Place, Memory & Myth: Some Reflections on September 11th

Unless you resolutely avoid reading the news then it can hardly . have . escaped . your . attention that we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Since I was living in New York at the time of the attacks and watched the towers collapse from my roof in Brooklyn Heights, this is raising rather a lot of mixed emotions for me. I’ll not claim that what follows is a coherent accounting of my feelings as we approach this arbitrarily significant anniversary, but I have yet to come across any commentary that reflects how I felt on the day and in the weeks afterward, and how I feel about it now, looking back across the Atlantic from London.

As an initial caveat, I will say that I’m not going to even try to talk about the loss of life. I was lucky enough not to lose anyone in the attacks, and nothing I can write can possibly do justice to those who did. I just want to write about what this all means for me.

Place & Memory

Like many New Yorkers, for me the World Trade Centre was an unconscious landmark — not somewhere I spent a lot of time, because the plazas and concourses as public space were really quite inimical to lingering enjoyment — but something around which my life was figuratively and literally oriented. This is because the WTC signified ‘finance’, which remains an essential part of New York’s economy, and because it also signified a direction of travel. You could emerge from nearly any subway station in the city and instantly orient yourself by noting whether the towers were South, West, or North of you. I suppose it worked to the East as well, but that would imply that I was spending time in Jersey, which is hardly something to which a true New Yorker would admit.

As a New York resident you didn’t really think about using the place as a landmark, but in a very Lynchian sense it helped you to make sense of the rest of the city and the many spatial relationships within it. So when the towers collapsed it wasn’t disorienting solely because of the loss of life or, more selfishly, because of the disruption to our blissfully inward-focussed world view, but also because a reference point… the reference point… in our mental maps had been erased. The World Trade Centre was omnipresent in a way that no London landmark is, and every time I got out of the subway after that day I was just that little bit disoriented. That little bit lost. Or as Art Spiegelman put it, I was now living In the Shadow of No Towers.

I’ve also realised recently that no one — especially not the overseas reporters looking back 10 years now — writes about the smell of the towers after their collapse. From the ‘anniversary’ issues all you seem to get is the striking images of the day, but the towers continued to burn for months after September 11th. The first two days were so dark with ash from the towers that night came hours early and the smell of burning paper, plastic, steel, and concrete was nauseating. Over the next few weeks the plume from the site often floated over my flat in Brooklyn, so it was a constant background for those of us who lived through it. In a way, its constant presence in my life was the complementary inverse of the missing towers — a reminder of just how truly massive the loss of life was and just how unimaginably hellish it must have been to be trapped inside.

I no longer have to ‘see the absence’ of the towers from my life, but the smells and sounds that I associate with those days are unavoidable and unpredictable in their effect on me… Sometimes the smell of a burning or burned out building is nothing more than a ‘local interest’ story for my brain, but sometimes it takes me right back to September 2001 in an instant. And the memories of that time are vivid in a way that only my childhood memories usually are. I feel them in my body. My mind and body briefly go their separate ways — I’m aware of what I’m experiencing but I’m also experiencing it in a temporarily total way. If that’s how it is for me — little more than a bystander– after ten years, then I can sure as heck understand why some people who were much more closely involved in the aftermath of the attacks have had to leave New York for good. I can’t fathom what hell we’ve thrown our military men and women into.

Place & Myth

The raw, in-my-body-ness of this experience is what makes it so hard for me to see its particularity transformed into a mythology of national, or even global proportions. Because we have to face the fact that that is what it has become. This is a date whose places and consequences will always be Capitalised — 9/11, Ground Zero, The Heroes, The War On Terror, With Us or Against Us, Mission Accomplished… The risk we run in making a myth out of September 11th is that we elevate both the attacks and the response to something more than murderous rage. It wasn’t some 3,000 individual human beings who were attacked. It was America. It was Democracy. It was the West.

The myth of ’9/11′ elevates Al-Qaeda’s operatives from fanatical, hypocritical murderers to devout freedom fighters. And the myth enables us to  justify retaliation by giving us a simple, mythic narrative around which to organise our fears: Al-Qaeda struck at the ‘heart of America’, and so we must strike back. In the myth, killing them will mean that good triumphs over evil. Killing them and marking this day 10 years later will mean that we can bring ‘closure’ the country and all move on. The problem is that if they are evil then we don’t need to actually wrestle with what it means that an individual human being — a man, a father, a husband, a man of faith… — is capable of such horrors. The problem is that closure doesn’t really exist for someone who has lost a father, son, wife, or daughter in the attacks… Speaking purely for myself, for me there will always be before and after, and the fact that it was 10 years ago (just about) today is irrelevant because I will always carrying that day with me. Instead, the myth (of closure, of evil men, and of victory of them) allows everyone else to move on to the next news cycle, leaving the survivors neither in control of the mourning process (because it has been appropriated by others), nor necessarily feeling the slightest bit better off for having had the rest of the country join them.

Moreover, the myth of 9/11 reduces the complexity of causes and coincidences that brought nineteen men to America in 2000/2001 to something as simple as: they are bad people. You can, as I have done, see them as insane, fanatical hypocrites, while still recognising that that is not enough to understand what brought us to that day. You only need to see the kids, most of whom were too young to even really remember the attacks, chanting “USA. USA.” in D.C. upon the death of bin Laden to know that the myth of good vs. evil has serious repercussions for how we understand what happened. I’m sure that there are plenty of very smart intelligence officers who know otherwise, but to hear kids and politicians tell it, we just sacked the quarterback and it must be ‘game over’. This is satisfying because it implies that the attack came out of the blue and was not the result of complex processes — some of which had nothing to do with us, and some of which had everything to do with us — whose dynamics were with us long before September 11th and will be with us long afterwards as well.

Meanwhile, this whole storyline is expressed on the ground in the ‘Freedom Tower’ that will rise a subtle 1,776 feet above Manhattan. What about this tower will mean freedom? What about this gratuitous urban form will have anything have to do with the ideas and people that were attacked on September 11th? Nothing. The design latches on to the myth of September 11th as an assault on Freedom, on Democracy, on America… in a crass, pointless way. Everything built in the area is apparently supposed to live up to some mix of symbolism, sensitivity, and practicality. It’s impossible. Let the memorial be what it is — a place to remember — and let the retail and residential be what they need to be — places to live.

Reclaiming Place for Memory

And I hardly need to point out that the impact of the ’9/11′ myth on how we think about place can also be seen in the virulent opposition to the ‘Ground Zero Mosque‘ — that is neither mosque, nor at ‘Ground Zero’ — in which the fact and specifics of place became entirely irrelevant to the story we wanted to build around it. More tellingly, the people who were most vitriolic in their opposition to Park 51 were most often the very people who detest everything that New York actually seems to stand for: messy, diverse, ugly, tolerant, and seething with new life and new ideas. They myth of ‘Hallowed Ground’ has been used to appropriate the experience of what life in New York really was at 8:30am on that day. I can’t help but see cities like New York as a microcosm of human existence; it’s all here with its ugliness and beauty on display for anyone willing to wander the streets. All of that complex, creative life bubbling away, busily taking back the ground that was taken away by the terrorists on September 11th.

The myth of 9/11 has a clean narrative structure, but it is life in stasis: for many people not directly connected to events in New York and Washington, it seems fair to say that the coverage and events surrounding this anniversary will memorialise without necessarily remembering. But, perhaps surprisingly, I take comfort from the fact that there are already many New Yorkers who have never known what the skyline ‘should’ look like. I look forward to, one day, visiting the newly-opened park at the World Trade Centre site and sitting with my memories of that day while around me people are eating lunch, running, laughing and playing — and in this it seems I’m not alone. At the point where life intrudes, the place where the towers stood will have started to be reclaimed from the myth that we built on their ruins.