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[Email from Wylie Goodman, September 30, 2001]

Random Thoughts on September 11 and Beyond:

It’s Sunday morning here in Bedford Styuvesant, and in a few hours, the bells at Concord Baptist across the street from where I live will begin to ring. On most Sundays before September 11, the bell ringer played a rather tenuous rendition of a standard church hymn, unrecognizable to me in name, but familiar in its holier-than-thou tone. It was, simultaneously, moving and annoying.

The first time I heard the bells when I moved here back in December, I nearly cried. There was something so beautiful and heart-breaking about the ritual of calling people near and far to pray. If I owned a proper church-lady hat, I may have even gone inside and taken a seat in the pew.

But for the past two weeks, and on seemingly random days and times, the bell ringer at Concord Baptist has been offering the neighborhood two new songs: “The Star-Spangled Banner" and “America the Beautiful." I’m embarassed to admit it, but the first time I heard them played, I was struck in the same way – slightly tearful and solemn.

For many years now, I’ve had this odd idea for a performance piece. It’s one I’ve never realized and described to only a few people. It involved placing speakers atop various buildings in the financial district of New York City and playing the Islamic “Call to Prayer." Years before, while traveling in Turkey and Egypt, that sound, awakening me at 5:00 in the morning and then halting the activity of shopkeepers and street vendors at various points during the day, had the same intense effect on me as the church bells in my neighborhood – they immediately pull focus away from the petty concerns of buying and selling to something greater and more profound – the search for meaning and an awareness of morality in its largest sense. I doubt very much that I could get a grant to do that sound piece now.

::

September 11, I went to work. On the way to work, in the subway, a man began to cry. It’s unusual for men to cry in public, and so a few women sitting around him began to offer him tissues and to see if he was alright. In a desperate voice, he said, “A plane. A plane. I heard a plane went into the World Trade Center. My wife works there." Soon the whole car was attending to his every word. We caught bits and pieces, as much as we could. A sense of panic began to rise among the passengers. We didn’t know for sure what he was saying, but we knew it did not bode well for any of us.

I got off the train at Rockefeller Center and ran up the stairs. My heart was beating, but I still didn’t know why. There was just an uneasy sense of dread. By the time I got to my office, a small crowd of coworkers had gathered around a tiny black and white television set someone happened to have, the only one on the floor. Rumors were flying. There was an accident. It was a terrorist attack. More were planned. No one knew what would happen next. Someone tried desperately to find a better television, a color one, so we could really see what was happening. We were glued to the set – not wanting to leave and yet horrified by what we were seeing.

When the towers crashed, cries and gasps rose up the room. People began to cry. An announcement came over the intercom system that we were safe, that there was no reason to evacuate the building. But none of us believed the omniscent voice telling us what to do anymore. We were on our own. The rules were gone.

After some panicked calls, we were told that if we felt unsafe and wanted to leave, we could. We decided to do just that. But because I run a news Web site for the company I work for, it seemed obvious that we were going to have to “cover" this in some way.

My coworker and I grabbed a digital camera and headed out to the street. The streets were filled with people who, like us, were in various states of fear and distress. We walked quickly to the office’s main building 7 or 8 blocks away. Traffic had slowed to a standstill. As we looked down Fifth Avenue, billows of grey smoke rose high above the buildings from the place where the World Trade Centers had stood. We took some photographs, slightly sickened that we were doing so, but compelled all the same.

The rest of the day is a blur. It was clear that we weren’t going to be reporting this"story"on the site. There were other messages to get out. Corporate messages about safety and security and concern for our colleagues. We left the news stuff to CNN. My coworker suggested that my services would be better suited elsewhere – as a psychologist – to counsel people in the midst of this crisis. At that moment, I was never more grateful to have those skills.

For the rest of that week, that’s what I did, in small ways. Nothing about this was heroic or extraordinary. Often I waited around in large, cavernous rooms along with other well-meaning psychologists, social workers, clergy, etc. waiting for someone to break down so that I could say a few comforting words. Mostly I and the other “helping professionals" stood in awe of the people doing the real work – the emergency rescue teams, gas and electric workers, firefighters, police, and other volunteers from around the country who had come from hundreds of miles away to help. They would return from “Ground Zero" covered in dust and dirt, their faces blank from what they had seen. There was no way to counsel such people. They were still numb with shock.

There are other stories from that first week to tell that you’ve all heard already, most likely; the eerie sight of telephone poles and subway walls covered with the faces of people deemed missing; the transformation of Union Square into an ever-growing candlelight memorial complete with hopeful teenagers singing “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie," in an attempt to recreate the anti-war movement of the ‘60s; the odd silence on the subway cars as people slowly returned to work, deadened in their own ways now by an unknown, private loss.

I was fortunate, if you can call it that, to have been kept busy that week. I volunteered with Bellevue and St. Vincent’s, mostly helping people try to locate their missing family members or friends by filling out forms and taking hairbrushes or toothbrushes to gather samples of DNA. One day, I got to go to “Ground Zero" as part of a team from Bellevue going down to talk with people at a local hospital that had been affected, along with one survivor and her family, and then to meet with rescue workers. Is it odd that I’ve saved that gas mask as a small “memento" of that experience?

::

Two weeks later, we are being told to return to normalcy. And, for the most part, that’s exactly what I and my fellow New Yorkers have done. On Friday night, I even went to see a Jean Luc Godard film – “Band of Outsiders" – which at one chilling point references the murder of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The film was made in 1964.

But another part of me doesn’t want to get back to normal at all. And, of course, normal is relative now. Over 6,000 people died in the period of under an hour; two of the tallest buildings in the world have vanished; countless families and friends are in mourning. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to go to cafes now as if everything’s okay.

::

I’m writing this because I guess I have to and I’m finally ready to. I don’t know what this is like for people in other parts of the country, and I’d really like to know. How does this affect you? What feels different now? Have you changed your life in a way as a result of this? Are you more politically active? More loving? Do you get angry less quickly? What matters most – or is it the same things that always mattered – you just appreciate them more now?

::

Anyone who knows me well knows that my friends are like my family. I have no immediate relatives. Never had cousins or aunts or uncles growing up. My immediate family is odd and unlike me and they live far away. I have no significant other. I am, for all intents and purposes, as we all are to a greater or lesser extent, alone. That realization is at moments frightening and painful, and at others, a source of great comfort. I am at any moment ready to die. And I do so with the full knowledge that if I die, I do so, as we all do, alone.

At the same time, it meant a great deal to me that first week to get calls and e-mails from friends expressing their concern. It’s so hard in this world we live in to balance and make time for all the things that are important to use – our family, our career, our friends, ourselves. I have so much immense respect and admiration for the brilliance and kindness of my friends. They are artists and performers and writers and psychologists. They write and lecture and teach. They raise children in ways that are loving and thoughtful. They are people who make a difference in this world, and I am honored and amazed that they count me among their fold.

::

The papers today said that a humanitarian crisis is mounting in Afghanistan. There, over 1 million, and possibly 2 or 3 million, people face starvation if aid does not reach them in time. Now that 5 or 6,000 have died here, perhaps we’ll have a clearer sense of what such a large loss of life could look like. Our tragedy – in absolute terms – is only one of many happening in many parts of the world every hour of every day. How do we live in such a way that we keep an awareness of that, even as we go through the routines of shopping, doing laundry, drinking coffee...?

::

I think this is all I have to say. If you don’t read all of this, I understand. That’s okay. Be well.

Wylie