Christal Cooper
PART
ONE: An Online Illustrated Anthology:
9/11: The Artistic & Spiritual Experience
PART
TWO: An Online Illustrated Anthology:
9/11: The Artistic & Spiritual Experience
PART
THREE: An Online Illustrated Anthology:
9/11: The Artistic & Spiritual Experience
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2016/09/part-three-online-illustrated-anthology.html
PART FOUR: An Online Illustrated Anthology: 9/11: The
Artistic & Spiritual Experience
An Online Illustrated Anthology:
9/11: The Artistic & Spiritual Experience
Part Two
Part Two
20 individuals from across the globe were asked two questions: 1. What is your personal experience of 9/11? (and) 2. How did 9/11 influence your art and/or your faith?
Their responses, photos, and examples of their artwork and/or symbols of their spirituality are included in this blog post.
***
Flight 175 explodes after hitting the South Tower. CCBYSA2.0
Their responses, photos, and examples of their artwork and/or symbols of their spirituality are included in this blog post.
KENT ALLEN
APRIL BRADLEY
BARBARA CROOKER
JENNIFER KWON DOBBS
SHAWNTINEAL HUGHES
EDWARDS
JERRINE ELGOFF
JULIA GORDON-BRAMER
KARY SYMONS GREEN
KATE KRETZ
LESLEA NEWMAN
LESLEA NEWMAN
JOHN OLSON
DR. RAM SHARMA
J.D. SMITH
JEFF C. STEVENSON
NICK SWEET
RICHARD THOMAS
JONATHAN TRAVELSTEAD
SHERI WRIGHT
DON YORTY
LORA HOMAN ZILL
***
KENT ALLEN
Writer,
Artist, Musician
Enterprise, Mississippi
Enterprise, Mississippi
"In the
adventure/journey of our lives, we are at our best when we are grounded in the
struggles that strengthen relationships and engage our talents."
Kent Allen
I was watching Good Morning America when the tragic events of
9/11 streamed into my living room. The image of the second plane crashing into
the World Trade Center, while I held my coffee mug in midair suspension, was
oddly surreal. The remainder of that day was spent in dazed confusion as I
huddled with friends and colleagues, attempting to make sense of the unthinkable.
Skipping ahead to the weeks and months that darkly followed, the
consensus of the country was that someone - a group, a culture, a religion -
must pay for the mass murder that 9/11 surely was. Our nation quickly
settled on the Old Testament rule of vengeance: an eye for an eye and so on. We
simply disregarded the transforming messages of Jesus and the other great
teachers to seek nonviolent responses to such an act.
And now the wars and carnage spins from the
vortex of 9/11 into the seemingly unending horror that engulfs our planet.
I propose that the main work of those who have chosen,
or been chosen, to work in the humanities (artists, writers, poets, dancers,
musicians, theater) become a major voice and vision to demand and lead
humankind toward the healing and compassion that this world so desperately
needs.
* Kent Allen is a
writer, artist and musician. He is the author of The Chronicles of Embritt
(2016, amazon) a young adult scifi, adventure novel.
***
APRIL BRADLEY
Writer
Goodlettsville,
Tennessee
I did not learn about the catastrophe that had
occurred to The North Tower on 9/11, until after I had dropped off my three-year-old
son at his nursery on the Yale Divinity School campus and turned on the radio in
my car. It was nearly nine a.m. when I pulled into my apartment building’s
driveway four blocks away, and by that time, the anchors on WCBS Newsradio 880
were reporting that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I
picked up my son from school, and instead of returning to our own apartment, we
went to our neighbors’ home across the hall. There, I called my sister
Jennifer, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, on a wireless
landline. My neighbors and I were watching when a commercial jet crashed into
the second tower. Because Jennifer did not own a television, I narrated the
events to her. We do not know how long we held on to one another through the
landline after the South Tower fell. She suggested contacting our family to
reassure them that my son and I were safe. My cell phone was unable to reach
anyone: my husband who was teaching at the University of Connecticut and on
lockdown, any of my family or friends, in particular my sister- and brother-in-law
and friends in Manhattan. I was only able to reach Jennifer. We did not want to
let one another go. When I recall that day, I feel the weight of the phone in one
hand and the weight of my son on my hip, held in the other. I held my son and described
to my sister how people were falling out of the sky.
April with son Henry.
Reflecting on how that day and its bewildering
and overwhelming events have shaped my art has been a deeply provocative
exercise. I have avoided Ground Zero and the new One World Trade Center. It is
more than because it is too painful. I felt vulnerable and sick with grief over
the victims and for the people searching for their loved ones. I do not want
different images in my memory.
I have been radically changed as much as our culture has by what happened; in particular by the magnitude of loss and suffering and the scope of people’s immediate, generous responses. Thousands answered the call of their vocations to give over their lives to helping others and thousands more reacted out of irresistible compassion. Although I was not writing fiction at the time of 9/11, there are repetitive themes that occur in my work, reflecting that day and the agony of events that followed. My characters discover the resilience of relationships while struggling with loss, grief, sorrow, confusion, weariness, revenge, justice, compassion, mercy, and love. They do terrible things to one another, and they exceed themselves.
I have been radically changed as much as our culture has by what happened; in particular by the magnitude of loss and suffering and the scope of people’s immediate, generous responses. Thousands answered the call of their vocations to give over their lives to helping others and thousands more reacted out of irresistible compassion. Although I was not writing fiction at the time of 9/11, there are repetitive themes that occur in my work, reflecting that day and the agony of events that followed. My characters discover the resilience of relationships while struggling with loss, grief, sorrow, confusion, weariness, revenge, justice, compassion, mercy, and love. They do terrible things to one another, and they exceed themselves.
*April Bradley is from Goodlettsville,
Tennessee and lives with her family on the Connecticut shoreline near New
Haven, Connecticut. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Literary Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts,
and Narratively, among many fine
others.
***
AFTER
The goldenrod’s gone to seed, tarnished and rusty,
AFTER
SEPTEMBER 11
BARBARA
CROOKER
Poet
Fogelsville,
PA
What is your personal experience of
9/11?
I live in rural northeastern
Pennsylvania; on that clear blue morning, I was walking my black lab in the
woods.
When I came home, I turned on NPR while I did the breakfast dishes. I soon realized this wasn't a single-engine plane that had gone astray and crashed into a building, that it was something much, much larger. I turned on television in time to see the towers fall. . . . Some of my friends had adult children who worked in NYC; there were miraculous stories of alarms that didn't go off, subways that were missed, meetings that were postponed. . . .
When I came home, I turned on NPR while I did the breakfast dishes. I soon realized this wasn't a single-engine plane that had gone astray and crashed into a building, that it was something much, much larger. I turned on television in time to see the towers fall. . . . Some of my friends had adult children who worked in NYC; there were miraculous stories of alarms that didn't go off, subways that were missed, meetings that were postponed. . . .
The
other thing that still remains vivid was the silence when I went for my walks
with no airplanes in the sky. . . .
How did 9/11 influence your art and/or your faith?
How did 9/11 influence your art and/or your faith?
The best way I can describe this is
by embedding the poems that I wrote:
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Psalm 11, v. 2-3:
for lo, the wicked bend the bow,
they have fitted their arrow to the string,
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
if the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?
Ground zero: Rodin’s Gates of Hell, twisted steel,
concrete
tossed chockablock, cascades
of debris, thousands of lives
erased in a minute.
Hiroshima. Beirut. Nagasaki.
Beyond the worst disaster
movie Hollywood could conjure.
The mayor says, Whatever the numbers, this will be more than
we can bear.
A group of young
firefighters, ghostly in their coats of ash and dust,
make their way exhausted down
the ruined streets.
One shoe, with a silver
buckle. A snowstorm of résumés, faxes,
time cards, worksheets. The river slides by, pulling its load.
A backdrop of smoke and
crushed cement rises higher
than the vanished buildings,
the forever altered skyline.
A small woman stands on a
rocky island out in the harbor,
her arm raised, a lamp held
high.
And the darkness is not
complete.
first published in The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2001
BLUE BEADS
This ironic strand of perfect
weather, week after week,
round blue beads, a rosary of
clement days;
a bright sun, the kind a
child draws with a brand-new
crayon, and over there, just
a thin scribble of clouds.
That terrible Tuesday, after
people dropped, burning,
from the sky— “Look, the birds are on fire”—
everything changed, and
nothing did.
There should have been an
orange sky,
a purple sun. Now, overhead, an airplane hums
with menace. We can’t forget the buildings slipping
from sight, the concrete
canyons filling with billowing
smoke, the galloping clouds
of debris, thousands of people
walking north, covered in
dust and ash.
No one turned back to look
at the pillars of smoke,
afraid they’d be turned to
salt.
first published in New Works Review, 2004
REWIND
Oh, how we’d like to put this
video in slow rewind,
go back to September 10th,
refurl the chrysanthemum
of ash to a bud, pull the
towers back up
from their soft collapse,
harden their sides,
slap cement on with our bare
hands, smooth it flat
with a trowel, return the sky
to its flawless blue,
no plume of black smoke, just
windows glittering
in the September sun, office
workers breaking
for coffee and bagels, the
world’s commerce
humming on. Let the planes remain in their hangars.
Let the men who plan harm get
caught in traffic,
misplace their tickets, miss
their connections.
Let us all sleep again at
night.
first published in New
Works Review, 2004
AND
One week later, and
I need to see my mother,
upstate New York, far
from the center, the
devastation,
but the need to be with her
is strong,
so I get in the car and drive
north,
and my best friend from high
school
goes to see her parents, too,
and we meet
for lunch. And Mom cries when Judy leaves,
then we both cry when I
leave,
and then I’m on the Thruway
and I need gas, and I start
talking
to the woman at the next
pump,
and by the time we replace
the nozzles, we’re crying
and
wishing each other
safe journey home and no one
knows
what’s coming next, the
darkness is gathering,
thick as crows in a roosting
tree,
but still, there’s an and—
first published in Migrants
and Stowaways, 2004
AFTER
The goldenrod’s gone to seed, tarnished and rusty,
but its wands still dance in
the breeze.
And the sky is so blue it
could crack your heart.
In today’s terrible news,
bacteria are dispersed
in the morning mail.
Five yellow finches go up and
down the thistle feeder.
My friend from Washington
writes how empty the sky is,
no contrails of jets, no
familiar drone of traffic in the air.
Here, a hawk circles lazily
in the updrafts, looking for prey.
The year winds down, and all
you can hear
is the small music of bees,
the thud of apples
hitting the ground. In Afghanistan, mortar fire pounds
buildings to rubble, a steady
thunder
drumming in the distance.
Meanwhile, October’s slow
cello keeps on playing.
first published in New
Works Review, 2006
AFTER
SEPTEMBER 11
If I say God is good,
you nod, because you also
believe.
But if I say MY God is the one true God,
that’s when the troubles
start. So many wars,
waged in the name of
peace. My missiles
are bigger than your missiles. In
the end,
when we are dust, will it
matter who won?
One blue sky, fragile as a
robin’s egg,
covers us all. When we sleep, grass
is our last blanket. Maybe the stars
spell different stories to
you, to me,
but in the darkness of the
night,
they are light enough to see
by.
first published in Windhover,
2004
and in Barbara
Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015)
PRAISE SONG
Praise the light of late
November,
the thin sunlight that goes
deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering
in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in
night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed
pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of
trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise
the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we
have, and it’s never enough.
first published in Windhover
and
in Radiance (Word Press, 2005)
SOLSTICE
These are dark times. Rumors of war
rise like smoke in the
east. Drought
widens its misery. In the west, glittering towers
collapse in a pillar of ash
and dust. Peace,
a small white bird, flies off
in the clouds.
And this is the shortest day
of the year.
Still, in almost every
window,
a single candle burns,
there are tiny white lights
on evergreens and pines,
and the darkness is not
complete.
first
published in Time of Singing, 2001
***
***
JENNIFER KWON DOBBS
http://www.jkwondobbs.com/
poet,
critic, Associate
Professor of English/Creative Writing and Program Director of Race and Ethnic
Studies at St. Olaf College
St Paul, Minnesotta
What is your personal
experience of 9/11?
Just
days before 9/11, I moved to Los Angeles to begin studying at the University of
Southern California for a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing.
I remember waking up and seeing the shocking images of the World Trade Center on fire, and when one of the towers collapsed, I panicked thinking about the aftermath. While the news celebrated the American public's outpouring of mutual support and grief for each other, it also reported of increased hatred toward minorities particularly those who had Arabic sounding names or Middle Eastern appearances.
In fact, on the morning of 9/11, a fellow student in my cohort said that government officials appeared at his apartment, woke him up, and detained him downtown with other brown people for an unspecified reason. (He didn't know about the terrorist attacks until after he was released.)
In the ensuing weeks, President George Bush's incendiary rhetoric about the Axis of Evil, which included North Korea, terrified me because it recalled the language of Japanese internment and Time Magazine articles about how to visually distinguish between persons of Chinese and Japanese origin." "Where are you from?"--the complicated question--became even more challenging and racist with its post-9/11 follow-up: "North Korea or South Korea?" But beyond strangers' disconcerting gaze, post-9/11 racism emerged as a threat that people of color were told to understand and to excuse in the name of national security.
I remember waking up and seeing the shocking images of the World Trade Center on fire, and when one of the towers collapsed, I panicked thinking about the aftermath. While the news celebrated the American public's outpouring of mutual support and grief for each other, it also reported of increased hatred toward minorities particularly those who had Arabic sounding names or Middle Eastern appearances.
In fact, on the morning of 9/11, a fellow student in my cohort said that government officials appeared at his apartment, woke him up, and detained him downtown with other brown people for an unspecified reason. (He didn't know about the terrorist attacks until after he was released.)
In the ensuing weeks, President George Bush's incendiary rhetoric about the Axis of Evil, which included North Korea, terrified me because it recalled the language of Japanese internment and Time Magazine articles about how to visually distinguish between persons of Chinese and Japanese origin." "Where are you from?"--the complicated question--became even more challenging and racist with its post-9/11 follow-up: "North Korea or South Korea?" But beyond strangers' disconcerting gaze, post-9/11 racism emerged as a threat that people of color were told to understand and to excuse in the name of national security.
How did 9/11 influence
your art and/or your faith?
I
became deeply concerned about U.S. militarism and how it warps the imagination
to dehumanize "others" as enemies to national security. I began
reading and writing against this gaze that in softer forms interrogates my
presence in the U.S. as a possible North Korean and in harder forms expresses
itself in nativist, hate rhetoric such as what we're currently seeing in Donald
Trump's presidential campaign.
In this way, I deepened my faith in poetry to intervene, complicate, problematize, slow down, re-cast, re-imagine, and say again in precise and memorable language how we look upon each other. We are neighbors, not others. An act of imagination is an action. It is not a luxury.
In this way, I deepened my faith in poetry to intervene, complicate, problematize, slow down, re-cast, re-imagine, and say again in precise and memorable language how we look upon each other. We are neighbors, not others. An act of imagination is an action. It is not a luxury.
***
***
Shawntineal
Hughes Edwards
Poet/ Owner of Diverse Creative Solutions
Atlanta, Georgia
I
remember sitting in the waiting room at the dentist office watching television
to pass the time. There was an interruption in the broadcast, and there I saw
it. News flash about the Twin Towers getting hit by airplanes. It was
surreal.
I was a recent college graduate. So even though my adulthood was truly beginning, nothing could have prepared me for this. I was going through my own life challenges at the time, but I wouldn't dare try to compare what I went through to the loss of loved ones and the devastation of that one day.
I was a recent college graduate. So even though my adulthood was truly beginning, nothing could have prepared me for this. I was going through my own life challenges at the time, but I wouldn't dare try to compare what I went through to the loss of loved ones and the devastation of that one day.
There
has been speculation over the years about the cause of such a heartless action
on September 11th. One thing I do know is that people lost their lives, and our
country has never been the same.
2001 was
a very significant year for me. It was also the year I gave my life to
Christ. My trust in God and my faith continues to grow. I've learned to
love and appreciate the simple things. Life is so short and should never be
taken for granted.
9/11
should not be reflected as a single incident. It should be a wake up
call to the whole world that we are living in a state of emergency. These
are the last days. Put God first. Dedicate your life to living and
treating everyone right so that when the time comes for you to be called home,
you know your work on earth will not be in vain.
***
***
***
JERRINE ELGOFF
Writer, Artist, Studied
Traditional Chinese Medicine
Plymouth, Massachusetts
Smokey after
*dedicated
to my brother who from cancer as a result of 9/11 when he worked as a
construction worker at ground zero.
My
brother amazes me
He
walks in dreams now
Plucking
ever after flowers
In
the desert
After
Ground Zero.
He
breathes again
Barefoot
from his rural home
Smokey
reveals
Everlasting
ever after.
***
JULIA GORDON-BRAMER
Professional Tarot-Card Reader and Poet
Maryland Heights, Missouri
***
***
LESLEA NEWMAN
KARY GREEN
Born Again
Christian
Atlanta,
Georgia
On September 11, 2001 I was
working as an adolescent substance abuse counselor. When the first plane hit, a
coworker came in my office and told me to come see what was happening. I
watched the TV in disbelief. Then…the second plane hit. We knew this was no
longer an accident. Several coworkers gathered in his office and watched this
nightmare unfold. No one said a word. It was completely silent. I can’t
remember how long we watched TV that morning, but I do remember seeing people
jumping from the building to their death. At that point I couldn’t watch
anymore. I went back to my office…feeling numb. The rest of the day was a blur.
But as soon as I got home, I turned on the TV and watched until I fell asleep
that night.
I went to work the next day and
everyone was talking about what they had seen on TV the night before. People
were displaying feelings of sadness, anger, disbelief, fear and helplessness. I
didn’t know what I felt. I guess a combination of all of these feelings. That
day at work all of my clients discussed their feelings about 911. I was riding
on a rollercoaster of emotions. When I got off work, I grabbed my purse to
leave and then I sat back down in my chair. I began sobbing…thinking about all
those lives lost and families that were hurting. About ten minutes later a
coworker came to my door and asked if I was okay. I honestly don’t remember
what I said to him. But I could tell he was feeling the exact same way.
Life certainly changed for me
after 911. I started to appreciate it more instead of taking it for granted. I
shared my love to family and friends more often, through my words and actions.
My faith in God grew. I witnessed people searching for peace because of this
tragedy. People were looking to God, more than they ever had before. (This was
inside and outside of my counseling office). People also seemed friendlier;
saying hello, holding a door or just smiling at a stranger. For me, 9/11 was
horrible and wonderful at the same time.
KATE KRETZ
Artist
Washington DC
I was sitting outside of my physical therapist’s
office, waiting for her. I walked into
the pharmacy and heard. I tried over and
over to call my brother who lives in NYC and could not get in touch with
him. (He was alright). I don’t think 9/11 affected my art very much,
though it affected me personally. I
remember thinking that there was no way that artists could make superficial,
Pop-culture work after 9/11, but I was wrong.
***
LESLEA NEWMAN
Northampton,
Massachusetts
13 Ways of Looking at
9/11
I.
First
thought:
This
is not good
for
the Jews.
Second
thought:
This
is not good
for
the lesbians.
Third
thought:
this is not good
this is not good
for
me.
II.
Even
now—especially now
the
body has its demands:
the
belly cries to be fed.
But
food can’t push past
the
lump of tears
stuck
in my throat
too
terrified
to
spill from my eyes
III.
The
cats, usually so aloof
except
at feeding time
stay
close
unaware,
yet knowing
something
heavy
soft
and purring
is
needed on my lap
IV.
Born
in Brooklyn
raised
on Long Island,
I
moved to the East Village
to
make my fortune
then
fled the city
twenty
years ago.
Still,
in my heart
I
am a New Yorker
so
people call,
wanting
to connect
wanting
it to be their tragedy, too.
“Did
you lose anyone?”
they
ask, almost hopeful.
I am almost sorry to disappoint them.
I am almost sorry to disappoint them.
V.
The
nation is on high alert.
I
stock canned goods in the basement,
stash
two hundred dollars
under
my mattress
thinking,
this and a token
will get me a ride on
the subway.
Then
I remember
where
I live
there
is no subway
VI.
The
search dogs get depressed;
there
are so few bodies to be found.
One
team stages a mock recovery
to
boost their dogs’ morale.
A
burly firefighter
puts
down his gear,
lies
down in the rubble
and
like a dog, plays dead.
Soon
the search dogs start to bark
and
wag their tails
and
lick his face.
Soon
the firefighter rises from the ashes
and
slowly walks away
VII.
Bags
and bags of body parts:
finger,
ankle, elbow.
I
remember lying in bed with you
looking
at our feet sticking up
from
under the blankets,
yours
so brown and slender,
a
perfect size six with ballerina arches;
mine
so pale and squat and flat.
We
joked about knowing each other in a crowd
solely
by our feet.
Now
I try to wrap my mind
around
the unimaginable:
a
knock at the door,
a
strange man
brings
me your right foot
and
I am grateful even for that.
VIII.
It
doesn’t take long
for
the newspapers
to
quote letters
blaming
Israel and the Jews.
It
doesn’t take long
for
the newspapers
to
quote Jerry Falwell
blaming
the feminists and the gays.
It
doesn’t take long
for
me to stop reading
the
newspapers.
IX.
In
my little town
at
my little grocery store
a
cashier refuses to check out
a
woman he calls a “turban head,”
a
woman I call a cancer survivor.
X.
It
is the longest we have gone
in
thirteen years
without
making love.
Finally
I let you touch me
though
I feel like glass
because
those who died
will
never enjoy
this
gift again.
How
dare I waste it?
XI.
A
blank notebook page
an
empty computer screen,
What
is the point of writing anything?
Then
an unbidden email from a fan:
“Thank
you for bringing so much
beauty
into my heart and the world.”
Tears
tumble from my eyes.
XII.
I dream a child stands
I dream a child stands
on
the twin towers
of
her sturdy legs.
before
she disappears
and
I am running
across
the Brooklyn Bridge,
naked
and burning,
my
skin falling away
like
the Vietnamese girl
in
that famous photo.
Everyone
I ask for help
asks
me, “Are you an Arab
or
a Jew?” I tell them,
“I
am a human being”
and
everyone who hears my answer
vanishes
like smoke
XIII.
On
Rosh Hashannah
There
is a discussion group at the synagogue.
Our
leader says when she first heard,
she
was so angry she wanted to kill
somebody—anybody—and
everybody
she
spoke with felt the same way.
“Is
there anyone here
who
isn’t furious?” she asks.
I
look around the circle,
then
slowly raise my hand
like
a white flag of surrender.
“13
Ways of Looking at 9/11” copyright © 2008 Lesléa Newman from Nobody’s Mother (Orchard House Press).
***
***
JOHN OLSON
Writer
Seattle,
Washington
The
Butterfly Effect
My father had passed away, at age 78,
just a few days before 9/11. I was in a state of grief. It was more than grief.
A paradigm had changed, both personal and social. Not only was my father gone,
and the values he embodied, but the United States seemed suddenly gone. Unequivocally,
irrevocably gone.
It began before 9/11. I’d say it became
evident around 1980, after Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency.
The United
States that I’d known - the country that had birthed and nourished
thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and William James,
the country that produced poets such as Emily Dickinson and Allen Ginsberg and
Bob Dylan, the country that produced innovative composers such as Charles Ives
and Duke Ellington, the country that stood for equal opportunity and social
justice and values of honesty and thrift
- was disappearing.
I still remembered the cattle I’d seen
lying dead in grassy culverts matted with patches of snow as our train to
Minot, North Dakota rolled by. It was May, 1997, and the snow had just begun
melting, revealing the carcasses of the cows. This was new. I’d never seen
that. In all the years that my grandparents had had a farm in North Dakota
people took care of their livestock. They brought them in. They didn’t let them
stay out and freeze. Something in the country’s psyche had shifted. Something
commercial, something bleak and mercantile had entered the picture and shoved
everything else aside, or just plain crushed it. Suddenly, as Gordon Gekko
famously uttered in Oliver Stone’s Wall
Street, greed was good. It was the day of the bully. The ends justified the
means. The world had become bloody. Consequently, my reaction to the events of
9/11 a few years later were strange. I didn’t think of terrorists. I thought of
rage.
I was in bed at our home in Seattle,
Washington when I first heard of it. This would’ve been 9:00 a.m. Pacific
Standard Time, which would’ve made it already noon in New York as those
horrific events were still unfolding. My
wife Roberta and I had just gone online. We were new to the Internet. We still
had dial-up. AOL. No YouTube. But we did get images. Roberta came into the
bedroom and told me that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade
Towers. The first image that came to mind was that of the B-25 bomber that
crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. Roberta thought it was a new
action movie that AOL was promoting.
I got out of bed and went to look.
There it was: black smoke billowing out the north tower. That’s all it was at
that point: a terrible accident. Not a movie, it looked real enough, but no
sinister intent was apparent.
That all changed when we turned the
television on. All the major channels were providing coverage for what had become
a full-fledged national emergency. Both World Trade Towers were billowing black
smoke. People screaming in horror as footage of the two plane collisions were
shown over and over again. Most horrific of all: tiny figures moving past the
glass windows, plummeting to their deaths thousands of feet below.
Photographs of the alleged mastermind
behind the attack were already being shown: a swarthy, middle-aged man wearing
a turban and a long black beard named Osama bin Laden. His group of terrorists
were called al Qaeda, an Arabic word meaning (roughly) “the base,” or “the
foundation.” It was a network made up of Salafist jihadists. These were Islamic
extremists who espoused jihad (an Arabic word roughly meaning struggle,
fighting, persevering) against whoever they perceived as enemies of Islaam.
Footage of this group firing machine guns and performing drills in the desert
would be repeated numerous times in the coming weeks.
My immediate thought was: how did they
know this so soon? I had to assume that this group of terrorists had been
suspected for some time leading up to this tragic series of events. But if so,
how they were able to pull it off? Weren’t they being watched closely by our
intelligence gather apparatus? Couldn’t this attack have been predicted? Where
was the military? It would be explained in the following days that the air
defense failures to intercept these planes were due to multiple factors,
including failure of communications between the agencies responsible and some
highly coincidental military exercises.
At 10:00 a.m. the south tower
collapsed. I was stunned as I heard Peter Jennings announce the collapse of the
building. I was dumbfounded by the calmness in his voice. The collapse of the
tower seemed to be taken for granted. But what I saw was clear and obvious: a
controlled demolition. Why was no one commenting on this? Had the terrorists
managed to strategically plant explosives before crashing the planes into the
towers? Had there been plans to bring the towers down in case of an attack?
Minutes later the north tower came
down. Again: a controlled demolition, the building collapsing in mere seconds
into its own footprint.
Had my father been able to stay alive
until these events he would’ve seen it for what it was: an expertly controlled
implosion of glass and steel. My father had been a designer and an engineer. He
knew physics. He knew materials. He knew forces and stresses and shocks and
balances. What would he have thought, this man who flew B24s in World War II?
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t
have a theory. All I know is that what I saw were two controlled demolitions
that day that in no way could’ve been caused by a plane crashing into the
structure and causing it to collapse due to the heat produced by jet fuel
aflame. I knew that in some way we were all being lied to. Once again, as with
the Warren Report, the American public was being spoon-fed a fiction.
At 5:20 that afternoon a third
building, the 47-story 7 World Trade Center containing New York’s emergency
operations center, came down in what was obviously a controlled demolition.
This building had not been hit by a plane.
In the 15 years since 9/11 the United
States has become a very different place. It doesn’t feel at all like the
country I grew up in. It bears a far closer resemblance to the dystopic
totalitarian government presented in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance, data mining,
torture, kidnapping, prison detention without charge and attacks on academic
freedom have all become the new norm.
9/11 has had a profound effect on my
relation with the country in which I was born and acquired my values. Like a
lot of people, particularly during the current election cycle, I’m frightened.
The society appears to be coming apart. Hatreds, racial and socio-economic, are
inflamed. Donald Trump is capitalizing on these hatreds to fuel his campaign.
Hillary Clinton is little better. She is a Medusa fueled by corporate greed. A
good way to depict the American zeitgeist pictorially would be to take Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, stick a few
corporate logos on Saturn and replace the son whose head Saturn has already
been bitten off and swallowed with the iconic Uncle Sam.
As a poet and writer, I have felt
alienated from American culture since at least 1966, when I was 18. 1966 was a
pivotal year, for a lot of reasons, including experimentation with LSD, but the
biggest seminal event was my discovery of Arthur Rimbaud and his poem Le bateau ivre, “The Drunken Boat.” Just
a few years previous, in 1964, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in America had won the Pulitzer.
Why I chose to become a writer in a society so antagonistic to intellectual pursuits is a mystery to me. All I remember is being utterly electrified by Bob Dylan’s lyrics and music. Mainly the lyrics. I wanted more. Thanks to some older friends and sympathetic teachers, I discovered Dada and Surrealism.
Why I chose to become a writer in a society so antagonistic to intellectual pursuits is a mystery to me. All I remember is being utterly electrified by Bob Dylan’s lyrics and music. Mainly the lyrics. I wanted more. Thanks to some older friends and sympathetic teachers, I discovered Dada and Surrealism.
Is it rational to believe, as did André
Breton and the other surrealists, that a revolution in consciousness was
possible? No.
Not in a culture that refers to a technocratic entrepreneur like Steve Jobs as a “visionary,” or frames highly aggressive moguls like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates as benign philanthropists. Or, for that matter, makes a candidacy like Donald Trump even remotely possible.
Not in a culture that refers to a technocratic entrepreneur like Steve Jobs as a “visionary,” or frames highly aggressive moguls like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates as benign philanthropists. Or, for that matter, makes a candidacy like Donald Trump even remotely possible.
That’s where faith comes in. The
motivation to create literary art in a society that ignores or flatly despises
literary art is nuts. It’s crazy. There’s nothing rational to support it. But
it’s there. It’s as pertinent to my existence as muscle or bone or blood.
According to chaos theory, most systems
are inherently non-linear. In other words, output is not directly proportionate
to input. The slightest of changes in one particular state can result in
massive changes elsewhere. This is known as the “butterfly effect.” The subtle
perturbations of air caused by a butterfly flapping its wings can, several
weeks later, result in a hurricane.
Faith may be initial condition
necessary to trigger a sequence of words in the hope they produce an alteration
in consciousness and hence, later down the line, a change in public policy for
the better.
Faith may be as natural as snow falling
in the Himalayas. Acoustical and awkward as a ghost note in a zydeco dance
competition.
Faith may be hope that a certain
medicine helps alleviate a stubborn pain, innervates a hollow feeling, or
palliates the pain of sciatica.
Faith may be warm and correspondent to
touch or unfocused as the drift of incense. A whisper of ginger, the feel of an
elephant’s trunk lightly touching the back of one’s neck.
A deep inner knowing.
Faith may be a little agitation in the
air caused by a flapping of wings.
***
***
DR RAM SHARMA
Poet/ Associate Professor & Head of the Department of English J.V. College
Poet/ Associate Professor & Head of the Department of English J.V. College
Baraut, Baghpat, Up,
India.
What is your personal
experience of 9/11?
It
was a devastating incident to create havoc among mankind. It spread deep wide
gloom of despair and depression . This was the worst incident i realized and
thought since i grew.
How did 9/11 influence
your art and/or your faith?
Love
and peace became more attractive and significant after this incident and i
started realizing to make this world more beautiful with my poems .Love and
peace was my twin towers to support the people
worldwide
.
OM
SHANTIH SHANTIH --OM PEACE OM
***
J.D. SMITH
Poet, Writer, Editor
Washington, DC
For me the events of September 11, 2011 and
their aftermath were not an abstraction. Nor were they distant. I learned of
the attacks at my office, three blocks from the White House, and before long I
joined the stunned crowds on the street dismissed from their jobs for the day
and looking for a way home. I had the relative luxury of walking to my
apartment in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, and on the way I bought one
bottle of ouzo and another of something brown in self-indulgent defiance of
what seemed like and turned out to be an Islamist attack. I made a dent in both
while watching with a friend. In the days that followed I saw the downcast
silence of bus passengers, and I saw personnel carriers manned by armed
National Guardsmen in the parks. Waiting for my first flight after the attacks,
in late October I saw the nearly-empty corridors of National Airport, and both
leaving and returning I saw from above the blasted walls of the Pentagon.
Visiting a friend in November, I walked around the still-smoking and sparking
pit that had been the foundation of the Twin Towers. In the fullness of time I
saw the streets of Washington push up bollards like so many malign hedgerows
and air travel turn into a wasteful exercise in security theater that brings
out the worst impulses in everyone involved.
Well before I could respond to these upheavals
as a person in the world, let alone as a writer, plenty of others had their
say, and it generally wasn’t pretty. The poems on the subject I heard at open
mics leapt over the already-blurred line between art and art therapy that
prevails in those settings, with plenty of preaching to the choir on the superiority
of love to hate and other such platitudes. At times I also caught a whiff of
self-aggrandizement and careerism, as if a poet’s big break might come from his
9/11 poem. Perhaps the most notable saving grace of this situation is that
poets had less to gain than those visual and performance artists who seemed to
relish the prospect of keeping individual and collective trauma raw as long as their
work was noticed.
My first response in poetry to the attacks thus
turned out to be a meta-statement on the solipsism and/or cynicism of what had
been written so far. And on having been beaten to the punch, since I could not
manage a final draft until September 2002.
Poems
of September 11
The words deserving of an audience
dissolve in the acoustical pads
of a therapist’s pastel office,
or they carom against bedroom walls.
The loftiest statements have been raked,
sifted beyond recognition,
in the level syntax of Fresh Kills.
None will apply for tenure,
or a grant.
Lacking the decorum
of a line in a vita, superseded
and set beneath the latest entry,
those cries and questions daily
rise to the first line, on a first page,
where there may be no second page.
They have yet to be closely read.
Until they are, and notes taken,
it is best to add nothing,
to ignore the first,
facile statements
such as this.
The poem nonetheless ends up feeding
the trolls and validating the poseurs by acknowledging their existence and
positioning the speaker in relation to them.
The
political and cultural atmosphere that arose from the attacks pushed me in
another direction. In a crisis, many among both leaders and the public at large
seemed primarily concerned with safety at the expense of all other values—the
priorities of consumers rather than citizens. The subsequent discussion of plans
for a “shadow government” in the event of a catastrophe seemed to be a further
sign of the country’s drifting from democratic attitudes. At the risk of making
a facile comparison, I was reminded of the shift in values that occurred as the
vibrancy of ancient Rome congealed into empire. Hence the lengthy one-sentence sigh
that is this poem:
For a Shadow Government
If the calculations are correct,
And everyone has inhaled
A molecule of Julius Caesar’s
Dying breaths,
I would imagine mine
Once borne on words
That could, in this tongue,
Be said again:
If this is our
path,
May the Republic
be restored.
In
retrospect I find this poem still too focused on personal response and too
intimate for addressing the sweep of history.
Left, the only surviving sculpture of Julius Ceaser made during his lifetime. Right, map of Julius Ceaser's Roman empire in 40AD
For a time, from the breaching of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 until the morning September 11, many of us had hoped that
the larger convulsions of history were behind us and that the world might
gradually move toward some patchwork utopia of free trade and liberal
democracy.
view of the East side of the end Berlin Wall, taken in December
of 19990 after the border was opened.
That dream has been dashed, and other disillusionments have followed. Besides a still-unresolved intervention in Afghanistan and the disastrous “war of choice” in Iraq, they include inadequate responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Even at Ground Zero, New York’s officials and developers failed to rebuild the World Trade Center site in a timely manner and to memorialize the victims and responders with the dignity they deserve.
Soldiers quickly march to the ramp of the CH-47 Chinook helicopter that
will return them to Kandahar Army Air Field on Sept. 4, 2003. The Soldiers were
searching in Daychopan district, Afghanistan, for Taliban fighters and illegal
weapons caches
That dream has been dashed, and other disillusionments have followed. Besides a still-unresolved intervention in Afghanistan and the disastrous “war of choice” in Iraq, they include inadequate responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Even at Ground Zero, New York’s officials and developers failed to rebuild the World Trade Center site in a timely manner and to memorialize the victims and responders with the dignity they deserve.
BAGHDAD, IRAQ (November 2003) - U.S. Army and personnel from pose
for a photo under the "Hands of Victory" in Ceremony Square, Baghdad,
Iraq during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.
New Orleans (August 30, 2005) – U.S. Coast Guard Petty
Officer 2nd Class Shawn Beaty of Long Island, N.Y., looks for survivors in the
path of Hurricane Katrina.
Platform supply vessels battle the blazing remnants of the off shore
oil rig Deepwater Horizon
It is not for me to say how other poets
should deal with the attacks of September 11 and the times they have ushered
in, but so far I have found myself drawn away from the comforts and distresses
of the private sphere. My now-distant childhood has less hold on my attention
than the present age, and bearing witness to that age in poetry seems more
urgent than providing another memoir in verse, which others do better anyway.
Within the limits of my ability I hope to explore poetry’s prophetic or
visionary function. By this I do not mean prognostication or clairvoyance, but
rather the function of bringing a long but morally urgent view to current
events. I will close with a poem that attempts
to move in this direction.
Two Capitals
1. Athens
Life must have smelled more then.
Along with dung and dust,
the urine sluicing through the tanneries
and cheeses going bad in the Agora,
the strigil-scraped and rancid oil
from wrestlers’ backs, like resined wine
and roasting joints of lamb,
would have suffused the air, if not enough
to banish sweat.
Those scents dispersed, what’s left?
Besides orations, plays, ceramics,
some verse, inquiries on
the nature of the Good, presided over by
a temple whose proportions cast
a shadow on the works
of every generation that has followed.
2. District of
Columbia
The present’s odor, though
noxious with exhaust,
or polysyllables of nitrogen
that manure far-sprawling fields,
may waft more faintly in comparison,
a benediction or achievement of
refrigerators and the vaccines they can hold,
and sewerage that leads unglamorously
to health, thus widening the canopy of years
beneath which we draw breath,
find entertainment, undertake
perhaps some larger task.
Above the buried genius of the Metro,
one or another borrowed idiom prevails
in castle, column, obelisk,
and an accounting made of wishes more than means
while texts of native wisdom fray
or turn to fossils under glass.
A later age may find, in this, our scent.
***
JEFF C. STEVENSON
JEFF C. STEVENSON
Twitter:
@JeffCStevenson
@FortneyRoad
New York, NY
Something is Going on Downtown
Jeff C.
Stevenson
One
day several years ago, I was cleaning my bedroom windows. I raised the heavy
blind that was always lowered half way due to the sun. I was surprised to find
a bleached-white page from the New York
Times taped to the glass. I had forgotten I had put it there and it took me
several seconds to realize what it was.
attributed to Martin Beebe
# # #
On
the morning of the September 11th attacks, I was at the advertising
agency where I worked, presenting to the client some TV campaign ideas for the launch
of a cholesterol-lowering agent. A woman knocked on the door to the conference
room. “Something is going on downtown.”
Soon after, the office closed for the day
and I walked home that beautiful morning. This was before everyone had a cell
phone so car doors were opened along the streets with radios blaring the
terrible news. People would cluster around, listen a few minutes, continue on, and
then pause at another automobile for an update.
I noticed a large crowd at one corner. “To
give blood,” the woman told me. I felt ashamed I hadn’t thought to do that; I
just wanted to get home. I remember the odd hush of that day. Other than the radios
playing from the cars, there was only the steady shuffle of thousands hurrying
home in the late morning. I don’t remember traffic on the streets, no horns or
shouting, just a mass of humanity trudging north.
The rest of that day and long into the
evening, I watched television. Facebook and Twitter and the other social media
platforms were not yet in existence. I don’t recall getting much information online.
I think there was the need to have human contact, even if it was only the
familiar faces of news anchors.
# # #
The
next morning, the agency was closed. I was up early, another beautiful day. The
streets were empty. That had never, ever happened before. No cars, no bicycle riders or joggers, no one on their way
to work. Looking south, I saw that awful smear on the sky from where the towers
were still smoldering. I purchased all the
newspapers, starving for more information; maybe the print reporters knew
something the cable programs weren’t aware of. I remember the storeowner didn’t
say much to me; his small TV set was on. Even reduced, the images still held
the power to traumatize, to make you recoil.
# # #
Thursday
morning, my office was open. The streets were almost back to normal; the shock
had worn off a little, everyone seemed a bit dazed but they were out and about.
I took the bus to work since there was a rumor the subways were going to be
blown up. There were only a few people on board; several were weeping, not at
all ashamed of their public grief. A dreary silence hovered over us; I was
already dreading the day ahead as we all tried to function under such horrific
circumstances.
Days after 9/11 in Washington Square Park
# # #
Friday
morning I met with an art director who was supposed to have some new concepts
ready to review. We were all cutting one another a lot of slack but clients
were not: they had ad buys that needed to be honored, so deadlines had to be
met.
“I have to leave early today,” she said
as we started to review her layouts. “Around three.”
“Will your revisions be done by then? The
presentation is Monday morning. There might be weekend work.”
She looked at me with concern. “You live
in the city, don’t you? So do I, but they’re going to blow it up. You heard,
right?”
I didn’t know what to say. Her layouts
were a mess. She had a lot of work ahead of her. And yes, I had heard that
“they” were going to blow up Manhattan.
She said, “My boyfriend and I are going
up north to stay with my sister in the Hudson Valley for the weekend. Where are
you going?”
I set aside her work. “I’ll be in the
city this weekend. How will you get your layouts done for the meeting if you don’t
stay all day?”
“I’ll work remotely and come in early
Monday to print them out.”
I waited for her to think through her
logic. She didn’t, so I helped her. “How will you print out your work if the
city is destroyed?”
It took her a few seconds. She sort of
grinned. “Oh. Yeah. Right.”
She stayed late to work on her designs,
but still fled the city that weekend.
Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from Catskill
Mountains by Frederic Edwin Church (1848), of the Hudson River School.
# # #
Only
a few days after the September 11th attacks, there were no American flags
available in New York City. They had all been purchased and were displayed in
offices or hung over restaurant or department store entrances. There was no
supply, just an overwhelming demand.
The newspapers came to our rescue. They
printed full color images of Old Glory. I trimmed mine out of the New York Times, taped it to my bedroom
window. Before I lowered the heavy blind, I noticed that just about every
apartment dweller had the same idea. Red, white and blue images were affixed as
far as I could see.
I would count flags each morning on the
walk to my gym; I always spotted at least fifty, but it was frequently closer
to ninety. For many weeks, all of Manhattan looked to be frozen in time, with
every single day resembling a somber Fourth of July celebration.
# # #
Attendance
at churches, temples and mosques—and bars—surged in the days and weeks following September
11th.
When there are catastrophic occurrences, such as wars, social unrest, or
terrorist attacks, people want to feel safe. They form faith- based or secular
or tavern communities, places where others are likeminded and share their same worldview.
Iranian girl with her mother turning candle light at Tehran,
remembering the September 11 attacks
I remember that all the religious leaders
were intent on explaining WHY this happened to America. Millions listened to
these men and women because they
heard
from God, and they alone knew what He was up to. Was God judging us, or was He
judging only some of us, and others just got in His way?
I don’t think God had anything whatsoever
to do with the attacks. It was conceived by terrorists who are as twisted in
their ideology as are those individuals who feel God is telling them to blow up
abortion clinics, picket the funerals of slain US soldiers, or kill the
physicians who work at women’s health centers.
However, as religious and political
leaders became more aggressive in their need to blame someone, I became
curious, then fascinated, to learn how leaders use cataclysmic events to
promote their own agenda, be it an end-time belief system or a left or
right-wing policy. When we are frightened, we are at our most vulnerable and
we’re desperate for someone to come along and tell us, “It’s okay. I know
what’s going on. I’ll keep you safe. Come with me.”
That’s why the number of cults and sects
always increase after times of great social unrest or turmoil. After 9/11, as
the claims of faith leaders became more outlandish and dangerous, I could see
how people would choose to huddle fearfully together in a bunker with an
all-knowing leader.
We live in scary times. Who will save us?
# # #
It
was what I heard from religious leaders that led me to write my first book.
After 9/11, I spent seven years
researching and writing FORTNEY ROAD: The
True Story of Life, Death, and Deception in a Christian Cult, which was published
in June 2015. It examines one of the most brutal cults of the 1960s and 70s,
one in which three people died. I interviewed 17 former members of the cult and
tell their stories; how they got in, how they got out, and what it was like to
live in an isolated community of believers who felt they were living in the end
times.
Positioning myself as the author of “A
true-life horror story and the ones we can only imagine,” I now write what is
known as weird or dark fiction. Since FORTNEY
ROAD came out, I have had more than a dozen short stories published. Like the events that occurred on September
11th, my tales involve ordinary people who encounter terrifying, out-of-the-ordinary
situations and try to cope with what they have experienced.
Jeff Stevenson with Wendy
# # #
* Jeff C. Stevenson works
as a freelance copywriter. He is a professional member of Pen America and an
active member of the Horror Writers Association.
His first book FORTNEY ROAD: The True Story of Life, Death, and Deception in a
Christian Cult was published by Freethought House in June 2015 and was a #1
Amazon bestseller in the categories of true crime and cults. Dean Koontz
praised the book as “a unique and compelling true story” and Jonathan Kellerman
said it was "fascinating and disturbing.”
Jeff has had many articles, novelettes, short stories and flash fiction published, and film rights to all of his nonfiction and fiction projects are represented by Steve Fischer of the Agency for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. Jeff is currently at work completing his first collection of short stories and a two-part supernatural suspense novel.
Jeff has had many articles, novelettes, short stories and flash fiction published, and film rights to all of his nonfiction and fiction projects are represented by Steve Fischer of the Agency for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. Jeff is currently at work completing his first collection of short stories and a two-part supernatural suspense novel.
***
NICK SWEET
Crime
Writer
Fuengirola,
Andalusia, Spain
What is
your personal experience of 9/11.
I remember coming home tired and turning the TV on, with the
idea of watching the news; but instead I found myself watching people falling,
or jumping, out of a tall building. I figured I must have got the wrong
channel, reached for the telecontrol unit and began to surf the channels…only
to find that the same thing was happening on other channels, too. I did a
mental retake: it wasn’t April 1st, was it? No, so this couldn’t be any April
Fool’s joke. Even so, it might be a stunt a la Orson Welles announcing over the
radio, back in 1938, that Martians had just landed on the planet Earth.
Photo of Orson Welles meeting with reporters in an effort to
explain that no one connected with the War of the Worlds radio broadcast
had any idea the show would cause panic.
But no, there was nothing remotely amusing about the images on
the screen; nothing that you might be able to look back on at a later time and
see the funny side of. Nothing at all. This was horrifying. Must, then, be some
new film that all the major channels had, by some weird coincidence, decided to
review at the same time. Or, to be more precise, the various channels I was
surfing through were all replaying the exact same scene from said new film at
the same time. Was that surreal, or what? A surreal TV moment, I thought, in
which the different channels had synchronized their output in an incredibly
specific way. My mind reeling, I stopped channel surfing, and turned to the
BBC, which I figured could be trusted as the most reliable news source, and
listened to the commentary that accompanied the horrific images I was
watching…and I quickly found that one surreal set of ideas or responses was
replaced by another in my mind. In other words, the reality of the terrorist
attack and its aftermath, which I was now hearing about, was so horrific that
it seemed even more surreal than my prior notion.
As I listened and tried to get my head around what had happened,
I found myself trying to imagine what the people who’d jumped must have gone
through. I tried to imagine how they must have felt, and what must have been
going through their minds. The most awful thing, along with the actual footage
in which you could see the people falling down through the air; the truly
terrible, heartbreaking thing, was the messages that they left to their loved
ones: all those, ‘I love yous’. I was moved, and still am, but I was also
greatly impressed and full of admiration for these people. They knew that they
were about to die, and in a terrifying and horrible way, and yet they had the
presence of mind to call their loved ones to say a final goodbye. And to tell
them how much they loved them. Looked at in that light, I began to realize that
there was a positive side to this terrible tragedy. Witnessing this awful
spectacle served to remind me just how awful people could be to each other,
sure; but beyond that, it was a reminder of how strong and essentially good and
loving and generous ordinary people can be, too. Goodness and love will out,
seemed to be the underlying message. The world may be fucked up, sure. It may
be full of violence and madness, sure. But at the same time, people are
basically good and decent, and brave and loving; and the human spirit is a
marvellous thing…
How did 9/11 influence
your art and/or your faith?
As I’ve explained in the answer to the previous question, 9/11
reaffirmed my faith in the human spirit. But it also did a lot of other things.
For a start, it was a very blunt and obvious message from terrorists who were
trying to make a point, and before I’d even got around to asking myself what
could possibly be going through the minds of these people of violence, it was
obvious that the world was now a less safe place. So, violence can and does
happen – and it can do so anywhere and at any time. That’s one lesson. But then
there’s the weird fact that the terrorists actually believe they are justified
in what they’ve done. These people think they are fighting for Good against
Bad. How can any Westerner even begin to understand these people? Well, there’s
lesson number two for you: the world is – or, thinking back to 9/11, it had
suddenly become - a whole lot more complex and complicated than it previously
appeared. Bad people can commit terrible acts of violence, thereby sending
large numbers of innocent people to their deaths, and they can do so believing
they are acting in the name of God. That takes some getting your head around.
It does for me at any rate. One man’s meat really is another man’s poison.
Violence comes from hatred, and so it seemed to me that there
was obviously an awful lot of bad feeling and ugliness out there. Violence and
strength in adversity; love and hatred; good and evil; complexity and simplicity;
dialectic and dogma; right and wrong…and, at the end of it all, the triumph of
the human spirit. ‘I love you.’ Now there’s a whole lot of material to get your
teeth into if you’re a writer..
***
Richard Thomas
***
A few people moved among the candles extinguished by the rain, dumped out the water and lit them again, the perfumed damp wax crackling and sputtering to flame as the ever changing crowd gathered around, stood and walked on. Here and there people played guitars and a circle of others holding hands prayed for peace in every country of the world, one guy calling out the names: “Let there be peace in Madagascar.” “Let there be peace in Madagascar.”
Union Square Friday September 14, 2001
People had also constructed a wall of hope that curved along the lawn toward the east with hundreds of photos of people who haven’t been found, most of them young, a father holding his newborn baby, a woman cutting her birthday cake, smiling at a party or the beach, some were old, a dignified man in a suit, lady executives and immigrants who cleaned the halls and bussed the tables at Windows of the World, in fact everyone in New York was on the wall.
***
Richard Thomas
author, editor, publisher, teacher
Chicago, Illinois
What is your personal experience of 9/11?
I was working downtown at an advertising agency, where I was
an art director and graphic designer. News started to leak into the office, and
eventually we found ourselves downstairs in the lobby, which was attached to a
hotel. I saw the second plane hit. It was surreal. I couldn’t believe it was
happening. I called my wife.
We were essentially in the shadow of the John Hancock building, one of the tallest buildings in Chicago. The Sears tower wasn’t too far, either. At that point, we weren’t sure if there were more planes, or if Chicago was a target.
My bosses wouldn’t let us go home. That was the day I knew I was leaving that job. Slowly over time they had revealed themselves to be racist, homophobic, sexist jerks, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They were more worried about losing television ad sales. It made me question a lot of things. I cried a lot that day, the visuals so shocking. I still have a hard time watching any footage of it.
I can remember wandering around downtown Chicago, we had to step out for a moment to get some fresh air, we wanted to get lunch, and it was a ghost town. The streets were deserted. We had to walk many blocks to even find something open. It was eerie.
Art work representing Richard Thomas's new magazine Gamut
We were essentially in the shadow of the John Hancock building, one of the tallest buildings in Chicago. The Sears tower wasn’t too far, either. At that point, we weren’t sure if there were more planes, or if Chicago was a target.
My bosses wouldn’t let us go home. That was the day I knew I was leaving that job. Slowly over time they had revealed themselves to be racist, homophobic, sexist jerks, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They were more worried about losing television ad sales. It made me question a lot of things. I cried a lot that day, the visuals so shocking. I still have a hard time watching any footage of it.
I can remember wandering around downtown Chicago, we had to step out for a moment to get some fresh air, we wanted to get lunch, and it was a ghost town. The streets were deserted. We had to walk many blocks to even find something open. It was eerie.
How did 9/11 influence your art and/or your faith?
I don’t think it shook my faith at all, it just felt like it
was our turn for disaster, or in this case, vengeance. The US does a lot of
things to anger the world, and I can see why other countries hate us at times.
These actions were terrible, but I saw a lot of good people out there helping
others, so many stories in NYC especially. It broke my heart on a regular
basis.
In my writing, I quite often talk about evil in the world, in many forms, and how we sometimes draw it to ourselves. I think of the Eye of Sauron turning and latching on. Once you’ve been seen, you can’t be unseen. So I know that in that moment, 9/11, it did put a hunk of coal, dead and lost, in the center of my heart. I think we all lost a lot that day, a certain amount of innocence. But I’d like to think we have learned, and are getting better, trying to make the world a safer place.
I left the US for the first time last summer, flying to Transylvania to teach, and it really did change how I saw the US, understanding we are NOT the center of the universe. There is danger everywhere, and sometimes it’s random, there is chaos. Other times, it is earned.
Simmer in Brosov County, Transylvania
My writing has always had a darkness to it, but it definitely has hope, too. I have lately changed my work, to put love at the center, instead of death. I still write dark stories, but there is more redemption, more promise in tomorrow, and ourselves, I think.
***
Travelstead with finance Heidi
In my writing, I quite often talk about evil in the world, in many forms, and how we sometimes draw it to ourselves. I think of the Eye of Sauron turning and latching on. Once you’ve been seen, you can’t be unseen. So I know that in that moment, 9/11, it did put a hunk of coal, dead and lost, in the center of my heart. I think we all lost a lot that day, a certain amount of innocence. But I’d like to think we have learned, and are getting better, trying to make the world a safer place.
I left the US for the first time last summer, flying to Transylvania to teach, and it really did change how I saw the US, understanding we are NOT the center of the universe. There is danger everywhere, and sometimes it’s random, there is chaos. Other times, it is earned.
My writing has always had a darkness to it, but it definitely has hope, too. I have lately changed my work, to put love at the center, instead of death. I still write dark stories, but there is more redemption, more promise in tomorrow, and ourselves, I think.
***
JONATHAN
TRAVELSTEAD
Poet/Firefighter
Carbondale,
Illinois
Bleary-eyed from
working thirds at Steak n' Shake & then going home to write until four AM,
I remember being surprised anything would jar me awake before noon. But when my
parents' phone rang for what I believe was the fifth time, I finally fumbled
the handset from its cradle.
"Jonathan, you need to turn the tv on," my mother
said. In her voice was an edge I'd rarely heard from a woman who calmly
interviewed enrollees for public aid, once managing to talk a broken shard of
snowglobe out of the clenched & bleeding hand of a client who had threatened
her life.
Despite the ticker tape reeling what I thought were more of the
same falsely-urgent catch phrases like JUST IN, or BREAKING NEWS, the first
thing I saw in the bottom right corner of the screen was that it was 11:05,
meaning I had already missed my morning classes, but the sinking feeling in my
stomach grew when the images on-screen arranged themselves into meaning.
I spent the following half hour gape-mouthed in my parents'
living room, watching a replayed collage of planes striking the tower at a
variety of angles, the damaged Pentagon, & the thankfully-briefer images of
people jumping from the buildings, a moment I imagine sifts down to choosing
between asphyxiation & one last moment of human agency in deciding their
own fate.
I felt a tremendous well of hurt. I felt as powerless as a
nineteen-year-old who wanted to help, but whose only experience was waiting
tables between classes at junior college, then staying up late trying to learn
how to write poetry. I felt moments of shame that I had as little to worry
about in the months after when civilians & rescue workers continued
recovering bodies from the detritus of rebar poking from broken, spalled
concrete like compound fractures. But beneath that, just more backfill in that
well of hurt.
Any writing from the time period of 9/11 was one of beginning my
first fumbling steps towards learning my craft, one in which I'm glad I didn't
send out work, instead following William Wordsworth's sentiment: "Poetry
is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquility".
However, 9/11's impacted
me greatest in the choices I made regarding my career outside of writing. A few
years later & I would find myself in Kuwait as a firefighter for the Air
Force, coming home, then joining my city fire department. Since doing so, I've
been exploring my experiences that have most most shaped & informed my
craft.
I'll never forget the eeriness of driving the Highway of Death
in Kuwait- an eleven mile stretch of blasted tanks, cars, & buses merely
swept to the side of the highway, something in my first poetry collection
"How We Bury Our Dead" (Cobalt, 2015).
Neither will I forget the intricately-carved mihrabs in the Grand Mosque where I glimpsed the lengths to which we will still insist on beauty even as we elsewhere explore the ruin we heap upon one another.
***
Neither will I forget the intricately-carved mihrabs in the Grand Mosque where I glimpsed the lengths to which we will still insist on beauty even as we elsewhere explore the ruin we heap upon one another.
***
SHERI
WRIGHT
http://www.scribblingsandsuch.com
Poet, Photographer, & Documentary Filmmaker Louisville, Kentucky
Poet, Photographer, & Documentary Filmmaker Louisville, Kentucky
I was at work at work, like
so many other people, when I heard the news from someone. It was horrifying to know so many died like
they did.
Unfortunately, I’m not surprised that terrorists were able to pull this off. Sadly, I wondered when something like this would happen here. Humans have a violent history and have been hammering down each other’s back doors since we could pick a club.
I think a good deal of this hammering can be resolved with a balance of equally between genders, less focus on coercion, materialism. The whole spin is on power, but we don’t often find a healthy way towards power. Until we do, there’s going to continue to be a terrible amount of doors knocked down.
Unfortunately, I’m not surprised that terrorists were able to pull this off. Sadly, I wondered when something like this would happen here. Humans have a violent history and have been hammering down each other’s back doors since we could pick a club.
I think a good deal of this hammering can be resolved with a balance of equally between genders, less focus on coercion, materialism. The whole spin is on power, but we don’t often find a healthy way towards power. Until we do, there’s going to continue to be a terrible amount of doors knocked down.
I don’t feel that my art
has been heavily influenced by so much war, other than it pushes me towards art
and imagination more often. I have also
felt more compelled to combine art with activism in some way. I feel that we all have a different for what
life we share the planet with.
*Sheri
Wright is a two-time Pushcart Prize and Kentucky Poet Laureate nominee
and the author of six books of poetry, including the most recent, The
Feast of Erasure.
Wright’s visual work has
appeared in numerous journals, including Blood Orange Review, Prick of the
Spindle, Blood Lotus Journal and Subliminal Interiors.
In 2012, Ms. Wright was a
contributor to the Sister Cities Project Lvlds:
Creatively Linking Leeds and Louisville.
Her photography has been shown across the Ohio Valley region and abroad.
Currently, she is working on her first
documentary film, Tracking Fire. https://www.facebook.com/TrackingFire
She also launched a campaign
to her second documentary film, Tracking Fire In Orlando https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tracking-fire-in-orlando-lgbt/x/4979755#/
***
DON YORTY
Writer
New York,
New York
The Luck
of Geography
from NY Chronicles 2001
September 11
Tuesday morning was sunny and fresh, a lovely autumn day that
made me happy to be alive as I walked to work at the Island School a few blocks
away. I’d been given a new classroom that had a huge walk-in closet to hang up
coats, but it was full of broken things that had been set aside to fix, never
to be touched again, useless old books, and boxes of dusty forgotten stuff. I
was going to throw it all out, wanting my room to be an amiable place of order
and calm, where my students would feel at peace and be able to learn.
My colleague, Nancy, interrupted my cleaning to tell me a plane
had hit the World Trade Center. I said and she agreed, “It must be a small
plane with a couple of seats. The pilot had a heart attack and crashed, killing
a few people and breaking a lot of glass,” and that sadly was that, I thought
returning to my own mess.
Pilot John Ogonowski of American Airlines Flight #11
Pilot Victor Saracen of United Airlines Flight #175
When Nancy stopped at my door again to tell me another plane hit
the World Trade Center, I thought of terrorists, and walked to the principal’s
office. I could have gone out on the street to see the smoking towers, but I
could imagine them well enough, and besides I was at work, and it seemed duty
came first.
When the principal urged us to go back to our rooms, I did and
having no one to keep calm but myself, I started to clean again until I heard
Nancy sobbing in the hall, with her face in her hands. Out of them she looked
and said, “The buildings fell.” It seemed like the floor gave way under me and
I was falling too as I imagined all those people.
At the office, the staff gathering, Sharon, the secretary, was
saying the buildings imploded. As a young woman, working for the Transit
Authority, she assisted the architect who designed the World Trade Center and
remembered the specs. “The buildings did not fall on any other buildings. They
went straight down,” she insisted smiling. Sharon was a born again Christian
and for her happily this was one step closer to the Apocalypse.
Minoru Yamasaki
Everyone else looked worried. A teacher was crying on the phone.
One of the teachers had a daughter who worked at the World Trade Center and she
was on the verge of hysteria. Another teacher had turned her radio on and was
upsetting the class. “Tell her to turn the damned radio off,” Barbara, the
principal, commanded, her mane of gray hair flying. “Everybody get back to your
classes. Let’s keep things calm.”
The Scream
I had no class to get back to and when a mother appeared,
desperate for her daughter, Sharon suggested, “Why don’t you go get her.” As
soon as I returned and handed over the little girl, another mother appeared as
desperate for her daughter.
The next hours blur, the Pentagon bombed, the plane going down
in Pennsylvania, interspersed with mothers and fathers coming to get their
children.
Pilot Charles Burlingame of American Airline Flight #77
Pilot Jason Dahl of United Airlines Flight #93
One mother told me she worked at the World Trade Center, but was on a week’s vacation. She really hugged her son. Every parent was concerned that terrorists were going to come and blow up the Lower East Side. What people love is what they fear to lose, no matter how inconsequential it may seem to the rest of the world. Going to get children made me feel like I was doing something and I was grateful for the job.
One mother told me she worked at the World Trade Center, but was on a week’s vacation. She really hugged her son. Every parent was concerned that terrorists were going to come and blow up the Lower East Side. What people love is what they fear to lose, no matter how inconsequential it may seem to the rest of the world. Going to get children made me feel like I was doing something and I was grateful for the job.
Later, back in my classroom, I looked out the window down at the
playground where even now some little girls were jumping rope. The wind was
blowing through the lindens, the leaves upturned, and birds were flying like
nothing had happened or these human affairs mattered.
"Skipping Rope" attributed to Maurice Prendergas 1892-1895
When I left school I noticed the smoke—the Towers were
gone—billowing over the horizon going south toward Staten Island. There was
hardly any traffic on Avenue D, which is a boisterous Hispanic street. People
were walking around without making a sound as if God had turned the volume off.
Avenue D
I had a beautiful view of the World Trade Center from my
apartment windows. Back home I saw the smoke and knew that it was really gone. The
night before I had gotten up to pee around four and looked at the Towers for a
moment when I got back in bed. They were enchanting sentinels, ghostly, with
red and white lights twinkling off of their great immensity, dominating and
defining the nighttime sky.
View of the World Trace Center Towers from Don Yorty's apartment window in the 1980s.
I checked my answering machine. I heard my friend and neighbor
Don Trammel screaming: “Don, get out of bed! Look out your window at the World
Trade Center! Look at the World Trade Center!” Next was Neddi. She wanted me to
call her at Gene and Brigid’s. I did. Neddi was sure there was going to be
another explosion, perhaps nuclear. To make matters worse, she couldn’t call
her mother in New Jersey; there was no long distance from Fifth Avenue where
she was. From Ninth and C, I reached Neddi’s mother, but couldn’t get through
to my sister Cathy in Pennsylvania, so I called Neddi’s mom back to ask her to
call my sister, but now I couldn’t get through to New Jersey either. Then I
dialed Pennsylvania and the phone was ringing. I told Cathy to tell everybody I
was all right, but the phone might go dead at any moment. She was glad to hear
my voice and I was glad to hear hers. Although many miles and a state away she
seemed to be in the same state I was, shocked but involved. “All those
firemen,” she said.
I went up to the roof to take some photos of the smoke. Don
Trammel was there. I told him by the time he called I’d already gone. He told
me he was riding his bike to work when he heard a plane go overhead down
Broadway so low that he looked up to read American Airlines on its side. Two
blocks later at Washington Square, he saw the gash in the tower. Don thought he
was looking at a movie set until he saw the flames.
Ted, our neighbor, a journalist who had risked life and limb in
Kosovo, was on the roof with his camera too. Ted had been up that morning and
was annoyed that when the first tower fell the anarchists at See Squat on
Avenue C had cheered on their rooftop like “their favorite team had just won.”
It was hard to believe Americans would find something to celebrate in the
deaths of fellow citizens whose only sin was getting up and going to work.
These East Village anarchists, if they were with Osama bin Laden for a minute,
he’d kick the beer bottles out of their hands and string them up stinking
faster than they hiss and spit at anyone who disagrees with them. The billowing smoke was a crematorium that left us quiet on our
rooftop. The roof on See Squat was empty; I figured once they’d realized
everyone had seen them cheering, they went cowardly into hiding. I looked at
all the people on the surrounding roofs and thought, “Let us live well and let
evil know we’ll not be cowed. But what we think is evil thinks we’re evil.
What’s evil? That’s the question at hand, the problem we have to solve.”
Don, Ted and Neddi came to my apartment. None of us wanted to be
alone. We sat together drinking vodka watching again and again on television
the second plane hit the second tower. Neddi was determined to leave. She was
sure there were going to be more attacks and was very anxious, as if every
second was Russian roulette aimed at her head. I told her not to worry, that
when you run from death, what you often do is run into it. But Neddi was
adamant. We told her that everything was closed and jammed. How was she going to
get out? But early next morning Neddi found a ferry going to Weehawken. With no
planes in the sky and not much traffic on the Hudson it was beautiful and
quiet. On the train from Newark she talked to a woman who had run out of the
first building and in all the smoke got lost and wound up back where she had
started, then she had to really run and luckily made it through all of the
confusion. “She was our age,” Neddi said calling from her mother’s.
When the Towers collapsed, the pressure at impact heated to a
thousand degrees, starting a fire beneath, that has to be hosed down constantly
or it will burst into flames. Everybody’s boots keep melting and have to be
replaced. Wednesday morning the rest of the World Trade Center collapsed,
sending smoke billowing north over NYU. When I left my apartment in search of a
newspaper there was the smell of fire in the air, and burning plastic, which
was unpleasant, but not overpowering. The streets were very quiet with hardly
any but official traffic. Every now and then you heard a siren. Some people
were walking around with dust masks or handkerchiefs over their faces. It was
impossible to find a newspaper. Almost all newsstands are Muslim run and I
smiled to let them know I wasn’t angry with them. One fellow, his wife and I
chatted. He didn’t have any papers, but said the front page of the Post had the
photo of two people jumping hand in hand from the Eighty-eighth floor. Hearing
the sounds of a plane, we and everybody else on Fourteenth Street looked up
warily to see two military jets streak overhead, feathering an otherwise
untraveled sky. The south side of Fourteenth Street was blocked off to general
traffic by the police and I had to show them my driver’s license before they
let me go home through the barricade.
Through the night the smell of smoke entered my dreams and woke
me up. Thursday morning the southern skyline was an oppressive fog that had
erased City Hall and all the other buildings south of Canal. It was like
nothing was there. I went to see a movie with my friend Gary. Sexy Beast was
entertaining and made us forget until we stepped from our air-conditioned
reverie to stroll the smoky streets reminding us of death again. Like me Gary
wore no mask. We had to laugh when we saw two young gay guys, each wearing white
dust masks, stop an older guy on his bike, excited to know where he’d bought
the green plastic sci-fi-looking respirator he was wearing. Only in the East
Village does disaster turn into fashion.
Friday the blockade on Fourteenth Street was lifted. Now
everyone can come and go as they please down to Houston. School would be open.
It was raining, pouring, which made me glad. While I was still in bed drinking
coffee, my cat Cachito ignored the cleansing weather and curled up by my thigh,
with his paws over his eyes. I don’t think he’s noticed the change on the
horizon, but then do we humans notice the anguish of animals, say the cries of
an anthill stirred up and torn asunder by the sticks of little boys? I often
feel, as a human, big and small at the same time, meaningless and yet the most
important thing of all. Knowing one day I shall be dust and smoke, I got up and
walked to work with a rolled up poster, a painting by Rousseau, The Snake
Charmer, to hang up in the back of my classroom next to a map of the world.
There was some good news. The first grade teacher’s daughter who
worked at the World Trade Center had caught a cold and didn’t go to work.
Unfortunately a colleague had a friend who was a chef at Windows of the World,
a young married man with a ten-month-old son. He hasn’t come home. Later I took
the bus—it was still raining—across Avenue D to C and then up Fourteenth Street
to Union Square to get money from my bank where, out front, a little Asian lady
was selling little American flags. At the south side of the Square before the
dark statue of George Washington sitting stiffly on his horse, people were
putting candles in a widening circle of photos and flowers and pieces of
cardboard with written expressions of sympathy on them.
Union Square Friday September 14, 2001
A few people moved among the candles extinguished by the rain, dumped out the water and lit them again, the perfumed damp wax crackling and sputtering to flame as the ever changing crowd gathered around, stood and walked on. Here and there people played guitars and a circle of others holding hands prayed for peace in every country of the world, one guy calling out the names: “Let there be peace in Madagascar.” “Let there be peace in Madagascar.”
People had also constructed a wall of hope that curved along the lawn toward the east with hundreds of photos of people who haven’t been found, most of them young, a father holding his newborn baby, a woman cutting her birthday cake, smiling at a party or the beach, some were old, a dignified man in a suit, lady executives and immigrants who cleaned the halls and bussed the tables at Windows of the World, in fact everyone in New York was on the wall.
I remembered 1990 in Guatemala when I stood in front of the post
office in Santiago Atitlan where people from the countryside had hung up the
photos of missing loved ones, hundreds of disappeared men and women, just after
the Army had opened fire in the town killing and maiming dozens of civilians.
We Americans have supported a Guatemalan government that since 1954, Eisenhower
and the Cold War, has murdered a hundred thousand indigenous Guatemalans in the
name of stamping out Communism. The wall in Union Square was like the wall in
Guatemala, full of the faces of common people that no one will ever see again,
done in by stern oppression. In that wall then and this wall now I could see no
difference.
Santiago Atiplan, Guatemala 12/04/1990
Santiago Atiplan, Guatemala 12/04/1990
I stopped at Dick’s Bar for a drink and talked to my friend Clio
who heard the first plane go over as he was arranging flowers. He walked down
Fifth Avenue and could see people hanging from the shattered towers, falling
and jumping. He kept walking as the second plane hit. When the towers fell he
stopped.
David, who works at CBS, said the most difficult footage he ever edited was of his fellow New Yorkers jumping and letting go. He noticed that as the women fell, those wearing skirts held them down modestly to the very last second. It was this holding down of the dresses, David realized, that made us human.
David, who works at CBS, said the most difficult footage he ever edited was of his fellow New Yorkers jumping and letting go. He noticed that as the women fell, those wearing skirts held them down modestly to the very last second. It was this holding down of the dresses, David realized, that made us human.
Curtis who has AIDS and lives at a hospice on Rivington Street
was having a morning cigarette down in the garden when he heard a “Boom! Boom!
Boom!” that he thought was thunder although the morning was sunny and brisk.
When he went up to the roof, he saw what he thought had been an accident. It
looked like a burning matchstick, just a little bit of flame shooting out.
Store on Rivington
Loretta and Grant saw the first smoking tower on an elevated
train coming into Manhattan. No one on the train reacted and for a moment they
thought they were looking at special effects: “It takes awhile to wrap your
brain around something like that.”
View along the Third Avenue elevated tracks in 2008. Now demolished.
Curtis had a perfect view of the burning tower from the dining
room. When the second plane hit, he was watching it on television and turned to
look out the window at the detonation of plane and building. At one with the
explosion between heaven and earth, Curtis could not understand why he was
alive while thousands of perfectly healthy people had just gone up in smoke.
Union Square Friday September 14, 2001
Union Square Friday September 14, 2001
Danny had worked at the World Trade Center for a marketing firm,
a psychiatrist who figures out the coming teenage trends. They’d done many fire
drills before, evacuating the Towers, but nobody had ever told him what to do
once he got outside, because he always went back in. Consequently hundreds of
people were standing around, only moving further back until the rumbling started
and everyone began to run trampling many, crushed and fallen, left behind.
Danny never ran so fast in his life. Beyond thought, pure terror propelled him
on to J & R Music World, where he stopped and looked around. Needing
someone to talk to when the Towers fell, Curtis called Richard who lives on the
Bowery and has a great view himself. Richard had seen the collapse and could
hardly talk, while he and Curtis looked at the smoke, but then Richard said, as
if out of breath, “Oh well, I never did like the architecture.” We have to
laugh. “They were too big,” Curtis remarks: “Like two big dicks. Oh dynamic
when you were standing right up next to them, but too much for such a small
space. I hope the FBI isn’t listening,” Curtis whispers half in jest.
I mention that on Fourteenth Street I saw American flag t-shirts
for sale. Curtis bristles at the thought of wearing Old Glory. “I like flags in
general, but let’s face it, wearing the American flag is, is, is tacky! It’s
gaudy!” Curtis finally blurts out, making us chuckle, but then I’m somber: “You
know, I was expecting a terrorist attack for a long time, but I always thought
it would be germs in the subway or a suicide bomber in the Holland Tunnel or
Radio City—” “In the middle of a performance of Cats,” Curtis says and again we
have to laugh.
On the way home from Dick’s I noticed on every lamp post, wall
and available space people had put up flyers with photos of their loved ones
asking me to get in touch if I’d seen them, described down to the smallest detail,
what clothes and jewelery they were wearing when they left home in the morning.
It was so poignant, so stupid, so useless; every face I saw was dead. When I
got home I saw Queen Elizabeth, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter standing together
at a funeral service on television, and something about the sad looks on their
familiar faces made me start to cry, a quick eruption that startled Cachito who
stretched up in my lap to look closely at my face, examining it strangely as I
sobbed tears and snot.
A man on television looking for his wife, held up her photo in
case somebody had seen her. “Retaliation isn’t the answer,” he pleaded. “This
has got to stop.”
A crowd in Jersey City attacked a car of Muslims, but luckily
the police intervened. When a reporter asked the little Muslim boy how he felt
about his attackers, he replied, “I want to kill them.” The boy was born in
Pakistan where they believe Mohammed gets you into heaven. I was born in
Lebanon, Pennsylvania where Christ is coming back to raise the dead, as if the
luck of geography predestines eternal salvation.
On the island of Borneo in February, five hundred men, women and
children were chopped apart, little girls sprawled headless in an Indonesian
civil war hardly noticed or thought about, brought about, one could easily
argue, by decades old Cold War policy now defunct. What makes one death
worthier than another?
“The Mouth of Hell,” Hillary Clinton called Ground Zero. I see open mangled space, pieces of the skeletal towers still standing, twisted burnt wet, windows broken, knocked out but not down yet. Downtown’s very lit, smoke still rising, but the air is cool and fresh because it rained and washed it clean of human ash, the smell of rotting flesh. There is no moon or stars, the dome of heaven’s endless, black but for two passing planes blinking transitory lights.
“The Mouth of Hell,” Hillary Clinton called Ground Zero. I see open mangled space, pieces of the skeletal towers still standing, twisted burnt wet, windows broken, knocked out but not down yet. Downtown’s very lit, smoke still rising, but the air is cool and fresh because it rained and washed it clean of human ash, the smell of rotting flesh. There is no moon or stars, the dome of heaven’s endless, black but for two passing planes blinking transitory lights.
Saturday is bright. I ride my bike near but not next to the East
River. Because of environmental laws enforced over the last twenty years, life
is coming back into the waterways where not only fish, but barnacles and snails
are living. After a century’s absence, these creatures have returned and eaten,
where they’d left off, into the wooden supports below the waterfront
surrounding Manhattan. My favorite promenade is falling apart and now fenced
off with no money to fix it up.
Until that long awaited day of reparations, I have to go like
all the other bikers next to the FDR Drive, which is another kind of river that
flows, comes and goes in its currents. Happy I ride, born from the struggling
sperm into the yearning egg, conceived around the time Israel and China were
born and shortly after Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead. Oh you school children
reading this one day on the moon, remember: “We the living think it’s all about
us, but it isn’t.”
United Nations School 1968
The pigeons come floating down at the very southern end of East
River Park, not fenced off. I sit and see beyond the Brooklyn Bridge the State
of Liberty, closed off to the public, surrounded by the Navy and the Coast
Guard, raising her lamp in the fading sunset engulfed in the color of blood,
the reddest of dusks.
Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the world (1886) by Edward Moran. Oil on canvas. The J Clarence Davies Collection. Museum of the City of New York.
I asked my grandfather once if he believed in life after death.
He was quiet as he thought about it. “There has to be more than this
nightmare,” he finally confided and we both had to smile a little bit.
***
***
LORA HOMAN ZILL
Poet and Editor
Conneat Lake, Pennsylvania
Conneat Lake, Pennsylvania
In 2001 I didn’t access 24-hour
news on the web and I don’t watch TV during the day. So I had no idea about the
attacks. On that particular morning, as I was getting ready for my work
teaching poetry to disabled students, the phone rang. A friend said, “Turn on
the TV.”
I was physically safe in
Pennsylvania. But it was a seminal moment for me spiritually and artistically.
I was struck by the stories: of those who perished, the first responders,
families and friends, even of search dogs. I was moved by the jumpers making
the impossible decision to take final control for their lives--and deaths.
I didn’t know them personally,
but I knew their stories.
I discovered more stories at
the memorial at the Pentagon and the ones being built in NYC and Shanksville.
Shanksville had a little hut with books of photos, and yes, stories. You were invited to write your reaction on an index card that would be added to the permanent memorial. I wrote:
Shanksville had a little hut with books of photos, and yes, stories. You were invited to write your reaction on an index card that would be added to the permanent memorial. I wrote:
Who
knows what an ordinary person will be called to do
on
an ordinary day? Maybe it will be my turn tomorrow. Thank you.
Since
then I’m determined to recognize and respond to the moment. That’s the story of
the brave souls on Flight 93 and so many others. They had a moment to react.
Doing my art, whether it’s crafting words into sentences or art glass into wildflower scenes, develops my intuitive feel for the moment. Perhaps through creating, this ordinary person will be practiced to answer the challenge of each moment. I don’t know if it will ever reach the point of death, like those of Flight 93, but I am called to respond to the moments I am given.
Doing my art, whether it’s crafting words into sentences or art glass into wildflower scenes, develops my intuitive feel for the moment. Perhaps through creating, this ordinary person will be practiced to answer the challenge of each moment. I don’t know if it will ever reach the point of death, like those of Flight 93, but I am called to respond to the moments I am given.
