 |
| Milky Way Behind Three Merlons (NASA photo by Donato Lioce) |
T anto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belleSo ends The Inferno, as Dante, having climbed through all nine rings of hell and witnessed unbearable horrors, from faceless souls scoured by flame to Satan himself, gnashing Judas in his mouth, makes a break for it. He rushes upward through a tunnel, and at long last, "Through a round opening, I saw/Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears/Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars."
Che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
It’s the happy ending of all happy endings, and today, Sept. 12, after an extraordinary weekend of national mourning and remembrance to mark the 10th anniversary of the fiery perdition of Sept. 11, 2001, I recommend that today be a celebration, a non-public holiday, a private return to life, wrenching our view from the past and its irrevocable tragedy and re-directing our gaze to the present and its small joys, and the future, with all its promise and peril.
I hate Sept. 11, hate that it happened, hate that people are capable of it, hate reliving it — I didn’t realize how much until this weekend, maybe because while 9/11 was marked in past years, it wasn’t the national day of mourning we saw now. No disrespect for the victims, nor their families, and the loss they suffered. I’m not saying that observance wasn’t appropriate. It was. I’m saying I didn’t like it — particularly the patriotic overtures. There was tremendous courage, yes, heroes aplenty.
But 9/11 shouldn’t become a patriotic holiday. Being caught unaware by 19 fanatics with box cutters and having a tremendous gaping wound kicked into the heart of our nation is not exactly an endorsement of the greatness of America. I flew the flag, and said the pledge, and talked to my children about what happened. But 9/11 isn’t the 4th of July, and the narrative we are building for it — that Sept. 11 is a story of heroism — gilds the horror behind it, like the growing tendency to recast the Holocaust as a tale of personal resistance, all Schindler’s List and Anne Frank, when the Holocaust is really about the negation of individuals, about inhuman slaughter completely out-of-scale with any mitigating flashes of bravery. Sept. 11 was an enormous atrocity committed by evil madmen against unsuspecting innocents, and while it’s comforting to focus on the sacrifice that came in its wake, and though comfort is necessary, we don’t want the solace to grow so large it overwhelms the monstrosity we’re being consoled over. As welcome as the stars are at the end of The Inferno , nobody is going to think it’s a book about stars. They show up in the last line.
So we’ve done our mourning, at least for this year, and probably for a while. The 11th anniversary won’t be the production the 10th was. What now? Obviously: look up, turn from the past, see the future and notice the good stuff.
Good stuff? What good stuff? The economy sucks, the wars . . . they don’t quite rage, but they simmer. China looms. What’s good?
Well, we’re alive, aren’t we? Wherever the economy is heading, it’ll still be better than being dead, and having acknowledged the fallen, it is now time to recognize us, the living. Maybe in future years we’ll have an official Mardi Gras Sept. 12th — the day after the funeral 9/11. We’ll bake special cakes and play music, dance and sing. Me, I plan to kiss the first pretty girl I see Monday morning — my wife — drink some black Cafe du Monde coffee, crank up the Mozart on the iPod on the Metra, rejoice that there’s still a newspaper office with my name on it, and go there and work. The stars will be harder — light pollution — but I’ve already checked them off. Several weeks ago, a friend invited me to hang out with his pals at the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had a long dinner, and then afterward I walked out onto the beach and looked up at the sky and just gasped. "Oh my God!" The stars, so bright I could barely make out the constellations, the full expanse of the Milky Way. More stars than I had ever seen; I felt like I was seeing the stars for the first time.
We all go through long stretches in our lives when we don’t see the stars, both figuratively and in the real world. They are drowned out by the glare of lesser lights. Yet the stars are always there, waiting for us, and if we try a little — Dante spends The Inferno climbing, weeping and struggling — we get to see them again. I’m not saying you have to haul yourself to Lake Superior. But you do need to expend effort, if only mental effort. There is wonder aplenty in our wounded world, if you look for it. Sky and color and sweet life. Poetry, friends, music, beauty. Time to find it. Enough of Hell for a while. "Riveder le stelle" — See the stars.
— Originally published in the Sun-Times, September 12, 2011
Oh my, thank you so much
ReplyDeleteTime is both a wonderful and wretched thing.
ReplyDeletePain is dulled.
Life continues.
Memories fade.
The world turns.
Lovely and wise. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThe man came Wednesday to give me a quote on a new water heater. I stood outside to greet him, and immediately sensed something was wrong as he held his cell phone. “I just saw something,” he said in a shaken voice, finding it hard to describe what he had seen. He had just been on social media and witnessed the assassination of Charlie Kirk minutes after it happened. No stopping the video just before the bullet hit. He saw it all. He was shaking and I brought him inside to sit down. “This is why I don’t talk politics,” he said. He went on to tell me that in his job giving estimates he’s come across families with deep cleavages. where grandparents can’t talk to grandkids, In American society, we’ve been conditioned to watch and digest such outrage, the Zapruder fillm of the JFK assassination, a lifeless Bobby Kennedy with a vacant gaze on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, and a fallen Martin Luther King Jr. outside his Lorraine Motel room. We grew up without the cameras stopping, but there was a change when 9-11 came. The wholesale filming of anonymous people jumping to their deaths from the two towers were missing from ordinary news coverage. But then came the Trump shooting with the death in the stands , and we were back to where we were. Interviewed later, a news cameraman for WABC said he deliberately did not film the suicide jumps. Instead, he focused on the disbelieving faces of those watching the people on their downward trajectory. That said it all.
ReplyDeleteI’m glad I didn’t see the Kirk assassination because many editors hit the stop button. Yet, at the same time I’m glad the salesman visitor had such a reaction of disgust and outrage when it easily could have been processed as just another video clip, one of many we have learned to live with and now expect.
Anonymous @ 11:55:
DeleteMy elderly neighbor next door called us on the phone at 9 AM EDT that morning, and yelled to turn on the TV. We did so, just in time to see the 2nd plane hit. And very soon afterward, CBS really DID show the jumpers. The all-seeing camera eye followed them down, as they tumbled through the air, gaining velocity as they fell. That footage has never been aired again.
Did not leave our house for the next few days. We were glued to the TV, just like after JFK. Finally couldn't take it anymore, and we went hiking in the woods. Didn't help. Had already seen too much. The jumpers were burned into our cabezas.
The first few years after 2001 were tolerable, if that is the right word. But as the Bush years dragged on, the anniversaries became more and more maudlin and overemotional, and it became necessary, at least for me, to keep the radio off, and to stay away from all screens. Too much smoke was getting in my eyes on Sob-tember 11.
ReplyDeleteBy the Obama years, 9/11 seemed to be less of a remembrance, and more of a patriotic holiday for conservative politicians and right-wing haters. America the Dutiful. Ten thousand mourners in downtown Cleveland, for the observance of Fallen Hee-rows Day. The response from me and my wife: "Include us out." And so it has remained. No TV. No flags flown. We try to ignore all the hoo-ha. Does that make us bad or traitorous people? So be it.
Anniversaries tend to be commemorated in cycles...particularly the unhappiest and most somber events. Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. JFK, MLK, and RFK. Elvis and John Lennon. The space shuttle and 9/11. The ones that end in a zero or a five are the Big Ones. And 2026 will be one of those milestone years. Twenty-five. Have given some thought about traveling to Shanksville, about four hours away, just for the spectacle. It will be yuge. Felonious might even show up. That would keep me away.
The museum at Ground Zero now has seminars and classes for teachers who want to explain 9/11 in their classrooms, to the kids born ten and fifteen years ago. The 9/11 attack is part of U.S. history classes now, like the Civil War and the Depression and WWII and Vietnam. My brother-in-law's granddaughter turned six that day. Today, she becomes thirty. Time doesn't march on. It runs.
I'm not exactly sure why, but it was several years after the event before I saw 9/11 happen on TV with the planes hitting the first building, people falling from the sky, firemen being despatched to what we know and they probably knew then was certain death, the second plane striking, then the collapse of the structures. Horrific, but not that emotionally impactful, given I already knew what had happened despite my reluctance over the years to witness it. Many, many people insist that we never forget the tragedy just as we're not supposed to forget the infamy of December 7th even though we've been quite chummy with the perpetrators going back to the late 1940s. I suppose there are lots of lessons to be learned from study of both catastrophes, many of them spurious, some downright hateful and all of them puzzling to me and others. We went to war. And millions died, some of them just as innocent as those killed in New York and Hawaii. Not to say that war was avoidable: God's will I guess.
ReplyDeletetate
I was at my place of business, watching it all unfold on a 5" black & white TV. I was horrified. When I got home that night and watched on a normal TV, I was ... well, words escape me. To this day, when pictures of that day pop up, I turn away. I still can't look at it.
DeleteJust stumbled upon the 2021 Esquire story about the 9/11 jumpers, a few hours ago. With still photos of falling victims. You don't see those images very much anymore. Hardly ever, in fact.
DeleteIn the rest of the world, there are actual videos of the 9/11 jumpers. But not here. Not in the Untied Snakes. It's as though, by some sort of unspoken mutual agreement, Americans simply decided that some things were...and are...just too much to bear.
I was home getting ready for work and had the news on; watched as the first plane hit the building; the commentator seemed to think it was an accident. But then when the second plane hit, we all knew this was no accident. Will never forget watching that and the aftermath of how we react to it all. Thanks for your piece-and remembrance.
ReplyDeleteRescind the patriot act.
ReplyDeleteAnd every Patriot Act spinoff bill!
ReplyDelete