Bearing Witness to 9/11
By Les Aaron, Oct 28, 2002
The shards of paper float down as if guided by an unseen hand.
Although these disparate scraps found their equilibrium, they have not settled in my memory, I see them in my mind's eye, swept ever upwards, hundreds no thousands of little scraps, bearing who knows what, as if propelled by some intelligent force, caught up in the swirling darkening clouds that menacingly rushed towards me that day.
Those swirling, ominous clouds, preserved forever in my mind, were like harbingers of the Dante-like Inferno they would later reveal.
They suggested places I did not want to go. And in my memory, they concealed even darker truths.
Truths that did not lighten my soul.
Or the soul of anyone touched by such unequaled terror On one clear day in September one year ago, morning that transmuted before my eyes into the blackest of nights, a cosmic hole in the firmament that swept literally thousands of living and breathing souls into its maw.
How can anyone who witnessed such a thing be not unchanged by the experience?
Thoughts of that chilling day will never go away; they bring to mind the essential evanescence of things, the fragility of life.
In their randomness and suddenness, we are forced to come to grips with the reality that there are no guarantees. What was there this morning will not necessarily be there upon our return. No matter how hard we pray.
All we can do is hope for the best. For continuity in a life that we now know may not be continuous for a prescribed number of years.
In the final analysis, we have to come to terms with ourselves. We must acknowledge that there is no transcendent contract that says we are entitled to stability or harmony in our lives.
If we are so blessed, then let us recognize it for what it is and rejoice. But we also realize that there is an inherent danger in letting our guard down. That we could be victimized again by the randomness of events over which we exercise no control.
What is hardest to piece together is the discontinuity of things. The notion that despite what we accomplish or who we are in the final analysis we are simply flesh and bone subject to untold anomalies that can change our fortunes in the blink of an eye.
Until that fateful day, we took comfort in the fact that our humdrum lives had a certain predictability about them.
We knew intuitively that the sun would rise in the morning and set at night. It helped us to make order out of chaos. We set our watches, watched our programs ate our meals in sync with the motions of the celestial orbs.
And our thoughts were on different things. On reaching goals. Celebrating birthdays. Visiting relatives. Shopping for dinner. Changing the baby. Calling mom. Or an infinite number of other mundane things that shape a life.
That now has been taken away from us. And it extracts from us a steep price. It has shown us that our vain beliefs have little basis in truth.
Now, if nothing else, we know that this presumption that man is in control of his live is specious at best. Simply a conceit of man.
The transformation is now complete. And with it, we are transformed as well. Transformed not so much in appearances as we are inside made different by events beyond our control transformed because of our acknowledged powerlessness to rewrite what happened that day.
To believe that just a handful of deranged extremists could change so many lives so unalterably, so irrevocably is beyond comprehension. We are at a loss to explain it.
It also forces us to ask questions about our own place in the unknowable firmament. We are obliged to seek out certain cosmic truths. Yet we know not where to begin this parlous journey.
The laws that seemed to govern the minutes and hours, that change night into day seem somehow transmuted, unrecognizable in the grand design.
The randomness of those precious lives snuffed out for no reason seems so foreign to minds that were shaped by order and patterns and continuity.
As a result, we are set adrift.
Those who did the only thing they knew how to do were not exempt; nor did they know that they, too, were mortal at the time. Nor did that truth weigh heavily on their minds as long as there was a strand of hope to cling to.
They did what they had to do. And, they, too, are changed for all time.
Now, we understand what we couldn't heretofore understand. That it is possible for people to disappear in an instant of time, in a blinding cosmic flash. A microsecond of the space time continuum where physicality becomes energy, and loved ones transcend their physical bodies to become one with the universe.
Such things seem more at home in prophecy or a fable than real world documents scribed by those of a factual mind-set. Nevertheless, whatever way we care to look at events, what is true is that for one moment in time, the finite and infinite collided in one cataclysmic event - a watershed moment that changed the present as it has the future.
The headlines told us that there were virtually no remains. What that meant was beyond our simple comprehension.
We were told that there were no typewriters. No office chairs. No computers. All was reduced to infinitesimally small particles no larger than grains of sand. With the exception of a surviving wedding ring here, a watch there and some papers, the kind of papers that describe people's lives.
It was as if a new Universe was just being formed from the remains of the old. A Universe that had in a split second added an army of angels to help with the task.
Now, what is there left except for us to integrate their loss into our lives and our psyches. And go on.
We will do this in different ways. But we will do it if only symbolically because we know that we desperately want each and every person, whether we knew them or not, to have counted for something so much more.
We do that as a testament to what life is all about. For us, losses of such magnitude must have meaning.
I don't mean to dwell on the sadness that wells up in me when I think of these poor souls who have become one with the Cosmos. How they started their day thinking that it would be the same as all days. Yet, it was not to be. Their lives were cut short for no reason that makes any sense. The real evil was not to be found in the World Trade Center but in the minds of a handful of religious zealots who thought that they were doing Allah's work.
How wrong they were.
And in a sense in their untimely loss there is melodrama. There was no hasty good byes.
No fond farewells. No theatrics. No long kisses. There was no Bogarts or Bergmans. No Tristam or Isolde. No Montagues or Capulets.
No, just ordinary people doing ordinary things on an ordinary day. They were just there one moment and gone the next. Can that be explained to a child of six or seven?. Or a mother who gives life only to see it taken away? We all depend on the continuity of life for our well being. We cannot imagine that on any specific bright shiny day, that everything that holds meaning will end in an instant. No, that would be too much for anyone to accept.
A year has transpired now. And I ask myself are we any the better for our grief and the mourning?
Who can say?
Yes, it is true that in time, memories do fade. And in time, people will get back to the business of living. There is no contradiction in that. For the immutable truth is that we have no alternative: We must go on. It is the way it is now; and it is the way it has always been.
But at the same time, this year has been a year of reappraising things. And there is good in that. A year of asking ourselves the tough questions. What is important to hold on to? And what is easy to jettison? Do things hold a place in our lives any longer? Or do they just become means of holding off the darkness?
Questions that need to be answered as we struggle back from the brink.
There is some solace perhaps in the knowledge that this was not only a New York tragedy; it impacted the world, in ways large and small.
The dreams that have ended may have caused us to rethink our own priorities. Hopefully, we will be better equipped to understand that we are only actors on this changing stage for just a short time. And what we do with that time is more important than any trinkets we collect.
In the final analysis, it brings us face to face with fundamental questions that seem to have no answers. At least no answers that satisfy our longing. Were we to vanish in an instant, could we honestly say that we have said and done all the things that were important? And needed doing? We are swept back in an instant to the most basic of things. And perhaps that is necessary. Whether we were directly affected or not.
Like those who escaped to shelters in War torn Britain to escape the pounding V2s that robbed life indiscriminately, we question whether we can ever be quite safe again. We are no longer children who believe in the Good Fairy. Or Santa Claus. Or the magic of possibilities. And that, too, is something we must try to understand and assimilate as best we can.
As we struggle to go on with our lives, pedestrian as they may seem, we must try to learn from what happened,. In that way, we can make those untimely demise count for more. I think these things as I hover at the yawning gap that was once a small city of stone and glass in lower Manhattan. And I wonder what would I have thought just two years ago just standing at this precise site.
No doubt, I would have looked out and thought about the Infinity capacity of man to reach out to the stars. And how man has inscribed his legacy on this island of brick and mortar. How different now.
As my mind wanders, it occurs to me that even the strongest things built by man can be brought down by man. At the same time, there is something else that is disturbing to me that at first I can't seem to define. And then I realize that it is the scent of the detritus and the fumes of the thousands of fires that burned on for weeks and weeks. Even now I feel it permeating my clothes.
It is almost as if I can feel the particles, like tiny atoms landing on my skin as they did that day, particles that were at once oddly soft and pliant. Particles that were caught up in the swirling streams of dust and other matter that I tried to wipe off my face as they battered me in a seemingly endless assault, the lingering effects of which could not be removed by the strongest soaps.
What did it mean?
A taste of salt works its way onto my lips and I attribute it to the sea not far away. I wipe my eye when nobody is looking and turn my back on this sacred place as if by such action I could simply ignore what is uppermost in my mind. And I retreat hastily, without a look back, in order to enjoy the comfort that comes from togetherness with my fellow man as we head uptown, a tight little army marching towards the light.
You can write to Les Aaron, the Hubmaster at Hubmaster@aol.com
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