And so what can I do now? I am a writer. The enormity of the events of last September leaves me with the awful feeling that no matter what I do, it risks seeming puny and inconsequential when compared with acts that send tremors of pain, grief, and fear through every living being on the face of the planet.
Even before the disaster that for months preoccupied my dreaming and my waking mind, I found it tough to resist a sense of futility as I exercised the gift with which I felt myself to be endowed. Too often, it seemed to me superannuated, rendered obsolete by newer, faster, and more seductive media. As for readers, as a poet, could I hope to reach more than a handful? As a novelist, two or three thousand, if I was lucky enough to get a book in print-unless by some miracle I were amongst that tiny elite whose books appear on the bestseller lists. As an art critic? Well, let's be honest, how many seriously read and care about this sub-genre of a sub-genre?
Even before the disaster, my experience on entering a book-store was a physical sense of overwhelming nausea. My God, so many of them! Who would be so foolish as to follow such a calling?
That was before. So what can I hope to do now, in a world we all agree to have been inalterably changed? It occurs to me, to begin with, that I have always had a special relationship with that most ordinary of our civilized appurtenances: paper. Aside from its utility, I've always had a feel for its physical properties, its texture and dimensions, its weight and color. I've always loved the way that words take shape on it. It has been, in a word, my stock-in-trade.
So in the new world, I looked at pictures emerging from that dreadful spectacle that was once the World Trade Center, and I saw paper everywhere. It drifted about in blizzards of ominous, apocalyptic snowflakes. It gathered in dusty, mountainous trash heaps, extending the full length of a street and beyond, past all imaginable corners, out of sight. I saw paper crumpled, ripped and shredded, or burned to thick, black wads of sodden ember: a calendar filled with what once were pressing business dates, corporate reports, proposals, financial statements spelling out wealth or poverty, email messages, a page from a book in progress or a journal, its relevance to some actual person now irretrievably lost.
As a writer about art, I have also a particular relationship with images. Paper has become such an image, or a part of a greater image, speaking powerfully of the suddenness with which meanings can be trivialized, and ambitions mocked; of the awesome ease with which destiny-by whatever name we want to call it-can transform all human pretense of order into chaos with a casual sweep of the hand. What can I do to match the power of that image?
Or what image could an artist now create to equal in power that journalistic photograph of a woman, so gray with dust she could have been two hundred years old, emerging from the toxic yellow filth of a disintegrating skyscraper? Or the video pictures of an airliner slicing through steel as though through butter, with a full complement of crew and passengers? Or the jagged grid of steel that towers, sole standing remnant of the building, above a mountain of rubble. Or the woefully floating body, drifting with awful grace toward the plaza below, of a man who chose death by falling over death by fire? We saw such images a hundred times, and still they exercised their dreadful power. We could never appropriate them; instead, they appropriated us, searing into a place in our brain where we knew they'd never be erased.
What about words? Do you watch television? Are you done to death with the pundits, with their mealy mouthings of opinion? Do you listen to talk radio? Are you tired of the hosts and the callers, with their peeves and gripes? Do you read the papers, with their special supplements? Like most everyone, I guess, I received literally hundreds of emails and forwardings. Each one of us had his or her piece of wisdom, an insight or suggestion, a protest or a word of praise. Some I read, some I erased with the click of a mouse. I had my own rant about what these terrorists had wrought. Perhaps what I'm writing now is a part of it. That avalanche of words.
I knew a beautiful young man who was working that morning on the one hundred and first floor of one of the World Trade Center buildings. Another good friend, old friend, my own age, in his mid-60s, died this week following a massive heart attack.
What price words now? You see what I mean.
So what can I do, in this predicament become suddenly dire beyond denial? One thing I have learned is that I can breathe. It sounds simple, but most often I forget that at every moment I'm committing this most basic act of life. I can watch the breath arrive and leave the body, and I've learned that this brings comfort, calm, perspective, even wisdom of a sort. Just to sit and watch the breath, and let the rest of the world go by.
I have been working, too, as I breathe in recent weeks-starting long before death reached out and slapped me in the face-to meditate on death. To become fully, not half, aware of its inevitability. To realize that it has happened to every other being that ever lived, and that with greater than 99.999 percent probability it will happen to me. What this practice brought up first was a lot of fear and sadness, a good deal of grief. But the surprise is that gradually the awareness begins to make everything else matter. It matters that I take in the next breath-and that I can make it a delightful one. It matters that I look out the window and notice the last of the oranges on my neighbor's tree. It matters that I honor this very moment by being conscious to it, by not letting it slip away unnoticed.
And from this perspective, it matters that I write. What a relief it is to realize this: it matters that I write without thought for the outcome, without attachment to publication and readership, without need for thanks. That it is enough to write in the simple consciousness of writing. Then it becomes a joy, when I can truly dedicate myself to putting down each word in the knowledge that it could be the last I ever write.
