I was at work, doing some shitty data-input routine, bored out of my skull. It was pretty early in the morning (I'm not feeling like checking what's the time difference between NY and Rio, but I remember it being the start of a bright and hot day just like it was in NY). We work in a gallery/mall type of building, with several different types of services being offered in contiguous spacious rooms - dentists, travel agencies, electronic apparel etc (I work in a student exchange program) - , and at some point in the morning someone from a neighboring room entered our office and told people to turn the TV on, quick. At the time we had only one tiny TV atop a metal rack stuck on the wall of a small cubicle, so we all went there, kinda elbowing each other, trying to avoid spilling coffee from our small plastic cups. And you can only imagine the amount of noise we got mixed with our news, being so distant from the epicenter of the attacks.
At the time I had a little bit of trouble grasping the importance of the event. My bosses, who work with some exchange offices in America, and who constantly travel to the US to the point of having a lot of friends there, were the ones who first realised how horrific the whole scenario was. Me, I knew close to zero about the towers, about their importance and symbolic significance, even about their massive presence and role in NYC's history and landscape.
Everybody was talking about an accident, a plane hit, and there were we, watching a catastrophe unfolding live on TV like we already were used to, when the second plane appeared as a fast moving dot on the screen and slammed against the building before our eyes. We had nothing to compare that to, nothing to relate to it, it was just... for a while, for maybe one hour or two, as more mixed news came about cars exploding near the Capitol, a plane crashing on the **frigging Pentagon** and planes falling, we were just accepting the fact that it was the first strike, the beginning of all-out war against America. Everywhere I looked, dumb faces, mouths agape.
By the time the towers collapsed, it was already too much. We barely did any work for the remainder of the day. We basically followed the news, and called our partners in the US. I remember the internet that morning, one of the first things to pop up in forums and blogs and news sites was speculation as to why september eleventh, and people digging particular relevant dates in the Muslim calendar; as tragedy piled upon tragedy (the hit, the trapped people, the fall, those unfortunate firefighters's plight etc), some news sites going down under excessive traffic.
Strange that, for me, full comprehension only hit this year. Thanks again to TV. They are running some specials about the event on cable, and I caught that documentary "New York: A Documentary Film", which has two chapters about the twin towers - one for their rise, one for their fall. I can't help but be fascinated by stories of human hubris, and I learned as in under a spell about "man's biggest construction since the pyramids", about that little magickal act performed by Phillipe Petit, that supremely delicate moment when the towers had just been finished. It was just fantastic, and then it all made sense to me: the World Trade Center really was the World. Trade. Center, exactly what the name meant.
My personal belief is that certain acts and situations, being so vastly larger than the individual person's experience, can only be considered acts with magick properties. The foundation of buildings has an old history linking it with human sacrifices - it's powerful stuff. In the documentary, a famous photographer ponders about the towers which seemed to link water and the sky - powerful messages, powerful symbols; 9/11 was a friggin' tarot card as it happened, and it could only have touched very old psychic channels in all who watched/experienced it, briefly awakening all that pre-Enlightenment mythical crap about Babel (wasn't the WTC the great hub for globalization? I assume there were contracts being made up there in almost every language conceived; didn't the casualties' nationalities paint a broad gradient of colors and ethnicities?).
What drove the point home this time to me was that the documentary showed so much street scenes, it grounded the experience for me in a very potent way. As long as I was watching it, I was in the streets of New York, and what an altogether unpleasant place to be at that time...
And, at the same time, I cannot finish this amorphous rambling without mentioning something: As I watched the documentary, I couldn't help but wonder about the planning of the attacks. Down to its minimal details (shredded documents pouring over people's heads as in a mockery of the transactions that took place in those buildings; the killing of the first wave of firefighters; make your own list), it looked like the darkest type of genius straight out of a James Bond movie. The type of foreseeing and planning that couldn't leave anything to chance. And that type of almost oniscient planning could not have failed to spot one of the defining effects that the attacks would bring. I keep seeing this scene where some very hirsute, dirty men huddle in caves making sinister plans, and then one of them has this thought, this inevitable thought: "You now, I bet this thing is really gonna unite those guys". To a foreigner used to tales about the so-called New Yorker stolidness (which I assume it's a myth they take some pleasure in maintaining), few things are more awe-inducing (which means AWESOME) than the thought of that massive city railing itself with the most basic human purpose of aiding each other. I found the reports on how the city felt all of a sudden like this huge human space - where you could connect with a stranger crying in the subway, where people could volunteer to help sometimes with nothing more than buckets and the facade of urbanite irony was dropped for a while - very touching, the sense of people watching each other's backs.
In the end of the day, the 9/11 attacks were just a vicious backstabbing full of resentment - a tactical success, but a strategic mistake, which not only didn't advance Osama's cause, not by a longshot, but actually seems to have put a lot of the Muslim leaders against Osama Bin Laden, whom now they blame for letting loose a 600 pound gorilla on their backs -, the type of thing that makes one think of Lex Luthor throwing dirt at Superman's eyes, out of spite and without the resources to actually bring him down. Kindergarten terror tactics, only with a bigger budget and total lack of moral restraints.
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Topic: September 11th - Five years later (Read 6461 times)