It was Tuesday, September 11, 2001, another day that shall live in infamy. Sun shining, moon a waning crescent. I was out in the garden early, and then at my writing desk upstairs with the dog lying across my feet when my wife called up and said, in a strident tone: “Come down and see the TV! Something happened!” Then her voice caught and I wondered if she was about to sneeze. Raw emotion.
It was 9 a.m. On TV we saw smoke billowing up out of the first tower, then watched incredulously as a second jetliner sliced right into the other. Mushrooming smoke, a cacophony of sounds, screams, and voices, not to mention inner feelings — and then all kinds of debris started filling the air, including maelstroms of paper soon reaching even across the river to Brooklyn. Where were you? Remember?
“The birds are on fire,” a little child famously said. It was people jumping out of skyscraper windows and plummeting downwards to a quicker end, but no one dared to explain it to her right then.
Franciscan Father Joe Bayne, who worked all day at Ground Zero in full emergency protective gear, later said: “I saw the face of God in the people working, caring, sweating, crying, rescuing, recovering and being very spiritual in their very humanness.”
Another first responder chaplain was crushed to death when a falling body landed atop him and a firefighter he was kneeling over, providing last rites. A fire captain searched the ruins for six months before finding his son, a fallen firefighter, in the lobby of one of the crushed buildings, with the remains of a woman he was carrying out of Ground Zero still in his arms.
Memory of sacrifice is passed forward from generation to generation, and lives on, for love is greater than death, amen, as the Good Book says. Death teaches life, and at Ground Zero that day it taught love, as Rabbi Potasnik said yesterday at a twenty-fifth anniversary memorial service. Live and help live. Savor the now.
My jokey New Yorker mind couldn’t quite comprehend it, and spontaneously diverted to its default MO, ironic cartoonish humor. Is this the old King Kong movie again, a War of the Worlds faux disaster broadcast?
My dear wife had a slightly different instant reaction, and started shaking and sobbing. She had engineers in her family, and architects, and sensed what was about to happen, inconceivable as it seemed. The first proud, skyscraping tower started to tip, then teetered, crumbled, and went down, poof! Enormous things of steel and concrete don’t normally melt and collapse like gargantuan sandcastles right before our eyes. Holy shit!
Who could do such a thing, how could this happen? The grown man simply put his arm around his wife and they stood and stared, huddled together like yin and yang, alone together in this brave new world. I wondered if this might’ve been some of what Adam and Eve felt. Alone together. Isn’t that our true existential situation in a nutshell? We are all alone, together.
On the TV, people — New Yorkers, doubtless, and whoever else in that great melting pot of a metropolis — were running uptown away from the blast, like in a horror film, Godzilla trashing Tokyo or something of the sort, fictional yet still terrifying.
I thought, “All those large financial concerns with their plans, strategies, stock options and ambitions filling floor after floor of the upper towers don’t amount to very much in the harsh light of life and death, as their world ended not in ice but in fire,” to echo the poet.
Then I saw first responders in yellow emergency jackets and red fire hats, blue police uniforms, emergency vehicles, all running straight towards the billowing dustcloud. And I started to cry myself. How many of them would never come out again?
Let us now praise famous men and women, and remember them and that heroic final act of their lives, too many to account for.
I’m sure God was there on that horrific day, but what the hell was he thinking?
As my learned Hindu neighbor would say, “Which God?” I think of the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament, alongside the loving, merciful, forgiving Jesus of the New. Yet all is sacred, and shadows are nothing but light.
Time, hoarfrost and grass grow equally over both graves and monuments alike, like Ozymandias the King of Kings toppled and gigantic, half sand-covered statue in the Egyptian desert. In war there are no real victors. I want to know: Are we at war right now? Who can say? Seems like a travesty to remain in the dark about such a monumental matter.
Someone, somewhere must know. Many things I would like to know, especially about human nature, the divine nature, Higher Power. Ya’ just can’t believe whatever you think.
Knock, knock. Is anybody home?
Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. He is the author of the bestselling book Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World and founder of the Dzogchen Center