For the last ten years, much of what we do, what we value, what we spend our money on, what we worry about, what we think, how we dwell, what we tolerate, and what we love has been tinted by four planes on a fateful morning. You can trace out the shockwaves as they echoed around the world, as if the event held reins that carefully orchestrated a global marionette dance. No one could have predicted how much the world would change over the last ten years. It is as if the boulder of Sisyphus got away and has been rampaging down the hill, taking us all with it. We now take for granted these changes, that we're gridlocked in several global wars, that we no longer press our faces against the glass to wave airplanes goodbye, that we mop the floors of security checkpoints with our socks, that we have all incorporated some sense of prejudice that we would never admit.
The world has changed; that is certain. But we have also started a process of rebuilding. We have grown saplings in memory whose canopy now shields us. We have carved memorial into stone, imbuing our grief into art. We have begun to design towers again. We have perhaps surmounted the crux of this global war and started to look beyond vengeance and dismantling. We have resumed our jobs. We spend 364 days of the year more or less on our own.
But today, we are joined by memories: memories of those we love and those we never met but who we love all the same. We find by bond of tragedy some quiet equanimity with those around us, and perhaps this will be the last time. Every single year in the last decade, I sat down on September 10th and wrote. There is an evolution of emotion over those ten years; when I first picked up the pen, I was seventeen. I tried to persuade words, caress images to express what I felt. But how hard it is to describe the impact of a thing like nine-eleven. We write and write and write, and all that comes out is a phantom of what we mean, and it has taken ten years for me to accumulate some measure of composure about this topic.
In the first two years after 9/11, I wrote in anger, imploring people not to forget the gravity of what happened. "I cannot stand relegating that memory to some distant and aloof history," I wrote, "So many will pay tribute by rote - pinching out candles as soon as they are kindled...How much meaning is there in a day of fasting when every other day is a feast, a day of remembrance when every other day is oblivion?" It was hard to see at that time that we needed to move towards healing, toward achieving some semblance of normality. Indeed, in 2004 and 2005, I nearly forgot to write about September 11 as it had faded in its impact. As a midnight gravedigger, I began to unearth those reflections. I wondered why memory was important and wrote, a little petulantly, "Another disaster, another tragedy, a pinch of nutmeg, a sprig of parsley. Fields of vices spring up! What have we to battle them? A soliloquy? A treatise? Words, words, words." And yet I continued to write, stubborn to find "some semblance of meaning, some coherence of moral."
Five years after the event, I realized "a new generation emerges that will learn our shock and grief through history books." Isn't that something? That we would be so defined by an event that others would only acquire second-hand? How do we protect their innocence, and should we? In 2007, I asked whether we could move on; "Are we stricken with inertia, bound like Greek Gods to orbit a fiery luminescence of the past?" I challenged those who paused in silence on September 11 to justify why they did it, why it was important. "Tell me. Because if we've lost cause, then it is time to come back inside, put piety on the hat stand, hang the cloak of duty for another day's resolve because I hate to admit it, but you will tap that well again and it best not be siphoned for an empty gourd." The following year, half-way through medical school, I pondered the randomness that you and I were not on the destined planes, not having breakfast in those towers of memory; "by stochastigarchy," I wrote, "we were drawn elsewhere, away from the epicenter." Finally, two years ago, I wrote about where I was on that day "when plumes like hands sent skyward a misery unfettered, a poison mistaken for a draught."
Last year, I wrote this:
"She is nine today, and in the fourth grade. She likes ice cream and plays four square and never washes her hands before meals. Imagine how big she is; she looks upon the world with wide eyes. She breaks rules sometimes; maybe she stays up past her bedtime drawing under the covers. What does she draw? For reasons unknown to her but stark to us, she draws misery and memory, sketches of fire and loss. They are not sad drawings, only serious ones, ones that outstrip her age, a light that casts generations upon her face. This is the juxtaposition of innocence and reality; she is only beginning to know what she means, how like Helen, she turns fleets. And we turn to her. She is a marking, a pivot point, a child whose grace we cannot take for granted. Give me a lever, said Archimedes, and she will be the fulcrum. She will move planets; they will take flight and hurl out into space, satellites that echo into orbit a refrain she has taught. With crayons, she maps out connections, a gravity that tugs on your heart when you hear of strangers in distress. Oh, it's all propaganda, you say, and it is; what could be more persuasive than a nine year old who teaches us to relinquish selfishness, to volunteer, to donate, to pray, to wish. She is nine this year, but think of what she has endured, and imagine how fast she has had to grow. Listen; don't ignore her because she whispers. No whisper is left unheard. 09.11.10."
I only recount this saga because I find myself at its epilogue. It is time to close the book. Writing on this eclipse year after year has taught me much about myself, about rationing emotional bandwidth, about excavating meaning in something that appears devoid of such, about writing the hard and fast-running feelings. We write to discover, and the sacred truth I find here is simply this. I cannot say whether September 11, 2001 and the impact it has had on this world was an inevitability. We cannot choose where we are born, which religion our parents take, what political system we struggle with. Perhaps the world had no choice and we were sent careening down this uncertain and unavoidable path. The world has changed for the better and it has changed for the worse, and we are here ten years later.
But whether illusion or not, we do have the sense of free will, and despite all those things we cannot control, we feel that we can choose good or evil, right or wrong, to move forward or to stall. After ten years of this funeral wake, it is time for us to take hands and rebuild. There will be more tragedies, more sorrow, more evil. We must take from these ten years what we can and set aside those emotions and values - fear, anger, vengeance, hatred, intolerance - that have no place in a post-9/11 world. Stagnant dwelling does no good. Ignoring the past does no good. But recognizing things for what they are, honoring those who took part, and incorporating the right values and morals into our everyday lives, that is what I take away. We are in a world that is hardly perfect but eminently liveable, in a society whose values are tarnished but not irreparable, in a story that has slowly rebuilt crumbling edifices into beautiful memorial. No whisper is left unheard. I write to turn this whisper into a song. 09.11.11.
Image of firefighter at Ground Zero in the public domain, from Wikipedia.
Posts
1 comment:
Craig,
That was a really really beautiful.
- Sascha
Post a Comment