There Will Be No More Beautiful Days, or, 9/11 on a Platter

I think that sounds like a diner breakfast order, two strips of crispy bacon and a side of (h)ash.

I was thinking I would write down my personal reflections of the event here, as it seems to be what everybody else is doing today. but I don't think I really want to take the time to narrate the complexities of my immediate reaction and activities nor my reflections since then on those events. So I'll bullet point it:

• I was in Boston. I had gotten to work a half hour early and was spending the time surfing the net. The last site I would visit before getting down to work was CNN. Right as I loaded the CNN homepage it was maybe 9:05 and the headline read: "Second Plane Hits World Trade Center". Such a statement really takes a moment to digest, you know what I mean? I remember reading the headline outloud to a coworker who had just walked in, kind of in a "get a load of this" tone. And then the internet froze and we turned on the radio.
• The towers fell while I was on the train ride home after they called for the voluntary evacuation of downtown Boston.
• I spent the rest of the day with my then-wife and my friend Jonathan. We ordered pizza in, drank beer, and watched tv for the rest of the day.
• Two weeks previous I had finished a small artists' book concerning Aberfan, Wales*. Afterwards the book was interpreted as a comment on 9/11, the Bush government, and the war in Aghanistan.
• Aberfan, a long standing interest of mine, reawakened my interest in plane crashes, and September 10th I had spent a few hours reading cockpit and control tower transcripts of air disasters.
• Thankfully, none of my friends or even seceondary or tertiary acquaintances were hurt or in the area that day, though many watched from their rooftops. My friend Chris, as always, had a similar emotional reaction to mine (though he works through those reactions in a different way.) The reaction was that despite the horror, it was also beautiful, though the horrific aspect would prevent us from ever describing it that way; it was the closest any of us might ever get to a thing truly sublime.

And that's all I will say on that. Except for this statement. Having lived in new York for seven years before going to Boston, I had lived through a few, a very few, perfect days like 9/11. Air that was crystaline clear, with a cool breeze and no clouds. All of Manhattan spread out with absolute clarity, devoid of atmospheric perspective. I don't know I have seen one since.

* Aberfan is a town in Wales that was the site of a mining disaster. The town was at the base of hills below the coal mine. Over decades of excavation, the mine had produced a gigantic amount of slag which had also been heaped above the town. One day, the slag fell down, buried a goodly part of the town including, most horrendously, a grammar school where many of the miners' children went. See: Aberfan

For me, Aberfan is emblematic of situations where our most noble and well-intentioned efforts (in this case making a living and supporting our families) backfire in the worst way, inflicting pain and suffering on ourselves and those we strove to protect or support. The secondary irony is that the rescuers were the town's miners, people trained and experienced in digging and excavating, yet when a moment came when their own children were buried beneath rubble, they were shown to be utterly powerless. The book I made, Angels to Aberfan, was a continuation of a line of thought and mode of representing Aberfan I had begun in college and had only just returned to in 2001. It utilized images of spaceships ("angels") that I had first drawn in kindergarten and first grade.

Two days after 9/11 and back at work, I went to a public church memorial on my lunch break. There, the pastor quoted the same Biblical text as was used in the main memorial service at Aberfan. I can't find the citation now, I believe it was the words of Paul.