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And my empire cries that he has a temper and now he has a headache
It's not that I have nothing to say about 9/11. I just don't know if I can say it better than I did for the tenth anniversary: it was stolen grief. I hoped the country would get better about it. I do not think it did. Heroism and mourning alike were fed into a machine of self-perpetuating symbolism and it grinds coarser and less historically every year. I feel the same way about the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013—it had to become a myth of strength and retribution so fast, there was no time for being in pain, in any kind of loss. Boston Strong. I remember people dazed and shocked and half-fantasizing and glued to the contradictory news. There was no righteous towering wave of holy justice. There was a perversion: to acknowledge the loss was to have your consent taken for the war it excused, which a whole generation now has never lived without. I am still not sure those dead have ever been properly mourned and therefore, as ghosts, ever properly laid. I have begun to think that no ghosts are ever laid in this country. I don't think it knows how to make itself vulnerable enough to hear its dead, much less give them what they need.
So I spent most of my day working and made dinner for myself and the cats in the evening and ran to the library to return a badly overdue DVD. I saw that Keith Collins who was Derek Jarman's muse and helpmate has died at an equally unreasonable age and I am not happy. (Nothing had better happen to Tilda Swinton.) I watched Gabrielle Tesfaye's The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), a gorgeous six-and-a-half-minute live-action and cut-paper-animated short film of the Middle Passage and the orishas of the deep sea. I played the Kilcid Band's ferociously catchy "The Good Get Gone" about twenty times in a row. I was trapped at my desk by the absolute trust of a sleeping Autolycus who wakes up just enough to make a heart-catching noise between a snuffle and a purr and then rolls over farther against your lap and goes back to sleep. (It is not possible to displace a cat that comfortable. Tough luck. You just live at your desk now.) In other words, I am having an ordinary day, and on some level I feel I should not be, but I do not want to be part of the machine. The night after the manhunt that followed the marathon bombing, I dreamed of Adresteia. I think she's still here, and her father has come to stay.
So I spent most of my day working and made dinner for myself and the cats in the evening and ran to the library to return a badly overdue DVD. I saw that Keith Collins who was Derek Jarman's muse and helpmate has died at an equally unreasonable age and I am not happy. (Nothing had better happen to Tilda Swinton.) I watched Gabrielle Tesfaye's The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), a gorgeous six-and-a-half-minute live-action and cut-paper-animated short film of the Middle Passage and the orishas of the deep sea. I played the Kilcid Band's ferociously catchy "The Good Get Gone" about twenty times in a row. I was trapped at my desk by the absolute trust of a sleeping Autolycus who wakes up just enough to make a heart-catching noise between a snuffle and a purr and then rolls over farther against your lap and goes back to sleep. (It is not possible to displace a cat that comfortable. Tough luck. You just live at your desk now.) In other words, I am having an ordinary day, and on some level I feel I should not be, but I do not want to be part of the machine. The night after the manhunt that followed the marathon bombing, I dreamed of Adresteia. I think she's still here, and her father has come to stay.
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I had a line about the living in there originally. I could put it back in. I don't disagree.
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That's well said.
With the dead of 9/11, I think it's not so much that they have become entirely invisible as that they are no longer seen as themselves, except by the people who actually lost them. Everyone else sees them through some filter or other of national symbolism. Even I do: I knew none of them living. I try hard not to weaponize them.
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That would rather put a different perspective on the ever-present genre of zombie movies.
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I woke up this morning from a really bad nightmare which included the dead returning to life and I couldn't figure out where it had come from, since the last thing I had been thinking about before bed did not pertain to zombies at all, but I think you may just have explained it.
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There was a perversion: to acknowledge the loss was to have your consent taken for the war it excused, which a whole generation now has never lived without. I am still not sure those dead have ever been properly mourned and therefore, as ghosts, ever properly laid. I have begun to think that no ghosts are ever laid in this country.
I was going to highlight just that first part, because oh man, so true, but then the whole-generation part is also so painfully true, war as a way of life, and then then next thing you say--that really got me thinking.
I think yes, never properly mourned, on one hand ... but I also think some people mourn by raging, and as a nation, that's how the United States rages. This train of thought leads me to wonder if people (and nations) would benefit from being taught to experience sorrow. I know there's teaching that goes the other direction! But how about in this direction?
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It's been taking turns in my head with "The Good Get Gone." I'm listening to Zeal & Ardor's Stranger Fruit (2018) right now in hopes of exorcising them both.
I think yes, never properly mourned, on one hand ... but I also think some people mourn by raging, and as a nation, that's how the United States rages. This train of thought leads me to wonder if people (and nations) would benefit from being taught to experience sorrow. I know there's teaching that goes the other direction! But how about in this direction?
I think so. Anger is an emotion you point at something. If you're going to use it at all, you use it as impetus for action. Sorrow can just exist. This country is not good at just existing. It always has to be doing something. I understand that—for the first twenty-five years of my life, I almost never cried, but I did feel intermittently like punching walls. And I have a lot of things I am angry about these days and I try to use it productively instead of just to sound righteous on the internet or screaming at myself. But grief is real and it is not interchangeable with rage and I don't think it is always the best idea to start fights with people rather than be seen crying. This begins to sound as a toxic masculinity problem as I talk through it, which is probably right. I do not think it was always so un-American to grieve.
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also
Re: also
It made me think of the college professor from whom I first learned the stories of the orishas, who loved mermaids and practiced santería and is no longer alive; I wish he had been able to see it.
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This is very wise and perceptive. Thank you for articulating it.
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It is probably not the worst thing about nationalism, because I think the worst thing about nationalism is how it kills people, but the part where it polarizes the public expression of just living in a country is not good.
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You're welcome. Thank you.
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We marched and we rallied and it did not matter. My older registered for the draft this year. I don't know what prayers to say for this, how to ask G-d for that forgiveness. I see no reason my childrens' generation should forgive me.
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This is so perfectly, unfortunately true.
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Thank you, by which I mean I'm sorry.