MEMORIAL
Memorial
The history of the competition and selection of the memorial to 9/11 holds no surprises. We could have written the story before it occurred. The script for the memorial to the Vietnam War had become canon. Since you have spent much of the last few years a thousand miles from our city, I suppose you abandoned the tale when it stopped being a tale, and can not know what has happened here and prompts my invitation to return.
Let me begin with Shragowitz, a name unknown to you but notorious here for a while with others in a roster of scofflaws desperately assembled to explain the events that have unfolded. For three days this crane operator, Shragowitz, was pilloried in the tabloids for his lavishly financed no-shows that were held responsible for the grander no-show, the disappearance of...But, that's the point: No Shragowitz, no clue to the mystery which is transfiguring our city. If you were here, I would point you towards one of those narrow fissures between buildings, one of those spots fortified against intrusion by the entire weight of the city's amnesia and neglect, or towards crevices, ledges, vacant lots, underworlds below bridges, islands isolated by highways. In those places where the simple elements seemed mutated, the transformation was entering. We did not know it, but in their preserved invisibility, the doors had been left open.
The Vietnam War Memorial: Two black planes converge into the prow of a boat. The polished marble surfaces are etched with names of the dead. It succeeded in containing in its small area the haunted and elegiac mood of a graveyard. It seemed to summarize an old battlefield: A conveyor of souls. The migration towards nothing, stayed only by grief. The face of the viewer is reflected on the walls, he walks towards the vanishing point in search of names. He witnesses his progress towards the wall that is only breached by souls.
Silence. The names travel towards silence. Even dust and ashes are coarse compared to this.
The memorial is distinct from a monument. A monument is a road sign giving directions. This memorial is a metaphor and a metaphor is made of different stuff. The Vietnam Memorial might have awakened me to this, but it is only after the events I will relate that I learned what it is. Say that it presaged what was to occur; then let me say that its order of appearance, following after what it prophesied, is what confirms it to me. I would not care otherwise, but now I know metaphors have ghosts. They are made of the same alloy as we are, a chimerical ore from an intertidal zone contested by kingdoms.
The outcome in the Great Lawn was a lesson that only through retrospect can we see we learned. The surprise is how thoroughly we learned it, how the weaving was done in the night, during our absence from awareness. Rather than prophetic, it was remedial, a primer, a nursery rhyme that made us fluent.
Didn't everybody find themselves caught in those rhymes, those simple sentences?
Following suit, the 9/11 memorial is described to me this way: Sunk into the "foot prints" of the lost towers, a cascade trimmed in "page boy" style. A thin fabric unspooling over a sharp bank, veiling shadowy grottoes with negligee sheerness. A catalog of names in the humid, somber twilight. Understatement, words vanquished in the face of cosmic mystery.
I have not visited it. I write to you about the other one.
Today I walked by the river. I have been overseeing the rearing of four goslings. Their parents are doing a good job of it, no, a graceful job of it, following the strains of music I can't hear but whose effects are apparent. The gander and goose lead their train of offspring to the brink of a question--water in this case, the air after molting-for which they already have the complete answer. Whether form is vessel or choreographer is something we will never be able to answer because by now the union of one to the other has left their separation only as a conceit of language, and every move they make is circumscribed by song. And again, I can not tell if it is to less translated birds that song is left while in these species it has completed its dedication to surge, glimmer, blaze and high vault and for the rest is tuneless coda, or if to the song the actual means of expression is a thing of indifference, maybe not even perceivable as long as a portal is opened.
Hurry. Something awaits your witness.
There have been hints. Remember how the towers pressed down on us, reduced us to the proportions of bugs, became the most realized example of those hives which demand for service lifeless, sexless drones? And then how we managed to throw off their weight and each of us in our separate way use them? They were convenient compass points visible at night for those of us spun around at a subway exit. They made crossing the gauntlet of the West Side Highway easy. But, what I want to remind you of most was how we transported those prisons of will into our dream of the city, how we converted them to prisms galvanized by sunlight and moonlight, and like some first paragraph in a story, the description of the weather written on their sides was translated into our moods and set the stage for spotting the beautiful girl in this weave of coincidence and destiny which the city looms.
Do you remember Union Square in the days and nights that followed 9/11? The crowds that gathered there bringing candles, photos, poems, flowers? The jerry-rigged altars? During the day, the candles melted down to frozen puddles, offerings piled randomly as clutter. It looked like the residue of an abandoned refugee camp. Some stunned migrants were still milling about or sitting on grass and benches, but for the most part you could have imagined that during the night a caravan of gypsies, eternal wanderers, had camped here, and that what you saw left behind had been taken from an ark whose covenant was with mirage, the pilgrim’s faith in distance softening trials into promise. At night, in the glow of candles, in the hushed shadowy multitudes, this reflection seemed borne out. They were unrecognizable; the armor of the streets had been ripped from them, or they were recognized for the first time in their original nakedness, lost, sad, penitent, charitable, searching, and it seemed proven or at least undeniably possible, that the imagined ark was a possession, a secret name given to each of them.
It was a cargo cult, it was Santeria. You could feel the loss of words and structure, the pathetic immaturity and futility about these expressions-maudlin, smarmy-a critic could have said. But feeling overwhelmed you in this collective of unspeakable loss and fear. In the face of their experience all the volumes, dirges, psalms of their separate churches had failed along with the pronouncements of the government. It came to you, a feeling cached only in the night, that here was the birthing ground of the city and religion, that this seeming refuse of grandeur, these trinkets portable enough to be grabbed from collapsing splendors were really the seeds-enough truth was contained in them, enough of the first language which is nearly as transparent as silence, to have built everything around us. Walking around the park, weaving between muted squatters holding hands in seance, amidst an emanation of prayer, you could feel huge gratitude for the company, and for being there, returned with the chance to walk innocently with your family before we built the tower of Babel.
Because some of what I will say about him might be a scandal if he is alive today or offend his memory for others if he is not, I will call him Bob and leave it at that. More than thirty years ago I worked with him on the graveyard shift at a bakery. His name is among those lost in the towers' collapse. I don't remember just where I read this, I have perhaps imagined his photo on the wall at St. Vincent’s, certainly I have imagined a photo and I do not recognize him in it, though the years would have added to his waist. However, the photo in which I have somehow framed his name shows a man far too young to be Bob in his fifties. Maybe this photo is of the man who coincidentally shares his name and disappeared that day. Maybe it is not even his picture but that of someone altogether different who got wrongfully ensnared in my patchwork memory of that time. I am probably not the only one who spent months repairing the ripped fabric of experience and consciousness that resulted from 9/11, and the results are curious, and sometimes anomalous. Though it seems sometimes I must learn brail to read them, I am yet to be certain that this is not the only way it can ever be done, and any improvement in technique or apparatus will only widen my separation from the event.
It has also occurred to me that given the circumstances this might have been the only photo made available. Someone grabs what comes to hand, by a statistical tropism, it is a photo from that era in someone’s life most frequently recorded and possibly of little use now in locating him. You think of all the reasons for a scarcity of relevant pictures, increasing shyness in front of the lens due to age, some reassessment of significant times in a life, the gathering haunting of past photos, general superstition or philosophical doubt about vitiating experience through objective witness. Any of this might explain a seemingly apocryphal picture of Bob. And then there is whoever it was who offered the photo. What faith, what hope did they put in that act? That he might be restored to them at this, his most typical or happiest moment? Or, that to whomever or whatever such an offering is made, their mercy, their energy, will be more likely spent on this image with its aura of fellowship and warm spirit than on one already stalked by loneliness and decay. How impossible that such vibrancy as depicted here or such complete normalcy should be lost in catastrophe. And resigned, after copying the photo for circulation and returning it to the album: This is how I will choose to have him remembered.
Against such competing forces, it would be a wonder if I should recognize him, and it is an even greater wonder that I did. Now in the hands of memory alone without the veto of his lingering presence, the conflicts are resolved in an essential Bob about whom the details of appearance, erased anyway in the fire, are of no importance.
It is Bob all right. The Falstaffian figure is cropped from a picture taken at an office party, I would guess. He looks a little glazed. That works, as does the setting. And so does that aura, consistent with the Bob I knew, of wise forbearance, profligate generosity for folly, and ironic, stalwart bonhomie, all garnered from a ruined life. He was the only alcoholic I have known whose grievances were selfless. He needed half a pint of bourbon in the morning to stop his shaking, but there was never a petition from his ego in his drinking.
One four a.m. after finishing the shift, Bob took the crew to an apartment in an expensive high rise on the Upper East Side. Bob was a Knickerbocker. He had that locked jaw manner of speech-he told the story of his mother's being accused of keeping an in house lover, because from the age of eight his cadences heard over the phone were that of a debauched social class-and it was never clear why he was working because I had seen him shove twenties across to bar tenders for tips. This apartment was an example of his congenital connections. I think his drinking was another example: a hemophilia of the soul inherited by the upper classes. It had chivalry.
I took my punctilious two fingers of scotch and sometime after wane sunlight poked through the heavy curtains, I left. Bob was asleep on the couch. He slept with his eyes open. Maybe this results from stupor. It was eerie to see; it is hard to imagine some one in that state visited by the usual dreams, instead you posit spirits, the traffic of the dead. For all that, I do not remember him looking disfigured, in fact, and I do remember this, stupor or not, he appeared to be listening. Absolutely attentive. What happened later may be explained by that expression; he seemed to be waiting for you. I said good bye, I did not feel I could just slip out, on the other hand I didn't feel that was the words he was set to receive.
Bob was not alone when I left. There was another worker from the bakery who stayed. She was a young woman who was still living the hippie life. Night shifts are known for gathering marginal types, anachronisms, specters, neurotics. But, in glibly branding hers an alternative life style figure in nights with their emptied streets and subway cars, the fugitive nature of all acts glimpsed, the odd wanderers, and the cathedral quietness of the city, figure this as a different ecology, the city transplanted to another island surrounded by black water, and figure in the burn scars over most of her body that long sleeve shirts and high collars could not completely cover, and her choice seems fated, a kind of exile, more curse than anarchic will.
Sometime after I left, Bob was awaken by her straddled over his loins and ridding him with gentle guardianship.
Bob was not above distressing the strait-laced, me, and I did recoil, but even at the time, years before I absorbed the message, I didn't feel he was trying to shock me or boast. A note of amazement leavened his jaded voice. Now, I believe Bob knew that beauty is closest to truth in the presence of terror. This woman was in the oubliette of her own skin, always in danger of a life of solitary confinement. A lot can pass in a glance, a touch. The shapes of insanity waiting for us in solitude one day will be known to each of us. We have had peeks into these nightmares. If someone might, by knowing us or from seeing us asleep, see these shapes whirling in our solitude, and know our awareness of their justice because we have recognized our own face in that hall of mirrors, then if this tender one acts to show that even now love has power and that terror is only one more mask, then even though she is plated in lizard scales, she has unraveled the labyrinths of exile as delicately as a flower opening its petals.
Another 4 a.m. comes to mind. I don't remember how a conversation or argument carried on all night ended with Bob dialing a memorized number to some security agency of the government and handing me the receiver. Maybe, 4 a.m. is itself enough explanation. Somnambulism dilutes every movement; you trail your actions as if following a post hypnotic order. The phone was answered on the second ring. "Go ahead" was all the voice said. I hung up. Bob had proved his point. Maybe, it was the TIPS line or its equivalent at another agency. I don't know. I don't know what part this phone number and the institution behind it had played in Bob's life. But, this voice, awake and poised at 4 a.m. in 1980 and the burned baker have made a palimpsest with the dubious photo. That disembodied voice gave rein to my imagination to give it form. Surely, the voice was entombed in a large building. The echoless silence around it requires barriers, keeps within keeps. Even a barrier of time. Its solid, literal tone, strong, patient, unexcitable, reminded me of the voice-over narrators for government films on venereal disease or enemy threat. If so, its owner would be dressed in a dark, overly heavy suit, white shirt, thin tie, and brogans, and a fedora would be on the metal table where he sat under a weak florescent bulb at this 4 a.m. and tomorrow's 4 a.m., in 1956, in 1980, and in 2001, a deathless figment of fear waiting through un-clocked centuries to hear the confirmation and acquit his assignment. That was my chance. Had I stayed on the line...I had nothing to report, but ready as he was, might he not have tipped the balance, put onto my side the weight of circumstance time awaited? Prompted me: "The Towers, go ahead."
Thus primed, I have imagined the photo delivered to us from the moment of crises, that Bob arrived for his predestined appointment, and this photo shows him after having recovered the stash of champagne he has knowingly hidden for this occasion, hosting his fellow workers at the true millennial New Year. Such imaginings which have come to me in the substance of rumors-ghostly and without source-have enabled me to place Bob and the burned baker at the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, where the story has already come to us impossibly through the flames, of a gracious gentleman who ushered the women into their suicide leaps, giving them a measure of respect and promise of divine courtesy they had never gotten in life.
I was there in the expensive apartment when the woman baker recognized Bob in the course of his pilgrimage. Within these imaginings time regains its transparent suppleness later lost in chthonic dirges. I assume many of us have remembered prophetic signs preceding 9/11 which have let us engineer escapes by miracles we now can see were previously guaranteed, signs which show us that the text of the past is written as tentatively as the future, and with equal chance for editing. How many of us call on just one tiny miracle, one available to the mind for the smallest mishap and surely not over strained by this chore--a pebble held to forestall an avalanche-one that simply employs that limberness of time which is the element in which we live, common as light and equally symbiotic with theology? This limberness has at other times seemed capable of nearly infinite dilation, we have suspected that it is only within these aphasias from aphasia that our living becomes known to us and the substance of time revealed. Don't we know then an implied reciprocation, and can't we call on it now to release the past into its continuing potential? Leave the mountains sleeping, the oceans restive at the fulcrum of eternity, but let our finger today miss the alarm clock's switch. What a collapse of kingdoms in each death, and it can be delayed by a flat tire, or the simple expedient of a head cold, or a convenient episode of sloth. What strain in this? So permeable was our green waking when this world first entered our senses and formed our minds in the continuous presence of wonder, that no sooner are we rudely thrust into its actual presence again than we find ourselves again smitten with its miracle and expectant of it.
Had Bob continued drinking at the pace I remember, he must already have been dead long before 9/11. Therefore, the fire with its tenderness for his name, has already rescued him once. This bodes well for a second time; why breathe his name if it is otherwise? Experience is not persuasive in ruling this out. However, his rescue becomes certain if we add on the photo which could not possibly be of him if we are confined to the possible. Though I am the only one with a record of the earthly commitments he navigated through those parsecs of space charted in astrology, the photo and name are property common to everyone in this agreed upon rock solid reality, and here we all know that no body can occupy two places at once, or equally axiomatic, two bodies can not occupy the same place at the same time. Therefore, neither Bob could possibly have been lost on 9/11 as long as we trust math's applicability to nature and its buffer to subjectivity. The possible presence of the other, makes the presence of either impossible and certain.
If I should bump into him tomorrow, it is no miracle at all. The same rules apply even if it actually was his name I read. Bowing to realism, I should be able to reclaim him, anything less is superstition. How to do it? By conceding that the urban myth that was spawned that day was never a myth but a hard nosed explanation of a phantasmagoric event. As I write, in Kansas, underemployed again though robust in a way I would hardly recognize him from heaving hay from a loft, Bob has struck his head on a naked beam and his amnesia is broken. He will be returning soon, as will the others similarly afflicted on that day. We have been waiting for that telephone call for some time now, it seemingly being more deferential to reality and easier on our credulity for dream creations to receive word from a disembodied voice than reconstruct an entire body and shoulder it into our doorways. When that call comes, and it is already over due, we must remember to be careful. Bob must never be reminded that he had lost his memory. He has awoken in Kansas reaching for that alarm clock he should have neglected to set on 9/11. All the intervening time and space has been contained in a dream, now forgotten. We must never explain it to him. Though we will have to bite our tongues, we must never even admit how much we missed him. He will remain confused; we will attribute it to a binge. "Where were you Saturday night?" is all we can allow ourselves. We leave Bob in that Kansas of the conceptual mind where solipsism mistakes itself for miracle. If we can spare him the contagion of our knowledge, then like the tree still standing in the woods because no one has heard it fall, Bob is preserved. He is our agent of amnesia. It is through memory of him that a small gap in time, an hour, even less, is bridged, and by refusing to admit or test its complete privacy, Bob is sewn into his own future.
We ignored the raising of the "Freedom Tower". They could not even have watched from Jersey. 1776 feet tall; we needed their help. Our collective efforts were noticed. Articles in the newspaper of record offered expiating theories. We read them all. We read every article on the tower, all the advertisements and blather. A sage told us we did not want to see the mutilation during the process of healing; in the same vein another understood we would not watch the dancer rehearsing or the bride dressing. We walked to the river and turned south. By the last months it must have reached its full height. We still could not see it.
Meanwhile, the Canada Geese continued each spring to ski down from the sky and skid onto the river. Amazing stories accompany them, but I didn't hear the whole message. During migration some species fly at thirty thousand feet. We have only just arrived at these altitudes, for millions of years they were saved for geese. Now we know it is an arctic landscape, glacier blues and blinding ice floe whites. The sun has no rind there. We peek through our windows. Like the Styx, living souls can not make the passage. Because of the power expended in their flight, these geese must fly at these freezing, nearly airless heights where the sky thins into the celestial. Their breasts generate too much heat to abide at more glutinous levels.
No one knows how they navigate. It is a metaphysical question. From what do they receive directions and how have they heard while in the egg? The map of the world or of its magnetic fields and maybe of the stars is already in their seed. The word made flesh. And in that text we have not yet the privilege of reading are directions for returning to the world after travel to the neither realm. We feel our exile from that language and have danced and slaughtered in hopes of awakening its voice. Maybe, we should search in lullabies: silence, whispers, and the tragedy in pilgrimage hint at lullabies, as does our experience that the less abstracted the memory, the more it is embedded in music. Among the chores for the custodial staff at the World Trade Towers was sweeping up the tiny carcasses of migrating song birds that had been misled by the beacons on their tops and flown headlong into wires and metal and been killed. Over the years the toll of birds deafened by this blabber among the stars mounted into the tens of thousands. They were swept up like fallen ashes.
We went about our work devouring every word about the tower. Not one word escaped us. We could not see the result of what we were doing even though the signs were everywhere. We were doing our own custodial service, sweeping the space clean between the constellations, opening the avenues, but only know it now.
I saw a model of the Freedom Tower in the window of an architectural institute. It was encased in glass like a mandarin doll. Though the new tower could account the memorial as dedicated public space, still more tax write-offs were necessary because the attempt to double dip the insurance companies had failed. The height of 1776 feet was supposedly a pledge to the dead, we read, and a Bronx cheer to the assassins, but there was not enough money to reach it, unless...The scheme: The top twenty stories would be an unclad steeple housing electricity generating windmills. Two parallel ramps would ascend from opposite sides of the tower, and at syncopated intervals of thirty-five feet windmills would be stationed. Their rotors would be fifteen feet long, and form following function, which was to gain the maximum torque from the least gust, they would be slender. Nothing needed to be invented, such windmills have been planted in wind farms around the country. Their rotors resemble gulls' wings, as both evolved to shear motion from predictable winds, but the true genius of their design would be to lift funds from the EPA and raise the last critical feet.
I saw the dissolving apex of the tower, but did not understand. I thought I was witnessing economics.
The construction went on for years. We devoured stories of the tonnage of steel used, the miles of wiring and cable and plumbing. We read about the built-in safety measures and the innovations in construction and materials.
Not one foot of the tower has been rented. The realtor had his agents sitting in the lobby. Every day he watched the stream of workers heading into the elevators to put in the final touches. Then he watched as only superfluous security guards arrived to take their posts in the morning. He was passed by the stewards of the windmills, the only ones allowed in the upper floors. They maintained the smooth turning of the rotors. They were serious, though not gloomy men, who worked with wrenches and oil cans, concentrating on small squeaking sounds, aiming grease into small port holes 1500 feet above the city, the wind cuffing their ears. It was not difficult work; they were all a bit on the heavy side, a result of expending little effort, but also, I can guess because the jobs would select for immunity from vertigo, and a light man standing in a wind tunnel might fall victim to the willies. I know they could have reported some anomalies, but constitutionally they were not whistle blowers. You would be a liability in certain jobs if you kept your sense of wonder.
Maybe they did grunt something to their wives, "Tricky up there". Somehow the rumors started. Then they were confirmed by a constant stream of thousands of witnesses. The entire population of the five boroughs has by now flowed through south Manhattan, Our collective presence blocking the streets and quieting the rumble of trucks and the wail of sirens. We can confirm what we had been told.
The towers are singing.
Not everyone can agree on what they are hearing. Some hear that final animation of metal which is the voice of the bell returning to its source. Others the ghostly harmonies of Tibetan throat singers. Others hear choirs. Some the call of the muezzins from the minaret. Myself, I hear the notes of those flautists of the Atacama Desert of Chile, who dwell on the moon and have carved images in the rock of the constellations between the stars that feed on light. Their tunes are airy and wistful and longing, maybe they must be, like those of birds that migrate by night, slight tunes nearly transparent, netting the music that is at light’s freed soul.
So, this is the result of our labor in the inner light of our hearts: A flute. A flute whose voice transcends the emptiness and guides pilgrims. You have to hurry back, my friend. Soon the tower will disappear altogether as a form in this world, as we all do, becoming only a gateway for the breath of creation. It's happening already. It is the air inside the empty lungs of that building we have begun to see, like the charged space in the golden doorway of a harp. Over the years, like moths and book lice, we had eaten each word that would have been attached to that breath and smothered it.
Try to be here by fall. I would like you to see with me the goslings I have watched gaining their wings, ride that song into altitudes not yet tethered.
We gave that breath leave to rise in its first, naked perfection into the silence which has longed to hear it, and around that song which is all that will soon remain of the Freedom Tower, you will see, the city is becoming what until now each of us had only dreamed.
