|
The Times of our lives
I was alerted to Tuesday’s cataclysm by an e-mail, saw the towers disintegrate on NY 1. In my apartment some two miles north of the epicenter, I sat riveted to the television as the day’s grim events proceeded. I was awash in electronic information, in graphic images of destruction, and all day I kept thinking: I won’t be able to make any sense of this until I read the newspapers. On Wednesday, I bolted awake at about 7 A.M. and looked outside my door: a blank expanse of hallway. No papers had been delivered. I went out to my local newsstand, and then to a couple of others: no papers. Delayed by the disruption? But on such a day, wouldn’t the press be all the more desperate to get through to readers? Finally I understood that my neighborhood had been cordoned off. Evidently newspaper trucks had not qualified as emergency vehicles; after all, it was not as if we needed them to find out what was happening. And yet I felt slightly panicky. I started walking uptown. I found the Post on 13th Street and by the time I got to midtown had gotten hold of the News, the Wall Street Journal, and the NY Observer. But the Times, it seemed, was everywhere sold out. The subway was working, so I rode up to 86th street, hoping I wouldn’t have a problem getting back home. Mirabile, a Times truck had just arrived and I stood in a long line, waiting for deliverance. What was behind my obsession? Denial, focusing on a small problem I could do something about? That was part of the story, no doubt, but not all. The rest has to do with the role of the written word in memory and history. The images I saw on TV will resonate forever in my brain and in the national life, but I can remember little of what was said -- it all felt like filler, accompaniment. As a writer I have a particular professional relationship with language; yet I am speaking also as a political person, needing to find my place in a public conversation about what to do. To be able to read and mull over the words on paper (the headlines, the various narratives as they are being pieced together by reporters, the eyewitness accounts, the early attempts at commentary-glimmers of insight and shafts of demagogy in a great cloud of anguish, confusion, bombast); to be able to see it all side by side, compare different versions, keep it to refer to when I need it -- this, for me, is the beginning of taking the measure of an outsized event and groping toward the understanding that makes intelligent action possible. The stack of newspapers now cluttering my floor is a kind of fossil record of themes beginning to take shape and put down tracks: terrorism has burst its boundaries to become the face of 21st century warfare; things will never be the same; our security and intelligence are abysmal; we can’t afford civil liberties now; we can’t afford to abrogate civil liberties now; we know what we need to know and must retaliate massively and quickly; not so fast, it’s a complex situation and we need to respond with reason, not hysteria; we must unite behind our commander-in-chief (large, ubiquitous footprints); the guy looks like a scared mouse and came to New York much too late (a few pointed quotes from rescue workers). There are gaps, of course. Those first few days I could find no mention in the papers of our own role in the Taliban’s coming to power. Nor did they remark on the discomfort some of us might feel about having Wednesday declared a national day of prayer (though now that Jerry Falwell has opened his big mouth and suggested that America is being punished by God for modernity and secularism, perhaps the question of religious fundamentalism at home will be open for discussion). For such subjects, the Internet and the radio were the media of choice. It’s not big news, as they say, that there’s much the mainstream papers won’t and can’t do: much of my own cultural criticism is an extended complaint about this. Yet I need my stack. I look at the front page of my morning-after Times and all the chaotic texture of those unbelieving moments and hours comes back, there to be recollected and deconstructed in (relative) tranquility as I decide what to do or write next. Electronic images are another matter entirely: the more I see that awful clip of the second plane slicing through its target, the more surreal and less intelligible it becomes.
Ellen Willis is director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism concentration in the graduate program at NYU’s Department of Journalism. A former columnist and senior editor for the Village Voice and pop music critic for The New Yorker, she is the author of No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays and Don’t Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial.
|
|