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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)
September 7, 2001
"Right now this plastic skirt is frying my butt."
Thank you, New York woman, for your weather forecast.
August 30, 2001
Today I am in awe of the painkiller. I took two and was again amazed at their efficacy. They take away the pain. Something in me resists their easy cure, but when I fold to their charms I feel like lighting a candle, singing a chorus, skipping a little. I’m just talking your basic advil at this point. Not even the killer painkillers, the percoset, the percodan, the demerol. When there has been discomfort, for who is to say it was really pain, and the body is cleared of that discomfort, the whole being feels polished. Every pain brings a great love of that part when the pain goes away; to feel it fresh again without pain makes that part seem limitless in its beauty and efficiency.
Initially I blamed Bob Dylan. I went to hear him play in a GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) pitch in Kilkenny on my last day in Ireland this summer. I went up to the front to see what this creature looked like close up now that he is sixty. It was very loud. I couldn’t hear in one ear the next day and then I got on a plane to New York. I couldn’t hear properly in that ear for weeks. And then it went away and I could hear again and hearing with two ears was miraculous. But it wasn’t Bob Dylan, I can’t blame him for my temporary deafness in one ear, nor for the strange sensation that remained, the conviction that there is something amiss with the lower half of my face. They have a term for it, but I’m less interested in the term than in the fact that I just can’t seem to take my jaw for granted any more now that it has this odd malaise. Apparently I have been gnashing my teeth (isn’t that supposed to be reserved for hell along with wailing?) at night, which leaves the teeth and the muscles of the jaw irritated. All day long I wonder what to do with my jaw. Where should it sit? I don’t know where it belongs on my face any more. It may detach and fly through the air, liberated from its uncomfortable socket. A bloody but relieved comet. I feel like Dora Maar after Picasso got at her—reluctantly Cubist. I would happily bandage my jaw to my head like one of those cartoon toothache sufferers; I have the odd, and apparently incorrect conviction, that this would help. My friend Kate, who had the same problem, says you have to keep the lips together, the teeth apart. Advice when very young on how to give a decent blow job and advice on how to deal with TMJ when middle aged appear to be the same. Meanwhile, I’m going to take another two advil and marvel at how it feels to have a face. Incidentally, Bob Dylan at sixty viewed from where I was standing on the Kilkenny GAA pitch is a reassuring mixture of the ancient and the ageless. A ravaged boy.
August 29, 2001
A letter from my father:
“Mature Summer has arrived, a sense—almost—of youth departed. Now we slide down towards September. I am more acutely aware of the passing seasons as I get older. More acutely aware, too, of the passage of time. Perhaps like some bird species we should reverse continents, exchange one hemisphere for another. Arrive in Australia for Spring! Love from Dad.
The proclivity for purple prose, his obsession with the seasons (note capitalization), the reminder of his chronic SAD (seasonally affected disorder)—the DNA, it will get you in the end as well as the beginning. But beyond the juvenile reaction to one’s own blood, it seems like a pretty good idea: Australia for winter.
Unbeknownst to him I had spent some hours surfing—surfing seems too elegant a term for what is involved in the search for information with my computer and modem—staggering about the web, regarding light therapy devices. For about $300 it appears that you might be able to convince yourself that you are in Australia for the winter by staring at a special lamp for half an hour every morning. The hope being that the attendant winter mood troughs can be avoided. Sounds like a bargain.