This period of the year, in which so many years ago V and I had our first meetings and fell immediately, wildly in love, for what turned out to be life, used to be buoyant, filled with those silly little personal acts of couplehood that are entirely ridiculous to any unfortunate beholder.
However, now and forever, this period has become sandwiched between two events that altered not only our own lives, but those of millions, and changed the profiles of not only of this nation, but many others: The Failure of the Levees, and the Fall of the Towers.
The Fall happened so close to us. Like the Failure, it kept on happening, with ever more ramifications that had personal impact while exploding across the stages of the world.
This is the first anniversary of the Fall in which I'm not in the place where I was when it happened. Yet the images of that morning are playing as vividly as ever across my memory screens. How very different our lives would be right now, if the Towers hadn't fallen. I do believe our lives would be better if 9/11 hadn't happened, or even if subsequent national actions had taken a different course. I say this even though, if the Towers hadn't fallen, if the nation hadn't gone to war in Iraq, it may well have been then, that this morning I wouldn't be drinking coffee in this wonderful study in this lovely little historic town, looking forward to the Farmer's Market and seeing JJ. I might well instead be getting ready to go with my Cuban madre and hermanas to the Farmer's Market in Havana.
This is also the week in which my baby sister was killed / killed herself.
__________________________________
A dear poet friend, who nearly died early in August from a diverticulitis attack, with two separate surgeries to save his life, posted this on the other blog:
"September 1, 1939"
by W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
It will take decades to sort out the meaning of 9/11. But history will not be kind to the Bush/Cheney response, which will also take decades to get out from under.
They pillaged at least two nations, the U.S. and Iraq, of treasure, of people and of civil liberties.
Cheney is the most successful thief in the history of the world, who pulled off the biggest haul of any one or any consortium. Further, he had already achieved this status of thievery BEFORE becoming the darthvadervp to the bushies.
Even the nazis had to return most of their stolen loot.
Love, C.
Post a Comment