George H.W. Bush:
"Read my lips. No New Taxes!" 1988
2016 Update:
"He (sic - W) kept us safe! -- Jeb Bush
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George H.W. Bush:
"Read my lips. No New Taxes!" 1988
2016 Update:
"He (sic - W) kept us safe! -- Jeb Bush
.
Showing posts with label WTC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WTC. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2015
"Read my lips." 2016 - "He Kept Us Safe" -- Jeb Bush
George H.W. Bush:
"Read my lips. No New Taxes!" 1988
2016 Update:
"He (sic - W) kept us safe! -- Jeb Bush
Sunday, October 11, 2015
St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church Resurrection at Old WTC - Former Site of Bankers Trust Plaza
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The St
Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church before 911 was little more than a painted over
modified row house with a tiny belfry tucked away in the corner of parking lot
near West Street.
After some
much rustling, renegotiations, rearranging of maps and priorities, the new St
Nicholas will stand above and near the WTC memorials in their park.
If my
calculations are correct, the new St. Nicholas will sit where the old artificial
second story concrete plaza attached to Bankers Trust Plaza used to stand. That
building was the “black widow”shrouding in protective netting years after 911
and its further history of death, of firemen, and incompetency, delay and corruption in tearing the damaged building
down for years and years. Almost for the building like being buried alive and
waiting for the last girder to be salvaged and other life to flourish in its absence.
They were
going to put the hang over structure, appendage trading floor, at this spot of
a new stock exchange maybe a decade ago. Now a beautiful piece of classic
architecture in the form of a Greek church will accent the whole mess of buildings,
memorials, museums, commerce in social city intercourse of New York City –
where the old World Trade Center used to stand.
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| Red Circle - New St. Nicholas Church Yellow Line - Foot Bridge Across Liberty Street |
(The church btw will no doubt sit where once a food kiosk stood on the sterile plaza of potted trees and where in the good weather months, Chinese food was sold in the that kiosk near the footbridge over Liberty Street to the old WTC and supplied by the Mao Tai Restaurant, located at the second floor rear of Bankers Trust Plaza.)
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Monday, March 25, 2013
Monday, August 6, 2012
Shards of 911 - Postscript - One Bankers Trust Plaza - 130 Liberty Street NYC
I saw a reminder on some blog last week about the
upcoming eleventh anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
It took perhaps longer for me to forget some aspects
of that day having worked across the street from the now defunct old World
Trade Center for many years back in the eighties or thereabouts on a timeline.
The new World Trade Center is rising quite
marvelously, taking its time to change the lower Manhattan skyline.
I call 130 Liberty Street by the title I knew it
back when I worked there – One Bankers Trust Plaza.
The building was the back office of the main office of Bankers Trust Company on Wall Street which I think these days has a health spa in the gilded art deco main banking floor of that building and with I think condos now in old office space. Things change especially in this virtual world. Back offices in general in America these days
are now in India and China courtesy of outsourcing.
That bank eventually went under IMHO starting with the eighties, having put its old fashioned conservative banking sense, along with all its customer good will and corporate nest eggs into the new computer generated crap shoot game derivatives basket. Some German bank bought out
the company in the nineties and what are left of old accounts on digital
records are in that bank’s midtown offices and computer memory.
BT plaza had a nickname of the “BlackWidow” for some
years. She had been wounded in the World
Trade center collapse and wore a dark fabric mesh covering for several years like a widow's veil. But with
insurances companies fighting and lawyers haggling, the building went to seed
or more properly went to mold and the building was condemned, rather than clean
her up and recycle its old function.
No big profit to be had in retrofitting a 1970’s design building. The bureaucrats made a handsome dime taking
nine years and $300 million to tear it down and turn the building into an empty
lot, waiting for some future billion dollar design office building or condos to
stand one day in her old place.
This empty lot BTW is now being used as a staging
area for tourists with tickets, to go across the street to visit the now opened
911 Memorial Fountains.
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| Second Floor Lobby - BT Plaza |
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| Skeletal outline of 1WTC (top) and 2WTC (bottom) |
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| Tickets! All visitors to the Memorial must have their tickets out. |
Postscript:
Without too much sentiment, looking at some of these photos of 911, I am reminded of a line by W.B. Yeats regarding that tragic day and use that poetic line in paraphrase – “A terrible beauty (was) born (on 911)”.
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Tuesday, August 23, 2011
911 - World Trade Center - Memories and Reflections
ghosts of 911 - reflections and memories of September 11, 2001
Reflections and memories of the events leading up to and following 911, by a resident of Staten Island working in mid-town Manhattan. Dealing with the immediate consequences of a city brought to a standstill by an act of war and living in and traveling through the war zone for months to come. This includes memories of the old World Trade Center before its destruction as well as points of views from different communities and their dealing with the tragedy.
There is also a tribute to Father Mychal Judge, Fire Department Chaplain, listed as casualty number one of a long list of victims on that day. There is hope in the building of a Peace Garden in Snug Harbor Gardens in Staten Island, which had the highest percentage of Fire Department deaths of any of the five boroughs of the City of New York
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There is a poem Opede rededicated to the spirit of rebuilding which the author originally wrote in 1978 and rededicated to the spirit of that building of a New World Trade Center out of the ashes of the old.
All in all, this is a series of short stories and reflections on various real people and unknown heroes of that infamous day in September 2001. I think your reading of this will help in the healing process and contribute to awareness of what some would label the beginnings of a New Global Culture.
Available on Amazon Kindle:
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Dark Night of America’s Soul – Bin Laden’s death
I am glad that that bastard Osama Bin Laden is Dead!
It is not very Christian of me to say that.
An eye for an eye.
WWJD? (What would Jesus do?) I don’t know. He turned the other cheek and got killed by the state.
In the dark night of this nation’s soul, there seems to be a slight sliver of light, of hope, in this long chaotic morass of this new century and this new millennium. That sliver of light and hope lay in the death of a self proclaimed messiah of Islam.
Self appointed messiahs rarely succeed in the vision thing.
Divinely anointed messiahs are quite another story.
The man in the Arab and Muslim streets came no closer to moral, political or intellectual freedom under this Al-Qaeda world wide reign of terror. The turmoil in many Arab states these days reflects a desire for self determination and more freedom. The turmoil is also the result of the collapse of the dollar and the price of bread in those countries.
I, as a citizen of the United States, have very little control over world or military events let alone military budgets.
In the dark night of this nation’s spiritual soul, in its seemingly disrupted journey to moral excellence, it is hard to turn the cheek if we have a presence in 150 nations. Etc.
Perhaps out of all this political chaos comes a united global world or a more human world that fits into the vision of the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are they that …”
And still I am glad that that bastard Bin Laden has been served justice on a cold platter.
God forgive me.
I am only human and personally witnessed 911 here in New York City. Witnessed that event and witnessed, am witnessing the long journey of this city’s soul out of the depths of tragedy and back to something resembling normalcy.
It has been pointed out to me that celebrating the death of Bin Laden is wrong. I agree. Celebrating that death would indirectly celebrate his life – which was a poor example of simple local humanity or love of one’s global neighbor.
I also see the spontaneous outburst of joy on Sunday night in Times Square not as a celebration of death but more as a celebration as an event, a turning point, in an ever growing smaller world where everybody is truly your neighbor.
In any case I quote from the Hebrew testament for lack of my own words to match such eloquence.
Ecclesiastes 3:3-4
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
Phoenix Rising - World Trade Center - NYC
( 911 Memorial - foreground - under construction )
[click on above photo to get expanded image]
[click on above photo to get expanded image]
Saturday, September 11, 2010
911 Again – Flawed Perfection
Remembrance is a good thing. But all this again and again 911 remembrance is a bit too much.
It has become a secular/religious orgy of death and not life. Three thousand died tragically yes. But millions more survived.
I am putting a ten year cap on all this mourning for the dead. The memorial for the dead is apparently on schedule to be opened in time for that tenth anniversary.
The new WTC is a bit bizarre, expensive and out of this world in terms of design.
It has not lived up to America’s best standards. And with people fighting a mosque center two blocks from the center of American construction Greed and awkward design – it completely baffles me.
Did the Arabs really win on 911 – NO
Has America lost it’s Christian way – I have to say YES.
War on Terror???
War on Moral Values – where are they America?
Time to stop pretending to rule the world. Time to bring all troops home.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Freedom to Worship - Mosque at WTC
There is a done deal on Park Place in Manhattan. It is a bunch of mid nineteenth century buildings without any grand architectural features to landmark what will eventually be torn down to make way for a multi-storied multi-use building and Islamic community center.
There is a hate element on the right fighting a “mosque” at the World Trade Center. It is not at the world trade center. It will be two blocks from the WTC and with no view of it – blocked by a taller building at 100 Church Street.
The thought occurred to me reading many pros and cons of this secular Islamic community center. One is that in most of Islam, secular is secular. Sacred in a western sense is a different perspective on the situation. The mosque or prayer on rugs in a skyscraper is hardly a cathedral type structure.
God is God. If God demands or needs worship, then a growing segment of the population from Islamic lands and Islamic cultures will be praising God within shouting distance of the
Saint Peter’s is one half a block from the WTC. When this RC pagan style temple was built two centuries ago and approximately two blocks from New York City Hall, it must have been thought to have been an abomination to the English Protestant establishment. But it got built none the less. This is America.
America is about free movement and free thought. And freedom to worship.
All these arguments about and against a Mosque at the WTC is useless out of date dross in our modern secular society.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Cross as Religious and Secular Icon
The image above is a piece of the destroyed World Trade Center pulled from the wreckage a few days after 911. Two beams crossed at a joint is an architectural necessity. Two beams crossed could also be a religious symbol or icon.
The above icon was on site at the new World Trade Center rising. It was temporarily moved two blocks to the side of St. Peter’s RC church on Church Street to make way for new construction. It will be returned to the finished WTC II. There will be no problem with a possible religious icon being displayed on private or corporate property, which the WTC is.
Ran into the following story whereby an American Legion War Memorial got put up in the California desert, with a cross, over eighty years ago. Somebody sued the government, the owner of the public land where the war memorial sits, and the case has been in and out of court all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found in favor of the memorial.
Mojave cross at center of court fight reported stolen
A war memorial shaped like a cross that has been at the center of a Supreme Court fight has been torn down by vandals from its remote perch in a California desert….
The high court on April 28 ruled the cross did not violate the constitutional separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought the original lawsuit to have the cross removed, promised to continue the court fight….
The Latin cross was first erected in 1934 by a local VFW unit to honor war dead. It has been rebuilt several times over the years, and Easter services are held annually at the remote desert site. The site is on national park land that totals about 1.6 million acres, or 2,500 square miles….
The justices did not completely resolve the fight over the fate of the cross, but the conservative majority re-affirmed recent rulings that there is a limited place for religious symbols on government land.Other quotes from this Supreme Court case that overturned the objection to this one case in particular but not setting any future precedents on the matter:
"It is reasonable to interpret the congressional designation as giving recognition to the historical meaning that the cross had attained," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. "The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion's role in society."
Supreme Court overturns objection to cross on public land
To Kennedy, the cross "is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs" but a symbol "often used to honor and respect" heroism.
He added: "Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten."As I have stated in this blog previously, I, as a secularist, do not object to all religious icons that have been there for decades and are therefore “grandfathered” so to speak into American public spaces and landscapes.
Dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens said: "The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith."
Now, with this haphazard crony nomination of Elena Kagan to the future 2/3 Catholic and 1/3 Jewish U.S. Supreme Court, I have to wonder if opinions such as by Justice Kennedy should not be more aptly labeled in the future as the opinion of Catholic Justice Kennedy.
My feeling is that all future cases to the Supreme Court will be tainted in terms of the extremely narrow cultural/religious diversity now seen on the Court.
So it goes.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Freedom Tower Rising WTC NYC
In this virtual age it is possible to get daily photo progress and comments without having to stand outside the fence trying to find a peek hole with the other guys at the World Trade Center 2 in New York.
wirednewyork.com forum WTC Tower One a.k.a. Freedom Tower
After years of delay, the Phoenix is finally Rising at the WTC.
The new Freedom Tower is going up like an erector toy set from childhood memory.
From the latest comments, I am guessing that more than New York city dwellers are watching the progress. The whole world (global) is watching this new building rising and set down on top of Hell’s fury of 9-11-01.
I never liked the old WTC. It was too modern and not user friendly. This new bunch of buildings are going up slowly in the recession. Freedom Tower is of course number one to go up.
I am not too crazy about glass-clad structures. Brick and terra cotta used to show the soul of a building and the stamp of both the workers and the architect. Times change. So do methods.
These buildings will be on street level and not on top of an artificial concrete box like the old Twin Towers, that in life seemed to be cut off from the flow of street life all around it. They have even opened up a few streets that disappeared under the old fortress like structure of the WTC complex now a part of history.
Explore. It is an interesting topic and there are many more architectural topics in the Wired NYC Forum. Enjoy.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
In the Shadow of the Kaaba – 130 Liberty Street NYC
I recently saw a YouTube of some Saudi VIPs walking around the inside of the Kaaba, an ancient and sacred building covered in a black silk veil, in Mecca. The doorway to heaven is supposed to be above this building that existed in Mohammed’s time.
The interior of the Kaaba is not like a place of worship as we in the west would understand it. It seems to me from historic comparison to be more like a Holy of Holies from the ancient second temple era in Jerusalem.
As such, I look and see that Islam has a different concept of sacred than the west. While this place is certainly sacred in culture, it is still just a building. People have different feels for sacred around the planet.
We in the west with its traditions of sacred and secular have a mental picture of what is and what is not sacred. The West’s idea of secular is perhaps too off the scale for Islamic cultures or too close to the money. Some of their mosques have grandeur and beauty as architecture.
If you look at the grand mosque in Cairo it has a grand plaza within the complex walls. As such in the middle of crowded city, mosques have much more of the secular feel of the original Roman empire basilicas as all purpose all weather public buildings.
But away from far away - We in America have our own Kaaba in America. It is in a sense sacred. It is part of the original World Trade Center complex. It did not have many valubles in it that day of 911 except mere people. So it still stands.
Eight and one half years and three hundred million dollars later, the “Black Widow” of the WTC (a dark building wearing a veil of mourning for over eight years), still stands and almost refuses to yield its final hours.
At the present rate of incompetence of the businessmen, bureaucrats and unions it will take another two years and probably another hundred million dollars to bring the grand dame finally down.
I worked in that building for six years once upon a time. I won’t bore you with those details now. But because I am sensitive to the energy of the building in question, I sometimes feel that it is not so much cursed as let down by America.
We were all let down on 911 in a way. We have not recovered yet. The taking down of 130 Liberty Street sliver by sliver and crumb by crumb is symbolic of failed American Enterprise and Ingenuity. As other projects and buildings are delayed waiting for the grand old dame to come down and make way for a ramp for underground parking, the old lady is telling a story of American Greed, Incompetence and possible Redemption.
I named the building “the American Kaaba” in another blog "ghosts-of-911" but eventually deleted it because the message I was trying to interpret out of that construction site was hateful toward the people who brought down the World Trade Center.
The old lady sits silent but is still telling a story as time drones on. She tells the story of the failure of the whole American Way as displayed in the failure of Americans to heal our wounds at the old World Trade Center. The WTC is a government boondoggle’s boondoggle for city, state and federal money to be wasted over and over again like water while the rest of American starves in the Great Recession.
There was a time when they said that they were going to take the 39 story building, clean it up, take out the asbestos, recycle it (how green) and redo the building as office space. But no. That was six years ago and two hundred million dollars ago. Why stop when the money well keeps flowing for the elites - New York Real Estate Moguls, a socialist crony class just like their Wall Street brothers. More money Uncle Sam! More Money! Mo' Money!
And the corruption goes on and on! Unlike the Mecca Kaaba that is only secular and just a building, 130 Liberty Street and the whole of the World Trade Center’s gaping wound is Sacred because it is all made of money - the only god some people worship.
I, at one point, thought that where it is at 24 stories, that maybe the last ten stories could be left in place and the remains turned into a much cheaper museum for vistors to memorialize the dead of 911 and still be part of the original fabric of that lost WTC.
At this point I would recommend that it, now clean as a baby’s bottom after a bath, be imploded to speed up the process of the new World Trade Center, bureaucratic nightmare that it is.
The old lady – the “Black Widow” - deserves a better ending than she is getting at the hands of 21st century American moronic business class thinking and full of disrespect.
I dare say Obama could send the Army Corp of Engineers in to coordinate private contractors to implode 130 Liberty Street within a few weeks. Onward America! Dare I dream???
I am reminded of an article from the Huffington Post before Christmas and the advice of Arron Zelinsky in the context of the Maccabbees and the spirit of renewal and rebuilding as part of the Chanukah story – and his advice to our Prez.
Judah the Maccabee's Five Lessons for Barack Obama
3) Rebuilding symbolic structures matters. The literal meaning of Chanukah is "rededication." Josephus recounts that Judah found the Temple in ruins, defiled and destroyed by Antiochus's military forces. Judah recognized the spiritual and political imperative to rebuild the Temple as a symbol of strength and unity. The Maccabees quickly rededicated the Temple, giving the holiday its name.130 Liberty Street is symbolic of all that is wrong with America at present. It is also perhaps the touchstone of the future, of our redemption from sitting on own asses in these past thirty years of gluttony and consumption.
In contrast, our desecrated buildings are now but four stories tall. It has been eight years since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Freedom Tower could have been a symbol of our resilience and confidence, but has instead become a model of bureaucratic inefficiency and political bickering. Rededication of symbolic structures is not easy, but it is essential and it must proceed faster.
We can get back on track and get back to the common sense of our ancestors.
Forward America! Dust (from implosions) be damned!
Bless the Spirit of our Founding Fathers.
We need that Spirit now in America!
Monday, August 4, 2008
A Vision of 911
The seventh anniversary of the tragedy of 911 is upon us shortly in another month. No great resolutions or finished monuments or buildings are there in downtown Manhattan.
The hole in the ground at "gound zero" is in a way a microcosm of the greater hole in the moral or neighborly way that is missing in the new godless economic global equation.
Until I see or touch the rebuilt World Trade Center, I feel that the world has a gapping hole in its side and a crown of thorns sits upon our future global vision of things to come...with the words of Yeats ...” what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? “
People deal with death and grief differently. Here in New York City, we still in many visible and sometimes in silent ways walk around the ghosts of the tragedy of 911. No friend, acquaintance or relative of mine died that day. I have heard a lot of stories about friends, acquaintances and relatives that bit the dust that day.
Forgive me for using that word dust but many did not have so much as a grain of dust or a positive DNA test to take to any graveyard or memorial. Many have nothing to hold on to, nothing to plant for a seed of hope for some future day when memories would not be clouded with a tragedy or a media event in a greater historic footnote.
One of the most detached and archival things I witnessed regarding that event was a death certificate of someone who died that day. It was a sterile looking NYC form with at least a three or four dozen boxes to place a check mark next to. The two marks next to (x)“murder” and (x)“at work” summed up the bureaucratic statistic of that day for many.
I could go on and on as to how real friends and real relatives dealt with the tragedy. I can only deal with this as something of an outsider’s view even though the event happened within my touch or grasp of things living here in New York City, living in one of the outer boroughs.
“Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.” wrote the poet Dunne.
In a way of tribute to the many that died that day, to the many known and unknown souls who met their fate that day, I grieve with others at a distance and as part of a greater community. We here in this city, directly or indirectly, were shell shocked by the event. I wrote the following as tragic relief and or tribute some one to two years after the event:
Thoughts do travel.
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
A heartbeat. A throb. A thunder from another world. Silence!
Silence and the echo of the last heartbeat, of the last sound, of the last verbal human moment.
Silence to reflect. Silence to wonder. Silence and the dreaded fear realized, dealt with, melted and dissolved away in an instant of time.
No time here. How long is a second of time where there is no time?
A flash of the shades of gray emerging from the black anti-thought, anti-time, anti-self world are suddenly present. Grays merge backwards into the original flash of inspiration.
Blinding light. Pure white. Inner sight is born.
I am trapped, no, suspended in a single moment of time. No past movement; no forward.
The image emerges.
I am sitting at my desk trying to sign onto the companies e-mail system. The system is slow and was no doubt expensive. Computers and software are the tribal magic of this modern age. Nobody is ever quite sure if Bill’s voodoo is better than Blue’s voodoo.
My head is turning. It senses something. Something unbelievable. I can hear screams from the Mexican counter staff in the coffee shop where I usually buy my coffee and bagel. How can I hear screams? That coffee place is floors above me or is it below me. I am in space. I am on the what floor? My mind races for facts to justify ?
Justify what?
What am I seeing outside the narrow slit of glass across the room. What is that object? That round circle both dark and reflecting light like a highly polished metal …?
OH MY GOD! HOLY SHIT!
IT’S A PLANE!. A JET.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT!
IT cannot be!
The moment, a split second before and after presentation of a universal law of physics. The moment passes with my limbs frozen in the last thought of what is it, it cannot be etc. The final moment was real. The last moment existed. But there was no follow up moment to savor or analyze the previous moment. The previous moment was a bitch!
Locked into some disreality of thought. Or perhaps it is a previously unused or unrecognized way of seeing things.. I am outside myself and looking down at some ?
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
I am in comfort. A truly comfort zone enwraps me. I am enveloped in some great benign spirit of the moment. I am merged with dozens of similar hearts and minds thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feels, realizing the same new realities or possibility of realities.
This must be a dream.
Calm.
I am floating above some child’s play area. Below hundreds of ants are scurrying out of a broken ant farm. The tiny bits, the dark colored entities are fleeing. Some are fleeing in every direction. Others are following others in predictable patterns. Pieces of the clear plastic ant farm cover are falling down on the ants as they try to escape. I focus for a closer view. These are not ants. They are people. They are not fleeing an ant farm. They are trying to escape the wounded entity. Entity? The entity’s name is World Trade Center One.What an unusual name for a creature? Entity yes. Creature? I don’t understand.
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
The flash of light was the impact of a jet onto the outside skin of WTCONE.
In a same measure of time, my skin, my former skin merged with the skin of WTCONE (a name? – an entity, a creature? Has to have a name, a label? How human to label things. Was I once a thing???)
Our skins merge in a force of energy, the crash and the instantaneous spark of fire. Fireball. FIRE. LIGHT. HELL!
I withdraw back into my comfort cocoon. Best to replay this tape from a distance. Yes a distance. A safe marked boundary from that other world. That other world?
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
This is not a dream.
This is death. ---
What an artist thinks…No…What an artist feels is what I perhaps now feel. I am connected with all the chaos below. I am floating. No I am standing in the midst of screaming, of blood dripping, of detached limbs and heads and emptied torsos, crushed oozing bodies, flames, of sirens sounding, of a thousand screams, no, ten thousand prayers to a living GOD. Where is God today in all this confusion? No answer. Perhaps an answer later. Perhaps.
Valley of tears is a phrase from a childhood prayer comes into focus to label this instant. Life on Earth can indeed become a trek through a great valley of tears. Lord have mercy. Amen.
An artist inspires. An artist touches the souls or is it the spirits of others when they look at his creation, his painting, his music, reads his book. At this moment I want to look away. I have no choice. I am part of this moment. The moment sculpts reality into eternal pictures.. Thoughts and photographic images, real in the human sense, real in the spiritual sense are being formed.
The living and the dead will no doubt in their own time stand back and admire or not understand or may even despise the art of this present moment. Where is the museum? It is here. Time stands still on this planet or at least slows down. Time pauses from second to second. A hundred lives passed in one second. Then two hundred lives passed on not the next second but the second after that. And so on an so forth. Statistics amass.
Amidst the screams and sighs and puzzled thoughts of the unexpected dead, a silence comes. I slip from this macro of life and fade into some micro aspect of my former existence.
I come to a bright sun filled prairie. A simple wood clabbered, white washed house stands in stark contrast to clear blue sky and rich green vegetation textures. A woman with her back to me is hanging wet laundry on clothes lines a short distance from the house. A small barn is also in view. On a short stone wall sits an old woman in a plain white robe. She is watching a small child, a girl in a gingham dress walking about the yard area. The old woman looks in my direction. I recognize her. She is Myrtle. I had been her elder in a church I belonged to. The last church I had belonged to. Haven’t been to church for a long time.
She smiles a faint smile at me. I never made it to her funeral. She never had a funeral when she died at 94. Her body had been willed to science.
The thought occurs to me that she is perhaps dreaming about some scene from her own childhood in early twentieth century rural Illinois. Myrtle gives me non-verbal nods to my questions to her. She had made it to the other side. I would not consider donating my mortal coil to be entrusted to the likes of some smirking first year medical students…
The smell of charred meat. How I always hated that smell. Leaving the roast in the oven too long to dry up and then to burn.
More like a barbecue smell. The teacher in eighth grade wrote in chalk on the slate blackboard common American words that originated in other languages. Barbecue had Spanish origins I think. I remember this as the pungent smell of burning meat rolls off the olfactory senses of a wandering creature all bent over as if in pain. Clothed in a thick dark outfit, he climbs stairs, step after step after step after bloody, dusty step.
The fireman’s breathing is labored. He occasionally reaches for assistance in breathing from the tank hanging off his back. Crackling noise of walkie talkie sounds mix with breathing, and hisses and the smell of burned meat dance around senses in a misty fog of smoke coming and going. The smell of burning petrol and plastic add to this undefinable barbecue sauce.
Why do I smell human smells if I am truly dead? Why am I suddenly connecting in consciousness to the senses of one living man, this fireman? Why am I connected back to the world of the living?
People push by on the dark stairs.
The fireman’s flashlight wavers back and forth to give momentary assistance to the descending surviving refugees of terror.
The fireman’s goal is upward, ever upward. A ladder to heaven is not possible but in this behemoth structure heaven might in fact be at the top of this arduous climb.
- -
The hole in the ground at "gound zero" is in a way a microcosm of the greater hole in the moral or neighborly way that is missing in the new godless economic global equation.
Until I see or touch the rebuilt World Trade Center, I feel that the world has a gapping hole in its side and a crown of thorns sits upon our future global vision of things to come...with the words of Yeats ...” what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? “
People deal with death and grief differently. Here in New York City, we still in many visible and sometimes in silent ways walk around the ghosts of the tragedy of 911. No friend, acquaintance or relative of mine died that day. I have heard a lot of stories about friends, acquaintances and relatives that bit the dust that day.
Forgive me for using that word dust but many did not have so much as a grain of dust or a positive DNA test to take to any graveyard or memorial. Many have nothing to hold on to, nothing to plant for a seed of hope for some future day when memories would not be clouded with a tragedy or a media event in a greater historic footnote.
One of the most detached and archival things I witnessed regarding that event was a death certificate of someone who died that day. It was a sterile looking NYC form with at least a three or four dozen boxes to place a check mark next to. The two marks next to (x)“murder” and (x)“at work” summed up the bureaucratic statistic of that day for many.
I could go on and on as to how real friends and real relatives dealt with the tragedy. I can only deal with this as something of an outsider’s view even though the event happened within my touch or grasp of things living here in New York City, living in one of the outer boroughs.
“Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.” wrote the poet Dunne.
In a way of tribute to the many that died that day, to the many known and unknown souls who met their fate that day, I grieve with others at a distance and as part of a greater community. We here in this city, directly or indirectly, were shell shocked by the event. I wrote the following as tragic relief and or tribute some one to two years after the event:
Thoughts do travel.
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
A heartbeat. A throb. A thunder from another world. Silence!
Silence and the echo of the last heartbeat, of the last sound, of the last verbal human moment.
Silence to reflect. Silence to wonder. Silence and the dreaded fear realized, dealt with, melted and dissolved away in an instant of time.
No time here. How long is a second of time where there is no time?
A flash of the shades of gray emerging from the black anti-thought, anti-time, anti-self world are suddenly present. Grays merge backwards into the original flash of inspiration.
Blinding light. Pure white. Inner sight is born.
I am trapped, no, suspended in a single moment of time. No past movement; no forward.
The image emerges.
I am sitting at my desk trying to sign onto the companies e-mail system. The system is slow and was no doubt expensive. Computers and software are the tribal magic of this modern age. Nobody is ever quite sure if Bill’s voodoo is better than Blue’s voodoo.
My head is turning. It senses something. Something unbelievable. I can hear screams from the Mexican counter staff in the coffee shop where I usually buy my coffee and bagel. How can I hear screams? That coffee place is floors above me or is it below me. I am in space. I am on the what floor? My mind races for facts to justify ?
Justify what?
What am I seeing outside the narrow slit of glass across the room. What is that object? That round circle both dark and reflecting light like a highly polished metal …?
OH MY GOD! HOLY SHIT!
IT’S A PLANE!. A JET.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT!
IT cannot be!
The moment, a split second before and after presentation of a universal law of physics. The moment passes with my limbs frozen in the last thought of what is it, it cannot be etc. The final moment was real. The last moment existed. But there was no follow up moment to savor or analyze the previous moment. The previous moment was a bitch!
Locked into some disreality of thought. Or perhaps it is a previously unused or unrecognized way of seeing things.. I am outside myself and looking down at some ?
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
I am in comfort. A truly comfort zone enwraps me. I am enveloped in some great benign spirit of the moment. I am merged with dozens of similar hearts and minds thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feels, realizing the same new realities or possibility of realities.
This must be a dream.
Calm.
I am floating above some child’s play area. Below hundreds of ants are scurrying out of a broken ant farm. The tiny bits, the dark colored entities are fleeing. Some are fleeing in every direction. Others are following others in predictable patterns. Pieces of the clear plastic ant farm cover are falling down on the ants as they try to escape. I focus for a closer view. These are not ants. They are people. They are not fleeing an ant farm. They are trying to escape the wounded entity. Entity? The entity’s name is World Trade Center One.What an unusual name for a creature? Entity yes. Creature? I don’t understand.
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
The flash of light was the impact of a jet onto the outside skin of WTCONE.
In a same measure of time, my skin, my former skin merged with the skin of WTCONE (a name? – an entity, a creature? Has to have a name, a label? How human to label things. Was I once a thing???)
Our skins merge in a force of energy, the crash and the instantaneous spark of fire. Fireball. FIRE. LIGHT. HELL!
I withdraw back into my comfort cocoon. Best to replay this tape from a distance. Yes a distance. A safe marked boundary from that other world. That other world?
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
This is not a dream.
This is death. ---
What an artist thinks…No…What an artist feels is what I perhaps now feel. I am connected with all the chaos below. I am floating. No I am standing in the midst of screaming, of blood dripping, of detached limbs and heads and emptied torsos, crushed oozing bodies, flames, of sirens sounding, of a thousand screams, no, ten thousand prayers to a living GOD. Where is God today in all this confusion? No answer. Perhaps an answer later. Perhaps.
Valley of tears is a phrase from a childhood prayer comes into focus to label this instant. Life on Earth can indeed become a trek through a great valley of tears. Lord have mercy. Amen.
An artist inspires. An artist touches the souls or is it the spirits of others when they look at his creation, his painting, his music, reads his book. At this moment I want to look away. I have no choice. I am part of this moment. The moment sculpts reality into eternal pictures.. Thoughts and photographic images, real in the human sense, real in the spiritual sense are being formed.
The living and the dead will no doubt in their own time stand back and admire or not understand or may even despise the art of this present moment. Where is the museum? It is here. Time stands still on this planet or at least slows down. Time pauses from second to second. A hundred lives passed in one second. Then two hundred lives passed on not the next second but the second after that. And so on an so forth. Statistics amass.
Amidst the screams and sighs and puzzled thoughts of the unexpected dead, a silence comes. I slip from this macro of life and fade into some micro aspect of my former existence.
I come to a bright sun filled prairie. A simple wood clabbered, white washed house stands in stark contrast to clear blue sky and rich green vegetation textures. A woman with her back to me is hanging wet laundry on clothes lines a short distance from the house. A small barn is also in view. On a short stone wall sits an old woman in a plain white robe. She is watching a small child, a girl in a gingham dress walking about the yard area. The old woman looks in my direction. I recognize her. She is Myrtle. I had been her elder in a church I belonged to. The last church I had belonged to. Haven’t been to church for a long time.
She smiles a faint smile at me. I never made it to her funeral. She never had a funeral when she died at 94. Her body had been willed to science.
The thought occurs to me that she is perhaps dreaming about some scene from her own childhood in early twentieth century rural Illinois. Myrtle gives me non-verbal nods to my questions to her. She had made it to the other side. I would not consider donating my mortal coil to be entrusted to the likes of some smirking first year medical students…
The smell of charred meat. How I always hated that smell. Leaving the roast in the oven too long to dry up and then to burn.
More like a barbecue smell. The teacher in eighth grade wrote in chalk on the slate blackboard common American words that originated in other languages. Barbecue had Spanish origins I think. I remember this as the pungent smell of burning meat rolls off the olfactory senses of a wandering creature all bent over as if in pain. Clothed in a thick dark outfit, he climbs stairs, step after step after step after bloody, dusty step.
The fireman’s breathing is labored. He occasionally reaches for assistance in breathing from the tank hanging off his back. Crackling noise of walkie talkie sounds mix with breathing, and hisses and the smell of burned meat dance around senses in a misty fog of smoke coming and going. The smell of burning petrol and plastic add to this undefinable barbecue sauce.
Why do I smell human smells if I am truly dead? Why am I suddenly connecting in consciousness to the senses of one living man, this fireman? Why am I connected back to the world of the living?
People push by on the dark stairs.
The fireman’s flashlight wavers back and forth to give momentary assistance to the descending surviving refugees of terror.
The fireman’s goal is upward, ever upward. A ladder to heaven is not possible but in this behemoth structure heaven might in fact be at the top of this arduous climb.
- -
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