Last night I dreamed that I was in a take out restaurant in LA and could see the downtown skyline across a body of water. (My dreams rarely make any physical sense.) There were some kids and families from my work there as well. As we were watching, something happened. It might have been a plane but I don't remember the dream clearly enough. After whatever this act of terrorism was, the big cylindrical building downtown collapsed. I thought, here we go again. The people I was with didn't seem to know what to do. I was telling people that if they were staying where we were, they should close the windows to avoid the dust. Otherwise they should go home.
I've had at least one other dream about terrorist attacks recently. I never dreamed this kind of thing when I lived near NYC or when everything happened.
I did, however, have dreams after the destruction of the towers where I would be walking through the mall under one of the towers just like I always did when coming out from the PATH station on my way to work at Trinity. Everything was there but without other people. These were some of the few dreams I have had where things were physically in the right places. It wasn't spooky, but it was just as it had been.
There were visions as well. One was a quick flash of scripture on the Saturday before that infamous destruction. A group I sang with had just finished what had been an important performance for us on the Hudson side of the World Financial Center. I was standing at the entrance to the underground mall that I would pass through on my way to the PATH train home. I was talking to one of my older and closest friends whom I had just sung with as we prepared to part ways. She was telling me about changes in her life and decisions that she was preparing to make that would change things for both of us, including her anticipated departure from our current shared musical venture. I remember looking at the chunk of stone in the sunlight by the entrance behind her and a spot of scripture popped into my head. I thought of Jesus saying, "not one stone will be left on top of another." Three days later than would be literally, not just figuratively, true.
During my time working in lower Manhattan, the night before Easter was also a night of unusual thoughts. Although they were probably induced by the hysteria of the 10 day music marathon at Trinity that surrounded Holy Week, there was a certain theme. The night before my first Easter in 2001, I closed my eyes for the few hours of precious sleep to come. As I relaxed, I saw before my eyes the scroll work on the pillars inside St. Paul's Chapel growing and unfurling like a wondrous plant or a billowing cloud. The next year I had driven or walked around the pit that day before Easter. I saw what looked to me like layers of basement that remained with their edges scrappy and fibrous bits of metal splaying out. When I closed my eyes that night, the landscape of that pit was all around me, expanding and growing through my vision. In 2003 the scene was different. No longer mentally anchored in lower Manhattan, I saw the green shoots of new born plants from my morning's run, stretching and growing out, a young and vital green.
I don't know why I've been dreaming these things, or why I'm dreaming them now, but I've been in a horrible place during the day after these recent visions. This blog that no one reads is a place for me to let it all out, a place to wonder aloud, vent, ask why and try to find some resolution for myself.
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The hills are alive... with fire
From my home in Pasadena, I can stand in my back yard and look at the Eagle Rock. Over the past few days, I have watched the giant pyrocumulous clouds blossoming from behind the surrounding mountains. The air is thick with dust and ash, and this morning my car and basil plants were covered. After much hand wringing while listening to my favorite radio station personalities, it seems that Mount Wilson, the observatory and the broadcast towers for the majority of LA's radio stations will now be saved, where yesterday they were anticipating being off the air at any moment.
As I look at the ash and fear for my lungs, this situation reminds me of the ash and dust of another September eight years ago when I lived near and worked in New York. Then dust and ash coated everything and everyone. The day after, I could smell it where I lived an hour away in NJ. The mass of associations aroused from that time by these new fires overwhelms me in its scope, variety and quantity.
I am easily lost in these recollections. My boyfriend often bears the brunt of my ramblings and tends to go silent when I fall into stories and legends of that disaster. These memories are important to me and not something that I share lightly or with people I do not know well. Whatever degree or amount of truth I have retained are illustrative of my own history and perspective as well as the actual event.
For a while I hated to hear most other people talk about what happened in NYC. They seemed to me to fall into three categories: the opportunists, the justifiers and sentimental wallowers who wished to use the tragedy as a cloak to give their own actions some greater meaning.
The most prominent opportunists in my mind were at my place of work in lower Manhattan. They had been there and certainly knew what they were talking about. At first they had to talk about it. This was dealing with life, it was catharsis, it was a means of healing a community directly effected. As the one year anniversary passed and beyond, it seemed to me to become something else. The leadership so enjoyed the notoriety and status that came from their extreme proximity to the event that they seemed unable to let it go. Every sermon had some mention of the towers that were no more. The first "dust, dust, everywhere dust" text, became a mantra substituted for meaning. Their overall corporation seemed to profit by the disaster, and they were even accused of price gouging by the New York Times in the immediate aftermath.
The justifiers are those who sins are now recounted daily by the same news media that turned a blatant blind eye to their crimes when they began. The justifiers wrapped themselves in false cloaks of righteousness and patriotism with the ash of the towers as their own jet fuel to decimate and steal from populations on the other side of the globe who possessed what they desired.
In dealing with members of my third group through the years, the sentimental wallowers, I simply go silent. Maybe their gestures really are well meaning, but they always ring untrue in my ears. Examples include people, years later, dedicating bad pieces of music to the memory of those lost in hopes that such a dedication might win them favor or get their mediocre compositions a bit more attention. Most are people who seem to have no connection to New York, the east, or anyone who was lost or even there, people who sanctimoniously pay homage in public.
In thinking about my lover's silence, I wonder if he sees me as a number three; someone searching to make up for my own lack by piggybacking on a tragedy experienced primarily by others. I don't think that I belong to this group. Though thankfully I was not so affected as many people I knew were, I too have lists of stories and vivid things all tied into that time, things that have been brought to the surface eight years later by only a large quantity of pollutants in the air and waking up to find my plants lightly covered in ash.
Is a blog a place to let all of that out? All of the first hand experiences and stories of others, descriptions of sights and smells, feelings of failure when I might have better handled a young student who had just lost her father, other students taking a hiatus from music lessons to go to grief counseling, the sights on a Sunday morning in lower Manhattan before we were allowed back into our proper church, the smells, the view from the ferry, peoples faces on a silent train as most of us traveled back into the city for the first time since the loss of its tallest towers, battery park dwellers returning home on the subway with Siamese cats in boxes.
This is the tip of a personal iceberg of memory, an iceberg that these horribly destructive fires have inadvertently triggered in this misplaced east coast transplant.
As I look at the ash and fear for my lungs, this situation reminds me of the ash and dust of another September eight years ago when I lived near and worked in New York. Then dust and ash coated everything and everyone. The day after, I could smell it where I lived an hour away in NJ. The mass of associations aroused from that time by these new fires overwhelms me in its scope, variety and quantity.
I am easily lost in these recollections. My boyfriend often bears the brunt of my ramblings and tends to go silent when I fall into stories and legends of that disaster. These memories are important to me and not something that I share lightly or with people I do not know well. Whatever degree or amount of truth I have retained are illustrative of my own history and perspective as well as the actual event.
For a while I hated to hear most other people talk about what happened in NYC. They seemed to me to fall into three categories: the opportunists, the justifiers and sentimental wallowers who wished to use the tragedy as a cloak to give their own actions some greater meaning.
The most prominent opportunists in my mind were at my place of work in lower Manhattan. They had been there and certainly knew what they were talking about. At first they had to talk about it. This was dealing with life, it was catharsis, it was a means of healing a community directly effected. As the one year anniversary passed and beyond, it seemed to me to become something else. The leadership so enjoyed the notoriety and status that came from their extreme proximity to the event that they seemed unable to let it go. Every sermon had some mention of the towers that were no more. The first "dust, dust, everywhere dust" text, became a mantra substituted for meaning. Their overall corporation seemed to profit by the disaster, and they were even accused of price gouging by the New York Times in the immediate aftermath.
The justifiers are those who sins are now recounted daily by the same news media that turned a blatant blind eye to their crimes when they began. The justifiers wrapped themselves in false cloaks of righteousness and patriotism with the ash of the towers as their own jet fuel to decimate and steal from populations on the other side of the globe who possessed what they desired.
In dealing with members of my third group through the years, the sentimental wallowers, I simply go silent. Maybe their gestures really are well meaning, but they always ring untrue in my ears. Examples include people, years later, dedicating bad pieces of music to the memory of those lost in hopes that such a dedication might win them favor or get their mediocre compositions a bit more attention. Most are people who seem to have no connection to New York, the east, or anyone who was lost or even there, people who sanctimoniously pay homage in public.
In thinking about my lover's silence, I wonder if he sees me as a number three; someone searching to make up for my own lack by piggybacking on a tragedy experienced primarily by others. I don't think that I belong to this group. Though thankfully I was not so affected as many people I knew were, I too have lists of stories and vivid things all tied into that time, things that have been brought to the surface eight years later by only a large quantity of pollutants in the air and waking up to find my plants lightly covered in ash.
Is a blog a place to let all of that out? All of the first hand experiences and stories of others, descriptions of sights and smells, feelings of failure when I might have better handled a young student who had just lost her father, other students taking a hiatus from music lessons to go to grief counseling, the sights on a Sunday morning in lower Manhattan before we were allowed back into our proper church, the smells, the view from the ferry, peoples faces on a silent train as most of us traveled back into the city for the first time since the loss of its tallest towers, battery park dwellers returning home on the subway with Siamese cats in boxes.
This is the tip of a personal iceberg of memory, an iceberg that these horribly destructive fires have inadvertently triggered in this misplaced east coast transplant.
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