We can bicker about whether 9/11 changed anything substantial in the politics of the West, but there is no doubt that in the Islamic world, especially among unassimilated Muslim minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, it really did change everything. The attacks, and the American retaliation in Afghanistan, will probably turn out to have been as definitive in the history of political Islam as the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Just as the Iranian Revolution produced a regime based on Islamism, catapulting the ideology into the Middle Eastern mainstream, so has Bin Laden’s attack made his ideology respectable among alienated Muslims, inspiring a small minority of them to commit their own terrorist attacks.

In 1999, Bin Laden was a wanted terrorist who could blow up relatively unimportant American targets and who was best-known to the CIA and other intelligence organizations. In 2004, he was a notorious figure who symbolized Islamism and anti-Americanism and who could inspire attacks independent of his own network. 9/11 was the work of Bin Laden’s people; the Bali bombing was the work of a regional affiliate; the Madrid bombing and the two London bombings were the works of local extremists inspired by Bin Laden but not affiliated with his organization.

Bin Laden’s own organization might have been able to carry out its own attacks instead of merely inspire them had the United States not crippled it in the months following 9/11. There is much to be criticized about the way Bush handled the invasion of Afghanistan, but it did in fact succeed in preventing Bin Laden’s operatives from striking. Its main failures were mishandling the political aftermath of the Taliban’s fall, and failing to achieve a psychological victory by killing or capturing Bin Laden.

Al Qaida has then become more of an ideology than a real organization. Bin Laden’s influence extends as far as his tapes go, just like a radical writer’s influence extends as far as his articles and books go.

Writing about 9/11 a year ago, I noted that post-2001 Islamic extremism didn’t work as a military hierarchy so much as as a university biology department, where every professor runs his own lab. In fact, a better analogy would involve an anarchist cell: the Jihadists may have leaders, but ultimately their cell structure is spontaneous, and although there is an overarching Islamistic goal, the immediate goal is to cause mayhem rather than achieve something concrete.

In fact, like anarchism, Islamism has specific goals. First, it wants foreign influence expunged from the Islamic world, especially American military presence but also Western cultural influence. Second, it wants to establish Muslim theocracies in Muslim countries. Third, it wants to subject Muslims worldwide to traditional religious authority. Some visionaries may look forward to a unified Ummah, or even to spreading Islam throughout the world, but most Jihadists have a distinctly local character.

Bin Laden’s distinguishing feature is his global outlook. Al Qaida the organization and Hezbollah are the only two Islamist terrorist groups that operate globally rather than locally. With the severe blow it suffered, Al Qaida is now forced to operate as a distributed network based on shared values rather than as a single hierarchy; however, it merely outsourced its global outlook to local groups.

However, this movement is still more about frustration and violence than about social change. This is what differentiates extremist groups that focus on welfare operations and gaining political support for reactionary legislation, such as Hezbollah, from extremist groups that focus on killing people, such as the Al Qaida movement. Social movements, even violent ones, tend to draw inspiration from events showcasing their own oppression – in the case of Islamism, the War on Iraq could be such an event. But in fact the Al Qaida movement’s main source of inspiration is 9/11, not Iraq; its defiant figure is Bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein. While the origin of this movement is largely in the oppression of Muslims in Europe, the focus is not so much on the oppression as on the fundamentalism it bred.

There is a reason all of these developments have only happened in the last five years. There was plenty of alienation around earlier, and both Britain and France have been harboring Islamist extremists for decades. But up until 9/11/2001, there was no inspiration for violent action, just as before Rosa Parks defied bus segregation, there was no inspiration in the American South for non-violent direct action.

Ordinarily, terrorism aims to engage in spectacular action in order to evoke fear among members of the terrorized group. This is especially true for factional terrorism, which cannot engage in large-scale massacres the way state terrorism can. In that traditional goal, Bin Laden has certainly succeeded, for Americans fear terrorism far more than social ills that kill an order of magnitude more people. But he has also succeeded in a nontraditional goal, in that he got a reputation of someone who could bring America down, and destroy its essential symbols. It does not matter that the actual attack was spectacular but did not kill that many people; when it comes to ideological grandstanding, perception is reality.

Still, in many respects, the 9/11 attacks did not completely change the character of Islamism. As I mentioned before, it remains primarily local. All Islamists hate the United States, considering it the symbol of all that is evil in the world. But British Jihadists evidently blow up the London Underground instead of traveling to New York and blowing up subway stations; even Iraqi Jihadists, including foreign fighters inspired by anti-Americanism, concentrate more on killing Iraqis of the wrong denomination than on killing Americans.

And two possible trends that would have made the attacks even more of a watershed moment did not occur. It was entirely possible for the attacks to scar not the vast majority of Muslims, but a near-unanimous one. In such a case, the focus of Muslim cultural identity in Europe may have been greater integration, despite Europe’s uniformly integration-discouraging governmental policies; any radical fringe could have then turned to non-violent direct action. I suspect a big reason this trend did not happen is Bush’s virulent response, and governments’ not cracking down on subsequent anti-Muslim hate crimes, but it could have also been due to other reasons, such as the lack of a civic tradition in Islam.

The other possible trend is massive radicalization. At present, the most biased neoconservatives say that 1% of all Muslims are Jihadists; the American response, combined with overt racism in Western countries, could have easily turned that number to 15%. The clash of civilizations fundamentalists on both sides have been hoping for did not happen, is not happening, and will almost certainly not happen. Even Samuel Huntington’s more denouement-based conception of a clash of civilizations has not materialized.

So in fact, 9/11 did not change the level of support Jihadi extremism enjoyed among Muslims. Its significance lies in changing the nature of that support, from merely hating the West and being drawn to fundamentalism as a reaction, to admiring and seeking to emulate Bin Laden. In that respect, it really did change everything in the Islamic world, for never before had there been a coherent violent Islamist ideology. Even if that ideology is still based on its believers’ cultural isolation and oppression, it is still an ideology that serves as inspiration to many extremists. And certainly, this is an ideology that only rose after the watershed moment of Islamism that was 9/11.

More than any other issue, it is the US invasion of Iraq that has separated the US from the rest of world after September 11th. It has also divided the United States internally, weakened its capacity to deal with the threat of extremist Islamic terror, and made a mockery of US power. While Guantanamo, Afghanistan, limits on civil liberties in the US, and the US acquiescence in Israeli bombing have set the US apart from the rest of the world, how many countries can really say they have not tortured prisoners, bombed innocents, imprisoned their own citizens without just cause, or over-reacted in their efforts to fight insurgencies and rebellions? However, other than the Soviet Union and Iraq, itself, no other country after World War II has had the power or the chutzpah to invade another, simply in order to remake it.

While the US Administration argues that Iraq is a part of the “war on terror”, most critics argue that it is at best distracting the US from dealing with terrorism, or, at worst, destroying its ability to do so. Still, it is hard not to be sympathetic to the project of a democratic pluralist Iraq, however much a mess the US has made of it. Is there a way, in which this US Administration, as opposed to some imaginary one with perfect information and ideal morals, could have achieved, or still can, a more stable Iraq.

Regime change without an invasion

All advocates of invasion also advocated regime change. But all advocates of regime change did not advocate invasion. So this administration could have mobilized a broader coalition, if it had actually implemented what was clear in its political rhetoric and official policy. It formally sought to end Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, but informally made it clear that it would not settle for anything less than regime change. The problem was the Administration’s insistence that regime change could only be secured through the barrel of a gun. There may have been another option.

Instead of invading on 20th March 2003, the US could have sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad with an ultimatum, two decades after his previous trip to Iraq as a presidential envoy of Ronald Reagan. Rumsfeld could have offered the following deal. Saddam Hussein agrees to an inclusive transitional government, grants formal self-rule to the Kurds, ends human rights abuses, cooperates against Al-Qaeda, and allows in UN inspectors. In exchange, the US would not invade Iraq. With the US forces poised to invade, it would have been an offer that Saddam Hussein would have found hard to refuse. But what if he had? There would be war, certainly no worse than what Iraqis face now. Even if he had stalled after accepting the deal, it would have been the beginning of the end of his autocratic authority.

A different beginning

Having invaded Iraq, what could the US have done differently? First the US could have prevented the looters from looting Iraq. A curfew combined with stringent measures, immediately after the invasion, would have stopped the looting and made Iraq safer. Second the US could have retained the Iraqi Army, an army of conscripts with no personal loyalty to Saddam Hussein, except for certain elite units. Third the US should have retained all former Baathists in professional positions, only “screening out” former Baathists who had committed abuses. Instead the US first expelled them all and then “screened in” former Baathists who had not committed abuses.

The result of such a “screening in” policy was that the entire professional class – university professors, teachers, doctors and engineers – who joined the Baath party simply to get a job were initially excluded from working. They then had to go through a cumbersome process to prove they were innocent before they got their jobs back. This took time, money, and energy on the part of those affected, and kept Iraq from using much needed local talent to reconstruct the country. These three policy decisions required neither new resources, nor prior planning. They only required sensitivity to the ground situation and a political understanding of how people behave under dictatorships and during transitions. Any one of these decisions could have had a significant impact on the post-war situation in Iraq. All three together might have changed the tide.

What can the US do now?

Now the US is facing terrorism, a tough insurgency and a divided Iraq. Bringing Iraq around would require breaking up the problem into three manageable parts. First the US can work with Iran to stabilize the Shia South. This would entail easing pressure on Iran’s civil nuclear program, lifting sanctions and engaging diplomatically, in exchange for better cooperation from Iran in reining in militias and monitoring the borders. Since Iran also has an interest in a stable Iraq over an unstable one, this is not an impossible deal to make. In any case it is unlikely that the UN Security Council will back the US on sanctions against Iran, so the US has little to lose. Of course, if it waits too long, it may also have little to offer.

Second the US can work with the governments of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and even Turkey, to help secure local autonomy and rights for Kurds within each of these countries. The pay off is greater stability in these countries, and more secure borders for all of them. The Kurdish regions in each of these countries, straddling many of the borders, then become better managed and policed, enabling a crackdown on the infiltration of men and arms to the Iraqi insurgency, rather than facilitating it because of unstable borders.

Third the US should negotiate with the ex-Baathist and nationalist insurgents in the central parts of Iraq, while isolating Al-Qaeda elements. This would reduce incentives for cooperation among the different insurgencies, and increase the likelihood of greater stability. To do this, however, the US would have to backtrack from a major plank of its policy after September 11th. It would have to concede that all terrorists are not the same – there are some terrorists you can and should actually talk to. And that Iraq is not just a central part of the war on terrorism, but a country facing a triple transition from Baath party dictatorship to multi-party democracy, US occupation to Iraqi self-rule, and Sunni Arab domination to pluralism. This would not be easy to do.

If this fails withdraw

The loss of international goodwill, the erosion of support in the US, the anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the anguish in Iraq, may make it politically impossible for the US Administration to take the above steps, even if it were ready to concede that Iraq may have nothing to do with the war on terror. This may leave the US, Iraq and the world with no option but a withdrawal from Iraq. Whatever its drawbacks, such a withdrawal is increasingly beginning to look like the least bad option available.

There’s an old theory that says experience in general is structured like trauma. Or, to put it another way, that trauma is merely a special or egregious case of what we suffer every day simply by coming into contact with the world. Much of what happens to us cannot be fully processed right away. It is simply too much. And so, experience gets packed away into memory where it sits, waiting for an occasion, intentional or less so, when it can be retrieved and dealt with. In this way of thinking, we are all a little like Proust, sorting through our vast store of barely acknowledged experiences and trying to make some sense of them the second time around.

It’s entirely possible five years after 9/11 to have a great deal of discussion about what the event really meant and what its repercussions have been. Simply pick up a newspaper or a magazine or turn on the television. But what has receded farther away, perhaps, is the actual experience of the day. That day barely exists anymore. This is well and proper in many ways, some traumas, some experiences, need more time than others. But it is also an odd feeling to know that such an intense experience does sit there latent, within us all, waiting to be tapped some day, like a kind of mental time bomb.

What I remember most about September 11, 2001 was the muted almost graceful way that the towers came down in watching them from the roof of a warehouse in Brooklyn. There was no sound. The flames and the smoke were distant enough that they were merely daubs of grey and licks of orange against blue. The sky was as blue and as bright as it has ever been. The city was as quiet as it has even been, waiting. Blue. And then, calmly, as if resigned both to the laws of nature and to the whims of human action that had conspired against it, the first tower came down. Something in the middle gave way and the top of the building seemed to slide down on itself, like a telescope. And in a few long, measured ticks of the clock it was gone. Just a plume of billowy cotton spreading out from lower Manhattan into the Bay.

Days later the smell of 9/11 became its main impression, an acridity to the air that everyone recognized but didn’t want to name. There was a burning in the eyes and a bad feeling on the skin. But the actual moment of the event itself was, for us in Brooklyn, like the very absence of sensation, a living abstraction and then a terrible waiting for the rush of experience to come crashing in again as it did the next morning when we woke up dumb, because we’d forgotten that all worlds are fragile and we’d forgotten that we were so very fragile too. And five years later we’ve forgotten all of that again, except here and there in little bits, when we remember.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Whatever is sufficient unto the human, with glories and miseries—freedom’s torch, the begging hand, aloneness; skyscrapers rearing with aesthetic delights not from a lesser god; acres of parkland where one can not just imagine (pace John Lennon), but have, Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’.

Of course, New York is magnificent, and New Yorkers know it, though naturally there are some who can only whinge about their magnificence. Citizens of Sydney, used to newbie enthusiasm over the city’s physical attractions, and far from immune to aren’t-we-wonderful self-glorification, know the real thing when we see it. From the Time Warner Center atrium to the trickling fountains at the Frick collection; up at the Cloisters, sequestered from development; down to the colossal energies of Times Square; at tony Park Avenue; through the empty space where the World Trade Center once stood, now waiting, yearning, for its Freedom Tower—Manhattan, Gotham City, stands, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island boroughs surrounding, an epic of social integration (‘Give me your tired, your poor’), a dazzling, perplexing, overwhelming city. With very expensive real estate. And with taxi and bus drivers whose skill in getting through the city’s ceaseless traffic can only be compared to the technique of great ballet dancers. Some long-term residents bemoan the changing character of parts of the city, but for the visitor it’s a case of: there doesn’t go the neighbourhood. Surely New York was never greener, cleaner or more attractive than it is now.

It might very well be a cliche to stand at the top of the Empire State Building. One does not run into Cary Grant waiting for Deborah Kerr, testing the limits of their affair to remember. However, the visual consummation at this height is quite something. Everyone who goes to New York should try to get there. Most New Yorkers will tell you to go on a clear day—you might just see forever—but I think it’s better to go after a rainstorm, when the clouds have partially cleared and are scudding across the sky, which is when I went. The crowds have dispersed and you don’t have to wait too long to get through the security checks. Then, up at that imperial height, where even Central Park is reduced to some olive spinnaker, you can see the whole fantastic panoply of the city lit by shadow and sunlight, the wind a bracing tonic against the tiredness that is likely to overcome you if you’re not careful. Don’t try to conquer too much of New York on your peregrinations. You won’t.

If that experience doesn’t send you to your hotel room somewhat chastened, then I suggest a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art might. The collection there is so awesome in its range of paintings, sculpture, furniture, glassware, armour and ceramics, that one could not begin to do it justice in less than a year of visits. Here is a place so vast that you can make a wrong turn, expecting to be looking at Greek statuary, and end up in a complete Egyptian temple or, taking another staircase, suddenly be confronted by an entire Frank Lloyd Wright room. Well, one can only take in so much art at one time. It was amusing to see people, just like myself, wandering in a slightly hypnotised way through the galleries at the end of the day. We had experienced the phenomenon of nervous attrition by artistic masterpiece. That’s a danger not just at MMA. There are MoMA and the Guggenheim to see too, for starters. The David Smith retrospective was on at the Guggenheim when I was in New York, and it was exciting to be confronted by an oeuvre I knew little about. By the way, the tour guides in the museums are unfailingly instructive and knowledgeable. They teach you so much in the short amount of time they have, and most of their work is voluntary. 

When the gold curtain parts at the Met for five hours of great Wagner singing (Hampson, Heppner, Meier, Pape, Putilin in Parsifal) or you sit in The Belasco for Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, its socialism on the right side of the agit-prop dividing line, in the very theatre where the play had its premiere, you can experience a rare theatrical frisson. The grandfather in the Odets’ play throws himself off the roof of the apartment block in which the Berger family live—Ben Gazzara, the original Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, in a fine performance. The hopes of a lifetime perish with a terrible fall from grace. It struck me that we were living through a similar period the play represents. Our dumb celebrity culture, cynicism and irony, our know-nothing knowingness, is different to pre-War New York, but in other ways we are similar. The grandfather’s ideals are under pressure from economic reality, just as we know the reality of torture, war and starvation. New York should confirm us in our ideals too, or at least make us think very hard about what is left of our ideals. Hart Crane invokes the feeling that precedes insight so well in the ecstatic ‘Proem To Brooklyn Bridge’ from The Bridge: ‘O Sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, / Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.’ I felt these emotions, these links between architecture and human aspiration, many, many times. The Rockefeller Center, for example, no doubt, for some, a worm of predatory capitalism symbolising all that is worst in the oppression of non-Western cultures, struck me as entirely beautiful, its art works, murals and sculpures, from the Manzù door reliefs to the Swarovski crystal installation (but how are they going to clean it?). For a poet the world may be something like a rose, for the scientist something like a machine to be explained. The future must see the uniting of the rose and the machine in culture, in politics, if we are to at long last fulfil the hopes of grandfathers who gave up and jumped off buildings, or poets who disappeared on ocean voyages.

Parts of the planet may well be rotten to the core, but other parts are marvellous. Sure, New York has problems, the major one being the clear social and economic inequalities between some neighbourhoods. On a mundane level, theatre etiquette could do with some sharpening up—the cannonade of coughing I heard through Act One of Tosca was something to behold. But then there are wonders unlike anything else: the rooftop garden vista at the Metropolitan Museum, the Morgan Library with its unique manuscript and art collections (Anne, Branwell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë manuscripts, Mahler’s 5th, an Edgar Allan Poe story et al), approaching the Statue of Liberty at dusk.

True, there are neurotics, jackasses and wannabes about, but you get those everywhere. Repose can be found in many a quiet enclave, whether that be in any of the numerous bookstores, Bryant Park or in the reading rooms of the adjacent New York Public Library (the library had a superb exhibition on—French Book Art of artists and poets in dialogue—when I visited). On the other hand, if people about you is what you want, The Village Voice can tell you about hundreds of events to go to. New York also means jazz, dogs and food—for cheaper eats try the cheeses in Zabar’s or the hamburgers at Nick’s on the Upper West Side. If you’re cashed up, there’s always Le Cirque. Street fairs are a favourite weekend pastime. Large sections of Broadway, or other thoroughfares, are closed off on Sundays and filled with stands from all over, conspiracy theory booths happily mixing with the corn fritters and pashminas.   

However, in the end, you must come to the one defining moment in recent New York history that centres all journeys in this city, and all one’s subjective emotions. Perhaps it is foolish to look for the spirit of this city in one moment or defining event, but I think you can find that New York spirit in a number: 343. That is the number of firefighters and paramedics who died on September 11 as they tried to control the catastrophe. Every death then was tragic, as are all deaths brought about through violence. But what honour was accrued to the city through their actions. People say the ancient myths were an invention to explain the unpredictable behaviour of the gods, but on September 11 there Hercules fought Antaeus. The golden Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center transformed itself at Ground Zero into stupendous courage and heroism. How proud the relatives and friends must be of those who went to their deaths that day trying to save the lives of others.

Next time you hear about New York’s brashness, financial shenanigans, corruption, its callous disregard for your intentions, look more closely. Beneath the harsh surface lies the greatness of the human spirit, in all of its faltering grandeur.   

                                                                  *

            September 11, 2001

You will remember, under brilliant stars,
The shadows of the burning, falling towers,
The kindness and the malice we receive
Or give to others, fortune’s miseries.

What steadfastness eroded skin will keep
In its griefs, inexplicable;
Dark energy can gather for a killing
Though not all joy is taken by cruel dirt.

When it is done, quickly the darkness comes,
Blood and iron’s mistaken enterprise;
Immortal smiles on future summer nights
Shall hold to reason with grasped photographs.

Time may despatch your broken history
And bid the dead eternal recompense—
Their shades surround you in the morning light
Edging through this silence on the ground.

Written 2003

Line 9 references Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7

‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’

Lillias White sings ‘Manhattan’ here. 2′ 46”

Shannon has left me.

No, wait. That’s not right. It’s I who’s left her, and I did it a while ago, too.

I sit in a drab apartment on the third floor of a complex off vaci Utca (VAHtsy OOtsa) in Budapest. There is fabric on the walls–scored beige, thick and hard as amphibian skin–and two putty-colored easy chairs, straight out of Super 8, and a coffee table of black-lacquered particle board, and a glass-doored hutch against the wall, also black-lacquered particle board. The tone is set by the single sad decorative effort: two shelves of empty liquor gift-tins, carefully arranged in the hutch: Dewar’s, Johnny Walker Red, Beefeater, Absolut.

Budapest in 2001–surely it’s a different place now, fast as Eastern Europe is these days, fast as it was in those days–is a city so sexy its longtime residents have relegated their constant hard-ons to the drear of daily life. The women are blonde; they have enormous breasts; they wear thongs; and over their thongs they wear filmy tights or tiny skirts. The men are powerful specimens, tall and muscled and preternaturally confident. These men could crush me in the crook of their arm. They are the Dutch, they are the Danish, but unburdened by the weary sophistication–political, social, sexual–of Western Europe. They all must be unbearably good in bed.

And they have discovered the candied bliss of the American shopping mall. Sixty feet away from my front door, just across vaci Utca, is a pristine five-tier retail mecca, replete with indoor vegetation, multi-screen cinemas (a captain’s easy chair for every paying customer), and countless stores selling whorish outfits for pennies, for spare change, forints. Each shopgirl is a dream of womanly abundance. There are fantastic asses everywhere you look. And the eyes–they seem to invite. (Is it my imagination? Almost certainly it is. I am terribly lonely here.) There’s a TGI Friday’s on the north end, first floor. It is my favorite restaurant.

What I mean to say: Budapest is the perfect place to watch the end of the world.

And Shannon has left me.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively. In the case of love: a thousand miscast glances, the contemptuous homemaking demands of a tyrant (well-suited for a ’50s housewife in high heels), and a precisely limited sexual plan, designed for my pleasure, designed for my pleasure.

We are in Venice, the living, gasping, brackish museum, in a fabulous apartment, in a fabulous palazzo, terra-cotta roofs in every direction. But for me, I am occupied by flirting with the bar girl. Shannon is at my side, doing the International Herald Trib crossword. The bar girl has sensual lips, that priceless Italian insolence, and is pleased to fuel my fantasies. Meanwhile, Shannon ignores it as best she can. There is grocery shopping to be done, and she’s always on the look-out for a provocative blouse to interest me, and she is deeply in love with Venice. She thinks she loves me, too, but in truth I am only a conduit, a way to get her in. And for me, Shannon is a way, was a way, to get me out. Out of Bennington, Vermont, out of the Bush-addled United States, out of a life that bored me. And here we sit, in this Venetian bar, where the bar girl has just walked by and brushed her hand against my shoulder. That insolence, those sensual lips. I’d like to do terrible things to her.

Venice is a small town for expat Americans. When Shannon has taken all she can take, when my contempt, my wandering eyes, my fury at her insufficiency, at my insufficiency, peak, I must find a new place in which to decay. Budapest, Buda-Pest, city on the Danube, where the buildings proudly bear the bullet holes of 1956, where the women, the girls, twitch their bethonged asses like seasoned pros. Budapest is the place to be, baby.

I am inside my apartment, inside my hard beige walls, because my eyes, my fantasies, are bigger than my courage. I’d like to be a player, but let’s get real. I’m too sensitive, too diffident, too weak, to make the necessary moves. At 3 pm, I turn on CNN and watch massive death in real-time. I see the second plane. I see the desperate, brave suicides. I see the towers fall.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, unrelated to the other languages of Central Europe, and as one of the small number of modern European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European language family it has always been of great interest to linguists. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighboring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. [–Wikipedia]

Halál. Death.

I do not speak Hungarian. I cannot pronounce Hungarian. For days I wander the mall, the streets, staring at the newspaper photographs of fire and death, halál, captioned and headlined in a language of stacked consonants and inscrutable syllables. I speak to no one.

Two weeks later I move to a new apartment, farther south, away from the mall, the TGI Friday’s, the fulsome bodies of the girls of my sad little dreams. In my new home I do not get CNN, but Fox News. I develop a disturbing relationship with Bill O’Reilly.

The previous occupant of my apartment, the son of my landlord, has left a cardboard box of videotapes, which I sort through in a pathetic attempt to avoid the writing that is, supposedly, my mission. But they are all in magyar, all useless, all but one. It is unlabeled, black, anonymous. It is unmitigated hardcore pornography. It is an Italian import. There is no sensuality here, no insolence, only fucking. Only death.

Thank you, I say. Thank you, whoever you are. This is everything. This is enough.

Five years seems like such a long time ago. Among other things, both my parents were still alive. (Neither is now.) I was not yet married. I had never heard of blogs. I had never been to Finland (a regular destination for me in recent years because of my friend Marko). I had never been harassed by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. There was no Department of Homeland Security. And there was no Patriot Act, the most dangerous, destructive (of civil liberties) and retrogressive piece of legislation in memory, which now holds over every head in this country (specially Muslim and Arab ones) the dark threat of indefinite detention at Guantanamo, without charge or due process.

The thing I remember most clearly about the day of the attacks is speaking to my mother in Karachi at some point. It wasn’t a particularly substantive exchange, but it was nice to hear her voice, and a relief, I imagine, for her to hear mine. For days afterwards one went around as if in a dream. Nothing felt real. The atmosphere in New York City took a long time to return to anything like normal, and during that period one’s emotions remained unpredictable and turbulent. September 11th itself was, of course, the worst. By afternoon of that bright autumn day, my uptown apartment had become a makeshift refugee camp for a number of friends who lived near the World Trade Center, and who could no longer go home. At some point on that day, we all went out en masse to try and get a late lunch, only to find an eerie silence on Broadway. All traffic had been stopped in Manhattan. For some odd reason, the few people present were whispering to each other, if speaking at all. After a while, armored personnel carriers with uniformed soldiers began slowly rolling down the streets, while F-14 Tomcats circled overhead. People in civilian dress carrying submachine guns quietly appeared on the street corners. (Later, I learned they were FBI agents.) It was not clear then if there would be further attacks. One felt like one was in a war zone, and I was reminded of my recurring childhood nightmares after Pakistan’s 1971 war with India. Every little while, someone in our group would suddenly break into tears.

That night, we slept fitfully, gripped by the confusion of sadness, fear, anger. The next day, I managed to collect myself enough to send an email to friends and family expressing some of what I felt. I reproduce that message here:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

On that day, the only thing that I was, was a New Yorker. A New Yorker who loved his wounded city more than ever. And one whose only allegiance was to the sentimental cosmopolitan ideal that this city somehow still manages to embody even today. Probably because many people were still in shock and unable to say anything, this email was forwarded along and eventually ended up being one of those things that went around the internet in ever-wider circles. I received hundreds of appreciative emails in reply and my two little paragraphs were translated into various languages and published in newspapers. They were even read aloud by European political leaders at emergency meetings and hastily assembled conferences. People started asking me my opinion on what had happened, and along with all the other bewildering sentiments, I started feeling inflated.

A little over a week later, I found out that one of my close friends, Ehtesham U. Raja, who had so far been unaccounted for, had actually died in the World Trade Center. He had been attending a business meeting that fateful morning in Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the WTC. Again, while trying to recover from this blow, I received many messages of sympathy. And I liked it. And then I felt disgusted for feeling self-important through my friend’s death. It was at that time, while sitting one afternoon in our living room with my wife Margit, in the midst of this confusing tempest of fast-changing emotions, that I sarcastically spewed out (for catharsis) what could in a very generous mood be considered a prose poem. I readily admit that I am no poet, and perhaps there is a bit of what Vladimir Nabokov once rightly described as (something like) “the passing around of specimens of one’s sputum for inspection” about my making public for the first time now what I had written that day, but in the spirit of telling what this horrific event did to us New Yorkers, I adduce it here. Please be gentle in judging me:

How We Became Important

At first we were thrilled,

the way one is thrilled by thrillers.

It was a real-life action movie, and then it got better.

This was no small entertainment–no Amtrak derailment,

no mere collision of jumbo jets over Tenerife.

It was something bigger,

and it was right on our doorstep, just outside our window.

It was real.

ABC News went off the air and, being engineers,

we realized the thin hypodermic,

a transmitting antenna, was destroyed.

We felt clever, in the know.

We changed channels.

We called family members

in anxious, incredulous excitement,

but we couldn’t get through.

Well, yes. That made sense.

This was big.

And then we saw thousands perish in an instant.

In a brown cloud.

Live on television.

And we wept. (Later we would brag about this weeping.)

We inventoried important landmarks nearby,

wondering if we would be next,

but we knew it was fantasy,

a wish for the adrenaline rush of fire and heat,

a wish to be closer, still closer.

Of course, no one thought us important enough to kill,

but it was thrilling to make believe.

We climbed to the roof and watched the rolls of smoke and dust.

We identified F-14s by their double vertical rudders,

the overall silhouette of the Tomcat.

We spoke like admirals about carrier battle groups.

We ate lunch, marveling at the unfolding of History.

We lowered the pitch of our voices, became grave,

newly aware of our central role.

We made pronouncements about death and infamy.

We were lucky enough to be Muslims

(and from Pakistan, too),

and while others worried for our safety,

we knew that no harm would come to us.

All the same, we had become victims–

that most desirable status, that gift of our time.

Now we had sympathy, the ear of the world

for whatever we might like to spew:

hymns and elegies

professing love of this land;

our shock and sorrow, and our attempts to transcend them;

pious lectures about people and nations

outside America’s soft, imaginary borders.

We defended Muslims to Christians and America to Muslims.

We were virtuous, pleading restraint but never peace,

and we became terribly sophisticated in our politics.

We ate well and slept badly.

We dreamed of burning airplanes.

Soon enough our attentions turned to Eros.

Women liked our newfound moist-eyed sensitivity.

You see, we didn’t know if there would be a tomorrow,

and in any case we were too important now

to read fiction or write philosophy.

There was no time for the old things.

This was big.

And then, with our egos already swollen,

we discovered that a close friend had died with all the others.

A man eating a breakfast with a view.

A close friend, gone.

We couldn’t believe our good luck!

Not everyone could claim such moment.

Not everyone would receive messages of condolence.

We had only lived on the periphery of meaning before,

but now, when the landlady called to collect back-rent,

we would ask if everyone she knew was OK,

and hope, hope that she would return the favor.

Rent.

How trivial compared to the loss of our friend.

Yes, there was grief.

But how quickly our losses were recompensed

by feelings of centrality, consequence.

Overnight, we became astute and worldly thinkers,

with courageous and steadfast hearts.

We were potent lovers and sensitive friends.

We were sages and saints,

and wise.

We really thought we had become important.

New York, uniquely, inspires proprietary feelings in people who don’t even live here.  All over the world, I’ve noticed, people like to think of their cities in relation to New York.  Bostonians speak of the Boston-New York axis, Washingtonians of the Washington-New York corridor.  Los Angelenos and Chicagoans too.  The English consume a diet of newspaper stories claiming that “Swinging” London in “Cool” Britannia has finally surpassed New York in any of a number of areas: art, music, architecture.  (There’s no corresponding competitive discourse in New York media – I guess we don’t suffer from comparative anxieties.)  Even in my hometown of Buffalo, where New York City is often regarded as the great sinkhole of state monies, we took a secret pride in being co-members of the Empire State with N.Y.C.  These perceived affiliations and competitions are a way for other cities to append themselves to New York, to partake of its cultural gravitational field.  Paris is French, Tokyo is Japanese, but New York, to many, is a heterotopia floating off the coast of the United States. 

Manhattan’s grid, and New York’s prolific displays of maps of itself and its subways, streets, and configurations, make it an easy city in which to feel at home.  People produce cognitive maps here very quickly, feel comfortable navigating its terrain almost immediately.  This quality of ease, which is so different, for instance, to the impenetrable ball of yarn that is the map of London, is perhaps the origin of the pervasive sense of belonging experienced by New York visitors and residents alike.  No labyrinthine local knowledges prevent the first-timer from getting from Fifty-Third and Sixth to Twenty-Sixth and Tenth.  Perhaps that famous expression of fealty, “we are all New Yorkers now” should have been, “we are all New Yorkers already.”

I may belong to a minority in remembering the World Trade Center as a poetic structure, but the reasons I do have much to do with how it expressed these signature qualities of New York City.   Visually, the buildings gave the sense of a vertical grid, elongated just as Manhattan is elongated, with an avenue of sky running in between.  Unexpected views of them would often crop up, maybe when turning south from Houston Street onto Sullivan, or standing on the corner of Lafayette and Spring, or while driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike.  Emerging from the Brat Pack-era hangout The Odeon, way downtown, their almost ominous presence suddenly loomed over you.  A perfect visual metaphor, they towered over neighboring skyscrapers the way New York towers over its neighboring cities.  Dark masses illuminated by a bright grid, they signified New York.

I often think about how important it was that there were two of them.  One skyscraper, like the Empire State Building or the Woolworth, somehow remains a building, its mass of steel and concrete impossible to forget.  The twoness of the Twin Towers brought into being relations with the air, dramatized space.  The few places where one tower completely occluded the other (such as the pier leading to the Holland tunnel exhaust, off Spring and West Streets) were uncanny viewing points.  The one visible tower despotically oppressed, rather than symbolized, the city.  One tower was a fascist; two towers invoked psychology, doubleness, complexity.  And because the footprints of the buildings occupied two diagonally opposed squares, they almost always presented themselves to the eye as perspectival, one slightly higher than the other.  The aura of their unevenness brilliantly leavened their austere shapes.  They hovered.

As you approached the plaza, you always noted with pleasure the little arches near the bottoms of the aluminum facade.  These merest bends subtly recalled and paid homage to the Deco architectural landmarks of the city.  They conjured the relation of the Chrysler and the Empire State to the grid itself, represented as the endless lines that clad the trade center’s sides.  The optical illusions those shimmering lines made were almost arrogant: excessive on a building that already inspired vertigo.  For a time, the cavernous lobbies contained a satellite airline terminal.  The sight of those ticket counters was oddly right in buildings that, like airports, constituted entire worlds unto themselves, with the frisson of rocket ships or space stations.  The towers’ otherworldliness made them the unlikely site of a Wednesday evening club night at Windows on the World, frequented by Kate Moss and the rest of the New York glitter circuit of the mid-Nineties.  You’d wander around with a drink and then suddenly come to the windows, through which the shockingly faraway streets below gave a pleasing shock. 

For me, the World Trade Center was part of the given world.  It was finished the year before I was born.  I could never quite comprehend accounts of the debates about Yamasaki’s design choices, about the wisdom of his aluminum minimalism.  To me, they were already there.  They were a late articulation of modernism, in a romantic and slightly whimsical version.  And modernism was a credo whose modernity seemed unquestionable, if you take my meaning.  The good things about New York City for me were (and are) related to its embrace of what it means to be modern, to be in the present tense.  From my family’s decision to immigrate to the United States to my mother’s Audrey Hepburn haircut, my life has been dominated by instantiations of modernism, by dynamic faith in making things new. 

From the time of my first visit to New York, when we visited the WTC and I finally tasted my first long dreamed-of escargot, it never crossed my mind that the towers, along with plenty of other institutions of the postwar period, would prove impermanent.  How could what represented the present become past?  But like other seemingly permanent features of life, One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center now appear as stupendous legends that lasted for a short twenty-five years.  The gashes that appeared in the buildings, as I stared at them from Chambers and Church Streets, never looked anything other than fixable – it never occurred to me not to assume the towers were invulnerable until they fell.  Even the great, floating sheets of metal tearing away and drifting down from above, or the people I saw leap to their deaths, didn’t convince me that the buildings themselves might not make it.  Surely the emergent chaos those gashes represented could never defeat the entire order.  But it did.

On September 14th, 2001, I flew back to Buffalo on one of the first planes to take off from JFK.  The night before, Abbas, Margit and I had spontaneously sung “New York, New York” at the top of our lungs with a bar full of strangers.  There were about six people on board the Airbus, and I was seated in the first row.  I was heading to a high-school friend’s wedding.  I broke into tears at the sight of the smoldering wreck of downtown, where I still needed to pass a military checkpoint to return to my apartment.  I remember clenching my fists and somberly determining that no passenger would cross the threshold separating me from the captain, on pain of death.  As the flight progressed, it occurred to me that everyone else on the plane was extremely afraid of me. 

It is the world as it existed when I happened upon it that turns out to be the fleeting one.  I’ll be simply part of a shrinking group of people who remember New York with the World Trade Center. 

My other Dispatches.

Justin E. H. Smith

What could be more self-indulgent than to recount where one was on September 11? As if other people were not somewhere. As if being anywhere at all on the planet automatically made one a survivor. I survived September 11, as it happens, in an internet café in Berlin packed with smirking German hipsters, who could not wait to go find more hipsters, at a rave or at a squat, with whom to wax ironical about the day’s events and to recount with a smirk where they were when it happened, a whole six hours later. My grandmother survived Auschwitz: disguised since birth as a Swedish Protestant, she rode it out teaching elementary school in Minnesota. But she had the decency to stay pursed-lipped after the war. We on the other hand must carry on about where we were, what we felt and thought, as though that mattered. I am no exception.

The first thought I had when asked to write something for the fifth anniversary of September 11 was: Jesus. I must be really old. I was old then, and it’s been five years. I should probably start wrapping things up right about now. I don’t even have a will, let alone a legacy. I can’t seem to bring myself to think about such things. I just love life too much. I do not want to die.

I knew of course that what I was expected to produce was hard-nosed political analysis –I’ve managed to do it for Counterpunch— and here I was carrying on as though it was all about me. I would like to be a sharp political analyst, I truly would: on the one hand, the chickens of American imperialism came home to roost, but on the other hand taking innocent lives is never acceptable, etc.

Some topics just stifle all that analytical acumen and cause me to regress into infantile self-absorption, unable to write about anything other than myself. My hope is that I will get away with this by lacquering it up with essayistic style, and claiming membership in a venerable tradition. Montaigne got away with it, some will respond, only because in the 16th century the self was a new and exciting discovery. Today it is old news. And yet, today, I carry on.

A long time ago, in that phase of life when infantile self-absorption was not only tolerated but celebrated by fawning adults, I lived in a white-trash exurb of a mediocre Western city. There were cars on jacks and mean-ass dogs on chains in front yards, people hung sheets in their windows instead of curtains, and there were no structures over two stories high. I imagined that cities consisted in rows of buildings as high as the World Trade Center, stretching out beyond the horizon in all directions, with tubular, glass bridges connecting them all at their very tops, for those who preferred not to use jet-packs.

But then I was taken on family vacations to the supposedly shining cities of the American West, and I saw empty lots between buildings, with broken glass glistening amongst the weeds, and plastic six-pack holders, and weeds pushing up even between the cracks in the sidewalks. No, Sacramento would not cut it, not even Los Angeles, and not even that supposedly exceptional Western city, San Francisco. I resolved by the age of eight or so to move to New York, where I would spend the rest of my life 110 floors above the earth, never again to descend to that terrestrial sphere where the dirt and the plants and animals, and the feral human rejects drifting across the great wide West, were condemned to live out their days.

On the day we moved out of my childhood home in the white-trash exurb, into a condo in a lower-middle-class suburb, I scrawled the lyrics to Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Halber Mensch” on the inside of a bedroom closet, with a magic marker, and added a hammer-and-sickle and an anarchist ‘A’ for good measure. It was 1987, and I was 15.

I arrived in New York in 1994 and left, unwillingly, in 2000. I went to the top of the World Trade Center only once, with Klaus, visiting from Berlin. He wanted to see Gary Kasparov playing against Deep Blue. 1997, that must have been. My sole visit to the 110th floor I had once hoped to inhabit was to witness a showdown between man and machine, a popular pastime among the curious ever since the Mechanical Turk made its debut in 1769.

On September 9, 2001, I set out from my miserable little college-town amidst the cornfields of southern Ohio, whither the great Metropolis had cast me once I finished my Ph.D. at Columbia. I drove to Chicago to fly to Berlin, via Paris, for a conference devoted to the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. On the way I passed right under Sears Tower. It looked shabby and old, and I remember thinking: that thing’s going to have to come down sooner or later. Structures like that can’t just go on forever. Is there anyone, I wonder, who will be able to see to its demolition?

I arrived on the tenth and installed myself in Pamela’s Kreuzberg apartment. She introduced me to her new boyfriend, and at every opportunity I suggested to her that she could not be serious. We had a punctilious drink in a nearby bar, the three of us, and she announced that I would have to make my way back and let myself in. The two of them had plans.

The next day I decided to skip most of the afternoon sessions at the conference in order to read the New York Times at an internet café near the Zoogarten Bahnhof. When I arrived, there was a widescreen TV in the café showing scenes of smoke and carnage. My first thought was: nothing to worry about. That must be somewhere really far away and irrelevant. Somewhere really fucked up, where this kind of thing is normal. Then I saw the NYPD vehicles. The hipsters who ran the place were watching and making jokes to one another. In the news report I heard the verb einstürzen. I was more surprised by that word than by the images it accompanied. That was among the first German words I ever learned, having been a card-carrying hipster myself and having throughout the eighties sought out the hardest-core German industrial music available in the California exurbs. It means ‘to collapse’, and is used in connection with buildings and other large structures. Einstürzende Neubauten had presented themselves as anarchists and nihilists, back in the eighties, but certainly not as fascists (and ‘Islamofascists’ were not even on the radar), who would have liked to have seen it all collapse.

I rushed back to the Leibniz crowd at the Technical University a few blocks away. Best of all possible worlds my ass, I thought. I had always found Voltaire an obnoxious wiseacre, all-too easily taking jabs at Leibniz’s Theodicy without having really made any effort to understand it. When Leibniz said this was the best of all possible worlds, he didn’t mean that it was great or anything, he meant that it was the maximal set of compossible individuals, some of which must, being different from one another, by definition also be worse than others. Hence evil. I felt in an instant that I had just had my own Lisbon Earthquake, and could no longer fault Voltaire for his pessimism. But still, the Leibnizians were my people, and I, like everyone else at that moment, needed some company.

On the program for that afternoon was a meeting of all the various national Leibniz societies, of which there are more than you would think: Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, Argentine, Spanish, American (but not, I probably don’t need to mention, Iranian, Afghan, or Libyan). The representative of the Chinese Leibniz Society was up first: he droned on for at least an hour about his group’s growing membership in a monotone ideally suited to some Central Committee report on crop yields in Xinjiang. Then the American representative got up and calmly said that, because our minds were all, no doubt, elsewhere, he would be brief with his news. Next came the Israeli. He wasted no time in telling all of us a thing or two about terrorism. One would not think that a business meeting of national Leibniz societies could turn into an occasion for a fiery political speech, about freedom and its enemies, about the importance of defending civilization against those who would like to see it all collapse, etc. But our Israeli colleague managed to tie it all together. He said that Leibniz would agree with the opinions he expressed, and that it would be a fine gesture to issue a press release to the Berlin media affirming our disapproval, as Leibnizians, of flying planes into buildings. Two days later, in Der Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Morgenpost, there it was: in German, English, and French, a press release denouncing, in the spirit of Leibniz, terrorism. Leibniz, I note in passing, is rightly credited with being an early visionary of a united Europe. He thought the religious wars of the early 17th century could best be avoided if the Catholics and the Protestants were to team up and invade Egypt together.

That night I went out to a bar with Pamela and her new boyfriend. I bought an evening tabloid from a vendor: ‘Zehntausende Tote’ read the headline. There were pictures of bodies falling from the tops of the Towers, pictures we don’t see much anymore. Pamela showed us pictures of her own from a recent birthday party she threw for herself at Windows on the World. I got drunk on whiskey. We talked, naturally, about New York. Her boyfriend had never even been there. He couldn’t relate. I imagined that under the circumstances she might just send him home so that the two of us could give each other a bit of succor.

When I was 13 or so I taught myself to stage bicycle accidents. I would ride to sorority row at the local university and, with great athletic force and balletic precision, would crash my bike on the front lawns of the houses with the Greek letters where the girls were congregated on the front porches. They would rush down to see to my well-being. They didn’t know me, but their collective solicitude had the effect of something like love.

But no, Pamela sent me back to her place, and went back to his with him. No matter. I had the mass media to keep me company: two TV’s, a radio, and the internet. I turned them all on at once. Local German news channels on TV, the BBC on the radio, and the New York Times online. ‘U.S. Attacked,’ read the headline. On the BBC I remember hearing interviews with passengers whose plane en route to the US had been rerouted to Halifax. An elderly British woman said something like: “Well I suppose we’ve got a free visit to Nova Scotia, haven’t we? It’s a lovely city, my niece tells me. I shall have to pay a visit to the aquarium.” Next they asked an American man what he was feeling. “They’re gonna fuckin’ pay,” he replied. “We’ve just gotta go over there and fuckin’ nuke ‘em.” Most of the opinions I’ve heard expressed since then amount to variations on these two themes.

I had to spend a few extra days in Paris waiting for trans-Atlantic flights to resume. There were US embassy officials at Charles de Gaulle, wearing badges around their necks, expressing what passes for official compassion to Americans trying to get home, but calling us “sir” and “ma’am” far too much to seem sincere. On my first day in Paris, after some hours of futile jockeying at the airport, I took the RER into town to find Anna in her attic studio off the Boulevard Hausmann. She was American, and I hoped she’d be good company. As it turns out, she was in New York attempting to get her French work visa renewed, and would later regale me with tales of great inconvenience. So I did not find any company, but I did see the flowers and banners along the length of the Seine, announcing “Nous sommes tous des américains.” I saw these with my own eyes, though I know it’s hard to believe. By the 16th or so, flights had returned to their normal schedule and those of us who had been stranded were being squeezed in for departures. I left Paris on the 17th. There was a false and forced sense of good cheer on the plane. I sat next to a man with a Tunisian passport, and we were exceedingly nice to each other. On descent into Chicago, the pilot pointed out to us that those on the left side of the plane could catch a spectacular glimpse of the Sears Tower.

I am terrified of flying, and have been since long before the events. My terror is existential and not statistical, and no amount of data as to the relative safety of flying will make any difference. It just feels wrong. It is something we should not be doing. Never do I feel more alone in the universe, more abandoned, than when I am in a plane, and it is that much more awful when we hit a little patch of rough air. This of course is the point at which self-absorption begins to border on insult to the memory of the dead. What the passengers felt on September 11, skimming just above the Hudson at 600 miles per hour towards God knows what, could only have been infinitely worse: the ultimate abandonment, the ultimate absence of love.

Which brings us back to Montaigne and the controversial art of carrying on about oneself. Some philosophers say that the self is a relatively recent invention, and that back in the good old authentic days real people had no need for it. I don’t understand this claim. It seems to me any fanatical cave-bear worshipping hunter-gatherer, no matter how un-modern, is still going to be able to think: too bad the mammoths trampled my brother. Then again, at least they didn’t get me.

It seems to me that those who demonstrated five years ago how ready they were to die and to kill would have liked to return to that imagined primordial era when the self did not matter, but only something somehow higher. It seems to me also for that very reason that our massive response in the form of self-absorbed chatter about where we were, and how the events inconvenienced us, might be more profound than it lets on. It is a response to a well-known pronouncement from a cave in Tora Bora. It says: no, I love life more than you love death. Go ahead and hate your life, but I do not want to die. I am a self-absorbed coward, who gets sick with fear in the faintest of turbulence, and I believe in nothing bigger or higher than my own little bubble of a world. I believe that all deaths are meaningless and regrettable, and especially mine. Death leads to nothing on the other end, and the good for each of us consists in avoiding it. The good of the world, in turn, is best seen to by maximizing the number of people who have no hope for reward in the afterlife, and who value bodily and structural integrity, boringly, over the splattering of guts, including their own, in the name of transcendent principles.

Blixa Bargeld, the idea man behind Einstürzende Neubauten, is in his forties now, and has put on quite a bit of weight. Even back in the early nineties, the anarchist feminists I used to know out on Warschauer Strasse, Silke and Heike and Ines, considered Blixa a bloated bourgeois sell-out. They preferred Donna Haraway, and music informed by the ethos of the Cyborg Manifesto. (It’s too bad I had not yet met Haraway back then, and could not tell them that the cyborg professor’s main preoccupations are in fact dogs and baseball.) They imagined themselves ‘posthuman’. One of them, who had been a high-school exchange student in Kansas some years earlier, enjoyed recounting to the delight of all how fat and stupid (how merely human) Kansans are. They squatted unclaimed flats in the former East Berlin, knitted their own socks, and posted a chore board on the fridge so that everyone could sign up to do their part. Daunted by the work expected of me, I stayed for two nights and then checked into a Best Western.

The girls imagined a radically different world, not one where all the Best Westerns would collapse, but at least where the guests would all be non-paying, and would provide their own maid service. They wanted to bring down the system, and then use its buildings. They disdained the boyish need to blow things up. Bargeld, for his part, never blew anything up –the thing about collapsing new buildings was just a symbol, you see– but instead went into theater. He now cites Bertolt Brecht, who hoped to see rivers of blood spilled for the creation of a better world, and who wrote the lyrics for a Kurt Weill song later transformed into a McDonald’s commercial (“It’s Mac Tonight,” sung by a styrofoam crescent moon wearing Ray-Bans and a tux and seated at a grand piano), as his model and inspiration.

**

[Justin E. H. Smith will be going on book leave for the next few months. An extensive archive of his writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

Given all the remarkable occurrences of the last five years, it may seem trivial to dwell on the emergence of fiction about September 11. Why not dwell instead on reality, which is so much more outlandish, tragic, and compelling these days, and whose catastrophes seem to have accelerated recently, so that ordinary life has begun to seem like a thing that is lived between bombings, wars, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other disasters? Fiction, admittedly, cannot bask long in politics (it dries out, it withers), and our era is intensely, blindingly, inescapably, and at times all-embracingly political. A novel cannot convey with any resonance the contemporary irony of an open racist like Patrick Buchanan finding a soapbox at antiwar.com, or, conversely, explain how good liberal intellectuals, through opening some sort of Pandora’s Box of nationalistic pseudo-patriotism, came to wring their hands over whether sleep deprivation is torture. Anyone who’s read The Gulag Archipelago or who is familiar with ‘sleep deprivation psychosis’ knows that answer is not complicated or morally ambiguous.

This stuff, you couldn’t make up. And, although the “September 11 truth movement” (which dominates the first page in a “9/11 truth” Google search) is, strictly speaking, a collective work of epic fiction, fiction writers could not have invented it or predicted its strange hypnotic power over people who should be able to recognize when an idea with the intellectual credibility of the Heaven’s Gate cult is presented by charlatans – and on progressive radio stations, no less. A punk band from the eighties called The Dead Milkmen put it best, and their maxim still applies: It’s a fucked up world.

Almost more than September 11 fiction itself, I am fascinated by the hostile reaction it often gets. There is a ritualistic aspect to the trashing of September 11 fiction, as if it were a ceremonial humiliation that our great minds have to be put through for attempting the impossible, a sort of midlife career change or imaginative retooling for writers suddenly made to feel that their worldview is obsolescent. Admittedly, some of the stuff published so far on the subject has not been very good. But there is another dimension to the case, which is that the wry people at cocktail parties tell us that none of it can be any good, which may be a sign that these writers are on to something. (These same wry people tell us that web logs are worthless enterprises.)

Why does a thoughtful critic like James Wood see the text of John Updike’s Terrorist through a blood-red gauze of derision and fury? Is it really the worst thing Updike ever wrote? Why did the New York Press take extraordinary measures to assassinate the character of Jonathan Safran Foer for writing the seemingly heartfelt Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? And what about Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, probably the most laughed-at novel from a major literary figure published in recent memory? Why is it that the usually melty ambiguous anodyne reviewer, normally prone to disguising his or her actual opinions of books in bland, sales-wrecking polite prose, discovers a voice of Hearstean bombastic rage when September 11th, terrorism, or the current political climate is the subject of a new novel? Is it because these books are unusually bad (some of them are)? Or is something else going on? And why has film – in the form of United 93 and Paradise Now – done better so far?

Part of the problem is the subject matter itself. Despite the recent and intriguing effort of Martin Amis, a stylish and witty writer with formidable intellectual powers, I still do not believe that Muhammad Atta can be rendered into interesting material for fiction. The simple reason is that Atta was not an interesting man; he was a man who once recoiled from the talking animals of the Disney film The Jungle Book with the commentary, “Chaos, chaos.” There is a basic confusion here about the nature of the events of September 11, which in themselves were unspeakably horrific and of monumental historical importance, with no fictionalization needed to make them more unspeakable, horrific, or important.

Those novels that take other current events as their starting point, like the day of global antiwar protests depicted by McEwan, or the hypothetical plot to cashier Bush relished in detail by Baker’s characters, have an even more difficult hill to climb in literary history because their real-life resonances are so time-bound. But this is the risk of all topical fiction – but Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls were once pretty topical, too.

A short note about what I think is the best attempt so far to scale this Everest of grief by an American writer, Deborah Eisenberg’s extraordinary short story collection Twilight of the Superheroes, which came out from FSG earlier this year. The title story is the only piece of fiction I have ever read about September 11 that gives me a sharp shock of recognition in the guts, the heart, and the brain. It is one of those works in which the author has written down what everyone is secretly thinking.

She got certain things that no one had gotten, or got them down, anyway – although her story is marred at points by over-dwelling in vaguely acceptable liberal explanations of the “root causes” of terrorism that, personally, have always struck me as nonsense. She wisely does not set her story inside the Towers, instead taking various tangent lines through time, moving the film quickly backward and forward so that the narrative never dwells for long on the event itself, the singularity, the black hole of meaning in Lower Manhattan. Instead, she depicts a group of listless young people who’ve subletted a luxury apartment overlooking the World Trade Center, and takes you into their lives before, during, and after the attacks. Good fiction shows time passing, human change, in ways that other art cannot.

Consider just one remarkable passage, one of many in the story:

One kept waiting – as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real – the intended – future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.

That is the world we inhabit, described with an simple, elegant, fearless, and heartbreaking clarity. Fiction still has new things to tell us, things our Secretary of Defense and national philosopher Donald Rumsfeld would call ‘unknown unknowns’: things we don’t know we don’t know. I would like to imagine that in twenty years Rumsfeld will cut a rather ignominious figure. It is politically although not logically impossible that he could go to jail under U.S. law for grave violations of the Geneva Conventions barring the torture of prisoners; perhaps it is more likely that he will end his days like Kissinger, with foreign travel a sometimes delicate matter. At any rate, I hope he will be a man diminished, and not enlarged, by history. I also hope Deborah Eisenberg will be even better known than she is now, especially to sympathetic readers who want to understand what happened to us along the way from September 11 to whatever future future we haven’t yet figured out how to keep from happening or, ultimately, having happened.