A Year Later... I used to have the most vivid dreams. I was this hero who lived in a great city. Highways were built on top of highways that some mad city planner had designed with twists and bends like a rollercoaster. Great tan brick building loomed up from an endless maze of rubble filled city streets, glossy black from summer rain. This was a city after its fall. I was picked up by the mob in one dream. Riding in their limo, they shot me in the leg. I remember looking down at the oozing bloodshot, thinking, lucidly, ‘Wow, it doesn’t even hurt.’ I was that cool. They were stupid teenage boy fantasies. The Iceman in the Mad Mad World and his exploits. It’s been a year now. A year of trying to move on. A year of conversations that begin, ‘I don’t want say it’s because of the World Trade Center, but…’ When it first happened, we didn’t know what to call it: ‘The Tragedy’, ‘The Recent Event’, ‘The End of the World’, totally at a loss to define what had transpired. Now, it’s just 9/11, a description mercifully devoid of any real meaning, just a marker. Before and After. My god, what a horrible thing has happened. I’m defenseless to it, even now. How empty everything seems. This isn’t pain or sorrow or loss. Those things can be overcome. This is something else; entirely new emotions on tap, or just the same old ones in new focus. Degrees of subtlety previously unknown illuminate from within. The differences between all the shades of ‘Perfect September Morning Sky Blue’ stand in sharp relief now, as if they were an entire spectrum to themselves. I often sit at home now, not afraid of the world outside, but unsure of its relation to me and I, to it. There seems to be a precarious balance at work and any subtle shift will topple the whole thing over. This may be how it always was and only now am I aware of it. One of the problems with being young is you can never be sure whether what you feel and learn and see are in fact new things or just part of the maturity process at work. Is this thing I feel unique or did I pick it up on Fox? I’m tied to these times, a child of the Zeitgeist, nostalgic for things I never knew. Nobody is built for tragedy, standing up to it is pointless and a good way to get yourself killed The worst thing about all this maudlin speculation is that what did I really lose? A job? A vague sense of stability? I’m pretty petty and weak when you come right down to it. My mother, in her dark moments, used to say she wish she could come back as a large rock. I asked her why. ‘So nobody would bother me.’ ‘But someone would come along and use you to picnic on or something, eventually’, I said. ‘Then I will be a rock in the desert, surrounded by giant shards of glass, nobody will come near.’ Missing the point, I sneered, ‘A challenge like that would probably just draw people to it from around the world to try to scale you. You’d be regular tourist attraction.’ She went back to her cooking. I was just antagonizing her now. I think if I were to come back as a rock, I’d be a rock in a stream. Slowly eroding away, carved by the rushing water, little bits of me silting up downstream. This is how I have to talk. When the towers fell they toppled with far more than concrete and steel and human bodies within. Our whole damned civilization fell with them and say what you want, but we don’t know how to fix it. It’s terrifying and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Welcome to the Middle Ages, brutes and damsels. Settle in, because it’s going to be a long spell. I suppose I should cheer you up now, otherwise you’ll be angry with me or worried I’ll do something to myself. Don’t worry though, this is just my elegy for The Dream. It wasn’t long ago; I wanted to experience everything, to know life in its mad passionate beauty, or rather, to have my own mad passionate beauty be returned. The thing to learn is that the water’s reflection is just that, a surface thing. Dive in deep enough and your lungs cave in, filling with water, and unfortunately, we are not fish. There is much to live for in this new world, but we must mourn what has been lost. We will no longer build soaring towers of steel that define the sky. We do not aim for the heavens anymore, held down by the weight of centuries. The giants of history stand on our shoulders now; we have become Atlas. Our environment is in shambles. Water is the new gold, tans mean cancer and seawalls define our coasts, a last stand against the ever encroaching sea. We are still building that bridge to the future, but there is no far shore in sight, just the endless expanse of a raging sea. Fortunately, there are many worthwhile things left to do. Show love to friends and family. Learn the finer points of cooking. It’s not really a bad world, this thing we inherit now. It’s a place of things and moments and time passing, that above all. Sand and water rushing past us, bit by bit smoothing us down into, perhaps, a different kind of beauty than the one we knew. What do I dream of now? I’m not sure, really. The dreams, they leave me as I wake.

-Japhy Grant September 1st 2002 New York, NY

posted by Japhy at 9/02/2002 10:28:00 PM || #