Downtown Manhattan with World Trade Center towers, seen from “lover’s lane” in New Jersey, 1983 by Thomas Hoepker.
And I sometimes forget that not everyone heard the sound of engines rumbling low to the ground and then the sound of police sirens and fire engines racing down the street. Emergency, except this is New York, and it always is. And I sometimes forget that I didn’t hear it once, I heard it twice, those engines rumbling low over my head. And then the sound, an impact I had never heard until I heard it again, but I am inside and I am at my desk and I am answering emails and no one is in the office yet.
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And I sometimes forget that not everyone was there when it happened. That they didn’t smell it for months coming out of the ground, throughout September and October wondering if it will ever stop because it feels like it is in your hair and in your skin and its not like anything you can describe because it doesn’t smell like anything you want to relive. And the smell lingers outside the house and outside the office and it’s much too close but it’s far away enough that I don’t have to breathe it in except when I can see those clouds that come out of the manholes. And then I hold my breath like a little kid sitting in a car that is driving by the cemetery. It is a long minute.
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And though it has been eleven years I cannot go because it’s just too strange to act like it’s business as usual because there are some things that I don’t want to remember and I don’t want to forget. We did a book right after and raised money because it was the only thing we knew how to do and that felt like something, because you wanted to contribute. But I had to release myself so I gave away the book because I will not look at violence like it is art.
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Only now it is odd. Because I peruse blogs for photos and I find these images of planes upon impact and buildings ablaze and people jumping and it has become an aesthetic to be consumed. It is but a photograph littered in between hundreds and thousands of photographs of teen angst and lust and drama and dreams.
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And so it has become a photograph. And this makes me think. About what it is when reality becomes but a memory, a memento, a token of life lived compressed into two-dimensions. An image. A decorative thing. I wonder what happens when something is both sacred and profane, and its meaning changes as it intersects with those who will never know it in any other way.
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Brooklyn, 2012