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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.
no subject
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.