Falling Towers

Sitting out in the sunshine today in a near suburb of Paris before my afternoon class reminded me with a start of September 11th 8 years ago on a different continent. What struck so many people that day, including me, was that after seeing horrific unreal action film-like footage over and over on TV and learning of sudden tragedy upon arriving sleepily at work, the weather was beautiful. It just didn't match and seemed not just inappropriate, but like a deep yet surreal form of betrayal. When my office was evacuated and I walked home since the metro wasn't running, I remember that the sun was out and the sky, the same sky that the twin towers once scraped and that the planes exploded in, was blue and cloudless. A recent trip to Germany where I visited the Dachau concentration camp under sunshine and blue skies inspired a similar feeling of meteorologic betrayal.

I lived in Washington, DC September 11, 2001, and I remember the following:

Before evacuating the building where I worked, we all watched the news mutely, breathlessly, watching the crash, the people jumping-- the same scenes over and over that seemed like they'd come out of Hollywood's best action thrillers. An NPR story that I heard later and have since never been able to find mentioned a crowd watching the collapse of the 2nd tower and described people instinctively outstretching their hands as if to try to hold up the tower and prevent it from falling. It was literally a beautiful gesture.

We were in a communication vacuum-- all the TV news simply showed the same images, they didn't even know how to interpret or analyze them. I tried to phone my family after the Pentagon was hit to reassure them I was fine, but all circuits were busy and no one could get through. I tried to organize office carpools so that my suburban coworkers could get home despite the closure of the metro and then we were told that for our own safety, the building would be evacuated and that we should call in the next day to see if it would be open.

The papers the next day had full page photos of what looked like the apocalypse.

If the defining question for my parents' generation was 'where were you when Kennedy was assasinated,' it become 'where were you on September 11th'? For the rest of the year, at parties everyone took turns relating the events of their September 11th.

The cultural memory of this event was obscured and tainted, I think, after the way the Bush Administration invoked and exploited it as justification for undemocratic measures like the Patriot Act and a ludicrous premise for another war in Iraq. For this reason, it's hard to find any sort of memorial events for the victims on this day outside of NYC. 2 years ago, I looked in vain for candlelight vigils in Paris on September 11th. Not only to remember those who died in the towers and their bereft friends and families, but also rescue workers, firemen, and policemen who risked their lives, and might today still suffer from stress, trauma or debilitating health problems from exposure to the dust and toxins on the day when TriBeCa also became known by the name Ground Zero.


What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
-T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland