September 11ths
September 11ths
9/11/1906
William James letter to H.G. Wells:
Dear Mr. Wells,—I’ve read your “Two Studies in Disappointment” in “Harper’s Weekly,” and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rem acu tetegisti! Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization....”Scoundrelly, as you say,”but understandable, “from the point of view of parties interested”—but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease...”
9/11/1968 (Beatles Studio Diary)
John’s song for those despised people who dissected his lyrics for hidden - but almost always unintended - revelations and conundrums. One of two songs on The Beatles to give mention in its lyric to another Beatles song title (“Savoy Truffle” mentioned “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”), “Glass Onion” is peppered with references to the Beatles” recent output: “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am The Walrus”, “Lady Madonna”, “The Fool On The Hill” and “Fixing A Hole”. John also tossed in what may seem a cryptic line, about the “Cast Iron Shore”. This is a real place in Liverpool.
9/11/1998
Prayer meeting at the White House “to help the president heal.” It’s interesting that he’s taking the evangelical approach.
9/11/2001
Obsessively watched news coverage all day. Images so horrifying and so shocking—that two huge skyscrapers are totally gone, and the sense that something like this has finally happened. (It’s the “Titanic” of the 21st century that I thought about).
I kept hearing “act of war”, “US will retaliate”, and I shuddered at the thought of a world war starting.
Other thoughts:
The boundaries of the oceans—how we feel protected by them; The day that changed everyone’s thinking;
Connects with people on so many levels—the “where were you when Kennedy got shot” phenomenon.
How will this affect art?
Took some pix with camera, but settings wrong, pix overexposed, but I will try to use them in some way.
9/11/2002
First anniversary of attacks. Absorption into the events seems almost pornographic, now with so many images associated with them, unlike 12/7/41. Most people I talked to wanted to forget, not remember. (Quote in Tribune: “We must not just always remember, we must never forget.” What is the boundary between forgetting and remembering?)
9/11/2004
9/11 Year 3. Interesting context collision: Hurricane Ivan decimates Jamaica, headed for US Gulf.
They had a candlelight vigil at the lakefront here in Chicago honoring the war dead. It was almost totally silent. You got the impression that something was amiss. This war shouldn’t have been.
One of the things I liked about Reagan was his notion of a “quiet faith”—a spirituality that rests below the surface but is never expressed outwardly. In politics, one’s religious persuasion is a kind of secret to yourself, in only a language you understand.
***
Neil Peart from Roadshow, June 2004:
“In 30 years of traveling around the United States, I have seen how entrenched Evangelical Christianity was in American life. Just before setting off for Nashville, I had read that 83% of Americans called themselves Christians, and half of Americans believe that God created humans pretty much in our present born at one time within the past ten thousand years. It seemed pointless to try to fight that tide of faith, even with the weapon of the laws of logic, and I thought, “I give up.” My blustering was not going to change anybody’s mind, and there was no sense alienating people and making enemies. You can reason with people’s minds, but you can’t argue with their faith.”
***
How much would it cost to capture 10 world tyrants? How long would it take? How many can you find? The cost for ridding the world of tyrants: Saddam Hussein: $200 Billion (plus trial) Kim Jong IL: >$500 Billion, Charles Taylor ??? Sudanese Janjaweed Militias: $200 billion, Chechen rebel leaders (only Russia’s problem, but not for long.
***
Read Ron Reagan’s article The Case Against George W. Bush: To some, this might appear shamelessly blasphemous. It gives one the feeling that the Bush administration is merely a shadow group of the more genuine Reaganites.
9/11/2005
4th anniversary of attacks. There’s more evidence of proliferation of homegrown terrorism a la John Walker Lindh.
9/11/2009
Weather is exactly what it was 8 years ago: clear blue skies. They’re replaying the events in real-time on the news shows. Interesting how it puts you back in that exact context. (Memory is made more salient with repetition in the media).
9/11/2010
Nine years later this is where we are coming to terms with a terrorist attack. Since so many copies [of the Koran] can be made, burning them is insignificant. This is hugely ironic since paper books are dying there is no need to burn them. Once ideas are suffused in electronic media, the ideas can exist without a physical object. Ergo, if your sense of spirituality is strong, the mere burning of paper books should not affect it. But it is the provocative act of summarily denouncing an entire culture.
9/11/2011
Beautiful morning, as it was 10 years ago. Things I liked: The power of names and how musically they are recited, music performed at ceremonies is always immediately powerful and resonant: The sound of memory, The sound of 9/11...
They say cities are not about the buildings, but the people. As regards religion, cathedrals can have the effect of reversing that equation: you may not care for the dogma, but the product of what we do as humans rise above the human condition. Some may argue that the communal experience of all believing and acting on the same ideas makes cathedrals possible.
9/11/2012
Beautiful blue skies, 85 degrees. Same weather as 9/11/01.
11th anniversary of 9/11. The numbers and the context will last for at least a century. And terrorists will continue on with their various ideologies and the “idea” of terrorism until the score is settled. It is amazing that modernity still does not understand this core precept about terrorism. Safety and security in a clash of civilizations is a chimera. Every generation understands the past, present, and future in entirely different ways. Artists more than anyone else are more acutely aware of this phenomenon and use the present and future to define the era. It is only later that a deeper history gets woven into what they do.
9/11/2013
Putin writes Op-Ed in the NYT about the situation in Syria. I can’t make the connection between the American demonization and the spirit of this letter. One would not even believe it was written by him.
9/11/2014
Dream: Witnessed collapse of a building. Synchronicity with history.
9/11/2019
Around the first anniversary of 9/11 in 2002, I wrote a guitar instrumental titled Forget September. My feeling at the time was that we needed closure--not more media coverage; We needed to begin to “forget” it--meaning we needed to move on, for at least the general public. (I called it “normalcy by denial” in one of the entries). It was already one year into the invasion of Afghanistan, so the idea of closure or normalcy was a fantasy. Music was an anodyne.
I used to frequently have conversations with an aunt who had memories of both world wars, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and the Korean War. I now realize more profoundly how many young people have no direct memory of 9/11. I also realized that there have always been lots of young people that have no memory of major events. I don’t have a memory of the Kennedy assassination. Not many people are living that have a good memory of Pearl Harbor, and the various annual commemorations that followed; They were all children then.
In retrospect, the narrative seems consistent for the current state of our nation, and that remembering (and revisiting--two different things) are hugely important.
There are more people that don’t remember anything. For those with a memory, you never forget.
9/11/2021
Same weather as 9/11/2001. If you want good weather in Chicago come the week of 9/11.
It all started last night (eve) when I started looking at the photos, then became unnerving. This is perhaps why I wrote “Forget September”. (Moving on) Perhaps at some point in the months following the event coverage of the event was crowding out the normal flow of life. What I want is the exformation, but how much information do we need in order to extract the best exformation? Some are lamenting the loss of history about 9/11 because of obsolesced formats, like Flash, but is it worth the effort to exhume it only to find not much of what we don’t already know? It’s not like it’s the discovery of the Nag Hammadi.
Like years before, I listened to the recitation of names which was often musical.
As I walked and biked around my neighborhood I was subconsciously scouting for that 9/11@20 photo. We tend to think there is a palpable vibe in the air when it’s just like any other pleasant Saturday. The 2020 lock-down had more photographic power, with towns looking like ghost towns, like lower Manhattan that week. I always thought 9/11 was the beginning of the Fourth Turning because it looked so apocalyptic.
***
I was just watching an interview with Peter Bergen who was one of the journalists that were in Afghanistan and managed to interview Bin Laden. The thing that I always focus in on is the metaphor of film--that there’s a slippage between reality and a film. There are similarities that we put together in our heads, but they are very different, and very much like dreams. Another salient point about information in general is that we’re always getting it from screens now, and screens obviously have a connection with film. There was a connection between film and print at some level--where a novel would be translated into a screenplay and a film would be made out of it. In a film experience we have a simulation of reality that can be very close or very distant, but we can’t always tell. Media are also “celebrity machines”, so the conflation of dreams, books, films, and screens of all kinds form our perception of reality. What I prefer to do is to find the people that were actually on the ground there. They are the sources of information that I think are most verifiable. But at the same time, people’s memories are like degrading films. History is the impermanence of memory, and the fact that the text is always wet on history. So even if people are recounting their experiences, who knows if their memories are actually verifiable. People are always “storifying” memory. When we remember a dream we have to stitch together the various fragments. In my experience there are always three or four fragments in a dream and when I get up and attempt to write it down, that’s where things get lost in translation because you’re trying to weave in a narrative. The reality of a dream and the reality that we make when we remember a dream is different so it’s hard to really pinpoint where the truth is. So you have to take in a lot of different sources and you have to connect the dots on your own, and avoid telling the story to other people who pass it around and then gets transformed again, and it keeps going on for years and decades and millennia. So what we come away with is some version of reality or a consensus reality and we have to accept some of it. There might be some similarities and there will be differences. It’s like the perception of a color: we all know what red is but what’s the shade of the red? How do we experience red? Some cultures call green a blue and some green blues are sometimes called our red. The labels that we put on things aren’t reliable. Even text itself is a label or symbol for something and those symbols can vary from culture to culture so there are anthropological aspects to it as well. It’s multi-factorial which makes it very interesting and engaging.
9/11/2022
A true break in the rain. Torrential rain for hours.
On 9/11 all flights were canceled due to a threat to humanity itself. Now it’s the IT breakdown—a similar threat.
In September 2047, it will be the 50th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana and the 25th anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2051, the 50th anniversary of 9/11, as well as commemorations of events that will occur as 10th and 20th anniversaries.
I had thought that YouTube’s algorithm results would have featured the annual 9/11 commemoration, but it didn’t. This is why organic memory is so important and is one of the good things about moderated and curated media: It reports on things that are more universal and traditional instead of relying on what algorithms perceived were important to me. We shouldn’t have to go hunting for our own news.
9/11/2023
Rainy and cool--unlike 9/2001--or many other 9/11s.
The Libyan 9/11: Libya hit by catastrophic flooding from a rare Mediterranean hurricane. What is now becoming clear is that failed states (perhaps including the US) cannot (or won’t) respond to events in which rivals are involved. Climate change is the perfect storm of human cruelty and bitch Gaia.
Still listening to Gnawa music. I think it’s a haunting sound for 9/11 and in fact was banned for years if not a decade. It’s interesting how all that dissolved into the next drama for the Western world. Amity does not equal enmity plus hazard. That equation is now dis-proven.
9/11@50: Not 9/11/2051 but 9/11/1973, the military coup in Chile. A good summary of how coups can play out. I’m perhaps being too paranoid about the possible parallels.