9/11: in memorium

“Give not over thy soul to sorrow; and afflict not thyself in thy own counsel. Gladness of heart is the life of man and the joyfulness of man is length of days.”

– Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus 21.

“If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.”

– Chinese Proverb

Last night as I was walking to dinner, I thought of this morning, 20 years ago.

Every beautiful September sky returns me to the morning of September 11, 2001. Every time I look up, among the flags of blue and the banners of white cumulus, I think of that day. Every time I look up at towering man-made construction, I see their beauty and their vulnerability. I think endlessly of that day. It shall remain that way for the walk of my life.

That morning was breathtaking. An inspired hopeful morning, with blue streaming across the Eastern seaboard. Only later would we, an entire nation and world, would we lose our intrinsic hope, earnestness and innocence. At least for a while.

I remember later, when the buildings fell amid a crush of chaos and crumbling commotion, my heart and head lost, trying to understand. I was 36 years old.

For the remainder of the day, I spent stunned, watching and thinking and processing history, from the theatre of our lives, collide and stretch before me. It felt both surreal and inevitable. As a child in Asia, during the Vietnam War, and later as a young reader I. America, I’d hunger force History, to participate in it by hat day it was impossible. Both unreal and prosaic, simultaneously.

Throughout the day I watch the 2nd building fall, after watching the first fall on television at work. I sat in near silence with my father watching cnn, and later when the second tower fell, calling frankly friends and family in nyc, emailing a friends mother in Ukraine as she panicked uncontrollably, as her son worked in the North tower. Word sped faster than our thoughts. The world was stunned, collective shock and fear and individual meaning vaporizing.

My friend Yevgeni, was a photographer in NY who worked as a stock trader. we had met on a Russian photographer website and then later more on Lightstalkers. Later, we drank together in my andvtalk abiut film, cinema, photography, Platonov and her mother’s cooking. The stuffed ingredients of friendship.

By 2:00 pm, the entire day oiling awayand later over the following days, many of us were focused on Yevgeni and the search fir him, just as much of New York was in search of list loved ones.

He was never found.

He was among the 2,606 killed that day, including 343 of the nyfd and 71 nypd

Numbers

But I lost a friend that day and my own youth.

I knew 3 others who died. And later I became friends with my dear friend Marc Davidson whose father died on that morning as well. A father, husband, son and grandfather.

8 years later, Marc had his remarkable photo essay on his father published in BURN magazine. Artifacts

He asked me to write the essay accompanying his photographs. . It was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to write. Consumed for weeks I didn’t know what to write or how to write it. Then one late night, I was reading John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. I wrote the essay in a single sitting with a bottle of wine.

Partially about my friends remarkable project, partially about my own grief over Yevgeni’s death, partially a reexamination of myself and the world, it seemed as I had poured 7 years of thinking into the writing. Long and rambling, it was meant to honour that day and the lives lost. I do not know if it did that.

Have we learned anything 20 years later? It feels as if we’ve grown worse, having learned very little.

We grow old, we grow old, our hearts corners are worn rolled.

Have I learned anything, even now when so many of my students were not even born before 2001 and many do not even know what the numbers 9/11 stand for. Many have no idea and more importantly don’t even seem to care. This moment, that can not be encapsulated in Twitter or Instagram. What do THEY think of now as so many of. Y students don’t even seem to focus on Covid, let alone the acts of 20 years ago or a war spread over nations and continents. Have I grown weary. I come from a nation that elected a faithless President in 2016 and again now under the leadership of a nation recalcitrant in its stubbornness.

We grow old.

As for my students, is not their fault

I often feel it is our fault, my generation and the generation before me, that we continued a war for 20 years that has cost millions of lives, millions. Process that. Mother’s still bury their daughters and sons every day, civilian and military. Every god damn day, without surcease. Without end.

Is this the way to honour?

It so often feels to me that man, men, and often older men, take into their destructive minds, a simple lesson: exterminate eliminate excavate.

Are we not better, more loving and faithful?

On most days, I believe we are. I must believe this. On other days, I feel we’ve lost, forever, the sight and scent of those green boughs amid the clutter of our lives. FB, Twitter, IG, politics, hatred, ignorance, fear above life.

Can we not see this.

I for one am no longer interested nor can I abide by their thinking. The blindness on inscrutable ignorance. People divide over power and belief, over science and voodoo, over land and hegemony. Enough.

The world is filled with enough attendant grief.

Will we ever see the green bough again.

Alas, spring shall return.

I look at these beautiful September skies, as I do every year, renewed. The light demands it. The air demands it. Our children and parents demand it my son demands it. The dead demand it, the dead in nyc, the dead in Pennsylvania, the dead in Washington, the dead in Afghanistan , the dead in Iraq, the dead in Syria and now the world over, all connected to a time and a principle long ago and almost certainly forgotten.

But for me, this day will always be the day Evgeni died and his father screamed out in terror and grief. And I will never forget that, not ever. How many mothers the world over continue to bury their families. How have we lost sight of this.

My dear friend, the remarkable writer and photographer Jon Anderson, would have shared my grief and outrage. He was a man of depth and courage and probity. Alas, he is not here to write about that day. He died of a lung disease and complications, like many others, from the asbestos from the rumble of the towers as he had raced their from uptown to photograph and spent much of the next week photographing. A mother horrific subtraction and consequence. He left behind a teen daughter and wife.

I miss Jon immensely.

May I go the remainder of my life with the same love filled heart as both of their lives contained, in the way I try to conduct my own life, one already having been spared a few times.

May we all live in honour of All the lives the world over lost in the shadow of the dire momentum of unreason. May we abide love and forgiveness and not enmity or disgrace.

May we allow others to live and to live and to be, continuing.

This is not such a difficult choice or act

With love. With grace. Renewed.

Alas Spring shall return and renew as it does eternally.

However, shall we?

I promise you this : I will.

With love and hope, again. It is my duty

What is your?