(no subject)
Sep. 12th, 2003 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantryslutMore serious thoughts on our recent "holiday," now that it's passed.
"Patriot Day," huh. Because "Memorial Day" is already taken, I suppose. The events of 9/11/2001 have already been used to political ends so often, it doesn't really faze me much. I did find myself switching off the radio and the TV a lot, though. Ironic that yesterday was the day we got cable.
Somewhere in my friends' posts, there is a link to "Enough Day" that I rather approve of, but I am composing this offline so you'll have to look it up yourself.
Trivia game for pseudo-memorial-holidays: I had fun driving across the bridge and counting how many flags were at half-mast versus how many weren't. It was an even split.
I have my own little memorial for 9/11. See, I was in NYC in late October/early November of 2001. The mayoral election was looming. The day after I arrived was the first day the skies cleared over lower Manhattan.
I was in town to read for Tough Girls. The readings, like many book events, had been planned way in advance. It was to be my first "official" trip to New York. I'd been once before, for the Stonewall Anniversary stuff back in...was it '94? But I hadn't seen much of the city aside from Washington Square Park and the hotel that the Leather Convention was being held in. It was really all a blur. My biggest out-of-hotel memory (even though I wasn't staying in the hotel, I was staying with friends in New Jersey) is catching a soccer game on the TV screen at a nearby deli. Oh, and the palm-sized bruise that one of the turnstiles for the Jersey train left on my thigh.
As a result, my first real impressions of New York City are inevitably wrapped up in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack.
I was staying with a writing friend of mine, in the spare room of her Upper East Side townhouse that she shares with her parents, husband, and two kids. Her husband worked downtown; his office had been relocated to New Jersey. She was understandably freaked out, still, by recent events, and both did and didn't want to talk about them simultaneously.
I didn't tell her the day that I went down to look at Ground Zero.
The only person I did tell, besides Steven, was my boss, who was also in town for book events -- it was our joint NYC tour. He'd arrived a few days before me, and he'd already been down to look at that hole in the ground. He'd felt compelled to, he said. I knew exactly what he meant. I felt guilty about my own compulsion, but I knew better than to ignore it. In fact, this is the first time I've ever spoken about those days to anyone else at all.
There were people taking pictures, tourists, smiling and posing next to the chain link fence barrier. That made my stomach a little queasy. There was a little camera shop right on the corner next to one of the blocked streets that was doing brisk business. But then I took a look at the rubble, the cranes, and the immense extent of the damage -- and then this beautiful glass arch, hanging in the middle of nowhere, glinting in the sun above these yards of desolation, and I had to take a picture too. Shamefacedly I went up to the register of that shop and bought a disposable camera myself.
I still haven't developed those pictures.
And yes, I remember the smell. And I laughed when I saw a recent headline on one of the SF papers, something about NY officials admitting that the air quality in lower Manhattan had been "brutal" for months afterward. I breathed that air; I'm not surprised to hear it.
I went down there because I wanted the unmediated experience. Unmediated by, well, the news media, unmediated by my New York friends' stories. Unmediated by words.
And so now I know the purpose of the moment of silence as a memorial. Ranting about our new holiday at Steven yesterday, I proclaimed that if our government officials really wanted to mark this occasion appropriately, they'd stop all their business for a minute, five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. They would stop moving, stop talking, hold still. In silence.
Like a meditation. Hold still for as long as you can. Eventually the thoughts come back, like a soft ocean swell, and with them memories and sensory impressions, and quotes and the knowledge of other tragedies, before and after, bigger and smaller. And all of that is appropriate. It is the only thing appropriate.
"Patriot Day," huh. Because "Memorial Day" is already taken, I suppose. The events of 9/11/2001 have already been used to political ends so often, it doesn't really faze me much. I did find myself switching off the radio and the TV a lot, though. Ironic that yesterday was the day we got cable.
Somewhere in my friends' posts, there is a link to "Enough Day" that I rather approve of, but I am composing this offline so you'll have to look it up yourself.
Trivia game for pseudo-memorial-holidays: I had fun driving across the bridge and counting how many flags were at half-mast versus how many weren't. It was an even split.
I have my own little memorial for 9/11. See, I was in NYC in late October/early November of 2001. The mayoral election was looming. The day after I arrived was the first day the skies cleared over lower Manhattan.
I was in town to read for Tough Girls. The readings, like many book events, had been planned way in advance. It was to be my first "official" trip to New York. I'd been once before, for the Stonewall Anniversary stuff back in...was it '94? But I hadn't seen much of the city aside from Washington Square Park and the hotel that the Leather Convention was being held in. It was really all a blur. My biggest out-of-hotel memory (even though I wasn't staying in the hotel, I was staying with friends in New Jersey) is catching a soccer game on the TV screen at a nearby deli. Oh, and the palm-sized bruise that one of the turnstiles for the Jersey train left on my thigh.
As a result, my first real impressions of New York City are inevitably wrapped up in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack.
I was staying with a writing friend of mine, in the spare room of her Upper East Side townhouse that she shares with her parents, husband, and two kids. Her husband worked downtown; his office had been relocated to New Jersey. She was understandably freaked out, still, by recent events, and both did and didn't want to talk about them simultaneously.
I didn't tell her the day that I went down to look at Ground Zero.
The only person I did tell, besides Steven, was my boss, who was also in town for book events -- it was our joint NYC tour. He'd arrived a few days before me, and he'd already been down to look at that hole in the ground. He'd felt compelled to, he said. I knew exactly what he meant. I felt guilty about my own compulsion, but I knew better than to ignore it. In fact, this is the first time I've ever spoken about those days to anyone else at all.
There were people taking pictures, tourists, smiling and posing next to the chain link fence barrier. That made my stomach a little queasy. There was a little camera shop right on the corner next to one of the blocked streets that was doing brisk business. But then I took a look at the rubble, the cranes, and the immense extent of the damage -- and then this beautiful glass arch, hanging in the middle of nowhere, glinting in the sun above these yards of desolation, and I had to take a picture too. Shamefacedly I went up to the register of that shop and bought a disposable camera myself.
I still haven't developed those pictures.
And yes, I remember the smell. And I laughed when I saw a recent headline on one of the SF papers, something about NY officials admitting that the air quality in lower Manhattan had been "brutal" for months afterward. I breathed that air; I'm not surprised to hear it.
I went down there because I wanted the unmediated experience. Unmediated by, well, the news media, unmediated by my New York friends' stories. Unmediated by words.
And so now I know the purpose of the moment of silence as a memorial. Ranting about our new holiday at Steven yesterday, I proclaimed that if our government officials really wanted to mark this occasion appropriately, they'd stop all their business for a minute, five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. They would stop moving, stop talking, hold still. In silence.
Like a meditation. Hold still for as long as you can. Eventually the thoughts come back, like a soft ocean swell, and with them memories and sensory impressions, and quotes and the knowledge of other tragedies, before and after, bigger and smaller. And all of that is appropriate. It is the only thing appropriate.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-09-12 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-12 08:06 pm (UTC)(whose previous work I know in an entirely
different vein, but still) as yourself.
Z
P.S.: Have you read Mark Morford today? He's on
to something, with how our current observations
of the day are *designed* to keep us from feeling
and turning inwards...
no subject
Date: 2003-09-16 11:23 pm (UTC)The Rest is Silence
Date: 2003-09-12 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-13 05:16 am (UTC)