’s all I know. I think it has something to do with it not being explainable.
My friend sent the poem for the same reason that other people are sending articles and petitions and such: as a response to the horrific events of the last week – first the attacks, then our president’s declaration of war and the ensuing avalanche of brainless nationalistic zealotry, to use three consecutive words that all mean the same thing.
I confess that I’ve been deleting many of the articles and petitions. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that people are circulating articles and petitions; I just can’t bring myself to read them right now. I read Neruda’s poem, however, and it gave me something I needed, not knowing that I needed it.
This of course is what poetry does, when it works: it seeps into the parched places inside us and gives us what we don’t know we need.
Doubtless to talk about this, cheapens it, so I’ll end here.
Here’s Neruda poem:
Keeping Quiet
And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas,
wars with fire,
victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
(Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.)
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.
I imagine the first tower a split-second before impact, seen from the cockpit of the first plane. From here, at this moment, it would be all one could see. Does the pilot, knowing that victory is assured, throw up his hands in celebration? Does he cry a few holy words as the nose hits home, splitting concrete and steel and glass and ripping into someone’s office?
This is the conclusion of a larger imagining. Earlier I saw a group of terrorists standing guard at the cockpit door as the plane approached its target. Their shared fear, the only fear that remained: that one of the passengers would try to break into the cockpit and divert the plane.
Yet another cockpit scene: the moment the pilot of the second plane, the one headed for the south tower, first sees, in the distance, the mountain of smoke rising from the north tower.
*
Must admit admiration, if that is the word, for the terrorists. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. In my innocence, I always imagined an atomic bomb at Disneyland, or some such, the usual 50’s-style nightmare. But this was more impressive. Four teams of hijackers on four different planes. And the nerve of targeting – and hitting! – both the Pentagon, symbol of U.S. military might, and the World Trade Center, symbol of U.S. economic hegemony.
One of my many tasteless remarks from yesterday, spoken sotto voice: “Too bad we can’t hire these people to run the revolution.”
*
Of course those towers were hideously ugly – twin abominations. Every time I stood beneath one, I thought this. Even more, I thought it from the Staten Island ferry, which launched just a mile south and yielded a spectacular view of the downtown skyline. If you never experienced this, you missed something: two nearly featureless slabs rising an absurd, inhuman distance into the sky. From here, and elsewhere, I often wished them gone. Only not in this way, of course.
Well, then, in what way? In no way: I could not imagine it. Not that I didn’t try. For me those towers always represented our collective insanity – the insanity of concrete and commerce, concrete and commerce, and little else. But however much I hated them (and I really did hate them), I couldn’t possibly imagine them gone.
I still can’t.
Endlessly repeated video clips notwithstanding, I won’t really believe it until I’m down there and there’s nothing.
That will be a strange day.
And then over time I’ll adjust – one always adjusts – until I finally forget the fucking things, as impossible as that now seems.
*
I don’t know anyone who died, quite yet. That is, I haven’t heard of anyone I know dying, although I haven’t heard from everyone I know. Most likely, there will be second-degree deaths – people close to people I’m close to.
There’s a poem by John Berryman, from “77 Dreamsongs,” in which the protagonist, Henry, wonders if he has ever killed anyone. It ends:
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
Similarly, I’ve been going through all the people I know here, trying to determine if anyone’s missing. No one is, as yet.
In conversations with friends, we list the mutual friends we haven’t heard from. Each conversation produces a few more names – often those, at this point, of people I hadn’t remembered. I seem to know a lot of people in New York, none of whom are missing.
Decided to change Oblivio so it would work for daily, shorter things. Did this. Showed early designs (which included some quasi-pornographic content) to several designer friends. One said, aside from design commentary, that I couldn’t or shouldn’t put such things (quasi-pornographic content) on the same site as my business stuff, what would potential clients think?
Became depressed. Had trouble sleeping. Would have begun drinking, were I the type. Had but two choices, as I saw it. Do it anyway, despite quasi-pornographic content, or create totally separate business site.
Separate site meant three bad things:
- Find available domain to serve as business name
- Design and build new site and produce new business cards
- Pay separate hosting and registration fees
Never considered the other apparent choice: to tone it down. Felt this would destroy it. Felt that if I had to evaluate each thing on the basis of whether it might offend someone, I was fucked.
After weeks of waffling, decided finally, irrevocably, to do it anyway, damn the consequences. Wrote a long impassioned email to designer friend, explaining my decision. Felt deep down that I want clients who won’t be offended by quasi-pornographic content, clients who might even appreciate quasi-pornographic content, clients who in any case can distinguish between what people call pornography and ramblings about what people call pornography. Told myself I would gain as many clients as I would lose and that the losses wouldn’t be losses but gains since I wouldn’t have wanted to work with “those” clients anyway. The quasi-pornographic content would be inadvertently beneficial, I told myself, since it would scare away the “bad” clients and attract the “good” clients. And the quasi-pornographic content would give me something precious, I told myself, something no sanitized separate business site ever could: a sense of wholeness. No more hiding what I write from the people I work with. No more splitting myself into separate personas for work and non-work. No more fear of people getting “the wrong idea” about me. Let them get “the wrong idea” about me; I will no longer act like someone about whom no one can get “the wrong idea.”
Such is what I told myself.
And then the next day I realized I couldn’t possibly go through with this, so I spent the next two months doing the three bad things I didn’t want to do, and now those three bad things are done and I have a separate business site which I’ve spent at least a hundred hours working on because I’m an obsessive motherfucker, and I also have new business cards and of course new hosting fees to pay, and here I am writing this new piece for the new Oblivio, which I must admit feels great, in part because I can now write the word motherfucker as many times I want without fear of seeming like the kind of person who just goes around writing the word motherfucker all the time and for no apparent reason.
Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.
05 September 2001 | Train
Getting off the train, she said, my friend, that she loves me. She was drunk. I hadn’t expected her to get off at this stop but the next. Instead she surprised me by standing and mumbling something about a bus, about how it was better for her to take a bus than switch trains. I stood and hurriedly embraced her. That’s when she said it. Never had she said such a thing. Moreover, I hadn’t heard from her in some time, despite having left several messages, which had made me wonder if we weren’t such good friends, in her mind. I said her name and that I love her too, only the I-love-you-too part came after she had already turned to go, and thus I said it to her back and, since we were on a train surrounded by people, not very loudly. I don’t know how drunk she was. Not that drunk. Something about the moment made it difficult for me to sit back down. In fact, it wasn’t until long after the train pulled out of the station and I realized that people were looking at me standing there, that I slowly lowered myself into my seat.
02 September 2001 | Send
Strange: when I’ve written something in my notebook, intending to email it later, I often have the sense that the words are already gone – gone, that is, as an email is gone.
It is like speaking to someone in a dream and then absently believing that this person, the real life person, knows what was said.
The mistake happens after I close my notebook (a comparable action, I suppose, to closing an email program). Thinking over what I’ve written, I will wonder, as I do with emails, how my correspondent will respond. I may even find myself regretting certain parts – again, as with emails – only to remember that I haven’t sent the damn thing, that the damn thing is just words in my notebook.
I do this a lot. Email has conditioned me to imagine that there is a Send button next to whatever I write, representing a nearly instantaneous connection to nearly anyone I know.
Well, to their computers.
No doubt the introduction of the telephone caused a similar shift in consciousness.
For it is – I can feel this – a shift in consciousness.
And a shift for the worse, I can feel this as well.
Not that the mistake I make is so horrific. Rather, it’s funny: it’s funny to be riding the subway and to suddenly remember that the email you’ve been kicking yourself about sending is just some scribbles in your notebook. I make myself laugh when I do this, for I suddenly see myself as some comical character, a character so immersed in “wired” reality that he becomes confused as to what’s real and what isn’t.
This is funny, isn’t it? I find it funny.
At the same time, it’s not funny, and I know it’s not funny, and it unnerves me.
According to the novelist John Gardner (I learned this from William Least Heat-Moon, from his book “PrairyErth”), there are but two plots: a stranger rides into town, and a stranger rides out of town. At certain moments, moments of something between melancholy and insight, I feel that I am that stranger. And the question I ask myself is this: Which way am I heading?
Perhaps it does not matter. I don’t believe it matters. Later in the same paragraph, Heat-Moon notes that his friend, poet and playwright Jack LaZebnik, has said that there’s but one plot: death approaches. This is what matters.
My bouts of media-induced senility foreshadow other, greater losses. Which is why they unnerve me: I am losing myself and I can feel it.
I am reminded of the famous scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which the surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman, disconnects Hal, the ship’s treasonous onboard computer. During the disconnection, Hal says in a whispered monotone, “Dave…my mind is going…I can feel it…I can feel it.”
I don’t mean to compare myself to Hal; I merely remembered him. But it’s interesting that Hal represents the idea of a machine with consciousness – an idea as silly as that of a cyborg, the supposed melding of human and machine.
These things don’t fit together. I can feel it. And that is the problem: one finds oneself disconnected, in one sense or another. And one can feel it, too, albeit from a distance, or what feels like a distance, and that feeling is strange.
Scary, too, but more than scary, strange.
