September 11th

[Aggie87]

I also have a crystal clear memory of September 11th. At the time I was still working for the Army in Stuttgart, Germany. I remember getting the news about what happened when a friend of mine from Garmisch called, and running down the hall to turn the TV in our conference room on. Although there were probably 25 of us in there, it was completely silent, and I think a few of us (both Germans and Americans) started crying. I went home in a fog that day, not really even aware I was driving.

One of the things that will stay with me forever is how much outpouring of sympathy and support we were given by the Germans. Naturally security at the bases immediately increased, every car was searched upon entering, etc. But while you were waiting in line to get on base, you could see 50-75 German citizens standing outside the gates holding vigils, with candles, flowers and cards, and singing songs. Some came up to us while we were sitting in our cars, and offered their sympathies, and also thanked us for everything we had done for them, from WWII on. This happened for a couple of weeks before tapering off, not just a one day thing. And it wasn't organized, just normal people taking time to show us how they felt.

Some of my best German friends were a retired couple in their mid-70's now. They always treated my kids like their own grandkids, and we loved them like family. We visited them at their home about a week afterwards, and I remember hugging them and all of us crying. None of us wanted to let go of each other.

[PHILLYQ]

One individual I often think of is a sculptor named Michael Richards (no, not the actor who played Kramer) who had a fellowship for studio space at the top of one of the towers for five months. 

A work of his, Tar Baby versus St. Sebastian ("a life-size bronze cast of himself as a Tuskegee Airman, with his body being impaled by many small airplanes") is pictured HERE.

THIS SITE has photos of another work, and an essay that expresses a lot of what I felt when I first saw these pieces:

There is another sculpture by Richards in resin and steel, one I have seen only in photographs. Its title is "Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian" and its meaning, in light of 9/11, is terrible. Seeing it, it is impossible not to wonder by what compass Richards found his way across this life, or how the needle quivering in that compass could point him to create a work that would foretell his own death. The sculpture, over seven feet tall, is a standing figure of a single Tuskegee airman. The pose is almost Pharaonic. Where in old paintings the body of the martyred St. Sebastian bristles with a thicket of arrows, this figure is impaled instead by a swarm of fighter planes, stuck like darts thrown at an effigy. The irony of this sculpture is obvious even to people oblivious to art. It is oracular and crushing. Looking at it now, there is no escaping a feeling that there are more dimensions to reality than we are able to acknowledge without becoming in some way unhinged.

Science is embarrassed by what it can’t explain…it falls off a cliff. Faced with Michael Richards’s prophetic depiction of his own death, it can do little more than mumble, "It was a random thing, the clicking-past of numbers…the shrapnel of blind fate." This work and the death of Michael Richards are a manifestation of a realm we are now for the most part closed off from, a realm not taken seriously (if it is even acknowledged by a modern to exist.) It is occult, a mystery we cannot penetrate. We cannot make our way into it with stethoscopes and rubble-sniffing dogs.

Heaviest of all is to look at photos from a 1996 show of his at theStudio Museum in Harlem.

Woah!

I met someone else (can't think of his name) who had a space in one of the WTC towers. He placed contact microphones on the walls and recorded the sounds of the building moving in the wind.

Later, after it all fell down, he made the recordings part of an installation at a mid-town gallery. Pretty creepy, all that moanin' and groanin'.

It's odd that you mention the sound of the building. That's one thing that will stay with me for life, the sound of the second tower falling. I was walking north on Water Street in a daze, with my wet napkin over my nose and mouth, through thick dust comprised from the first tower, when I heard the groan of the second tower falling- it was the most sickening sound I ever heard.

[PHILLYQ]

If I remember right, that was the beginning of the anxiety.

* * *

On the walk back to my apartment, a young man (probably early 20s) collapsed into the arms of my girlfriend, bawling and repeating one word: "Why?" Walked alongside a black woman in her 40s who was covered in white debris - forgive the allusion, but she looked like a ghost... completely white.

When I got home, tried to call anybody from my family I could think of. Couldn't get a line out. Finally, about an hour later, got my grandmother (who died only a year later)... she said "this is worse than Pearl Harbor". Seemed appropriate to me.

Walked around, stunned, all day... just to get out of the house, and turn off the TV. Military and police everywhere... nobody talking. Spent the evening and early night on the roof of my brownstone, watching the column of smoke slowly trail off across Brooklyn and Queens. Took some pictures on a disposible camera. Sometime that night (probably around 1 or 2 in the morning, my girlfriend broke down and started crying hysterically. Mine came the next afternoon.

* * *

Since then, I've developed serious anxiety problems and a healthy alcohol problem to go with it. I'm not proud, but that is the truth. After the death of my grandmother, I drank excessively for three or four months, ended up with a new girlfriend and in Atlanta.

I also can not talk about it in real life - I guess that is why I feel the need to tell the story here, in relative anonymity. Three years later, and this is the first time I've

described my experience in this much detail. I'm glad I had the opportunity, hopefully it will help with some of the buried pain.

I also fully identify with those who regularly expect to turn on CNN or any news station, and expect to hear the news of the latest catastrophe. There is always a weird, relieved let down when all the local stations are still on regular programming.

Shrdlu.... I am a Christian myself, and I find your comments offensive and completely inappropriate.

You're always welcome here to chat or vent or whatever you feel like. If you can, hook up with somebody that you feel comfortable talking about this stuff with-I speak from personal experience, as I found it helpful to talk with some buddies who also worked downtown that day. Hang in there, be strong.