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September 27, 2001
My favorite part of the day is later than it used to be.
By ten p.m. I am almost convinced of a life.
As if the functions misfire all day and then hit their stride as bed looms.
Don’t get me wrong; I love bed.
My encouragement to myself daily, to leave that place, rests on the logic that if you don’t leave it you can’t get back into it.
But there is peace, or a sense of it now, here at the desk: no phone, the vehicle soundtrack muffled.
Scanning an article on James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín I read:
“He found odd jobs and then lost them, washing dishes, working as an elevator boy. He drank, he had casual affairs, he suffered a number of nervous crises.”
What reassurance biography becomes.
Today, I saw a completely naked man in Soho.
Neanderthal in Soho. Between two cars.
So in place.
September 23, 2001
Yesterday, hot but beautiful, found me eating Mexican food at a sidewalk table on 8th street, thinking that I really might be in Los Angeles. A glass of beer lulls me into survivor’s gloat; here we are again, alive, enjoying the day. Again it is remarkable to be alive. The people at the tables around me seem oblivious to the light, the trees, the birds. A niece is being irritated by her aunt who is critical of her eyebrow do: “too fluffy...too bleached...I used to shave mine off...do you wax or pluck?” A foursome of tourists is being bullied by the alpha male of the expedition who has apparently lived, albeit briefly, in the city and insists on guiding them to Midtown on the subway for their Broadway musical. The other male of the foursome makes a dive for a cab as they leave the restaurant. Alpha Male explains the “off duty” sign to Nervous Male and they head for the subway at Astor Place, their wives uninvolved in the primordial struggle. The women discuss how age has sapped their faces, particularly the lips, of all color. They apply red lipstick, a little too orange in hue, and submit to their guide. Nervous Male follows a few paces behind the trio.
That brief moment of community that appeared after the disaster seems diminished, replaced by irritation. My own irritation seems to have gone. I feel a strange calm and a renewed vigor for life. I meet Gabrielle, the chef of Prune, at the Farmer’s Market. She is eating a raw green bean: “These are really over.” She says that the days following the disaster, before 14th street was re-opened, were glorious days. The customers delighted and delightful. By Friday they were saying: “I don’t like any of these white wines.” She had resolved to work less.
Mainstream media is making me mad. Took some comfort this evening from the Vollman piece Dave posted, and on TV from BET's (Black Entertainment) coverage and also Gay USA, Channel 35. Different notes being sounded.
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.
September 11, 2001
"Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking - and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone. Generosity of the disaster. There death, and life are always surpassed."
"The Writing of the Disaster" by Maurice Blanchot (translated by Ann Smock)