Too Soon
I was moving out, that day. Didn't have a television, saw it all unfold over the internet. I saw no video of the towers falling until, like, 2007 - and that was out at some public place, I was half through the however-many-seconds it took for them to fall before I realized what I was watching.
No more planes flying that day, that's what I remember most: sitting with my friends on a lawn on Westcliff Drive, staring up into a silent sky. An actually silent sky. I said, "It will never again be this quiet." The reality of souls lost that morning I don't think has ever really hit me, I was too far away (still am, and will always be), though I get flashes of it. What I grieved for was the death of the possibility for anything to happen by the usual means (peaceful protest, calling yr congressperson, etc.). Something frightening was coming, and did.
Taken at the SF Federal Building during the protests on the eve of the Iraq war.
I remember humanities people up on campus arguing about what it should be called: the disaster, the attacks, other things that seemed to the conversants to lend too much gravitas to the lives lost and not enough to the socio-historical conditions that produced it, the symbolic weight of it, a comparative impulse that looked back at US military agression through what really were "the ages": the events, it was finally decided, in the Derridean sense (I don't think I'd heard of Badiou yet). Later came the ironic redeployments of pre-events WTC memorabilia ["WTC: as close to heaven as some people will ever get," read the 80s-era poster one friend found on the internet and sent me], but at that moment I knew that irony was dangerous (I removed the peace hand american flag sticker from my car that day).
This morning, I'm struck by this: sf writer (and famous ex-mormon) William Shunn's online survivor registry. Elsewhere, they are reading aloud the names of the dead. Here is a record of those who survived reaching out to friends and relatives, saying "I'm OK." Here is a record of what it felt like, when, as Shunn says "to feel the world changing around us."
There's something moving about that registry, and about the walls covered with photos and messages that sprang up in the days and weeks following, something complicated. They both first started out as urgent messages regarding the safety of loved ones, but the physical, meat-space walls have since ossified, as it were, into monuments (such that I can't find images of those early days online, just marble and bronze). Shunn's site retains something of that sense of time unfolding: "I am not hurt, I love you GP" reads one message. A Yahrzeit wall for the living. A sense of the storm irresistibly propelling us into the future.
No more planes flying that day, that's what I remember most: sitting with my friends on a lawn on Westcliff Drive, staring up into a silent sky. An actually silent sky. I said, "It will never again be this quiet." The reality of souls lost that morning I don't think has ever really hit me, I was too far away (still am, and will always be), though I get flashes of it. What I grieved for was the death of the possibility for anything to happen by the usual means (peaceful protest, calling yr congressperson, etc.). Something frightening was coming, and did.
Taken at the SF Federal Building during the protests on the eve of the Iraq war.
I remember humanities people up on campus arguing about what it should be called: the disaster, the attacks, other things that seemed to the conversants to lend too much gravitas to the lives lost and not enough to the socio-historical conditions that produced it, the symbolic weight of it, a comparative impulse that looked back at US military agression through what really were "the ages": the events, it was finally decided, in the Derridean sense (I don't think I'd heard of Badiou yet). Later came the ironic redeployments of pre-events WTC memorabilia ["WTC: as close to heaven as some people will ever get," read the 80s-era poster one friend found on the internet and sent me], but at that moment I knew that irony was dangerous (I removed the peace hand american flag sticker from my car that day).
This morning, I'm struck by this: sf writer (and famous ex-mormon) William Shunn's online survivor registry. Elsewhere, they are reading aloud the names of the dead. Here is a record of those who survived reaching out to friends and relatives, saying "I'm OK." Here is a record of what it felt like, when, as Shunn says "to feel the world changing around us."
There's something moving about that registry, and about the walls covered with photos and messages that sprang up in the days and weeks following, something complicated. They both first started out as urgent messages regarding the safety of loved ones, but the physical, meat-space walls have since ossified, as it were, into monuments (such that I can't find images of those early days online, just marble and bronze). Shunn's site retains something of that sense of time unfolding: "I am not hurt, I love you GP" reads one message. A Yahrzeit wall for the living. A sense of the storm irresistibly propelling us into the future.