September 20, 2001.
The contours of this feel so familiar. But if you were to do a transverse section of both disasters, 9-11 and the last 20 years of aids, they could not be more different. To walk around Downtown seeing that we had all entered that place now, together, was a strange, guilty comfort to me. And yet on Thursday when Uptown there were still women jaywalking on Madison Avenue with Prada bags, outfitting for the disaster. Pete Hamill on Charlie Rose last night speaking of a “golden parenthesis” in the US running from the end of the Cold War to 9-11. We are still such islanded beings.
Here again at the edge of the spectrum. I feel like I haven’t even begun to approach the last time we were here, a disaster behind. I went to Union Square yesterday and felt incapable of getting the correctly shaped emotions into the right spaces: I ended up leaving irritated, no tears, no catharsis, merely irritation. Not even anger. An autistic child attempting an IQ test. I am finding it impossible to write about this disaster but find I can now look more closely at the last one. The last time we were here I thought this, eventually:
In that room, with him as the center, prostrate or sitting and eating with distracted effort, with him appearing to shrink before my eyes, to diminish and desiccate until his skin is so dry that he can trim bits off his lips with a nail scissors, I begin to experience gaps in time. Something akin to delight will blow in like a draft, a teleological vertigo, a hope that in this hermetically sealed sick-room we are all careering through space and time toward something which we may be fortunate enough to glance up against if we are vigilant in our care of him. I see him being pulled by a malevolent vacuum through the sheet of our atmosphere, his astronaut feet disappearing last, as the tent of our world reforms around his exit denying that any disturbance has occurred.
I still think that if we are vigilant of each other and of ourselves that there is a privilege to living such times. The need to see friends. The comfort in the e-mails and phone calls from friends not in the city; netting us together. Working briefly in the service industry in Manhattan made me deeply sad. I regularly saw people treating each other with such disregard. If only for a brief time, it is comforting to see that disregard missing. Missing. That was what struck me most about Union Square, the word “missing” on the pictures of lost loved ones. That is the word that begins to let me walk into the space where I can be dispossessed of everything.
I also experience dislocated emotions when at the Union Square memorial. One day I went there and donated my work gloves, a hard hat and some batteries. There was a tangible purpose to that visit which felt OK. I've been pretty out of touch with anything but depression. I can't write. What comfort tobacco provided last week is gone. I keep thinking of DW and what this would mean to him.
Last night Diti, Marybeth, Jim and I walked to Greenwich and Duane, the pile looked to me to be about 100' high.
I think DW would have made a great deal of it. Part of the beauty of his talent was his ability to process it all on the run, head on, no assimilation required. A sort of revved up creative metabolism, part of it out of necessity. The rest of us will just have indigestion for years.
Yes, he did process things very quickly and did so constantly, but you do too I think. I'd say that You, David and Mr. Wilson are the most prodigious processers I've known. Maybe such an act of rage would have left David more conflicted than the rest of us.
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The contours of this feel so familiar. But if you were to do a transverse section of both disasters, 9-11 and the last 20 years of aids, they could not be more different. To walk around Downtown seeing that we had all entered that place now, together, was a strange, guilty comfort to me. And yet on Thursday when Uptown there were still women jaywalking on Madison Avenue with Prada bags, outfitting for the disaster. Pete Hamill on Charlie Rose last night speaking of a “golden parenthesis” in the US running from the end of the Cold War to 9-11. We are still such islanded beings.
Here again at the edge of the spectrum. I feel like I haven’t even begun to approach the last time we were here, a disaster behind. I went to Union Square yesterday and felt incapable of getting the correctly shaped emotions into the right spaces: I ended up leaving irritated, no tears, no catharsis, merely irritation. Not even anger. An autistic child attempting an IQ test. I am finding it impossible to write about this disaster but find I can now look more closely at the last one. The last time we were here I thought this, eventually:
In that room, with him as the center, prostrate or sitting and eating with distracted effort, with him appearing to shrink before my eyes, to diminish and desiccate until his skin is so dry that he can trim bits off his lips with a nail scissors, I begin to experience gaps in time. Something akin to delight will blow in like a draft, a teleological vertigo, a hope that in this hermetically sealed sick-room we are all careering through space and time toward something which we may be fortunate enough to glance up against if we are vigilant in our care of him. I see him being pulled by a malevolent vacuum through the sheet of our atmosphere, his astronaut feet disappearing last, as the tent of our world reforms around his exit denying that any disturbance has occurred.
I still think that if we are vigilant of each other and of ourselves that there is a privilege to living such times. The need to see friends. The comfort in the e-mails and phone calls from friends not in the city; netting us together. Working briefly in the service industry in Manhattan made me deeply sad. I regularly saw people treating each other with such disregard. If only for a brief time, it is comforting to see that disregard missing. Missing. That was what struck me most about Union Square, the word “missing” on the pictures of lost loved ones. That is the word that begins to let me walk into the space where I can be dispossessed of everything.
- rachael 9-20-2001 6:01 pm
I also experience dislocated emotions when at the Union Square memorial. One day I went there and donated my work gloves, a hard hat and some batteries. There was a tangible purpose to that visit which felt OK. I've been pretty out of touch with anything but depression. I can't write. What comfort tobacco provided last week is gone. I keep thinking of DW and what this would mean to him.
Last night Diti, Marybeth, Jim and I walked to Greenwich and Duane, the pile looked to me to be about 100' high.
- steve 9-20-2001 8:00 pm [add a comment]
rachael thank you for sharing that--steve whats DW
- Skinny 9-21-2001 7:29 am [add a comment]
David Wojnarowicz
- steve 9-21-2001 6:17 pm [add a comment]
I think DW would have made a great deal of it. Part of the beauty of his talent was his ability to process it all on the run, head on, no assimilation required. A sort of revved up creative metabolism, part of it out of necessity. The rest of us will just have indigestion for years.
- rachael 9-22-2001 4:35 pm [add a comment]
Yes, he did process things very quickly and did so constantly, but you do too I think. I'd say that You, David and Mr. Wilson are the most prodigious processers I've known. Maybe such an act of rage would have left David more conflicted than the rest of us.
- steve 9-22-2001 11:08 pm [add a comment]