Things To Do on September 11th

9/11: a day that has been given two numbers as a signifier instead of words, as if words were inadequate. These numbers are a sign of defeat and resignation. These numbers say "what else can we call it but what it was? A day in September; September the 11th..."

It is easy for me to get emotional about 9/11 even though the physical event was thousands of miles away from me. It was not the physical but the emotional proximity to the event that struck me, that struck all of us. We never thought our empire could be so badly crippled, so terrorized, so knocked speechless and wordless and empty. Why, then, am I not shocked to hear of ravaged villages in South Ossetia and Georgia, this very week? Why, then, do I not memorialize and mourn the torture and murder of Iraqis (both in Iraq and in our own detention camps), Afghans (at the hands of a tyrannical theocratic government), Sudanese, Kenyans, Tibetans, Chinese, and on and on and on? Why are my landmarks of human injustice only those that shook my nation and my people? What evil goes on every day that I never hear about, or if I do hear, that I never care about? Why did the falling towers hurt me by proxy when other events do not? Why do only American deaths make me cry?

Things To Do on September 11th
Today I plan to read Art Spiegelman's comic book "In the Shadow of No Towers." Spiegelman wrote the great holocaust horror-comic Maus, which I recommend. In that work, Spiegelman wrestles with the fact that his father Vladek survived the Holocaust and the guilt he feels for living a relatively easy life when his father suffered so much. He considers how many dead that were taken in place of his father, and by extension, himself; in one scene Spiegelman is trying to focus on writing his comic book while his writing stand is propped up by several emaciated corpses. Spiegelman lived in New York during 9/11, and "In the Shadow of No Towers" is billed as his struggle with that horror and how it was transformed by our government into the horror(s) of Iraq (et al.), and so terror bleeds on into other terror, and on and on again.

Here are some other suggestions.

• Listen to Philip Glass' album Solo Piano. Also, the Philip Glass piece "Opening" from Glassworks was played on NPR the day of the attacks and seemed to capture the national melancholy of that day.
  
  

• Read Nancy Gibbs' article If You Want to Humble an Empire published in TIME Magazine on September 14, 2001. In it she details, minute by minute, the events of that day. Excerpt below:
  

If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted at the base of Manhattan island with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America's true God.

• Watch The Fog of War by Errol Morris (music by Philip Glass).
  

• Read Holy Sonnet 10, or "Death, be not proud" by John Donne (full text below)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go--
Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!

• Read this short piece by Jorge Luis Borges, which he wrote (I assume in the early 60s) in response to the assassination of JFK. It is titled "In Memoriam, J.F.K." (full text below)

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar's murderer. In the mid-seventeeth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen's throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many other things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.

• And finally, some scripture.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, "Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation."

-Isaiah 25:6-9

Also 1 Corinthians 15. Here is Verse 26: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death."