#dec18

dec 25

“In truth, the simplest memorials of the first days after the [9/11] disaster, those xeroxed handbills with “Missing” emblazoned on them and the photographs and descriptions of the lost below, still move us more than any other remembrance. “missing One World Trade Center, 100th Floor, Roger Mark Rasweiler”; “We’re looking for Kevin M. Williams, 104th Fl. WTC”—these signs were made with the foreknowledge that the missing were in truth dead. There’s a wall of them within the museum. They voiced a refusal to accept their passing without protest and insistence: he died here, not some office worker. (Since we take pictures of the ones we love mostly on holiday, some bore apologetic inscriptions: “Was not wearing sunglasses on Tuesday.”)

[...] The lesson of these handbills is simple: that life is tragic and precious and fragile, that there is an irreducible core of violence in the world, and of fanatics in love with it, and that we failed once in our responsibility to protect ourselves from them, and from it. [...] He was not wearing sunglasses on Tuesday; he was a happy person who made choices. He may be lost now, but he is not faceless.

The attempt to fill the museum with personal ephemera—the vitrines are stuffed with relics and mementos of the dead; even tapes of final phone calls play on a perpetual loop—seems merely macabre by comparison. The power of the personal reliquaries alongside the Vietnam wall, as of the photocopied flyers on the downtown fencing, lies in their spontaneity and their essential privacy, their innocence of manipulative address. Orchestrated as part of an official design, they feel barked out rather than overheard.

[...] Will any of the architectural memorials be half as moving, or as fitting, as the “Project for the Immediate Reconstruction of Manhattan’s Skyline” (as it was then named), which appeared a mere six months after the disaster: eighty-some searchlights rising at night from the ground to space itself, or so it seemed, forming two violet columns of lights where the towers had once been. Fragility and resilience, loss and persistence, spirit and substance—all of that was expressed by the two luminous pillars in a way that drains and benches and wall labels can’t. Improvised memorials suit self-organizing cities. Not long ago, I was dragooned into a memorial scheme for a ninety-five-year-old, recently dead in New York. In an instant’s impulse, and violating God knows how many Department of Health regulations, his out-of-town family chose to take taxis to his apartment after midnight and spread his ashes in the median on the avenue outside. It was where he belonged. Memorials don’t live easily in liberal cities. But memories do. He’s there. So are we.”