Now if this isn’t one of the freakiest bits of coincidence in history, I don’t know what is.
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It’s all Sean’s fault.
I wasn’t going to write this essay. I wasn’t going to post any personal reflections on 11 September. I was content to quote three particular items from works that are special to me: Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! my Captain!”, as a token of the enduring American culture; the picture and quote from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, as a reminder of the rank absurdity of the concerns that so often move humans to killing and war; and an epitaph from Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel The Lions of Al-Rassan, the words of which would not, it seems to me, be out of place on the gravemarkers of any of the people who perished that day. On a day when every medium – television, radio, the Net – was saturated with personal remembrances, the offerings of one more blogger seemed redundant, even irrelevant. But, Sean asked an interesting question today:
“How should we remember?”
Everyone remembers in different ways. This is only natural, and necessary. A person who escaped the still-burning towers and lived will remember the day in a far different manner than someone who sent a loved one off to work, perhaps with a kiss or perhaps not, at the WTC or the Pentagon only to later find that their loved one had not gone off to work but off to die. A person who called in sick to work at the WTC that day will remember it differently from a person in rural Iowa who has never been east of the Mississippi or a person in Portland, Oregon who has never been east of the Rockies. How different are my memories of 11 September from everyone else’s, and how different are everyone else’s from mine? Sean’s question thus becomes not how we should remember, but how I should remember.
I had no personal connection to the events of that day. No one I know died or was injured; no one I know lost a family member; no one I know, so far as I am aware, even saw the attacks take place. There was not even a sense of fraternity in living in the same state as the WTC. Buffalo is a Great Lakes city, with more in common with Detroit than New York City. In fact, Buffalo is far enough away from NYC that one could drive from Buffalo to Cleveland and back in less time than it takes to drive from Buffalo to NYC, one way. I expect this is true of any large state; how much kinship does a person in El Paso feel with a person living in Texarkana? Thus, the horror that day was more for fellow Americans than for fellow New Yorkers. Not that this, in any way, lessened the horror. I suspect that day was precisely as horrifying for people who watched the attacks on TV in Honolulu as it was for the ones who watched them on TV in Buffalo or Pittsburgh or Des Moines. However, even as the day unfolded I could not help but think of the “six degrees of separation” that are said to exist between ourselves and anyone else in our world. It turned out that my closest personal connection to the attacks was through my father, a college professor of mathematics one of whose former students worked for Cantor-Fitzgerald.
After 11 September, I did not write for three days, nor did I listen to a single note of music. I think I read, but I don’t recall. Art was the farthest thing from my mind, until the events receded enough that my stories returned. (One of those stories, directly inspired by that awful day, can be read here.) Part of the problem was the fact that a good deal of what I write is horror, for what possible literary horror could ever approach the reality of 11 September? Of course, I soon remembered that fiction does not approach reality so much as enhance it; and besides, storytelling has been at the heart of all attempts to find something of value in the wake of horrible events. That is the ultimate basis of storytelling, horror and otherwise, going all the way back to the most primal myths. In any event, I struggled to find my own personal connection to the attacks, to close the sense of disconnect and find my reason to remember – – and my way of paying tribute, when eventually that time would come as today it finally did.
Like many, I wondered why these attacks. It surely was not a mere desire to wreak as much death as humanly possible; if body count had been their sole concern, surely the terrorists would have struck two days before, crashing their planes into sold-out NFL stadiums. No, these were attacks on our very culture. These people don’t just hate us. They hate our culture – – every culture, in truth, as was shown when the Taliban destroyed the great stone Buddhas.
And there it was. They wanted to destroy our culture, a culture which has produced Mark Twain and Steven Spielberg and Leonard Bernstein and Jackson Pollack and Charles Burchfield and Charlie Parker. They wanted to destroy a culture whose relics include Gravity’s Rainbow, Kind of Blue, Star Wars, Casablanca, East of Eden, Star Trek, Foundation, and Cosmos. They wanted to silence a culture that has spoken through such voices as Superman, Gully Foyle, Butch and Sundance, Professor Childermass, Tom Sawyer, Andy Dufresne, and the Joad family.
And with that realization came another: that while I had always loved America in an abstract sense, the way one always loves one’s hometown because it’s the first thing they knew, I had also loved America for its culture. America is my home. America is my country. And America is my culture. This country has produced so many, many works of art that have shaped me as a person and (I hope) as an artist. That is the personal connection I sought to 11 September: the attempt of a joyless, beautyless culture whose only notable feature is empty, ugly piety to destroy a culture that, while young, has contributed greatly to the march of human expression. So that is how I remember 11 September, and how I mark the day: by partaking of my culture.
I read some American poetry today. It was not a day for Tennyson, as much as I love his verse. I listened to American music today; it was not a day for Hector Berlioz. For dinner I made a pot of American chili, and for dessert, an ice cream cone. I didn’t discover America on 11 September; but because of 11 September, I rediscovered it.
And that is how I will remember the wicked day: not only for the fires and the deaths, but for everything that came before and everything that is certain to come after.
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O Captain! my Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up–for you the flag is flung–for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths–for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
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The planet Earth, as photographed by Voyager 1 as it left our Solar System. The shaft of light is a reflected sunbeam on the camera lens, and that pale blue dot is our world.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
“….There is perhaps no better demonstration of the foly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
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A brief political reason: I finally figured out, after this post of his, just what bothers me so much about Stephen Den Beste’s insistence on the moral imperative that the United States has to act unilaterally against Iraq. What bothers me is that SDB seems to genuinely believe the US-Iraqi dispute to be a dispute between two nations and two nations only: the US and Iraq, and that no other nations need concern themselves with out little war. It seems to me that one lesson of history is that “private little wars” like this tend to have effects, for good or ill and foreseen and unforeseen, on far more nations than just the two combatants.
I still waver on the issue of whether or not we should invade Iraq, and I’m not going to delve into it here; I’ve broken my “no politics” pledge enough already. But I will note that I find the current meme in the pro-war community, “It’s between the US and Iraq and everyone else can butt the hell out”, to be a dangerous and possibly short-sighted attitude.
And as Mr. Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
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I’m one of those people who still watches ER religiously, so I greeted this news item thusly:
AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!
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I have now seen the funniest movie trailer in history. I have played this thing ten times or so since I discovered it (via Roger Ebert’s Movie Answer Man column). Check it out. If you’ve ever tired of those ponderous film trailers with that deep, gravelly voiced guy starting off “In a world where….”, you’ll love this.
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I’ve been on a roll lately with the novel-in-progress. As it stands, I’ve got four more chapters to do before it’s done and ready to be spit upon and laughed at accepted warmly by an agent and, then, a publisher. This is something of a milestone for me, as I have been working on this particular item for nearly six years now. (And it will actually be longer than that, as this is only Book One of a duology.)
Of course, that six years is not one unbroken stream of work. Like most proto-writers, I used to go through periods during which I would consider that “I really ought to get some work done on the book” and yet, never actually do any writing. Never a day without lines is a tougher commandment than it sounds.
I’m a bit worried right now about the length of the thing. Currently, the word count stands at a little more than 135,000 words. Allowing for my average chapter length, I expect the novel to weigh in at 170,000 to 180,000 words. If one assumes roughly 400 words to a page in a mass-market paperback, that puts my book at around 400 to 450 pages or so. Somewhere I seem to recall encountering advice that first-timers should err on the side of brevity, but I may be wrong. And assuming that the book actually comes before an actual editor whose reaction isn’t “Send the form letter and bring me the next manuscript!!”, there will be a lot of editing to be done in the future.
Anyway, it’s still pretty exciting to actually be nearing a conclusion of sorts. And then it’s on to the second volume….
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I haven’t tried to write one yet, so I can’t be sure, but it seems to me that haunted house stories must be fairly hard to pull off successfully. The tropes are by now very familiar: the brooding mansion sitting on a large estate out in the country; the history of eccentric owners who met dolorous ends in the house; the fact that people who have attempted to stay in the house have failed miserably; the odd, almost robotic housekeeper who still stays on at the house; decriptions of the house itself as “evil”, “malevolent”, et cetera.
All of these tropes are present in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Maybe it’s the familiarity of the haunted house story that made the book suffer a bit for me, as I found the story rather hard to really get involved in. The feeling of malice in the book never really came alive, at least not until near the end. The book does not so much “build” as “meander”, and then it suddenly arrives. The only real indicator of an impending climax in the book is the dwindling page-count as one reads it, which I found disappointing. I’ve admired Jackson’s short fiction, and I have also read a great deal of praise for her novels (and this novel in particular), so I am quite surprised by my reaction.
The story is fairly simple: four people go to live for a time in Hill House, as an experiment at the behest of a researcher into the paranormal. Living in the house tends to bring out the worst in all of the characters, for some reason, and it is to Jackson’s credit as a writer that each character becomes unpalatable in his or her own way. Unfortunately, though, the characters are not balanced, as the tortures and self-loathing of Eleanor overtake everyone else. (Yes, I know that in the end there is a reason for that, but it still doesn’t help the two-hundred plus pages leading up to it.) There are the standard “things that go bump in the night”, but some plausible explanations for this are provided along the way. In fact, nearly everything that happens in the book seems to have a plausible explanation, so we are never particularly certain if Hill House really is haunted or not. That’s an interesting angle, but it never really takes flight.
I wanted to like The Haunting of Hill House much more than I did. My attention was simply never grabbed as a good horror story should (or any good story, for that matter). For a very similar story executed in more involving fashion, check out Richard Matheson’s Hell House.