My local NPR station, WNYC, has been great this past week with their attention to the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Thoughtful, complex, challenging shows, as you'd expect from them. I've had it on almost constantly in the car. While waiting to pick Stella up from the bus stop last Tuesday, I caught the end of Soundcheck, an episode where John Schaefer interviewed people about how 9/11 changed their creative lives. You can listen to that show here, if you'd like. One caller's comments particularly got me thinking: he said that he was working for a lower Manhattan arts organization in 2001, and that he had felt ambivalent about being commissioned to make art afterwards in response to the attacks. He said he had wondered if his viewpoint from that day really warranted an artistic response.
I feel for this guy. You can see where he's coming from. He said he'd only been in the city for a little while at that time; he had his own personal story of what he did on 9/11 but it probably didn't involve being down at the Towers. Everyone has a story of that day. Was his particular experience worthy of being mined for artistic inspiration? And if, instead of responding personally, the idea was to create on behalf of the city as a whole, then how on earth was he qualified to do that? It must have been a head trip.
:: this week's New Yorker cover, Reflections, by Ana Juan ::
In so many postcards and magazine covers and such in the past 10 years, we've developed an iconic set of 9/11 New York images, of the city skyline with the ghosts of the Towers represented in some way. It's complicated to call them art - in some ways they're more akin to propaganda, though of course without the negative connotations of that word. I'm not criticizing. I'm very receptive to having my heartstrings pulled about this - it's cathartic, which over the course of human history has been one of the primary "jobs" of art: to induce catharsis, to help us emotionally purge and be cleansed. These images make us feel something powerful together, they get us all on the same page. They're not personal, telling one soul's story, they're... civic. And some of them are beautiful. I truly love the bigness of Tribute in Light, the installation/memorial they do each year on the anniversary. The dual shafts of blue light beaming up into the night sky (and visible from up to 60 miles away) visually remind us, in a heartbreaking and powerful way, of what the city is supposed to look like. The new skyline is still not normal to me - I think to most adult New Yorkers. The absence of height at the lower tip of the island still seems like Manhattan's most noteable visual feature, like a smile with its two front teeth knocked out. The Towers are like a phantom limb in which we continue to feel pain, the pain of our losing all those thousands of people so horrifically and senselessly. And there is no better way to sum up this response and all its accompanying feelings of loss and grief than with an image, so much more encompassing and expressive than words.
And yet: doesn't the diversity of people's experiences that day and all the days since deserve a diversity of creative responses?
In the city last week for lunch with Chris and my mom, we came across a small 9/11 memorial garden tucked in on a side street on the grounds of the Church of the Epiphany. Facing out onto the street is a sunburst sculpture made of twisted metal and pieces of glass. It's beautiful and striking and strangely organic, emerging up out of the ground like a gnarled tree. And, unlike more literal memorials, it only reveals its connection to 9/11 when you get close enough to read the plaque. Once you know, the scraps of metal forming the sunburst start feeling more like the bones of another metal structure, and the golden light streaming through the windows of glass starts to seem redemptive. It's one of the more hopeful memorials I've seen.
I scoured the internet but couldn't find out who the artist is who made it. Though it's possible, chances are good that she or he wasn't at Ground Zero a decade ago. Does that diminish the sculpture's impact? This is what I'd like to point out to the first radio caller, who asked whether his viewpoint merited a creative reaction. Clearly it is crucial not to appropriate the grief of another person or culture for your own artistic purposes, but there seems to me a very large gray area in between doing that and making nothing. Artists create art. They are not politicians looking for the perfect spin on an issue or teachers imparting important knowledge. They make beauty and tell the truth, and if they have to be worried about pleasing or "accurately representing" the public then they can't do their work.
Just musing here without answers, as befits this day. There are no easy answers and no simple responses. But I am grateful for the solace that art - visual, musical, all of it - can offer in the face of heartbreak and confusion, even ten years later. At the 9/11 memorial ceremony my family went to today, the local police chaplain, a rabbi, told us that in Judaism when someone dies you say "may their memory be a blessing." Isn't that perfect? May we continue to remember, and may that remembering be a blessing to us, and may we continue to be comforted and inspired by creativity along the way.
