Connective Cube

Ten years ago, I woke up to a phone call from my Dad’s girlfriend in my dorm room on Lafayette Street.  It was early in the morning.  Did someone die?  My class that day didn’t start until around noon, and I had not planned on waking up until nine.  She told me a plane hit the World Trade Center.   The same World Trade Center I had gazed up at when I went grocery shopping on Greenwich Street.

I had wanted to make pasta sometime that week and get used to cooking.  I had just moved to New York from the outer suburbs of Atlanta.  At the time, terrorism was something that happened somewhere else to an Other, something that happened in lands that I read about in the copies of The New York Times I would buy on campus at The University of Georgia in Athens, where I had attended college for my first year and had experienced an overwhelming support on campus for the election of George W. Bush.

This memory of rolling out of bed sticks with me, even years later when I watch footage of the planes hitting the buildings.   I was ever so naïve then, turning on my roommates’ 12” inch television and staring into the screen, moments after the second plane had hit.  At the time, it didn’t occur to me that a terrorist attack had happened.  I hadn’t thought deeply about terrorism or the end of the world at the time.  Only days before I was asking my roommates, who were from San Francisco, who the man with a mustache surrounded by red was on their wall.   They rolled their eyes at me.

I decided to grab a bagel.  It was really my excuse to walk over two avenues to Church Street, where I would get a full view of the towers.  I arrived.  It was the first time in my life that I felt completely disconnected from my body.  I knew I was missing some major piece of the puzzle as to why this happened.   I didn’t see the building collapse, but I did see the planes lodged into the buildings.   Little black specks dotted the landscape.  At the time I thought it was ash, but then I realized later it was dead bodies falling to the ground.  The people all around me had their mouth agape, looking up.  We were far enough away so the debris wasn’t falling around us, but I was close enough to realize that I needed to get back to my new home and call my not-so-old home.

When I got back to my dorm, I tried to call my mom and tell her that I was okay.  While I was on the phone with her, a security guard came and told us we would have to evacuate our building.  I didn’t realize that my thong underwear and platform heel shoes would irritate me on the walk uptown.  When I got downstairs – I lived on the second floor – my roommates from San Francisco, with looks of terror on their faces, asked me to go back upstairs and get their purses.  They weren’t letting anyone who had crossed the front desk back into the building.  After I grabbed their purses, we walked outside.  The dust and remains of the collapse of the twin towers reached the street two blocks south.

What happened right after we were evacuated from our building, which was only blocks south of Canal Street, remains blurry.   Everyone walked uptown, and I tagged along with my three roommates.  I was still anxious about whether they liked me or not, even on this long walk uptown.  Was I ever so young, as young as Didion’s shivering image of her past.  We got to the campus at NYU, and we were told there were cots at Coles Gymnasium.  I opted to go to Carlyle Court with my roommate from New Mexico.  We watched images of the planes hitting the towers on television. About the 10th time we saw the image, I started bursting into tears and regretting my move to New York.  I would stay for an additional nine years.

***

The next day I woke up before everyone else in the room and left Carlyle Court to find underwear.  In my young age, I forgot to leave a note, and I apparently terrified everyone with my disappearance.  In my young age, I thought they didn’t want a sobbing wreck to deal with.  I went to K-Mart on Astor Square to find underwear, and perhaps a more comfortable pair of shoes.  The streets were silent on Wednesday morning.  No one was humming into work, and plenty of people were sleeping in.  I got to K-Mart, and there was no underwear, no socks.  So I got a pair of flip-flops and walked to Washington Square Park.  I ran into a girl from transfer student orientation on the 9/12 streets, called my mother, and rode up to Dykeman Street with my friend from orientation to stay with my second cousin.  It felt like another world, and I didn’t want to hop back on the A Train and go back home.  When I did, I had to show my ID to get through a security checkpoint, something I would have to do for the next couple months.

***

By next Tuesday classes had resumed.  I was taking an upper level Sociological Theory course, one I would not be able to concentrate on for the remainder of the semester.  The professor, a Durkheimian scholar, asked us what we thought about the increasing displays of nationalism at the memorials in Washington Square Park and on television.  I felt frozen.  I really had no idea how to answer that question.

***

Telling people this story, recounting this story at times almost seems pointless, as if I am reveling in some congratulatory effort for having been near the towers that day.   This is not the case.  I was jealous of the people who watched it on television.  In my moments of post-traumatic stress disorder, I told myself I had no reason to really feel sad.  No one I knew died, and who really cares if I didn’t know what to do once the buildings fell?

Within all of this I knew in my gut that I shared this world orders benefits, and perhaps that I was responsible for this attack in away as an American citizen.  But I ignored this question, sinking into a deep depression for a few years that continued my invisible streak I desired to leave behind in Georgia.  This continued to shut me up from pointing out how inevitable an event like 9/11 was.  I didn’t want to become a terrorist either, proclaiming that it was this nation that needed to get back at the terrorists.  It confused me.  If we got back at the terrorists, then weren’t we terrorists too?  Weren’t the terrorists getting back at us?  I didn’t want to be a terrorist, but it got to the point where I didn’t want to be silent forever either.

Maybe this desire to not engage with why 9/11 happened came from this sense of guilt that I felt when I looked at the buildings with the two planes lodged into them.  I had no idea they would collapse.  I just thought there would be gaping holes in the buildings for a really long time. The floors below the holes would be used, and everything above would be a memorial that people could fly through in the years to come.  So I thought.

Months after the terrorist attacks, Jean Baudrillard wrote “The Spirit of Terrorism,” which pointed out the potential for an extreme nationalism to emerge.  He makes the point that the good/evil dichotomy related to a Westernized way of thinking, one where one way is automatically ‘right’ and the other way ‘primitive,’  The media plays an important role in this emergence, as it repeats the image of the attack, and keeps the memory of the attack relevant.  The difference between the time Baudrillard was writing and now is the emergence of digital media, of viral media that spread images and messages around to even more fragmented groups of people.  Al Gore did not have a Twitter page.  There were no smart phones clicking images of 9/11 and posting them on Youtube, and no comments from people who saw the experience first hand.  This experience came from documentaries, from news sources.

Yet the United States is not Germany geographically.  It is enormous, yet the sense of personal responsibility prevails in terms of formations of citizenship.

One point Baudrillard makes remains relevant to the present moment, and perhaps relates to how  globalization is threatening the nationalism that people cling to.  “We are even facing, with the World Trade Center & New York hits, the absolute event, the “mother” of events, the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened.”  I guess it amazes me to this day how quickly people have moved on from this event, while I can’t forget the acrid smell of dead bodies and metal that permeated the air for months.  The televisual does leave out certain sensory experiences.

One question I often ask, perhaps foolishly in response to Baudrillard, is how digital technology has rendered this event not as a moment of spectacle, but rather as a symptom of a system that was infected a long time ago.  Baudrillard would agree that the system was infected long ago, and he even debunks his own theorizing of the simulacra temporarily.   But the image of the towers remains alive, and depending on your news feed, you may or may not be hammered with sombre messages about 9/11 in 2011.  Yet his postmodern thesis that there is no originality to a commodified image remains in question in “The Spirit of Terrorism,” at least to me.  The twin towers went up in the race to claim the ultimate city, and at one point the twin towers were the largest twin stuctures in the world in the ultimate city.  Yet this image of the ultimate city was destroyed in a moment, at a time when many parts of Manhattan didn’t quite resemble a suburban shopping mall.  One, then the other, fell.   The city needed to recover by proving it was strong, by proving it could persevere.

Part of this perseverance, to me, was forgetting what happened, and quickly on a mass level.  This was especially evident when I was sitting in my Broadcast Journalism class one year later.  If the media perpetuates all evil, as Baudrillard says, then I knew I wanted no part of it when our teacher showed us the planes hitting the towers and asked us to write a news story about it in Fall 2002.  This wasn’t a free write whatever you want and get your emotions or arguments out; rather, it was a practice exercise to write shortened copy about the event that would appear on CNN, CBS or some other news channel.  I felt the room, sobbing, feeling like such an idiot for feeling anything about it.  Everyone else around me had seemed to move on so quickly, and if they hadn’t, they saved the sobbing for the safe confines of their apartments.

The schism in the NYU Journalism School was whether to teach people how to become engaging writers or whether to teach people to write for network news or major newspapers.  It was kind of shocking that a major journalism school in New York City was caught up in such an irrelevant debate.  They obviously thought the technology bubble had burst and had no way of reforming at the time.

If moving on means that I have ejected any memory of the day and months following 9/11, I still haven’t moved on.  Perhaps that thought came from my own terrorism of navigating a subway system nine years later that I felt terrified to ride on an even more heightened level than I felt only five years earlier.  I didn’t bike because it was the new cool thing to do amongst people my age, but because I didn’t want to be on the subway when a suicide bomber attacked.  Seriously, what if a suicide bomber blew up the subway?  The London attacks happened on my birthday, which is more a coincidence than anything else, but something that adds a link I have not become quite so comfortable with.

***

Sure, I can’t live in that fear, but it’s funny what that memory of the smell, the checkpoints, and the utter silence of New York City for that few week period can emerge in memory.  Perhaps it was the first time I really thought about life and death, the first time I realized how fragile the system around me really is.   That is, the system of deep urbanization that we have all deeply naturalized. And I know this weekend people my age will whip out their iPhones and Smartphones and record the beams of light that shoot through the sky every year.

I wish they would stop.

I had no idea this could ever happen when I moved to New York.  I sometimes get scared at how comfortable the present moment feels, as if no one worries that this could happen again.  This is not a call to live in fear, but rather a call to engage in dialogue that extends beyond what I am finding a deeply move inward to form communes where you only include people who agree with you.  I moved to New York to live away from this communalism, largely based in the Church, yet I find these present communal formations emerge from a fear of excessive isolation.

There were no phones recording this event and posting it on youtube moments later.  There was a struggle to document the moment, to piece it together, and to situate it into some understanding of the horror of that day.   But perhaps the linear narrative is no longer the moment.  The time/space compression in New York City speeds up as people become more connected with their loved ones through digital technology, but I have become suspicious of this connection over the years.  This is not because I don’t feel more connected with people because of this technology – I do – but I also think it provides a layer of protection from the terrorism that happens so sharply in front of our faces everyday in the name of reproducing capitalism.   Is it an effort to disconnect with terrorism by utilizing media to form social connections and bonds that were more difficult to enact in more traditional forms of geography?  For those with terrible social skills like myself, this may be the case.

So why did this happen?  Is this a fourth world war?  I don’t think so, at least in the exact way that Baudrillard theorized.  The towers collapsed, the Pentagon had a big gaping hole, and the site in Pennsylvania is a rural blip on the map to many.  The wars continued well after 9/11, the hunts for weapons of mass destruction, the mass killings of innocent civilians that we don’t hear about.  This technology of the past was supposed to improve the lot for humanity, with little thought about how it would destroy humanity.  But humanity continues to self-destroy if robots are being made to do warcraft, if who gets to die relies on this struggle to own the majority of the world’s capital and commodities.

I do think the thing to fear in this country in the years to come is a return to communalism that is encouraged by the fragmentation of social media.  This continues to separate humans from the corporate powers that continue to produce technologies and alter what it ultimately means to be human as we know it.  I don’t embrace this change fully.    I do desire to be touched by people who can engage a sensory processes that I feel is not precisely human as the way we knew it ten years ago.  Heck, this essay would likely ended up in one of my dog-eared diaries.  But I don’t lament what used to be.  It was awful.  I want something else, but will that come with the development of socialized technology and globalized conversation?  Maybe my teeth will rot before I can fully answer this question.  Or maybe I will die of some scary cancer that grew from the air I breathed in months after 9/11.

Now another architectural wonder will symbolize New York City’s perseverance.  I’m glad I am not there to witness it.