15 Years Later

It will go down as one of those moments everyone talks about until almost a century has passed. It falls in line with some of those other pivotal moments in our history: the attack on Pearl Harbor; the assassination of Pres. Kennedy; and now, 9/11. I was at work in my temporary office because my department was undergoing renovations. My co-worker and friend AK called me in tears from home; she had not come in because of a migraine. We all started looking up news sites on the Web, and we turned on TVs in our various departments. We watched in horror as the rest of America did, at the footage of the airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers, as well as the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and then watched in disbelief and in tears as we watched as the Towers fell. It was incomprehensible how any of this could have happened, and in some ways we probably all still wonder how it was even possible. 15 years later...we have moved on and we know that nothing has been the same ever since. I still feel as if there was a wave or rupture in the time-space continuum on that day. People say we lost our innocence. This is true. But we also realized our own mortality on a global scale, but both for bad and good reasons. Despite the tragedy we came together and we supported one another across the world. We got through it. Because, despite all the pain and anguish we may go through in our lives, we prevail and we move on. It is the human spirit to move on. But we do not forget and we ache again and again as we remember those who perished on that day, unwilling victims of a terrorist massacre and willing heroes who rushed to their aid knowing they themselves may not survive.

On that day all those years ago, a state of emergency was called across the nation. I was still living in Florida, and it was my job to oversee building security and related issues at the FAU Library. I announced over the PA system, calmly, that the library and campus was closing, that the governor had declared a state of emergency. People were confused, some not even aware what had happened, but we emptied the library and vacated the campus, and then with frustration sat in traffic for over two hours trying to get home. But once we were there, we sat and stared at our TVs non-stop, tears in our eyes for days to come. For us in that area the next few days and weeks held other surprises for us. The terrorists had been living in Coral Springs, less than 15 minutes away from where I lived. Even more shocking, they had used our library and our computers in Boca Raton and they may have plotted some of this attack right in front of our very eyes, and we had had no idea. Innocence indeed.

Reflecting back on those days, it seems surreal, not just because of all the events that unfolded that day and afterward, but because since then, 15 years have passed, and I am stunned into silence to think about everything that has happened in my own life since then. I have experienced great sadness and painful death more raw and more personal than I did when I grieved on September 11, 2001. But I have also experienced incredible love and true companionship, and I have accomplished many personal triumphs along the way. It is true: we do prevail, we do move on. As it should be. With death comes life; with tragedy comes hope; with destruction, rebirth.

It was five years ago that I visited the 9/11 memorial fountains that had just opened. This morning AA and I went down to the waterfront along the Hudson River in Jersey City for a walk. We knew it was 9/11 and that anniversary events would be taking place. But somehow it didn't occur to us that events would be happening here in JC as well, so we stumbled on the beginning of these events and spent time with many others commemorating this day. I took the photos you see here. The image above shows the Freedom Tower in the center distance while the memorial ceremony took place before us. We are literally right across from where the Twin Towers once stood, their presence replaced by this single tower of rebirth and renewal, their invisible presence still felt by all those who remember the old skyline. The second picture you see here was at the other end of the avenue, where two firetrucks raised their ladders to unfurl this enormous American flag, which blew in the wind and reminded us of our strength and how we have survived, rebuilt, and moved on. But still we do not forget, and as we are home now and on TV downstairs they read the names of the victims once again, we know that all of these poor souls will not be forgotten. Similarly, all the victims of other terrorist attacks around the world will not be forgotten, from the attacks in Paris to the massacre in Orlando. It is our human spirit to commemorate and remember, but it is also in their memory that we must go on.

In the end, today for me is about life and living. This is a day to honor and remember all those we have lost throughout history and time, due to warfare, hatred, anger, sickness, poverty, famine, illness, accident, and natural causes. I struggle when I hear others perpetuate anger and hatred and fear and judgment, because at my core I am a pacifist. So today I try to focus instead on remembrance and honor, a day to commemorate all those we have lost in the spirit of humanity, love, and peace.

9/11 Memorial

I've had a busy week, so it's only now that I'm able to talk about the 9/11 Memorial, which I was very fortunate to have visited with my friend JF this past Tuesday evening, two days after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  When the memorial first opened this past Sunday, it was for family members of the victims, but it is now open to the public with time-reserved tickets for which one makes a donation.  You can click here to reserve your ticket, but right now as I'm writing this post there are no tickets available until the evening of November 28.  I won't go into details here about all the information you would want to know about the the project itself because all of that is discussed on the 9/11 Memorial website.

The memorial encompasses eight acres of the World Trade Center site and was designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, who were selected after an international design competition was held.  You enter the site through a circuitous route that includes an airport-like security checkpoint, employees and NYPD officers continuously monitoring the activity of those waiting to enter and checking tickets frequently along the way.  Once you enter the site, it strikes you as being largely an urban green space.  The ground is laid with stone and there are swamp white oak trees everywhere.  As of right now, they are still young trees, but as they grow they will create a beautiful canopy of leaves that will provide a lot of shade and rustle in the wind in a way that adds to the overall serenity of the plaza.  Framing the two pools are bronze plaques on which appear the names of all of the victims.  The names are stenciled through the bronze rather than engraved into the surface.  Their names themselves commemorate their memory, but the empty space in the letters of their names also suggests their eternal spectral presence at the place where they died. As night falls the names glow from an interior light source that makes their absence more uncannily present.

The North and South Pools themselves are nearly 1 acre each in size and are situated where the actual twin towers themselves stood.  They are enormous in size.  Pictures such as these that I took do not begin to do the pools justice in terms of understanding how large they are.  You truly do have to experience them first-hand.  They are the largest man-made waterfalls in the U.S., and they are quite beautiful.  We're so used to memorials being statues or monuments that occupy our space, objects at which we look up and around, that to see these as waterfalls reaching downward into the Earth is disconcerting at first.  And yet the invisible presence of the towers themselves remains before you, since you cannot enter the space itself, and they still become a three-dimensional object occupying the visitor's space.  Indeed, the entire 9/11 Memorial reflects presence and absence, in the names stenciled into the bronze, and in the way the waterfalls work.  The waterfalls are simply beautiful.  The sound of water truly has the power to soothe, and to watch the water fall is relaxing.  Like with the stenciled names, as night falls the waterfalls are illuminated and they take on a new sensibility in how they are appear.  The water itself pools toward the center, where an empty crater sucks in the water like a vortex.  Your eye cannot help but be dragged to that central point, and it's quite painful to look at it, because you cannot see where the water goes, and you know in your mind and heart what lies there and what it represents.  It is depressing, to say the least.  But at the same time, I said to JF that perhaps part of what we're meant to realize as well is that the emptiness, like in the Taoist/Zen Buddhist tradition, also can be seen as the source of life and new beginnings.  The air we breathe and the space between each one of us is incapable of being comprehended by our five senses, and yet without air/space, we cannot exist.  It is the pith of our vitality.  The craters then do represent the sense of loss and can be seen as death, but in much the same way that the towers still stand before us as invisible presence, so too are what they represent, symbols of healing and rebirth that reach heavenward like the towers of light that have been projected each year over the past decade.

Because the entire area surrounding the 9/11 Memorial is still under construction, there is a lot of noise surrounding the plaza, which unfortunately interferes with the serenity the memorial is meant to suggest.  Once the construction stops, however, it will be the place of peace it is meant to be.  Surrounded by office towers, including the so-called Freedom Tower that will be 1776 feet high when complete, the plaza runs the risk of turning into a picnic spot for workers at lunchtime.  It seems unlikely that they will be able to monitor the memorial plaza with timed tickets forever.  At some point it probably will open completely to the public, but that may be many years from now.  JF and I were also concerned that the ridiculous red, white, and blue lights and the gargantuan American flag on the under-construction tower put too much emphasis on the memorial as a patriotic space and thus detract from the true meaning of the memorial, which is spiritual, not nationalistic, in nature.

The most incongruous part of the memorial, however, has to be the museum they are constructing on the site.  The building itself is dynamic in its design (the picture here shows a view from the South Pool looking toward the museum), but as you get closer, looking through the glass-plate windows you can see remnants of the steel girders from the towers, calling out to the viewer like the guardians of a shrine.  Even worse, a 9/11 "gift shop" (I'm not sure what else you can call it) already has opened up outside the exit.  We walked in just to see what it was about, and I'm not joking when I tell you that I wanted to vomit.  I'm not sure what repulsed me more: the actual commercialization of this tragedy into a money-making opportunity, or the line of people waiting to purchase t-shirts and souvenir books. While I imagine people think they're supporting the memorial itself, the entire shopping experience--and by extension the museum itself when it opens--simply cheapens the entire sense of peace and serenity that the pools and plaza are meant to convey.  (Just reading about some parts of the design for the museum makes my skin crawl.)  As JF and I both said, it's simply too soon for a museum.  The memory of the events are too raw and too recent for everyone.  They should have waited a generation before embarking on a museum.

When all is said, however, the 9/11 Memorial itself truly is a beautiful, serene place.  Living in a concrete/steel/glass environment like we do here, having such a large space devoted to the memory of the victims of the attack, but also providing a place for rest and contemplation about life, is a progressive testament to the heart of NYC.  Like the tree leaves that will change color in the fall, die in the winter, and return in the spring, life does go on here in NYC, but now we have a spot where we can stop every once and awhile and think not only about life but how we want to live it.

(To see more of my pictures of the 9/11 Memorial, click here.  Note that I own copyright on these photos. You may use them for personal interest or educational purposes, but please credit me, Roberto C. Ferrari, as the photographer and provide a link back to bklynbiblio or the Picasa collection itself.  Thanks.)

Review: New York

Over the past year and a half, I have been watching on DVD one of the best documentary series ever: New York: A Documentary Film. Directed by Ric Burns, this documentary premiered on PBS in 1999, encompassing 14 hours of the history of this city, from its early days as a Dutch colony up to contemporary history. Filled with art work, archival photographs, and early film footage, the visuals of this documentary are supplemented by interviews with so many New York "experts," from former mayors and reporters at The New York Times, to historians and urban planners. The only reason why it has taken me so long to watch the series is because there is a lot to process in each episode as far as factual, social, economic, and political histories, that it really does make you want to think about how New York has evolved into one of the greatest cities in the world. Some of the highlights of the documentary for me included: the initial growth of the city above Wall Street (it was, quite literally, a wall at one time to keep the Indians away from the Dutch settlers); the city's early history as the nation's first capital; the construction of the Erie Canal and how it made the city the economic center of the United States; the story of Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge; the building of the first skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building; Robert Moses and the effect of urban planning with automobiles in mind (the result of which I can hear right now outside my window, as my apartment overlooks a section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway!); the Great Depression; immigration and racial tensions; the Harlem Renaissance.... As you can see, I could go on and on. But if I had to sum up the one lesson I've learned about this amazing documentary, it is that New York has always been a commercial city first, and in that mindset, it is a city that has always made a habit of tearing down and rebuilding. It is, in that sense, one of the most forward-thinking cities in the world. As a result, it has lost historic neighborhoods and beautiful buildings, but somehow it still manages to move forward and redefine itself over and over. The main documentary premiered in 1999 with seven episodes. One of the interesting things about it is that there is a sense of naivete in many of the interviews and in the perception of New York's centrality in the world. I don't think this innocence was obvious at the time, but seeing the documentary after 9/11, it is striking how New York (and the United States) lived such a very carefree existence. The events of 9/11 changed this city probably more so than any other. As a result, Ric Burns and his team got together and did a followup sequel of another two hours that discusses the World Trade Center from its inception in the 1960s all the way through the events of 9/11. This sequel acts as Part 8 of the documentary. I didn't think I would be as interested in the building's history, but as it turned out, it was an amazing coda to an already incredible story.

7 Years Later...

It seems only appropriate that I say something about 9/11 on the seventh anniversary of that tragic day. The above image has become an iconic memorial for all of us who remember that day. (This particular photo was taken by Derek Jensen and was kindly issued in the public domain by him through Wikimedia Commons.)

This morning while eating breakfast, every news station was reporting on the memorial services being held near Ground Zero. I was living near Boca Raton, FL when the tragedy took place. The events happened in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, but the tragedy was global and we were affected by the implications of it as well. Governor Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency and reflection, and everything was shut down for the day. Surprisingly, it came out afterwards that some of the highjackers had been living in a neighborhood about a 10-minute drive away from my own home.

It's amazing to think how many years ago all that was. Yet, somehow it still seems so real and new. That's the funny thing about time--it is immeasurable. Chronos can fool you into forgetting how long or how short the amount of time has passed. I visited NYC shortly after the incident, and I can attest to the eerie spiritual presence that could be felt in the area. The energy of the living and deceased penetrated the air all around. Sadly, that didn't stop hawkers from trying to sell picture books and postcards of the falling towers amidst the streams of makeshift memorials along the way.

Watching the grief on the faces of so many of the people on television this morning, I was struck by how many of them still need to visit the WTC site, to actually be in the place where their loved ones were killed. It's as if they still need to connect to that place, that moment in time, where and when their loved one died. For some people, visiting a cemetery might provide that solace. I go to the cemetery to visit my mother's grave everytime I'm back in Florida, but I do it for meditative purposes, not to "connect" with her. She resides in my mind, my memories and dreams being how I want to connect with her, not through a cemetery plot. Yet, for these people participating in the 9/11 memorial today, a cemetery can never be enough. The moment of death is more important to them, not the placement of the remains. For some, the remains of their loved ones were never recovered, and so this is their final resting place. No memorial site in suburban New Jersey or Connecticut can ever provide them with the solace they seek.

I've learned that grieving never ends, but it does get easier to live with as each day passes. It is my hope for the families and friends of the 9/11 victims that they are able to move beyond the shock of their own grief and eventually find solace in the lives of their loved ones, not in their deaths. For in the end, it is how we lived, not how we died, that matters most.