It is, once again, a stunningly beautiful day here in New York City, this September 11th. Folks are making their way through the streets, Sunday paper and a coffee in hand, walking their dogs, pushing strollers, riding bikes, holding hands, and turning their faces upward to soak up the rays of the glorious September sun.
September is arguably New York’s best month. The air is more breathable, the sky more clear, the heat less oppressive, and every industry is back in motion after their summer vacations…there’s new art, theater, sports, music…life.
The New York Times printed this today:
Spalding Gray, the actor and monologuist, died in 2004. The following letter, which he wrote in the aftermath of 9/11, will appear in "Life Interrupted," a published version of the monologue he was working on at the time of his death.
For 34 years I lived with you and came to love you. I came to you because I loved theater and found theater everywhere I looked. I fled New England and came to Manhattan, that island off the coast of America, where human nature was king and everyone exuded character and had big attitude. You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd.
When we were kids, my mom hung a poster over our bed. It had a picture of a bumblebee, and under the picture the caption read:
"According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly because its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wingspan. But ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway."
That is still New York City for me.
God Bless New York City. God Bless the United States. God comfort the families of those we lost four years ago. Our thoughts are with them today.
And now, I’ve gotta fly…
Consider this an open thread.
I’m actually in New York today–looking across at Prospect Park right now. I didn’t lose anyone I knew four years ago so I was free to focus on the harm done to the city itself. (Here, too, in a more political fashion. Also here, which may be the best piece of writing of the three).
And so it has helped so much, to see the city not only survive, but more than survive.
The contrast with New Orleans is awful.
And our country has survived, but I wouldn’t say it’s more than survived. I’d say it’s been somewhat diminished. Diminished in a way that–I mean this seriously, and not in a careless way–breaks our obligation to those who died there.
I wrote this several months ago:
“In the Jewish tradition, and as always I could be screwing this up, you are commanded to say the Kaddish only for one month when a child, a sibling or a spouse dies, but you are commanded to say it for eleven months when a parent dies. This is odd to many people today: the death of a spouse is thought to be at least as devastating as the death of a parent and generally more so, and the death of a child is worst of all.
It only makes sense, I think, when you combine it with the view that the Kaddish actually helps to “elevate the souls of the dead” from Gehenna (which is called “the Jewish name for hell” but it’s really a lot more like the Christian idea of purgatory than the Christian idea of hell.) Since parents are more responsible for the acts of their children than children are for the acts of their parents, or spouses or siblings are for each others actions, it makes sense that the children’s saying of Kaddish would have the most effect.
I do not believe, literally, that saying the Kaddish for people after they die gets them out of purgatory and into heaven faster. I am simply agnostic about the existence of an afterlife. But there is a way that we all live after our deaths: in the bodies of our children, and in the minds and memories of all those who knew us and to a lesser extent, those who know about us.
I think the story that saying the Kaddish elevates the souls of the dead out of gehenna is metaphor. It is not literally true, but it illustrates something true: we have obligations to the dead. We have an obligation to remember them, to remember them honestly but while also honoring their memory, and to use make good things instead of bad things out of that memory.
We view it as good to bring flowers to your relative’s grave & to take your children there, to sit shiva and say Kaddish for them. We view it as evil to descrate someone’s grave.
Well, I believe that to use the Holocaust to justify or excuse the rape of millions of German women, or 9/11 to justify Abu Ghraib or extraordinary rendition, or Abu Ghraib to justify or excuse some future atrocities by Zarqawi, entirely apart the harm it does to the living, dishonors and harms the dead as surely as desecrating their graves. And to use those things to work to try to prevent such horror from ever befalling any people again–in Sbrenica or Rwanda or Darfur–honors the dead as surely as saying Kaddish for one’s relatives. I don’t believe that you can lift someone from purgatory to heaven by saying Kaddish for them, but we would not be able to honor the memories of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson as we do if not for the efforts of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and every union soldier and abolitionist newspaper writer who helped to end slavery.”
I meant that seriously and I still do. The way to honor the people who died four years ago isn’t this stupid propaganda march that the Department of Defense is organizing. It’s also not the 9/11 memorial that Michael Arad’s designing, although I like the design and will certainly visit it–or the hundreds of smaller memorials that exist, though I really like some of those. Even good and sincere memorials are necessary but not sufficient. A beautiful funeral service, a dignified tombstone with a nice epitaph–those are ways of fulfilling our obligations to the dead but they are not the main ways. The main ways are in how we remember them and live our own lives.
There is nothing any politician can say today that will honor those who died on 9/11 as much as allowing Americans to die of hunger and thirst on the streets of New Orleans last week dishonored them.
(Don’t take that last sentence as a conclusion about exactly where the failure in New Orleans lies. It lies in a lot of places, and I don’t what to debate exactly where they are on this thread.)
I wrote this letter in December, 2001 after listening to Michael Krasny interview Spalding Gray on KQED’s Forum. I still have hope, but oh, the time we have lost.
Dear Mr. Krasny,
I enjoyed listening to your conversation yesterday with Spalding Gray.
As a fellow ex-New Yorker, I identified with the feelings he described regarding the attack on the World Trade Center. I went back there to visit my family and some old friends a week after Thanksgiving, and I too was drawn to the site. There wasn’t much visible from street level. On Broadway there was still a shrine, with children’s drawings, photographs, and names, but it has become something of a typical New York scene — there were volunteers handing out leaflets, wearing “Prayer Helps” T-shirts (and a similar billboard). Nearby you can purchase souvenir FDNY/NYPD hats.
From one side street I could still see the last standing bit of the towers’ steel exterior, as well as another burnt-out building skeleton. There was a constant flow of people down that street — some taking photographs, some just looking. For a downtown New York street at noon it was very quiet.
One thought both you and Mr. Gray expressed on the show prompted me to write this note. It was “what else can we do,” referring to the U. S. action against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
I share that feeling, too, and I believe the U. S. had to take action. When I heard that the residents of Kabul celebrated the fall of the Taliban by playing music in the streets, it made me think that the action was right.
I fear, though, that our current administration is so skeptical of international agreements and cooperation that it will fail to take the longer-term steps needed to oppose terrorism. Although senior officials, including the President, give lip service to the need for a sustained effort, not much careful planning is yet evident.
We need cooperation from other nations to apprehend terrorists, to limit the resources available for terror, and to shrink the pool of willing volunteers who will follow leaders preaching hate and suicide as the path to paradise.
We also have to think more carefully about our own vulnerabilities. After all, most of the damage in New York was caused not by the impact of the planes, nor the jet fuel fire, but by gravity. The twin towers were large, heavy structures reaching far above the earth’s surface. Although they survived the hits well, and stood up to a raging inferno for quite some time, eventually the supporting members were too weak to hold the weight, and down they fell, destroying themselves and the surrounding area.
We have numerous vulnerable targets in this country, far too many to be guarded by troops, even if such a defense were effective. We cannot achieve security by military force alone, whether applied within the U. S. or without. We have to use our imaginations to help create a world where terror is less likely to erupt. We cannot eradicate evil. We can only look for ways to reduce its attraction.
two vignettes. ahh..
What do I know from New York? Spent 2 days there thirty years ago, seen Manhattan, it’s an ok city. I’m sorry for your loss, everybody’s loss.
But as the day reaches it’s end, I find myself shedding a tear for Spalding Gray.
Weird how these things go.
Oops. I know: too picky.
I know: too picky.
Not at all, thanks for that bit of myth-busting. Now watch as everyone for whom that slogan had provided a sliver of hope descends into despair.
“The old bumblebee myth simply reflected our poor understanding of unsteady viscous fluid dynamics,” explained Wang…
… before she crushed the dreams of all the so-called Intelligent Aeronauts, who had maintained that bees and other insects were kept aloft by some kind of super-natural Aeronautic Deity that supplied the necessary lift to wings that simply could not generate it on their own. They claimed that the failure of conventional aerodynamics top explain bumblebee flight was proof that the Aeronautic Deity existed, thus confirming a central tenet of their religion: gravity and lift are the actions of two separate supernatual entities pulling all objects in opposite directions; the good entity, Uhp, pulled objects towards the sky and perfection, while Dowhn pulled things Earthwards to decay.
Taking stock.
The bumblebee story has never given me hope, exactly, but then I blame Martha Graham’s pedegogical practice for that.
According to Sean Curran, from whom I heard the story, she was running her company through an exercise of falls and recoveries (a low contraction into a backwards Graham fall and back up to standing). The first round had dancers doing this in sixteen counts, the second in eight. Then she moved the posts and asked for four; her company did their best. Then she asked for two, and they tried. Then, astoundingly, she asked for people to get down to the floor and back up, in approved Graham technique and philosophy, in a single count. The dancers muttered–quietly, I’ll bet. As the legend has it, Martha hobbled out into the center of the floor and announced that “scientists tell us, [etc.]” Then she turned to the accompianist and nodded.
I, for one, am relieved to know that bumblebees can generate local vortices that explain their ability to fly.
First hand report from the Freedom Walk.
So are the organizers completely free of any sense of irony, or so good at it that they are actively f*cking with us?
Katherine, thanks for posting this guy’s first-hand account. I’d read somewhere about an Abu Ghraib protestor’s being arrested, but nothing about the charge. “Failure to obey a lawful order” sounds pretty vague, and I’m guessing that in court the charge will amount to little more than a wrist-slap.
It is interesting, though, that wearing a mask might be considered a “class 6 felony.” If anybody understands the relevant laws here, I’d be interested to hear about it.