| << 18 October 2002 | 2002 > October | 23 October 2002 >> |
Monday, 21 October 2002
An empty hole ::
Saturday, as the bus approached Manhattan from New Jersey, I found myself looking, as usual, eastward for glimpses of skyscrapers. It’s a ritual, perhaps a mental preparation for the sudden immersion into the city upon exiting the Lincoln Tunnel. I kept looking in the direction where I thought the twin towers of the WTC would have been, not expecting to see them, but trying to compare their absence with memory of their presence. It had been 2 years since my last trip to NY, one of perhaps 50 trips there in the last 20 years, so memory failed: I knew the towers were missing but I couldn’t point to a spot and say to myself, wow, that precise spot in my geographical memory is now missing something very large. Even in making my way to my SoHo bed and breakfast, I had that same sense: I know they had once dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan, and they were now eerily absent, but I couldn’t point to exactly where they had been. So a couple of hours later I found myself walking south toward Ground Zero, carefully watching my observations and recollections. Would their absence become more visceral, more real? ...
Patriotic music from ghetto blasters ::
Over the weekend I had some strange reactions to music. At the WTC there was a man playing, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and then “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on a flute. At one point I heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” coming from a ghetto blaster—and I deliberately use that perjorative term for a portable music-playing device, because for some reason the emotions I felt at hearing patriotic music in this context were not what I would have expected, not after being in Thailand in January and hearing a gentle Thai man’s first words to me, “I’m sorry about what happened to your country.” ...