It was an infinitely blue sky. But we all know that.
I’d gotten lucky that morning. Shouldn’t mention that but that was where it started. Feeling infinitely good, oblivious to any media inputs, I left the brownstone in the Village and walked out under that sky onto Varick headed downtown to the office in Soho.
A few steps on I suddenly felt like I was on the set of the 1950’s “War of the Worlds” or “Target Earth” right after the aliens have shut down the power grid and everyone is in the street.
There was no traffic. Not a car, truck or bus in motion. Every vehicle stopped, most with their doors hanging open, strangers, singly and in random clusters, hovering around and leaning into cars, alternately listening to the radios and peering up at the sky, and listening to the radio, and looking at each other, no sound I could hear, except those car radios.
Looking at the sky I saw it, a cigar or something sticking out of a Twin Tower. No smoke. Some thing. What is that? Is that a plane? A little Cessna? What is it? “Some planes have crashed into the Towers.” What?
I hurried down the middle of the street the Soho office 18 floors up. There in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows looking directly out onto the Towers, my little crew is gathered, staring at the fires, smoke, fuselage. (There must have been falling bodies but I have never remembered that part.)
We wanted to look away but we could not. I will never forget the fire and smoke dropping down, down the building and then, the nova, a perfect sphere. A universe I could see into and through to the other side, everything moving inside of it like Dante’s inferno, so primal, so beautiful. And, then, now, barely twenty minutes into this morning, in our minds the explosion of horror, the first shock wave of what this was. We were peering into hell, a swirling miasma of true hell.
Then the collapse, the nova gone, the building folding, falling, vanishing, and beside me, an old friend, a devout former nun, falling, crashing to her knees and wailing “this is why I hate religion. Look at what it does to people.”
Platitudes leaving my mouth. “You don’t mean that.” “Yes, I do. I do. I hate religion.” Later that day, and for many days on, we would go to the sanctuaries of St. Lukes, Grace, St. Francis, etc along with everybody else to escape the white flakes and stench and the shock of afterlife.
Feelings of rage, hate, and revenge mingling with constant eye contact with everyone, no one a stranger– for the first time, no black, no white, no this, no that, like New York City was some giant nudist colony, and everybody recognizing it, feeling a little ashamed of how we had been and not wanting to let go of this.
We walked and rode about nude, flags in the dust, chunks and flakes, men on the buses sitting next to you with caked hair, eyebrows, faces like miners exhausted from burying our pain.
Within a day we were telling stories to each other. Starting to organize the reality, pull apart, and cover the emotions.
Finally, I had to walk down, around the barricades, and through Chinatown to within yards of the site, death in the air, there is no other expression, death in the air, no escaping the thousands of sad shocked spirits hovering about. Were these the dead… or our memories of them? I don’t know but it was there, overwhelming and I had to leave and have never been back.
I cannot comprehend the men and women who worked on those death piles for weeks and months on end. Was it hate that sustained them? Or was it Love?
For me, my personal rage was short lived. An old weary tired and deep love for my fellows was constant and mutually shared everywhere I went– in the analogue world, in the immediate world where we see and touch each other.
But in the world of the tube, starting the next morning and every morning, the tube stoked revenge, revenge, revenge, fear, fear, fear, hate, hate, hate.
And to those ends, and who knows for what purposes, our civic life was hijacked and we have lost that love, that common weal of the first days after and find ourselves in a day where serious public discourse contemplates mercenary militarianism, millenarianism, and anarchy in the social fabric as a reasonable social future.
Personnally, I think the natural course for single and small groups of humans is to heal and find love, not to tear asunder in cycles of hate and revenge. But clearly we have a history as a species in also organizing ourselves and attaching ourselves to leaders who cultivate and use hate and fear.
There is this abiding conflict in our souls and body politick, this admixture of love and hate. Is that what we saw in that writhing ball of fire, all the love of those thousands of souls and the hate that wrenched them from this corporeal plane?
And why did we have to see it, that beginning of a new universe, certainly a new reality? Is there a learning here when you witness creation? If our telescopes ever capture the big bang and all the curtains are pulled back, what lessons can we possibly learn that are not already in front of us?
*******
Soon the clothes were back on, with an extra layer. I guess we feel we need to cover our wounds, now scars, and our deeper embarrassments at having let hate win—for now.
Love and hate will always coexist but I hope someday the balance shifts and “love alone prevails.”
