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9/11 Remembrances

When I was in college at New York University in the early 1970s, the World Trade Center was still under construction. We used to admire the lights twinkling in the twin towers at night from the rooftop of our tenement on Sullivan Street—SOHO was not a fashionable address in those days—its sleek towers rising day by day, cranes silhouetted against the night sky. We would gaze at that nighttime apparition always with an admixture of derision, regret, and awe—derision at its cold, rectilinear modernity (and because we were barely twenty years old, children of the Sixties, derisive of everything that the mainstream culture had to offer); regret at seeing the Empire State Building eclipsed; and above all perhaps, a disquieting awe at the ambition and hubris of a city that knew no bounds.

After college I left New York for graduate school in Boston, and Manhattan and its landmarks faded from view. Life and years went on, most of my family dispersed to other states and cities, and New York became for me, as for so many others, a great place to visit. Although I used to joke that the truth was the opposite of the cliché—that New York was a great place to live, but I’d hate to visit there. Truthfully though, long before 9/11, New York had long ceased to feel anything like home.

The morning of 9/11 was a beautiful, cloudless day, the sky a clear and vivid blue. Everyone who was on the East coast that day remembers that brilliant blue sky. My office phone rang a little after 9; it was a colleague who worked for me calling from our primary office down the hall. I don’t remember her exact words, but it was something to the effect that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck by planes and that our nation was under attack. I think it was at that moment that I looked out the window across to Harvard Yard and noticed the brilliance of the sky, the utter serenity of the day. After a moment of stunned speechlessness I raced down the hall, where other colleagues were gathered around a workstation streaming live images of the burning towers. We watched in stunned silence for an hour or more, until a decision was made to close the office, and most of us went home to be with our families.

After the attack, there are two things that I remember most beyond all of the shock, tragedy, and national outpouring of grief, beyond the mesmerizing images of the billowing towers replayed endlessly on our television screens: a strong nesting instinct—buying flowers and other decorations for my home, surrounding myself with beauty—an urgent, procreative need for beauty—and paradoxically perhaps, a powerful desire to go to New York, to return home, to be with my city. No one understood this. I did not go, of course, until long afterward.

Although personally untouched, so many of us knew someone who was affected on that day. My nephew was living in New York, and I worried for his safety and whereabouts. One colleague lost a brother on American Airlines Flight 11; another brooded over how often her children had taken that very flight alone to visit another parent on the West Coast. A close relative who lived across the river in New Jersey lost many neighbors in her town, where many worked in the financial industry. (I watched their names scroll by on the television screen during today’s 10th anniversary commemoration, only the name of the town familiar to me.) It was much later that I learned how a cousin who owns a restaurant in the Village worked to feed the recovery workers in the days and weeks that followed, and raised money for the families of the many firefighters in his precinct who lost their lives.

Another vivid memory is the flags – flags everywhere, plastered in every home and shop window, hanging from every balcony and balustrade. Flags where you least expected them – in Cambridge (“the People’s Republic of Cambridge”) where I worked, and even at my own home. I only owned a flag because my father, a WWII veteran, had passed away several years earlier, and one was presented to us at his funeral. Suddenly it was neither tacky nor a distasteful display of patriotism – a sentiment with which I not only did not identify, but which I actively repudiated– to display an American flag. All at once the flag symbolized not a hideous and insular chauvinism, a glorification of American hegemony, but something far different: a transcendent national unity, an affirmation of the high ideals of a free and open society, an emblem of the essential bond that makes us who we are. Some colleagues derided this symbolic outpouring, maintaining all of the old, familiar associations–but to me, the meaning was new and different. We had been attacked; thousands had died; and the attack showed that we were different from our attackers. Whatever our national flaws, we stood for something good in the world, and that essential goodness defined us as a nation.

On the three-month anniversary of the 9/11 attack, I was scheduled to give a talk on fair use at a local professional meeting, and I chose the flag as my theme. Cultural symbols are memes that penetrate our thinking and bind us to one another–a form of memetic expression without which a culture literally cannot flourish. “What if the American flag were copyrighted?,” I wondered – how would our ability to cultivate and nurture a sense of shared values be affected by the need to pay a fee every time we wanted to display the flag– or worse, found ourselves unable to display it? Which of those uses would we be able to justify as ‘fair?’ I made this the title of my talk, linking it to the impact that copyright restrictions have had on similar acts of cultural expression, such as the singing of God Bless America around a campfire and painting Disney characters on the walls of a preschool. At the end of my talk, it being December 11th, I indulged in a small rhetorical flourish that linked my theme back to the 9/11 anniversary, surprising myself with an emotional reaction that left my audience somewhat flummoxed. Nonetheless, I’ve always been fond of that paper, and regret never having published it. Somewhere it’s safely stored on CD, a function of my transit from one coast to another; and possibly on paper as well in some sequestered file. Perhaps I’ll dig it out for a future anniversary.