Don't Panic, Little Stargazer: Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well

3.29.2006

Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well

I find it interesting how perspectives on 9/11 differ according to where you were, and not who you were, when it transpired. New Yorkers relate to it quite differently than Nebraskans. They have the acute sense of human loss and sadness because they saw the towers everyday, because they have relatives who worked there, because they are in a position to give blood that could save lives, because it was their backyards. Nebraskans, on the other hand, have no such immediate and visceral connection, so their response is to immediately symbolize - put in a historical, political context. Nebraskans will jump to military action, put up posters, make little flags to be worn patriotically, argue about jingoism, judge all parties involved - but all of these reactions are distant and indirect and somehow much less sincere. It makes me think that people who made profits out of 9/11 were probably not New Yorkers.

Inmates listen to music over the rec yard loudspeaker (Shawshank Redemption)

Of course, Nebraskans can't think the way New Yorkers do about September 11th. Our only connection is a national one - so our response is nationalist (or anti-nationalist). All we know to do is rationalize it to something we can write an essay about - we don't think about the immediate casualties of people who died - those of us who claim to consider this are unconsciously lying. How can we think of the people who died? We're too disconnected from that - disconnected because we see it through a cathode ray box, through heavily-filtered news media. Everything human about the experience has been drowned out by the time it reaches our senses.

array

And though the new 9/11 movies coming out are going to try to put us where we could not be by recreating the terror and horror and mass panic and confusion of the day, it will not be successful, because the moment has passed, and the replacement moment is artificial. They should take something out of "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Art. Mechanical. Reproduced. For art it may be alright, but for catastrophes?

What's That Smell in the Kitchen? - Marge Piercy

All over America women are burning dinners. It's lambchops in Peoria; it's haddock in Providence; it's steak in Chicago tofu delight in Big Sur; red rice and beans in Dallas. All over America women are burning food they're supposed to bring with calico smile on platters glittering like wax. Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat. Carbonized despair presses like a clinker from a barbecue against the back of her eyes. If she wants to grill anything, it's her husband spitted over a slow fire. If she wants to serve him anything it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the heart of an insomniac. Her life is cooked and digested, nothing but leftovers in Tupperware. Look, she says, once I was roast duck on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam. Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.