09/11/06: Approaching Midnight

All day, things have been fine, more or less. Moments of silence, observed at the instruction of authoritative voices coming from my radio weren't sufficient remembrance to provoke a sense of grief. Even while understanding logically that the loss was vast, to me it was also vastly impersonal.

What has struck me are the small things, flashes really, glimmers of an emptiness where obvlivious fullness used to be. Maybe that's why I found myself here, where I hadn't intended to go. Here is where I'm physically closest; but here is where I'm as much a tourist as any resident can be in her own city. I am out of my element, streets cross in unfamiliar intersections, and I don't see anyone I know. Perhaps it is this displacement that I sought unconsciously when my boots walked me here.

I arrived in small, steady footsteps, took my place--an imposter--among the rightful mourners, shuffling behind, blending in, another blood cell in the vast, pulsing flow of the city. I hear it sometimes, in variant forms: sometimes it is a single scream, magnified by a thousand; others it is discordant, layered, cacophonous, the precise and painful opposite of harmony.

People leave notes and flowers, teddy bears, even, here at the inadvertent burial ground, the unsheltered, outdoor hall of memory. The memorial shines in the night, and at intervals pops with illumination as flashes blink at the wall. Everyone here is a war documentarian, a photographer trying to capture in three dimensions the grief--in its universality and in its horrific specificity. When they get home later, they'll likely be disappointed by the results.

At their base, the pillars of light seem stable, and surprisingly small in surface area. As they extend skyward, the human eye perceives a slant, a small but incremental refraction that seems to rouse the beams from a parallel path and bring the columns of illumination closer to each other. My eyes see them enter a cluster of clouds, and I picture them meeting at the top, leaning on and into each other, in an embrace somewhere beyond my field of vision, but not beyond my imagination.

Buildings were here and then not, in a perceived instant. Six years later, there's a meticulous squareness to these blocks, streets I'd stayed away from for years. I waited, as the city cleaned and cleared the area, and the space emerged--a visual echo in its emptiness, a canyon of otherworldly ether.

Between the pit and the towers of light, this is where I sit, on a stone cold slab as the moonlight alleviates darkness enough for me to put pen to paper. I am scrawling in an attempt to silence. In a world where silence=death and in a faith that urges us both "to remember" and "not to forget," I feel my selfishness acutely. Others do not have my options. For them, what reverberates is not the media echo of the desperate, imagined scream of all humanity, but something more particular, more familiar, something that epically tears them asunder in every torturous moment of memory.

We have had our pillars of smoke and fire, which led us into chaos and despair; now we have our pillars of light, our luminescent hope that extends forever into the heavens, melting together at the top and seeming to form rungs. We climb, unsure of where we'll end up, but we use the ladder because it is our legacy.

Even if we walk away from it, try to put it behind us, the image follows us back to our most familiar streetcorners-- fainter, but present. That ladder, those rungs to remembrance, are a resonant reminder.

-- September 11, 2006, 11:56 pm -- in their memory

(For more photos from downtown, see Flickr badge at left)

Comments

[John Boy]

Thanks for sharing this with us.

[Lubes]

Thank you, Esther!

[rnf]

Very well captured in almost impossible words. Sigh.