Ground Zero, September 11, 2001
“All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by….” –Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit, 1973.
On the eleventh of September, on television, radio, and around campus, people witnessed a sight unimaginable to civilized, sheltered lives, as thousands died in one cataclysmic event. After seeing the footage of the carnage replayed repeatedly, I fled the campus for the comfort of my own home. There, I placed on the stereo my LP of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. It seemed the only appropriate way to mourn the dead in a war not yet declared. I wept as the words of the Missa Pro Defunctis, the Mass for the Dead, overlaid with the anguished, indignant and tenderly elegiac poems of soldier-pacifist Wilfred Owen, surrounded me in that empty living room.
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
to break earth’s sleep at all?
Amid the ghastly statistics of casualties and mute footage of smoke and rubble, the shocked sensibilities of the living instinctively turn to the comfort of story. At first, we seek the narrative of the event itself, as if in establishing the facts to each other we somehow can shape them, impose a certain order upon them, and so comprehend them. Then presently there emerge, like diamonds from ashes, the individual accounts of personal heroism or pain. We listened as people told us of their fears for the safety of relatives who worked in Washington or New York City or in the World Trade Center itself, of comforting friends who waited with dread for the news of loved ones, of trying to wrap their own minds around the enormity of the evil played out live on a sunny street or on a cold glass television screen.
We learned of airline passengers who through conscious self-sacrifice almost certainly thwarted further tragedy. Of stock traders who led the infirm and disabled down the endless steps of the towers. Of the doctors and EMTs and nurses who braced for the casualties to come in a neighborhood turned suddenly, inexplicably, into a war zone. Of clergy and firefighters, themselves perishing as they tried to rescue the living or comfort the dying. Of how a missed connection or an ignored alarm clock or a break in a cherished routine left some safe and some doomed. We learned names, occupations, hometowns. We were told of plans changed or dashed to pieces. We were admitted into the homes, families, and lives of acquaintances and strangers, survivors and victims as we shared our shock, compared experiences, and mourned the dead.
On some level we also know, with a dark certainty of the sin that lurks in each of us, that those who planned and carried out this ghastly act also have their own unimaginable story to tell. So we awaited news of the perpetrators, their names and faces and backgrounds, sensing that even individual stories of hatreds sustained, planned and carried out over half a decade were preferable to the dread vacuum of a faceless, nameless group acting seemingly without reason or remorse.
Like a revolving door cutting a crowd into individual people, the cataclysm has set us apart as individuals even as we experience it as a society. We are suddenly, violently aware of our places as key players within a larger story. Those of us who only last Monday would have brushed brusquely through oncoming crowds with no more thought than a swimmer gives the waves, now hold open doors, deal patiently with the annoying and tiresome among us, or speak tentative yet gentle words to the suffering stranger standing next to us in the line at the coffee shop or bookstore.
We all carry within us a uniquely personal perception of this life, shared by no other. No one stands exactly where we stand; no one else sees exactly what we see. We find ourselves born into community, but are still utterly alone, as alike and yet as different as grains of sand on an endless beach. The awareness of these extremes is what sets us apart from other creatures. It is not a comfortable place to be. The temptation to deny one side or the other is always there. We assume all stories are the same as ours, and blend into the crowd, immersing ourselves in the camouflage of class distinctions or nationalism or tribal hatred, hoping vainly for a sense of security-in-numbers. We co-opt the suffering in the stories of others and use it to act in their name for our own ends.
Or in a different kind of perversity we stand deliberately and completely apart from the human family in scorn, disgust or self-centeredness, pretending that they have no part in our story. We demonize, trivialize, or simply refuse to see people individually at all; we stop our ears and cover our eyes to the point where, ironically, others must then lead us along if we are to navigate the minefield we have planted without falling victim to it.
We are lenses, then, through which can be seen whole other worlds. My story will never be, cannot be, wholly your story. But while you cannot look through my eyes, you can listen as I tell you what I see as I stand in this place. And in listening to me and my story, you will see me not as faceless entity in the aggregate mass of humanity, but as a whole person, a witness to and interpreter of life as lived in this world, as are you.
At the end of the War Requiem, two soldiers confront each other across a bleak and nameless battlefield. They sing each to the other his story of horror and pain and, ultimately, death. Finally, the second sings to the first, simply, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”
If we have our stories, those whom we label ‘the enemy’ have theirs to tell. The faceless and nameless ones, the fellow-travelers upon whom we project our fantasies of domination or powerlessness or vengeance, must be granted their chance at truth-telling if we are to regard them as more than the extras in our personal drama.
What is your name?
What is your story?
(Note: This essay was originally written as an assignment for my “Philosophy of Journalism” class in my first semester upon returning to the University of Massachusetts/Amherst after a 30-year hiatus. September 11, 2001 was my first day of class. The essay was later published as the final selection in a one-time collection of student works entitled Voices of September 11.)
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