We’ll Even Laugh

Today (Tuesday) was the first full day of Rosh Hashannah, and in his sermon, the rabbi addressed the question I’d asked myself the night before: how can we give thanks to, or seek comfort in, a God right now without feeling absurd? His response: despite what some may believe about God’s power, we really have no guarantee of physical security in our lives. After all, everyone dies eventually. What we do have, he said, is a guarantee of spiritual security. That is a source of comfort and a reason for thanks.

I couldn’t really argue with what he had to say. But you know, religion seems to be a lot like law. When you’re given facts that contradict what you thought was true (God will protect us, but then 5,500 people die senselessly), instead of losing your faith you merely change your interpretation of that faith. It bends — even if it has to twist into a pretzel — but it does not break. I admire that.

Several times in the past week (has it already been a week? has it only been a week?), I’ve been envious of people who have recently died or who are near death — people who died a month ago, before any of this happened; people who are 90 years old and won’t have to live in this world much longer. I read an obituary of an old person, and I think, wow, that person had a long, full life. Who knows what we’ll have?

In the summer of 1987 I was thirteen years old. I was at summer camp up in New Hampshire. One night we went for a hike and camped by a lake. The sky was filled with a universe of stars. As we sat outside, someone (maybe me) brought up the fear of nuclear war. How can we go on with our lives in such a world, I asked? My counselor said: we just do. If you think about those things all the time, you’ll go nuts. There’s no use worrying about what you can’t change. Most of the stuff we worry about never comes to pass.

That’s still true. We got through 45 years of thinking that the planet had a good chance of being annihilated. We got through it. And we even laughed sometimes. We did that — we’ll do it again.

We still have to keep up hope.

Hope, by the way, is faith — even for people who claim they don’t do religion.

Did anyone catch Letterman last night (Monday night)? It was his first show back since the attacks. He’s usually ironic and irreverent, but he spoke for a long time, with raw emotion, in all seriousness, and from the heart. He openly questioned whether he should even have come back on the air yet.

It was the same thing with Conan O’Brien tonight, his first show back. I didn’t catch the first half of Jay Leno tonight, so I can’t write about him, but as for Dave and Conan — who both produce their shows in Manhattan — I have so much admiration and respect for those guys. It’s fascinating to watch funny people respond to tragedy. Humor is often a defense mechanism, a response to tragedy, so the funniest people often turn out to be those with the most pain. Therefore, their responses weren’t really surprising. But still moving.

I can’t imagine what Saturday Night Live is going to do when it begins its new season soon.

It’s interesting to watch our entertainment venues struggle with what to do right now. They’re not any different from us — after all, these shows are produced by people. But usually we turn to them for some sort of slick certainty, and yet they’re as much in the dark as we are right now. We’re all equal.

They will take steps, gingerly, feeling their way around this new world. Conan said tonight that he didn’t see how they could do shows anymore — but, he said, they’ll try to do tonight’s show, and then tomorrow they’ll try to do another one, and so on, and so on.

It’s kinda like all of us. We’ll live another day. And then another one. And then another one. And so on.

And you know what? Like them, we’ll even find things to smile about. And laugh about.

Not all the time. But sometimes.

And whenever we do, this whole “life” thing will seem worthwhile again.

L’Shanah Tovah

Happy New Year. Rosh Hashannah began tonight — the Jewish New Year. I’m back at my parents’ house. We went to synagogue tonight, and we’ll go again tomorrow and the next day.

Rosh Hashannah is supposed to be a joyous holiday, but nobody was feeling particularly joyous. And for me, it felt kind of strange to be reciting prayers to God tonight. I’ve never been particularly religious. And if God exists, then I’m really pissed at Him right now. If He doesn’t exist, then it seems kind of futile and absurd and comical to be praying to Him. I don’t know. I just wasn’t into it.

This week’s New Yorker was in my mailbox this afternoon. I’d been curious to see what the cover would look like, and I was taken aback when I finally saw it. It wasn’t what I’d expected at all. It was rather astonishing in its simplicity. You’ll just have to see it for yourself.

The bulk of the issue was devoted to last week’s events.

There’s a pattern to the way the media processes things: first, it happens on TV. We get the immediate reactions.

The next day, we get the first newpaper stories and front pages. We get the first written record of the events as well as some analysis and some moving language.

Several days later, after we have begun collectively to process the events, we get the magazine stories. That’s where we’re at right now. Reading the New Yorker’s take on any particular recent event is always soothing, therapeutic, in a way. The quality of the writing in that magazine is just so damn good. This week is no exception.

The first piece in the “Talk of the Town” section, by Hendrik Hertzberg, is dead on. I quote:

With growing ferocity, officials from the President on down have described the bloody deeds as acts of war. But, unless a foreign government turns out to have directed the operation (or, at least, to have known and approved its scope in detail and in advance), that is a category mistake. The metaphor of war — and it is more metaphor than description — ascribes to the perpetrators a dignity they do not merit, a status they cannot claim, and a strength they do not possess….

The scale of the damage notwithstanding, a more useful metaphor than war is crime.

Oh, by the way, if you haven’t read this yet, you should. (via kottke)

I think the Bush Administration — no, I think our national government as a whole — is rather blind. Bush keeps on saying that America is the best country in the world and we’re number one and these evil-doers have awakened a mighty giant and so forth. All this is doing is creating more antagonism with the rest of the world. And even many European countries are getting a bit more skittish about going to war than they were at first. Who are we going to war against? How can you conquer an enemy when all it takes is ten guys with knives to kill 5,500 people? I think there’s a true lack of insight, a lack of fresh thinking, and an excess of America-centrism going on here. The reason this happened in the first place is because we throw our weight around — because even though this horrible thing happened in New York and Washington, some equivalent of this is happening somewhere every day. A huge percentage of Africa is dying of AIDS. Much of the world is poor. And us, we’re the largest consumer of energy on the planet. On top of that, we try to dictate the terms of almost everything going on in the world.

That’s not to say that any of last week’s carnage is justified. It was revolting and horrifying. It’s just that I don’t think our leaders really know what’s going on in the world.

I think that before you get elected to any national office in this country, you should be required to live overseas for a few years so you can see the United States from the point of view of an outsider. Our leaders are so narrow-minded!

America isn’t representative of the rest of the world.

America is an ivory tower.

Well, as we say in Judaism: have a Sweet New Year.

Back in Manhattan

Last night, for the first time since Tuesday, I went back home — and back to Manhattan — in an attempt to be normal.

My dad, who got back from San Francisco around 2:00 yesterday morning, insisted on driving me back to Jersey City yesterday afternoon instead of letting me take the bus and the PATH train. “Like I’m going to let you take public transportation,” he said.

This seems to have brought me and my dad a little closer together. On the drive back to Jersey City, he told me that when he heard about the disaster, he got worried about me, because he knew that I had the week off and was probably planning to be in the city, and for all he knew I might have been passing through the World Trade Center PATH station or even visiting a friend in one of the towers. It’s interesting how parents’ imaginations run wild with possibility when their children’s lives are potentially at stake.

To get to Manhattan from my parents’ northern New Jersey suburb, you drive east along Route 3 for about fifteen miles. You get a beautiful view of the skyline directly ahead of you, growing larger the closer you get. The first thing you see, over a ridge, is the Empire State Building. Eventually you see more buildings, and eventually, as you look to your right, you see the cluster of skyscrapers in lower Manhattan.

As we looked down there, we could still see a huge cloud of smoke where the towers used to be. I inhaled sharply and my dad seemed startled. It was his first in-person view of the scene.

When I got back to my apartment I unpacked my clothes. Then I went out and bought a flag. I had to stop into a few shops on Newark Avenue, a shopping street with tons of 99-cent stores and the like. I managed to find a guy selling small flags, maybe 1 foot by 2 feet, for two bucks each. He didn’t have many left. I bought one, came home, and taped it inside one of my windows facing the street.

I called CanadaGirl and we decided to meet up for dinner and movie in Manhattan.

At the PATH station there were little flyers describing the new routes: Newark to 33rd Street, Hoboken to 33rd Street, Journal Square to Hoboken. It’s weird how the little things have been changed by all of this.

I got off at the 9th Street station — 9th Street and Sixth Avenue — because I wanted to walk around and look at the flyers containg pictures of victims. I didn’t have to look very far; as soon as I stepped off the PATH train and onto the platform, I saw them in front of me. Several were taped to a big map of the PATH routes. The immediacy of it hit me. I stared at the flyers and the tears came again, for the zillionth time in five days.

Outside — on the corner of 9th and Sixth — there were a bunch more of them taped to a wall right next to Balducci’s, a gourmet food store. Several people stood there looking at them.

They’re all over the city, taped to street lamps, mailboxes, payphones, bus stop shelters. “Missing.” “Have you seen…?” There’s usually a photo, along with the date of birth, their height, their weight, the company they worked for, the floor they worked on, any distinguishing marks. “A cast covering his right leg from knee to toe.” “Wearing a Rutgers University class ring.” There was one photo of two young guys together at a bar. They’re both missing.

It’s heartbreaking.

It’s even more heartbreaking to know that these people really aren’t “missing” anymore. We know exactly where they are. They’re buried beneath the rubble of two mighty towers, all 5,000 of these people, or they are lying in makeshift morgues. There’s not much need to donate blood, because there’s nobody to give the blood to.

Some things serve a different purpose than originally intended. These flyers were put up for a practical, immediate purpose — to locate the missing. But nobody who’s staring at these flyers is doing so in order to identify bodies. We’re staring at them in order to identify souls. We’re in mourning. It’s easier to grieve a single person, to think about the details of that person’s life, to think of that person’s spouse or parents or children or friends — to think about that 25-year-old guy’s favorite bar, or that 35-year-old woman’s family, or to think about what the completely ordinary thoughts that person was thinking when they showered and dressed and had their coffee that morning — the same thoughts we all have when we get ready for work in the morning. It’s easier to grieve such things than it is to grieve the loss of 5,000 people. We function better with concrete details than with abstractions.

I made my way down to Washington Square Park, fully aware of the gap in the sky. Usually as you walk down Fifth Avenue, the Washington Square Arch frames the Twin Towers. You can see them in my brother’s NYU graduation photos from last June. No longer.

There was a chain-link fence surrounding the arch — I don’t know if it had already been there or not. One side of the fence contained huge pieces of butcher paper filled with messages, as well as a few cups of markers. The other sides were covered with more photos of people, and poems, and messages, and postcards containing the World Trade Center, and bouquets of flowers stuck into the links of the fence. And on the ground — on the ground were hundreds of lit memorial candles of all colors and sizes, two or three feet deep. Also lots of American flags, and more poems of peace and photos and messages and postcards and mementos. It reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of Oklahoma City, or of London after Diana died.

I was late for meeting CanadaGirl, so I left and walked back up Fifth Avenue. American flags all over the place, flying from stores and apartment buildings, taped to windows. Also, because New York is such a walkers’ city, there were lots of people with little flags poking out of their backpacks — portable patriotism — and a few flags tied around people’s heads like headbands. It made me think of the 1960s.

As I walked along, things began to seem normal. Families walking around, couples, single people, all doing their Saturday evening New York thing. It was nice to see so much normalcy. It was even nice to walk through Chelsea. I usually dislike Chelsea, but it was reassuring to see the familiar Chelsea Clones out and about and to walk past the Big Cup, as I’ve done so many times before. Many of the guys on the street were beautiful as usual. It was nice to be reminded that there’s still beauty in the world.

Not everything was normal, though. As I got to the designated meeting spot, at 23rd and Eighth, I saw cops standing at all four corners of the intersection. Nothing was going on — they were just there for safety.

I met up with CanadaGirl, and we stood there hugging outside the movie theater for about ten seconds. She was limping, because a week earlier she’d been on the Montreal-to-Portland AIDS Bike Ride and had strained a muscle, and then she’d played softball a couple of days later. We bought our movie tickets and then went across the street to Boston Market for a simple dinner. As she limped across the street, I wondered if people would think she’d escaped from one of the buildings.

We sat there and talked about everything, including Doug. You know, I feel bad, because among our small circle of friends, I wasn’t as close to Doug as others were. We just never had much in common. We lived in the same city and I hadn’t even seen him since August 2000. I wished that I’d been closer to him.

After Boston Market we had donuts at Krispy Kreme. Then we saw our movie: Together, a Swedish film about a commune in the 1970s. The theater was crowded — I guess lots of people have been looking for something to take their mind off everything. Even so, while watching the movie, my mind was never fully away from everything. There’s one character who is a communist and is advocating revolution. It was kind of comical, but eerie as well. There was another scene where two boys are playing with war toys. That was too unsettling.

When we came out of the movie we saw a police escort with sirens moving along 23rd Street. There were two police motorcycles, and then a police car, and then some sort of truck, and then more motorcyles, and then a humvee, and then another police car. Just another night in disaster-struck Manhattan.

I said goodbye to CanadaGirl, and then I went down to the East Village to meet up with Nick and a few friends of his at the Phoenix. The Phoenix! I hadn’t been there since the previous Saturday night. It was now 11:30 at night and the place was packed. It was heartwarming to see so many people doing the normal Saturday night bar routine.

We stood around talking about things. One idiot friend of a friend of Nick’s was generalizing about Arabs and Muslims. I cringed and then I corrected him, told him that Islam is not a warlike religion (never having read the Koran, I’m not positive on that, but I’m sure it’s a peaceful faith) and that this is really about extremists of all kinds. The guy made me so angry.

There were lots of attractive guys at the Phoenix, but I wasn’t really up for cruising. Still — it was great to be able to go out to a bar on a Saturday night as usual. At the same time there was something slightly absurd about the whole thing.

We left the bar at 1:30 and Nick, his friend Frank, and I all got pizza. We sat there for a while, and then we walked all the way over to Union Square.

On the way, we passed a firehouse. Outside were lots of candles and flowers. We grew silent and slowed down as we walked past. A couple of firehouse workers were standing around. Another pedestrian walked past, and as he did, he turned to them and said, “Thank you guys.”

We walked on and finally got to Union Square.

Wow.

This was the first time I’d seen the impromptu memorial there. It was like what I’d seen at Washington Square Park but on a much larger scale. There must have been at least two or three thousand candles grouped in a big mass, as well as the flags and the photos and the flowers and the mementos and messages of peace. It looked like a miniature city, a miniature skyline of candles.

Even though it was 2:30 in the morning, there were lots of people there, although probably not as many as there’d been earlier in the evening. Still — it was astounding. People standing, staring into the flames. Sitting on the ground in front of everything. Looking at the photos and cards and posters and scribblings on the fences. The statue of George Washington was covered in chalk, including a chalk-scrawled peace sign. There was a “table of prayer” that was playing recorded music. There were a couple of people playing folk songs on guitars. There were small groups of people having debates about military action or just sharing stories. It felt like an eighteenth-century Boston tavern or coffeehouse.

People would see that a candle had gone out, and they’d take their lighters and relight them. One guy picked up a candle and lit his cigarette with it.

I imagined each flickering candle as a human being. I let my eyes go blurry and I could see all the candles flickering at once — it looked like a crowd of people, sobbing in pain.

It’s so strange. Nobody planned this. There was no central committee that designated Union Square as a memorial spot. No, it just kind of happened, spontaneously, organically. An impromptu church, a gathering place for mourning and solace. Human beings need these things.

Nick left, and Frank and I stayed there for another hour. It was 3:30 in the morning and still pretty crowded. Eventually Frank left and so did I. I stopped off to buy a Sunday New York Times and then I walked to the 14th Street PATH station. A guy was playing Crosby, Stills and Nash on a boom box. Not your usual boom box fare, but these are not usual times.

It’s weird to see this combination of metaphors going on. It’s a cross between World War II and Vietnam, a hybrid of Pearl Harbor and the 1960s counterculture. So much of the country seems to be unified as it hasn’t been in years, and yet at the same time the legacy of the 1960s is present as it hasn’t been in a long time. There’s a huge amount of introspection going on. At least, there is at these impromptu memorials.

We’re living in absurdity now. We try to continue on with our normal lives. People try to walk around with their stoic New York faces again, and in some sense they’re succeeding, and you think, wow, things are getting back to normal. But then you see a police officer, or your eyes glance at the huge cloud of smoke downtown, or you see a guy with an American flag wrapped around his head, or you see a picture of a missing person taped to a lamppost. You’re constantly reminded that things aren’t normal right now. They’re not normal anymore.

You know, I’m not really sure what year it is. 2001 wasn’t supposed to be like this. Kubrick had it all wrong.