I have been one acquainted with the night. | I have walked out in rain — and back in rain. | I have outwalked the furthest city light. | I have looked down the saddest city lane. | I have passed by the watchman on his beat | And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
Everyone who was here will tell you about this monumental quiet, and the dignified calm. But what accounts for it? Are New Yorkers walking around Washington Square right now, and strolling smoky streets where only emergency vehicles go, walking slow and calm because to be fully alive to what happened is too much — and they'd be driven mad? Or are they calm precisely because they're alive to the historical magnitude of the event, know what to do despite the horror of it, and therefore can't be driven mad? Is today's calm our civic mask, or the very toughness of our civic wisdom?
Neither, I think. We can be relatively cool today because we are (relatively) all on the same page in time. This cannot be said for our attackers. We measure historical time by a more immediate metric: the human life. Your uncle's life, your friends' life, your own. This is not the only metric available to the human mind, and when people say we're in a war between rival systems or civilizations this is part of what they mean.
In some way we admit to not comprehending that the suicide bomber is saved rather than destroyed by killing himself. But can we comprehend this other way culturally? The people of this rival civilization, if it really exists, may be measuring their time in centuries. That's why you bomb New York: to regain Jerusalem for the ages. To some, the towers went down in the same narrative space as the Hebrew Temple in 70 AD. We cannot, as we say, get our minds around this.
They are on another clock entirely, which means they assign different meaning to yesterday's loss of human life. Their understanding took aim at ours, and hit the center.
But when I turn on my television set, the narrative space shown me cannot hold the possibility that the attack also occurred on a different historical clock, alien to ours. The news has room for only one clock, one grammar in time. And here we meet with the limits of America's civic wisdom. For what the news cannot "hold," the nation cannot behold. On TV, it's still one trusty frame for time. Right now on Manhattan's streets, the ruined air tells of two.
Jay Rosen: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? September 12, 2001
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet | When far away an interrupted cry | Came over houses from another street, | But not to call me back or say good-bye;
"Collapsed" is not the right word for what happened to the twin towers; they were somehow turned to dust. Steel beams, glass window panes, cement and gypsum board made those dark surging clouds you’ve seen on television replays. Engineers are starting to explain how. But what engineer can explain dust that was steel and must now have in it human DNA? That is one thing I think about.
Last night I made a friend show me how he downloads video from the Web. I felt ready to watch the Towers go down again and again. Hannah Arendt says somewhere in her writings: "The struggle to believe the evidence of our senses is at the root of all moral life." Show me how to download video so I can begin.
I think about ecstasy. The ecstasy of that half-trained pilot as he approached the moment of impact, and his instant transport to heaven. What time means for me, time did not mean for him. This much I know: there’s a deep rupture there. We call him a suicide; they call him a martyr.
There is too much optimism in this language, which relies on our power to name things and thus define their sense. The struggle to believe the evidence of our senses is a struggle with the lie of language, which cannot hold September eleventh's evidence or make it available to the human mind. When I reflect on that I would sooner have poets bring me the news.
Think about this, because as a professor of journalism I have: There were more people killed in one hour this week than in all the news stories from all those years of trouble in Northern Ireland. The time scale of one is incommensurate with the time scale of the other, although both are held to be "news." You can have funerals with bodies in Belfast and Gaza. We will have our funerals in New York, but most of the bodies are somewhere in that surging cloud I’ll watch again and again on video.
Television reporters do what they can within the word games they have mastered, but their subject exceeds their sense. You cannot report on a rupture in time; you can only stand near the scene and report right into it. Candlelight vigils are silent for a reason. And there is a good moral sense in the three minutes of silence the people of The Netherlands observed this week. They said it all.
Soon workers will be sweeping up the dust in lower Manhattan. The traffic will return; pedestrians will walk the streets again. And the struggle to believe our senses will enter a new phase. But when tomorrow’s news from New York tells of the city getting back to normal, hold on to your doubts and imagine a poet with a microphone reporting live from a rupture.
Jay Rosen: Reporting Live From A Rupture September 16, 2001
And further still at an unearthly height, | O luminary clock against the sky | Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. | I have been one acquainted with the night.
Robert Frost | Acquainted With The Night
Note This entry relates to a two-part August post in which Jay explores "...how the American press might start its own story over after the attacks of 2001." His above work, from a rupture in time, reminds us that poets are sometimes better able to report the news.
