Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 16:16:19 EDT
From: HMMeister at aol.com
Subject: Life During Wartime

Dear Digesters,

Many of you have traveled so you will understand me when I say that
different, great cities, each have an individual feel about them.  
Something hard to pin down precisely, as it is to describe a perfume with
precision.  Paris is not like London; Rome does not feel like Amsterdam;
Tokyo is not like Jerusalem.  Each has its own resonance, aroma, light, look
and buzz.  It's a kind of marker achieved only over great time and deeds.  
New York has always had its own, as all great cities do.  New York is
electric.  It buzzes and surges and runs too hot.

I have been struggling lately.  I have this powerful urge --it comes over me
three or four times every day-- to sit down and write to you about what it
is really like here in New York, now.  But I am prevented by the wave of
enormous lethargy which inevitably sweeps over me next --I think it's an
internal response mechanism, some sort of self-shutoff-- an ennui and
deadening.  It is very, very sad here in New York City.  Do you get that
sense of things here from the reports you have seen where you are?  I know
you all know the facts; the figures and estimates and body counts and
tonnage.  But do you know about the peculiar pall?  The unusual quiet in
usually blaring, boggling places.  Deference on the sidewalks.  There are
crowds of people still, but they are (we are) so somber.

We fill the usual places.  The weather has been gorgeous most days since the
11th, and restaurants with sidewalk cafes are jammed.  Just last week I took
my wife out for brunch at the very hip boite called, Markt, down on 14th
street way over west in the (now mixed-use) meat packing district.  They had
Miles' _Kind of Blue_ on the box.  We sat overlooking the cafe, just inside
the cavernous room, sipping Bloody Maries in the sunshine.  To our left a
gaggle of runway models twittered and smoked Gitanes, to our right a
foursome of well fed suits tore into their mussels steamed in Dutch beer.  
And two gigantic dump trucks rumbled slowly past carrying several tons of
WTC in 10 p ound chunks.  They left a fine cream-colored dust in the air
behind them, most of which is concrete but some of which, I know, is people.  
It's a fine mist in the air everywhere downtown.  I have never had to brush
human remains off my skin before.  Nor wash them out of my clothes.  In
horror I realized today that they have made me a cannibal.  A CANNIBAL!  
How will I ever rid myself of this now that they are in my cells?  I have a
friend of a friend who returned to her apartment three or four blocks from
the site.  She began sweeping up the inches thick dust, but she found two of
someone else's fingers on her terrace along with a greasy patch she is
unwilling to scrub.  She won't stay there anymore.

Yesterday I finally got talked into walking all the way down to It, or as
close to It as we could get. You can smell it before you get to the first
set of manned barriers and checkpoints.  By the time we got close my eyes
stung from the smoke and dust.

 And we got pretty close, about two blocks away.  But there is a problem
with scale in this.  Two blocks is a fair distance; about 1/10th of a mile.  
A two minute walk.  At a distance of two blocks views of the wreckage are
only partial.  There's no way to take it all in from any one spot.  The pile
of WTC2 rubble is taller than the building I live in.  That giant, listing,
lattice-like curved section of reinforced concrete standing in many photos,
must be eight stories tall.  I had assumed it was left standing smashed
where it had always been when the building was whole, but I was wrong.  
They say it was originally floors 90 through 98, or so.  I am sure you do
know about the enormous efforts being expended down there by the rescuers
and construction crews.  But TV speakers can't convey the din of work at the
site and the hush of the thousands filling it.  Or the fine dust, with the
peculiar odor, that coats everything in seconds.  It's mostly concrete.

There's a big problem with every one of those hideously sublime images of
WTC, still and moving, that have been shown to you.  It's a media studies
thing: the images themselves are all nicely composed.  They are formally
balanced, compositionally pleasing.  Objects and people are organized in
arranged space and framed by cropping.  Editors place the images nicely on
pages and TV screens.  The horrid subject matter is presented in a manner
contrary to its reality.  The photographers and editors cannot help
themselves, I suppose.  The pleasing is addictive, compensatory.  They (and
we) have learned how "good photographs" are supposed to look, and that
training becomes reflexive among photojournalists.  They are not, after all,
artists, and so they almost always follow visual conventions.  And I fear
that these organized and balanced and composed images subconsciously suggest
to you a level of organization, balance and composure that is wholly opposed
to the reality of the site.  Ground Zero is very large, and the destruction
is total.  It is a vast twisted burning stinking deathscape; hills of rubble
bounded by standing buildings with jagged smashed corners and thousands of
broken panes.  So seeing the site unmediated is a shocking experience.  
Shocking all over again, not for its narrative content --I already knew the
facts of the thing, as I know that you all do-- but for what the thing *is*.

But this is New York, and from time to time things have always blown-up
here. 

Sewers explode in the night.  Water mains crumble during rushhour.  It
rains and a tenement tumbles, it freezes and the street caves in.  It's a
busy place.  And those little disasters never dimmed the electric buzz of
the place, the excitement in the air everywhere, all the time. They were
facts-of-life but they did not alter the feel of life much at all. The thing
that I have wanted to tell you about *this* time, the thing that's different
and that I worry you might not be getting from afar, is the way it *feels*
here.  How enormously sad it is now.


And how hard it is for me to express any of this well enough to do it
justice for you.  How very hard it is, for the moment, to muster the will to
do much of anything at all.

Howard Meister