Ben and Sam's Original Idea for a
9 / 11 Tribute in September 2001
Back in 2003, on the second anniversary of 9 / 11, French high wire artist, Philippe Petit (b. 1949), wrote a sad and beautiful tribute, "My Towers, Our Towers," in which he tells the story of his daring high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, on the morning of August 7, 1974, when high above the ground he crossed eight (8!) times between the two towers.
Petit had been in love with these towers even before they were built, awaiting the moment when he could trespass on their air space, and now he had witnessed their collapse: "Where had they gone? Who besides me knew that, despite 200,000 tons of steel, glass, concrete, and aluminum, the towers were made mostly of air . . . air to air . . . ashes to ashes?" (Wall Street Journal, Thursday, September 11, 2003).
Along with his memories of the earlier days of the towers, Petit includes the sad story of the sudden death of his 9 1/2 - year - old daughter, Gypsy, in 1982. In his grief, he was advised by a priest: "Speak of her in the present tense." This advice stayed with him, and he applies it now to the tragedy of the World Trade Center:
"I close my eyes, I remember, I pay my respect to the victims and their families. That dreadful morning, my towers became your towers, our towers.
". . . gone, yet still standing tall, made of thin air, yet gloriously defying the sunset on this warm late summer evening.
Look at them!"
For connections and coincidences, following Petit's eloquent observations, I have decided to simply re-post the essay that I wrote last year on my daily blog for September 11. I am guessing that some did not see it a year ago, and that others won't mind reading it again. The fact is, these very same recollections will always be my story of that shattering day:
NOT A NORMAL DAY
A moment of silence and retrospection on this saddest of anniversaries. As with the assassination of JFK, we all remember where we were. I was in my kitchen, working on some scrapbooks for my children. The new school year had just started, and I was sorting through the previous year's memorabilia. Such a simple pleasure, so mundane. But many days are like that.
Just a few days before, on Sunday the 9th, my husband Gerry had flown to California for a meeting. Monday night, he had taken the redeye home, arriving back in Philadelphia very early Tuesday morning and, naturally, going in to work a couple hours later, after walking our sons across the street to school. He hadn't been on campus very long before calling to ask me if I needed to drive anywhere that day.
"Only to the boys' piano lessons after school."
"Why don't you call and cancel, okay?"
"Okay?"
"Some strange things are happening in New York and Washington."
"You mean the stock market?" Not that finance is my specialty, but that's what came to mind: desperate History Channel images of the Great Crash.
"No," he said. "Some planes have crashed in both cities."
"Are we at war?"
"I don't know. Just don't turn on the TV."
So I called our piano teacher (remember from the other day, scales & Bach). She was fine with the cancellations, as she herself was worried sick, having just heard from her sister who worked in Washington, DC, in a building that was currently locked down with everyone inside until further notice.
Then I called my sister, who also worked in DC. No answer anywhere, but as the day went on, I learned that rather than being locked into her building for the day, she and her husband had been turned away from their parking garage upon arrival that morning and instructed to return home. They spent the long hours in traffic on I-70, very frustrated but safe.
Then I turned on the TV. Then I turned it off again and thought of what to do next. Get milk.
I opened the front door into the irony of one of the most beautiful days on earth: high of 72, low of 72, not a cloud in the sky. Wondering how it could be true, I walked the few blocks to the nearest 7-Eleven (on 2nd Street). Actually, in Philadelphia, it's not called the 7-Eleven; it's the Wawa, which sounds kind of silly until you notice the flying goose on the store logo and realize that "wawa" is an onomatopoeic Leni - Lenape word for "goose" or "wild goose" or "Land of the Big Goose."
Standing in the dairy aisle, I reached for a gallon of milk, then deliberated about taking a second, though I knew we didn't need it. I reasoned with myself: as an act of faith, lets take only one today. Lets have faith that the store will be here tomorrow, that the milk will be here tomorrow, that there will be enough.
Resolved, I headed home, cutting across the school playground on the way. Everything was very close together -- the house, the Wawa, the church, the school. That was a happy urban time when we were able to live a mostly pedestrian life, sometimes using the car so infrequently that we forgot where we had parked it last.
The teacher out watching the students on their after-lunch recess hailed me to ask if I wanted to take my kids home early. I could see the younger one there playing with his friends, still innocent but wary. They must have sensed that something was up. Hanging on to my moment of faith in the Wawa, I answered the teacher, "No, not yet. Just let them have a normal afternoon."
When Gerry and I went over a couple of hours later to pick them up at the regular time, the older one was ecstatic, exclaiming, "All I could think was, 'When's Daddy getting back?' And then I remembered, you were already home."
Thanks to my friend Jan Donley for suggesting a poetry connection that perfectly captures the mixture of shamefulness and gratefulness one feels for being granted an ordinary day, while at the very same moment others are in despair. How amazing and humbling to feel so secure despite the uncertainty:
September Twelfth, 2001
Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,
aren't us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.
Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.
X. J. Kennedy (b. 1929)
American poet, translator, editor; and
creator of textbooks for teaching Literature and Poetry
That was not a normal day. In an odd way, it reminded me of Bay of Pigs when I was a child—that sense of doom...the unidentifiable fear...the uncertainty.
ReplyDeleteEloquent, Kitti. Thank you.
Thanks Paula!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/
ReplyDeletehttps://www.facebook.com/garyobrien1/posts/10212026631115951
I have NEVER understood the negative reaction to this photograph and others similar. These people were faced with CERTAIN death. As an alternative to that, they made one final choice in the hope for a better outcome. When I look at this picture, that's what I see -- a courageous choice for life, just in case it might somehow possibly work. I only pray that I could summon a similar admirable courage, rather than cowering, as if the alternative were inevitable. If that were my loved one, I would be proud, not mortified.
"One of the duties of the artist – not the only duty, but a central one – is to impel people to imagine the complexity of thought and feeling inside another person. Art complicates moral action, because we have to accept that other people matter, that their hardship and suffering, even their rage and sorrow, are, to some extent, our responsibility."
ReplyDeleteby Steve Almond
from his article about the tragedy of 9 / 11:
"The Decade of Magical Thinking"
https://therumpus.net/2011/09/the-decade-of-magical-thinking/
www.thevillager.com/villager_71/towersarenomore.html
ReplyDeleteI am exhausted by it all. I have this deep sorrow, a sorrow I cannot describe with words. It aches deep within me, to the core of my being. Sad. And tired.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I feel like I am trapped in time, like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day." Every day I wake up and it's still September 11, 2001. It seems like many around me are okay with that. "We will never forget!" they cry. And they mean it! They will love and cherish and nurture the hurt and anger of that day, as if it is the only thing that has give their lives meaning for the last eighteen years. At what point, I wonder, does healing begin; as it is obvious that there are many for whom that process has not yet begun.
I am angry and sad and tired. Sure, I'm angry about what happened that day. Sure, I'm sad about the loss of life - those who perished that day, and those who continue to die from the after effects. I'm angry about two worthless, endless wars that were started under the pretense of combating terrorism. I'm sad about all the service members, and all the innocent civilians, who have lost their lives as a result - far more than died on September 11. I'm sad and I'm angry and so bone tired of all of it.
But, mostly what saddens and angers and wearies me most is missing the America that died that day. As a nation, we've grown angrier and more hateful; distrustful of of those who don't look like us, of those who don't pray like us. We've raised that anger and hate to a virtue, nursing it, tending it, until it's become powerful enough to elect an incompetent moron to the presidency - because his anger and hatred resonates with us. We've decided that torture is okay and that government snooping into our emails and phone calls is okay - all in the name of national security. The Patriot Act, we call it...because that sounds so much better than The Police State Act.
If the measure of "winning" is who killed the most folks on the "other" side, we're winning this so-called "war on terrorism." But, if the measure is who we were as a nation and who we've become; how much we've changed, and whether that change has been positive or not; how much of our national energy and treasure we direct towards vengeance, I'm not sure we've "won" anything. And I know we've lost a lot.
So, forgive me for not joining everyone else in re-living September 11, 2001. Forgive me for wanting to move on. Forgive me for wanting my country back.
https://www.hammerandrails.com/2009/9/11/1025201/i-am-an-american
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-foster-wallace-on-9-11-as-seen-from-the-midwest-242422/
ReplyDelete"My Towers, Our Towers"
ReplyDeleteBy Philippe Petit
Sept. 11, 2003 12:01 am
You breathe, don't you?
So do I. And so did they, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Whenever a cloud interrupted the sunshine that made their silver robes flutter chromatically, the drop in temperature caused the steel skeletons to contract a little; when it passed, they expanded again.
You and I groan in anger at times. So did they, when gales forced them to sway, although they had been designed to win that sort of tug-o-war.
All this I know for a fact; because I rigged a cable between the two towers, from crown to crown -- the appellation for the inclined set-back of the top floors that supported the roof, coined by Leslie Robertson, the buildings' structural engineer.
That gray morning of Aug. 7, 1974, the twins, separated at birth, acquiesced in a temporary union, as they welcomed a trespassing poet determined to etch his destiny upon the sky. I linked them with a smile, that of my cable's catenary curve. The curve of my involuntary smile mirrored that of the cable as I took my first steps. The towers whispered in awe. At mid-crossing, I sat down to contemplate the horizon and noticed that it, like my balancing pole, was slightly curved; the towers had imparted to me a most important discovery: "The earth is round!" They quieted down the moment I genuflected, so that I could hear the clamoring of the astonished audience that had gathered a quarter of a mile below. The towers kindly held their breath as I lay down upon the wire, they eavesdropped on my silent dialogue with a red-eyed sea gull that hovered above me.
That morning, the twin towers became my towers.
Six years earlier, learning of their impending birth, I had decided to conquer them. I watched them grow. I spied on them. I fell in love. Then, under cover of night, I married them, with a seven-eighths-inch steel cable composed of six strands of 19 wires each. At daybreak, the entire world was our witness.
For what seemed an eternity, we enjoyed each other. I visited them often, through the ups and downs of their colorful lives. I introduced them to my friends and family. And then, on a perfectly clear blue September morning, I watched them die, stabbed in the back by assassins who vaporized in mid-air.
I heard my towers cry for help for a long, long time. I listened in anguish, powerless, to their last sighs. I witnessed their collapse and fell silent, eviscerated. Where had they gone? Who besides me knew that, despite 200,000 tons of steel, glass, concrete, and aluminum, the towers were made mostly of air? Between every piece of solid material, air! Mostly air. Could it be air to air? Like ashes to ashes?
Fluidly, in a deadly cascade of smoke and debris, in a matter of seconds, they erased themselves, taking thousands of human lives with them.
I close my eyes, I remember and pay my respect to the victims and their families. That dreadful morning, my towers became your towers, our towers.
Eleven years ago, when my young daughter died without warning, the dean of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, came to my side. He offered me guidance from his heart, but quite commandingly: "Speak of her in the present; you must not use the past tense!"
When asked today, "Do you have children?" I answer, "Yes, I have a daughter named Gypsy. She is nine and a half years old, and no longer alive."
So are my twin towers, our twin towers, gone, yet still standing tall, made of thin air, yet gloriously defying the sunset on this warm late summer evening.
Look at them!
******
Mr. Petit, artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, walked on a high-wire from one Twin Tower to the other on Aug. 7, 1974.
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