Stating the Obvious on 9/11

“The Insistence of Beauty” - Stephen Dunn

The day before those silver planes
came out of the perfect blue, I was struck
by the beauty of pollution rising
from smokestacks near Newark,
gray and white ribbons of it
on their way to evanescence.

And at impact, no doubt, certain beholders
and believers from another part of the world
must have seen what appeared gorgeous -
the flames of something theirs being born.

I watched for hours – mesmerized -
that willful collision replayed,
the better man in me not yielding,
then yielding to revenge’s sweet surge.

The next day there was a photograph
of dust and smoke ghosting a street,
and another of a man you couldn’t be sure
was fear-frozen or dead or made of stone,

and for a while I was pleased
to admire the intensity – or was it the coldness? -
of each photographer’s good eye.
For years I’d taken pride in resisting

the obvious – sunsets, snowy peaks,
a starlet’s face – yet had come to realize
even those, seen just right, can have
their edgy place. And the sentimental,

beauty’s sloppy cousin, that enemy,
can’t it have a place too?
Doesn’t a tear deserve a close-up?
When word came of a fireman

who hid in the rubble
so his dispirited search dog
could have someone to find, I repeated it
to everyone I knew. I did this for myself,
not for community or beauty’s sake,
yet soon it had a rhythm and a frame.


This is a long post, which one of you has already teased me about (and rightfully so!). But I’m going to give myself a pass on this one (and hopefully you will, too, and will read through it), because today has been an unexpectedly difficult day. Starting in 2002, I developed my own memorial routine on this day to avoid the public spectacles and photo ops: making a point to block out some private time between 8:45 and 9:15 am to re-open the file that I only open once a year, a file that contains my sacred objects from that day and some of the days that followed; a file whose folder still has the tear-stained scribblings that I wrote on it two days after the attack because I couldn’t find any paper.

But this year has been different in many ways for me. Most difficult is that during an internal office move last year, my sacred file (which I kept at work, because work was so tied into my experience of that day) was misplaced, and the office manager was never able to relocate it. And so I am mourning the loss of those tangible connections to that day in addition to all the losses of that horrible day itself, because they gave me a “rhythm and a frame” that kept the memories arranged and defined, not simply as my own, but as part of a larger collective.

I mourn that day not simply as a concerned friend or acquaintance or neighbor, but as a member of the family of New York, whose own heart was pierced by the sword of those planes when they were thrust into the unsuspecting breast of the city, whose own heart was singed and scarred by the fires that exploded out of those towers, and yet somehow filled all the more with love precisely because it was so filled with grief, as the simple poster in the photograph above that appeared all over the city declared.

I mourn that day as one who waited on the street for those making their way home from downtown, wandering down the middle of the avenues like a refugee column that you’re only supposed to see on the news about places far away.

I mourn that day as one who called friends that I believed could very well be dead, who heard their cheery, unsuspecting voices on their answering machines, who left a strained message and then watched the clock as the seconds and minutes and hours tick by without any response, until the ticks began to sound like church bells announcing a funeral. And finally, finally, the triumphal trumpeting of my ringing phone began the shred the silence, each time announcing a voice that is alive on the other side of the call and calling to say, “I made it out; I made it home.” And then I felt guilty for feeling such joy and relief, because I knew how few other people in the city who had made those calls would have the same experience.

I mourn that day as one who stood on an avenue and watched my local fire company respond to a call on September 12, a day and an age after the attacks. They roared up the street with lights and sirens blaring while pedestrians, one after another, stopped in their tracks to raise their hands: some to form fists of defiance and strength, some to clap in gratitude, some in salutes with their palms over their hearts, and some as shields to cover their mouths, turning their heads away so the firefighters would not see them crying.

I mourn that day as one who stood on the side of the street in the twilight of early evening on Friday, awkwardly holding a ridiculous, cinnamon-scented bathroom candle because it was all the local store had when I rushed in after receiving the email chain about New Yorkers doing a candlelight vigil wherever they were at 7 pm that night.

I mourn that day as one who, while watching the latest news about the recovery at Ground Zero later that night, finally came undone after barely shedding a tear for almost four days, my whole body convulsing for almost an hour with primal sobbing that I had never experienced before and hope never to again; a sobbing that until then I would have thought was ridiculous overacting if I had seen it onstage, that felt as if it would literally tear me apart by the volcano of grief erupting inside me for my people, my city.

I mourn that day as a New Yorker.

So what does that mean? It’s hard to explain beyond what I’ve already said. But isn’t that what art, what poetry is for? Yes, but the poets largely let us down after 9/11. When we needed a new Walt Whitman to write our “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” or a Hopkins for our “Wreck of the Deutschland” or a Wilfred Owen for our “Futility,” there was none to be found.

I think Dunn comes closer in his poem to something real in response to 9/11 than most poets. In particular, he notes how New Yorkers, especially those that fancy themselves in the elite, “take pride in resisting the obvious,” and yet find themselves drawn into it against their will. Even cynical, sophisticated New Yorkers had to accept that the obvious forms of beauty (sunsets, etc.) could be edgy if they're seen "just right" in such circumstances, and that even sentimentality, “beauty’s sloppy cousin,” had a place.

But Dunn still falls short. In fact, I am going to argue that only Bruce Springsteen, with his album The Rising, produced a truly significant piece of honest, profound, public art responding to 9/11. He leaves no aspect untouched, and quite simply does not concern himself with the navel-gazing niceties of where the line is between beauty and sentimentality, and whether or how the latter has a place. He just states the obvious, all the sloppy, confused, complex dimensions of human life in the midst of tragedy:

• There is the shell-shocked guilt of a survivor in “Nothing Man;" the confessions of an emergency responder struggling with the dual burden of his own guilt and the adulation of others, which feels false or downright dehumanizing. He not only feels like a nothing man; he wants to be one, not a hero.

• There is the remarkably, dangerously, bold meditation on the possibilities (and perhaps impossibilities) of understanding and even love between American and Muslim cultures, personified in mismatched lovers in “Worlds Apart.”

• There is one of the finest depictions of grief in modern art (of any genre): the extraordinary, subdued, heartbroken lament of someone who is beginning to realize that her phone will never ring with good news from her husband in “You’re Missing.”

• There its counterpoint in “Empty Sky,” where a man awakens gasping with grief as he looks at the empty impression that his wife’s sleeping body has made on their mattress, then staggers into the seductive, understanding embrace of a revenge fantasy.

• There is the surprisingly triumphant title track of a doomed firefighter narrating his experience that day of leaving home, answering the call, and running up the stairs to his death. But instead of the expected imagery of “The Falling” at the chorus, the song switches to what sounds like nothing less than the voice of God, who redefines reality by beckoning him further up from falling to The Rising, from death to resurrected life (“come on up for the Rising;/come on up, lay your hands in mine”).

• And there is the seemingly paradoxical refrain of the final track that every New Yorker instantly understands because every one of them has said it already: “My city of ruins/My city of ruins/come on, rise up!/come on, rise up!”

To listen to that album is to hear what it means to mourn 9/11 as a New Yorker; and the irony that it was written by the patron saint of New Jersey will be lost on nobody who knows New York. Though, as for that, when it comes to 9/11, all the bridges and tunnels disappear into our common river of loss and grief.

But Springsteen comes through where almost all others have failed, I think, precisely because he knew what Whitman and Hopkins and Owen knew, what Dunn comes so close to knowing but cannot quite accept. Sometimes the obvious cannot, should not be resisted, precisely because the temptation is to do so. Sometimes the insistence of beauty is a distraction; sometimes the obvious is the only thing that is real, the only thing that matters. Sometimes we just need to admit:

Baby, once I thought I knew
Everything I needed to know about you:
Your sweet whisper, your tender touch.
I didn’t really know that much.
Joke’s on me, it’s gonna be okay,
If I can just get through this lonesome day.

— Bruce Springsteen, “Lonesome Day,” The Rising

I Love NY

Sonnet XVII - Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

For my money, this is one of the greatest love poems ever written. In a perfect world, everyone would get a chance at least once in their life to read this poem to someone and really mean it as their own words, and for that someone to hear it, believe it, and feel the same way. And even more to the point, I’ve heard that Neruda wrote this poem to his wife. Perfect worlds aside, that should give pause even to the most hardened cynic about the possibilities for deep, passionate, lasting love within a lifelong relationship.

Well, we do not live in a perfect world, and many people do not get to read this poem in such a way, and many people who do read it have no business doing so. Like much of Neruda, the unblinking ferocity of its passion and the delicateness of its beauty have been appropriated by those who have no appreciation of its true power or value, like someone who steals a van Gogh and hangs it in their bathroom. Hopefully, I am not one of them when I suggest that this poem, with the object of its beloved unspecified, may help unlock what we mean when we claim to love New York.

“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off,” he begins. As beautiful as those things are (the perennial beauty of a red flower, the eternal beauty of a red precious stone, the fleeting beauty of sparks from a fire), as popular as they are as metaphors for love, they have nothing to do with what he feels for her. Those are all things that are superficially beautiful, easily recognized and appreciated by any who gazes upon them. Any idiot can appreciate the beauty of a blossoming flower; his love is far more profound, far more intimate, far more rare: “I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.” It is a deeply knowing love, a love that knows and treasures what the casual gaze of the world never gets to see, indeed could never see because it cannot be known outside of the relationship.

It is also, ultimately, a mysterious love, an inexplicable one. What plant never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers? What certain solid fragrance is he talking about? What exactly is the place between the shadow and the soul? None of it really makes sense. Which, of course, is the point: “I love you without knowing how, or why, or from where.” We spend so much time trying to quantify love, classify it, evaluate it, deconstruct it, test it. But love is not a theorem that can be proven, nor an argument that can be won. Love is either real, or it is not. And its reality can never defined or explained, but simply known and experienced.

There are lots of outward things to appreciate about New York: its energy; its size; its cultural depth and breadth and diversity; its history; its power; its unique opportunities. We may greatly appreciate and value those things; they may even be the things that initially drew us to New York and first excited us about it, like the first flushes of desire and infatuation in a budding relationship. But they are not reasons that explain our love for it; reasons are never enough, and there are always good reasons not to love (it’s crowded/dirty/inconvenient/expensive…).

Our love is much simpler and straightforward than that. We love because it is the only thing we can do; our love itself becomes part of who we are: “I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you…” The city, in a very real way, becomes a part of us, to the point where we no longer think of ourselves in purely individual terms, but as part of a larger intertwined whole without ever losing our individuality.

I have lived in this city for over a decade, and while that relationship has had its ups and downs, I have never once desired to leave (though I have had some good reasons to do so), never once grown tired or indifferent to its hidden beauty, never felt unappreciated or that I did not belong or that I did not have something to offer, and never been able to adequately explain why that is so. All I know is that, in a very real way, I would not be me without this city, and I don’t want to be.

The city has been the witness and companion and partner in my life that has been with me and for me in my greatest joys and heartaches, hopes and disappointments. No, it does not replace having what Neruda himself had in terms of a person with whom to truly share your life and being. But it is still, undeniably, a loving relationship. And perhaps I know that to be true the most because I don’t seem to be able to explain exactly how, or when, or from where it is so. I just know that it is.