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Wish You Were Here
Sep. 11th, 2007 09:42 amIs this the first time it's rained on this day since? I can't remember. That says something, both that I can't remember and the first thing I always notice is the weather. But it's nice that it's different, nice that I don't feel like we're in an endless loop of it anymore.
We are designed as a species, I think, to forget pain when at all possible, and designed, therefore, to cleave to it as long as we can, as its absence hurts too and frightens us surely.
When 9/11 first happened, one of the refrains here for at least a few months was "those buildings were fucking ugly but we're going to put them back up exactly the way they were, FUCK YOU." In hindsight, it is easy to attribute a lot of that to shock, this belief that we could somehow make everything as it was if we could just put the buildings back.
But the sentiment was, and also is, a tribute to the fact that New York is a 19th-century city steeped in decay and the memorialization of things no one remembers anymore. Look at all our statues of men on horses. We are a city of sediments, layers upon layers grown in upon themselves (thank you, William Gibson, for that remark which although not about New York, always immediately put me in mind of the nearly monthly occurence of Con Ed or the MTA or someone digging some hole here and going "shit, we didn't know that was there!") and piled high and here is this thing just gone, no layer to remember because it went into the air.
Everyone who has the emotional room (and many don't and with good reason) has their favourite graphical representation of what happened here. There was "I Love New York More Now Than Ever" or the person who put up the patriotic chihuahua flyers and the woman (I presume) who wrote messages begging for tolerance in lipstick on bus shelters after the inevitable began to happen (a knife was pulled on the sister of an Indian friend of mine, because the fellow thought she was "one of them" and this on a city bus!).
And then there was the Village Voice cover pictured below. In hindsight this image for me is less about the Towers and more about the New York of my childhood, a place that we wanted to be safer but we knew couldn't and shouldn't ever be completely so, a place that affirmed life in its proximity to death -- there was, it seemed, always at least one body floating in the East River.
All of that is gone now. Some of that is good. Most of it was unavoidable. We don't tolerate risk or grit in the same way we did then and we have not chaffed perhaps as hard as we should have at becoming America's property in its grief and our need for tourism to sustain us, especially in those months of disruption, of the city within the city shut down, the zones beyond which we could not go.
But we were once, as Spalding Gray always said and now he's gone too, an island off the coast of America. And I was happy to live there. And while the chain stores and a theme park pantomime quality had come to the island before 9/11, I think it was only after, much after, that we realized all the things that left on it: not just those buildings, and not just the over two-thousand souls whose faces I will see on the missing posters of every dream, every disaster, every horror movie for the rest of my life, and not these over four thousand soldiers lost fighting, it seems, for things too crass to speculate on today, but New York too, a certain New York of dreams and mythology and struggle that I always thought I had bypassed for growing up here when the subway cars never had lights and were always full of graffiti.
So now they are rebuilding. And it's new and all about public spaces and shopping areas it seems. And I hate it. It could be any building in any city, even with the memorial areas, even with the parks. It is not New York for its character, it seems, but merely for the fact of what happened here, as if those planes will always be more important than the lives started and lived and ended here over centuries that have been and perhaps centuries that will be.
And oh, New York, I so wish you were here.
We are designed as a species, I think, to forget pain when at all possible, and designed, therefore, to cleave to it as long as we can, as its absence hurts too and frightens us surely.
When 9/11 first happened, one of the refrains here for at least a few months was "those buildings were fucking ugly but we're going to put them back up exactly the way they were, FUCK YOU." In hindsight, it is easy to attribute a lot of that to shock, this belief that we could somehow make everything as it was if we could just put the buildings back.
But the sentiment was, and also is, a tribute to the fact that New York is a 19th-century city steeped in decay and the memorialization of things no one remembers anymore. Look at all our statues of men on horses. We are a city of sediments, layers upon layers grown in upon themselves (thank you, William Gibson, for that remark which although not about New York, always immediately put me in mind of the nearly monthly occurence of Con Ed or the MTA or someone digging some hole here and going "shit, we didn't know that was there!") and piled high and here is this thing just gone, no layer to remember because it went into the air.
Everyone who has the emotional room (and many don't and with good reason) has their favourite graphical representation of what happened here. There was "I Love New York More Now Than Ever" or the person who put up the patriotic chihuahua flyers and the woman (I presume) who wrote messages begging for tolerance in lipstick on bus shelters after the inevitable began to happen (a knife was pulled on the sister of an Indian friend of mine, because the fellow thought she was "one of them" and this on a city bus!).
And then there was the Village Voice cover pictured below. In hindsight this image for me is less about the Towers and more about the New York of my childhood, a place that we wanted to be safer but we knew couldn't and shouldn't ever be completely so, a place that affirmed life in its proximity to death -- there was, it seemed, always at least one body floating in the East River.
All of that is gone now. Some of that is good. Most of it was unavoidable. We don't tolerate risk or grit in the same way we did then and we have not chaffed perhaps as hard as we should have at becoming America's property in its grief and our need for tourism to sustain us, especially in those months of disruption, of the city within the city shut down, the zones beyond which we could not go.
But we were once, as Spalding Gray always said and now he's gone too, an island off the coast of America. And I was happy to live there. And while the chain stores and a theme park pantomime quality had come to the island before 9/11, I think it was only after, much after, that we realized all the things that left on it: not just those buildings, and not just the over two-thousand souls whose faces I will see on the missing posters of every dream, every disaster, every horror movie for the rest of my life, and not these over four thousand soldiers lost fighting, it seems, for things too crass to speculate on today, but New York too, a certain New York of dreams and mythology and struggle that I always thought I had bypassed for growing up here when the subway cars never had lights and were always full of graffiti.
So now they are rebuilding. And it's new and all about public spaces and shopping areas it seems. And I hate it. It could be any building in any city, even with the memorial areas, even with the parks. It is not New York for its character, it seems, but merely for the fact of what happened here, as if those planes will always be more important than the lives started and lived and ended here over centuries that have been and perhaps centuries that will be.
And oh, New York, I so wish you were here.
