Too Soon
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
"Never Forget", the hand-made signs say, as if we could. 9/11 is not something remembered. It's a living thing of violent birth that has grown into a hydra.
Profound traumas are never really remembered — they are always present. Traumatic events stay with us in a way neutral ones don't — they carve themselves into our brains, become a part of our physical bodies, harder to excise than a cancer.
(Studies have shown that "emotionally arousing events activate the brain's amygdala, the portion of the brain involved in emotional learning and memory, which then increases a protein called 'Arc' in the neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in processing and enabling the storage of lasting memories. Researchers believe that Arc helps store these memories by strengthening the synapses, the connections between neurons.'")
As my father lay dying, his mind went back to childhood traumas — to beatings he had received from a cruel relative he'd been shipped off to after his mother's death — that seemed sharper than the pain he was living through in the moment.
Still, it surprises me how the pain from that day has settled in me, how it has hardened, grown, gained mass and weight. Metastasized. It is not something remembered, anymore than a tumor is something remembered. It's there. A toxic lump.
I didn't lose anyone on that day. I was in Boston, watching slack-jawed from a cancer ward where I was working for the summer, looking forward to returning to Europe in another week.So it seems a little dramatic to say that for me personally 9/11 and the waking nightmares it spawned was the final blow to innocence — to any grand sense of optimism about the future of humanity — and arguably appropriately for a man my age — the birth of profound foreboding, of the sensed knowledge of mortality (as opposed to an easily compartmentalized intellectual awareness of it).
We know we have no right to our innocence after a certain age — and part of the injustice and imbalance in the world is that in certain parts of it we are able, and enabled, to cling to it well into adulthood. Our prolonged innocence is a luxury inconceivable in much of the world.
9/11 isn't painful only because of what was lost that day, but of what was found and can't be lost again — what we can never forget.
So there it is. "Never Forget." A statement of fact or an exhortation?
Well, it became a war cry. In our political culture, at least, "Never Forget" was a barely veiled euphemism for "Never Forgive."
If we could only go back to 9/10, but it's too late. And as a consequence, it will always be too soon.
Brilliant, succinct, and just how I feel as well. I lost no one I knew on that day, but I was the leaning post for a few who had.
I see 9/11/01 as the day the lid was peeled back from the packaged-and-sold image of America we'd all grown accustomed to and, perhaps, bought into.
Instead of the Land of Opportunity and Unlimited Possibility, suddenly the latent hate and fear mongering that only persisted on the fringe and if you were pay attention, was given center-stage. From my vantage point, we've since become a nation that spends more time discussing what we are afraid of, and hedging ourselves in from the rest of the world, rather than growing and shaping our relationships with other nations in a healthy, sustainable, and more humanist way. This has only been enhanced by the successive economic stumble we seem unable to stop, and the continued military presence we maintain overseas. If anything, fear has taken over.
We still are afraid of the Other. Whomever or whatever they are. We have a long way to go in terms of finding our place in the global community. You strike just the right note with regards to forgiveness, especially in a country that continuously enforces it's religious (read: Christian) right to exist in the first place.
Also, excellent choice of art to support your argument.
It's these posts that keep me coming back to your blog, good sir.
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Predictably, the media resorted to stale and meaningless statements about 9/11 -- within three hours I was hearing on several news services that "America has lost its innocence." When did this country do that? When the first slave was herded in chains down a gang plank? When the first Native American was shot dead?
I was in my ofFice at MIT that morning when a friend called to tell me of "a plane navigation accident" in New York City." I got out the TV we used for some of our classes and set it up on the scenery painting floor along with a bunch of folding chairs; my colleagues and I sat through the morning in stunned disbelief. The second plane flew into the second tower on camera. Unbelievable. But yes, always present, not the slightest possibility of forgetting.
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You cannot know how your choice of this painting of Pieter Breugel the Elder (now believed to be his composition but not his execution) to headline your post depicts my own feelings about 9/11. I could wax (pun intended) from on high my own peculiarly ambivalent thoughts that flit about when I have pondered this event over the past ten years. The miracle of flight; past and present despoiling of the New World by the Old World; the indifference of Life as It goes on; the son Icarus contravening the wishes of the father Daedalus; the twin poems of Auden and Williams; and the overweening legal maxim "fiat iustitia et ruit caelum." And all this from one painting done 400 years ago. Thank you kindly
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