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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.