A Plea for Eros: Essays

1

9/11 HAS BECOME INTERNATIONAL SHORTHAND FOR A CATA-strophic morning in the United States and the three thousand dead it left behind. The two numbers have entered the vocabulary of horror: the place names and ideological terms that are used to designate dozens, hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of victims — words like My Lai, Oklahoma City, the Disappeared in Argentina, Sarajevo, Cambodia, Collectivization, the Cultural Revolution, Auschwitz. 9/11 has also become a threshold and a way of telling time — before and after, pre and post. It has been used to signify the dawn of a new era, an economic fault line, the onset of war, the presence of evil in the world, and a loss of American innocence. But for us New Yorkers, whether we were far from the attacks or close to them, September 11 remains a more intimate memory. For weeks afterward, the first question we asked friends and neighbors whom we hadn’t seen since the attacks was: “Is your family all right? Did you lose anybody?”

The media question “How has life changed in the city since September 11?” is one that has been reiterated over and over in the press here and abroad, but it can’t be answered by passing over the day itself. There can be no before and no after, no talk of change, without our stories from that morning and the many mornings that followed, because even for those of us who were lucky and didn’t lose someone we loved, September 11 is finally a story of collective trauma and ongoing grief.

Twelve of the thirty firefighters from our local station house in Brooklyn died when the World Trade Center collapsed. Charlie, the owner of the liquor store only a few blocks from our house, a man who has helped me and my husband buy wine for years, lost his sister-in-law. She was a stewardess on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The terrorists slit her throat. Friends of ours who live on John Street were trapped inside their building as the towers fell, their windows shattering from the impact. With help from the police, they finally managed to get out, but as they left, they found themselves stepping over human body parts lying on the ground.

My sister Asti, who lives with her husband and daughter, Juliette, on White Street in Tribeca, was walking south toward P.S. 234, an elementary school only two blocks north of the World Trade Center. She had dropped Juliette off not long before but decided to go and get her after the first plane hit. Asti remembers wondering if she was overreacting. Then she heard the blast of the second plane as it crashed above her. She looked up, saw the gaping hole in the building looming above her, and started to run. By then people were streaming north. She heard someone say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping.” A woman near her vomited in the street.

My friend Larry, who works at The Wall Street Journal, the offices of which were directly across from the towers, escaped from the building and ran until he couldn’t run anymore. He stopped to catch his breath, turned, and saw people on fire, jumping from the windows. Hours later, he managed to make his way home across the Brooklyn Bridge. When his panicked wife, Mary, opened the door, she saw a ghost man, covered from head to foot with a fine white powder. After he withdrew from the hug she gave him, Mary noticed that her arms were bleeding from the tiny pieces of pulverized glass that were part of that milky dust.

2

Seeing isn’t always believing. Traumatic events are often accompanied by a form of disassociation. What is unfolding before your eyes seems unreal. Although I saw the damage done by the first plane from the window of our house in Brooklyn, I saw the second plane go into the second tower on television. The two pictures I hold in my mind are strangely mismatched. The first has a power that the second doesn’t. It has something to do with scale and something to do with un-mediated vision. The smoke rising from the familiar skyscraper through my window shocked me. The image on a twenty-one-inch television screen had an alien, almost hallucinatory quality that forced me to say as I watched, “This is true; this is real.” Asti, on the other hand, who witnessed the second crash, who heard and saw the horrific destruction only blocks from where she was standing, remained calm. It was only when she had put Juliette to bed that night and saw the plane cut into the building on television that she began to cry.

The problem of direct and mediated images is important to September 11 and its aftermath, not only because most of the world witnessed what happened on television but because the terrorists knew that they were staging a spectacular media event. They knew that in the time that elapsed between the first plane crash and the second television crews would have descended on the scene to record the horrifying image of an airliner entering the second tower and that the tape would be played and replayed for all the world to see, and they knew, too, that it would resemble nothing so much as a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie. A hackneyed fiction remade ad nauseam by the studios was manipulated by the terrorists into grotesque reality. At the same time, it must be said that it took very little imagination on the part of screenwriters to take actual events of terror and enlarge on them to fit the writers’ own notions of a thrilling spectacle. September 11 was not unimaginable. We could all imagine it. It’s the fact of it that annihilated the fantasy.

On September 12, I was traveling in a subway car during what is normally rush hour on my way to collect my fourteen-year-old daughter, Sophie, who had been stranded overnight on the Upper West Side near her school. There were only a few of us in that car — myself and five or six other silent, stunned passengers who had decided that a trip was necessary. Because the regular line had been damaged by the attacks, I left one train to find another and noticed a large poster for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie plastered to the wall in the station. A picture of the oversized actor was accompanied by a text — the gist of which was that a firefighter had lost his wife and child in a terrorist attack and was out for vengeance. It made me sick.

I was not alone. Immediately following the devastation in New York, Hollywood recanted. The New York Times carried articles in which studio powerhouses made dramatic statements about how everything had changed. A new era had dawned. A novelist and screenwriter declared on television that she would never write the same stories again. Sincerity charged back. Several periodicals pronounced “irony” dead. An acerbic, often cynical film reviewer for The New Yorker ended his column with a heartfelt statement about love. He seemed to mean it. My brother-in-law, a sculptor, reported a conversation that he had with fellow artists who said they were rethinking their work. For a brief time, photographs of firefighters and policemen replaced pictures of celebrities in the tabloids and on magazine covers. The news channels dropped commercials from their coverage, as if they knew that alternating film footage from the site, where rescue workers were digging for pieces of the dead, with ads for dishwashing liquid or an allergy drug would be unacceptable. But by now, this talk of a cultural sea change is mostly gone. Collateral Damage, the Schwarzenegger film, was withdrawn but later released, and now it has come and gone. The movie moguls backed away from their statements, arguing that they had been in shock and didn’t know what they were saying. Television commercials were reinstated long ago, and images of corpses lying in the fields or cities of other countries are cut short by pleas to rush into your nearest Ford dealer to save hundreds of dollars on a new SUV. As for irony, the word had been misused so often in the press before September 11, had been trumpeted far and wide as the tone of our age, as if it meant nothing more than a cold and cynical distance. Irony is always double. The juxtaposition between the declarations made immediately after 9/11 in the media, announcing a new earnest world, and the return to business as usual only months afterward might serve as a singular proof that the ironic point of view is sometimes the only legitimate way to interpret the reality we live in.

3

There aren’t so many flags in the city now. Some still hang outside houses or flutter from the radio antennae of cars and taxis, but they are no longer ubiquitous. In the city, we understood those flags, but many Europeans I have spoken to in these past months mistook them for American chauvinism. They weren’t. They were what we had — a sign of solidarity— and they appeared spontaneously on that day in September. Who knew that so many people had old flags in their closets? On the Friday after the attacks, twenty thousand people from my neighborhood streamed onto Seventh Avenue with candles to honor the dead firefighters from our Park Slope station. Many people carried flags or wore flags or had dressed themselves in red, white, and blue. There are a lot of old hippies in our neighborhood. During elections, 98 percent of us vote for Democrats. Many of us, including me and my husband, marched against the Vietnam War. That night someone in the crowd began singing “We Shall Overcome,” the old protest song from the civil rights movement that carried on into the anti-war movement. The last thing anybody in that crowd wanted was more blood. The United States is still at war, and if New Yorkers were jingoists, the flags would still be omnipresent — and their meaning would have changed.

4

“Everybody was so nice after September 11, you remember that?” one woman said to another on the subway a couple of months ago. She had a loud voice, a heavy Russian accent, and while she hung onto a pole with one hand, she gestured emphatically with the other. Her companion spoke softly, and I heard in her sentence the lilt of the islands, Trinidad or St. Lucia, perhaps. “It’s back to the old ways now,” she agreed. It’s true. We were wonderful during the crisis, and we were tender to one another. Volunteers streamed to the site. After only a few days there were so many, they were turned away by the hundreds. Our local bookstore became a donation center and was so overwhelmed by garbage bags, flashlights, boots, socks, and gloves that the owner posted polite but firm signs that made it clear she couldn’t accept any more supplies. Here in Brooklyn, block after block organized bake, tag, and book sales to raise money for the families of the dead. Strangers spoke to each other in the street, in stores, and on the subway. That need to ask, to tell, is over now. People have returned to the business of living their private lives.

Those of us who are not widows, widowers, or the children of a dead parent have moved from active grief to the repression necessary for recovery, a state of mind that is possible only because the city hasn’t been attacked again and, unlike people in some parts of the world, we are not occupied or living under daily siege. The impromptu memorials of candles and teddy bears, poems and letters, have disappeared. Nobody has mentioned gas masks, Cipro, escape ladders, or kayaks to me for a long time. There was a run on kayaks in the city, purchased by anxious citizens who intended to drop the slender boats into the rivers and paddle upstate or to New Jersey when the next target blew. The fires have finally stopped burning at the site, and the city is no longer counting and recounting its dead.

P.S. 234 was closed for four months. The children returned to school in January, and Juliette was glad to be back. One of her classmates, a girl who would not let go of her mother for weeks after the attacks, who clung to the maternal body wherever it was — on the toilet, in the bathtub, or asleep in bed — is once again a freewheeling second-grader. The three-year-old boy who refused to walk, telling his parents he didn’t want his feet to touch the ground because he was afraid of “burning sticks,” no longer needs to be carried everywhere. The police roadblocks below Canal Street are gone, and now hundreds of visitors to the city stand in line to buy tickets to view the site of the devastation. The gaping hole in the ground has become New York’s number one tourist attraction. I know of only one family in my neighborhood that sold their house after the attacks and moved to the suburbs. Connecticut is an unlikely target. For months afterward everyone was worried about the air downtown. Nobody could say what was in it. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, I still sometimes imagine a sudden explosion, steel and concrete giving way beneath the vehicle and my own sad, sudden death in the East River. But like a lot of people in the city, I’m a fatalist or, as ray mother used to say, “philosophical.”

The truth is I can’t leave New York because I’m mad about it, hopelessly in love with this place in a way that is usually reserved for a person. And in this, too, I’m not alone. It’s a big, bad, wonderful city — loud, raucous, and nasty — but it’s also kind and dear. I’ve lived here for twenty-four years, and I’m not over my love affair yet. There are parts of this city so ugly, I find them gorgeous. I’ve always been attached to the litter, the graffiti, to the noisy, jolting trains, and it seems that despite my antipathy to them, I’m rather attached to surly garbagemen, mute cabdrivers, and overly charming waiters as well. There was a hush in New York for a while — an eerie calm that attends the rites of mourning. You still feel it near Ground Zero, but away from the site, people have been sniping at each other again for months. They’re yelling at meter maids. Truck drivers are howling obscenities at jaywalking pedestrians, and straphangers are shoving each other in the subway. But, just as before, people rush to help a person who’s fallen on the sidewalk. They dole out loose change to bums and con artists and musicians and troops of young boys who sing in harmony on the trains. And New Yorkers of both sexes and all classes still send you compliments or encouragement on the fly—”Love your hat, honey,” “Great coat,” or, “Hey there, slim, give us a smile.”

5

One day in March, my husband was watching 42nd Street on television — the 1933 film musical. Near the end, Ruby Keeler appears in a blouse and a small pair of shorts. She swings her arms and her feet start to tap like crazy — shuffling, sliding, and hitting her marks on the stage as if there’s no tomorrow. As Paul sat on the sofa and watched the gutsy dancer, at once tough and feminine, he felt tears come to his eyes, and he gave way to a moment of hopeless sentimentality. “For the old New York,” he told me, “not for September 10, but for what used to be.” Paul was born in 1947. In 1933, he was nobody, but the fact is that New York is as much a myth as a place, and because we all participate in that fiction, we make it partly real. After September 11, the imaginary New York of the century now gone — the wisecracking, rough-and-tumble world of gangsters and dolls, of cigarette girls in absurd outfits, of the Cotton Club, of hot jazz, of hipsters and Beats, of low-lying clubs dense with smoke or Abstract Expressionists at fisticuffs in the Cedar Bar — have become more poignant to us than ever.

The inhabitants of this city have always known that the rest of the country doesn’t like us much, that New York inspires fear, anger, and irritation in middle America. I know. I grew up there. We had our moment in the sun. For a few months, we looked awfully good to other parts of the United States, but not a single person I spoke to in the city thought it would last, and it hasn’t. We’re not all that loved from the outside, so we love ourselves fiercely, and we perpetuate and celebrate our own myths — the poems and books and plays and movies and all those songs about our greatness — and the terrible wound inflicted on this town has only made a good number of us more fervent.

6

Real New York and imaginary New York aren’t easily separated. The stuff of a city isn’t only material; it’s spiritual as well. What is true is that 40 percent of us are now foreign-born. A few years ago, I read in the newspaper that in a single elementary school in Queens, the children spoke sixty-four different languages at home. Riding the subway, I routinely see people reading newspapers in Spanish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages I’m too ignorant to identify. New Yorkers aren’t bound by a common tongue or by similar backgrounds. We’re everybody from everywhere, and most of the time, we tolerate each other pretty well. The people in this city know that in this we are unique. No other place comes close to our diversity. We have our share of ugliness, brutality, and pockets of cruel and stupid racism, but the fact is that if you don’t like the hectic jostling of innumerable cultures and languages and ways of being, you wouldn’t want to live here. The terrorists understood nothing. When they hurt New York, they hurt the whole world.

These days New Yorkers are talking about September 11, 2002, and how we will get through it. It isn’t only that people fear another attack on the city, but that the date itself will force us to relive a trauma, which, despite our efforts to live normally, is still raw and undigested. My sister Asti told me that she dreads the approaching anniversary so intensely that she tries not to think about it. A journalist friend of mine, who’s traveled the world reporting from some of the most dangerous war zones for National Public Radio, is hosting a program on that day. She said that for the first time she’s worried about breaking down and crying on the air. What the Memorial should look like and what should be built downtown have become hotly contested issues. More and more people are saying that they want the towers back. I understand how they feel. For a year now, looking at the skyline has hurt me. We all got used to those two enormous and, frankly, rather ugly pillars that loomed above us. But the dead can’t be brought back to life, and even if the city were to rebuild exact replicas of the fallen structures, they could never be more than twin ghosts of a city we can never reclaim. It is better to face their absence as our painful collective scar and to celebrate and protect what has not changed about New York — the city of immigrants, of pluralism, and of tolerance.

Nobody who was here in the city will forget that day of mass murder, and as the first anniversary comes nearer, I recognize that for most of us the ugly memory surges back at the slightest prompting, and for each one of us, the memory is different. Some saw arms and legs falling from the sky. Some waited for a phone call that never came. Some ran for their lives. Some stood frozen on the street in disbelief. Some wandered in Brooklyn with face masks as the debris blew across the borough. Some in the Bronx and Queens saw only the blue sky turn black with smoke.

Both in the United States and around the world, 9/11 has become a media euphemism batted around in political debates from both the right and the left with a glibness and ease that’s rather frightening. But it seems to me that like other crimes committed against human beings around the world in the name of varying ideologies and religions, the attacks on the World Trade Center can only be understood through individual people, because if we lose sight of the particular — of one man’s or one woman’s or one child’s suffering and loss— we risk losing sight of our common humanity, and that is a form of blindness, not only to others but to ourselves.

2002