It's September 11th, again. The day when the truth of our interconnectedness came bounding through the television set, a flickering and pixelated monster. When the feeling settled around us like ash, like snow, that something fundamental and overlooked had gone horribly wrong. The day when the parade of assumptions about how and why we live, handed down through generations of American experience, packed up and went home, leaving the streets quiet and empty.
We crisscrossed the Great Plains and grew the circumference of our compass beyond the deep forests and their dancing, primordial shadows. We conquered 'need' to build an empire of 'want', then painted it in distraction and set it ablaze in the night sky; fly across the Eastern seaboard at night and you might as well be looking at a microchip laid bare from horizon to horizon. But today, beneath those twinkling lights, in a sinew of cables and silicon, the images of those people splashing against the pavement-humid, carnal, fragile images frozen in the smooth, precise violence of technology-dance again like primordial shadows. Images of people with epitaphs of wet words like 'murder' and 'kill', words that roll around in the mouth like grapes. But what they show us about ourselves, about the whole created comfort of the Great Modern Failing, seems to slip away with each passing year, jetsam over the rail that disappears into the opaque depths.
We once had the supreme confidence of our conquering. Now there's a gap in the New York skyline and the lingering haze of death. But we'll build in its place and bow our heads to the river Lethe, for the rites must continue.
Today is an anniversary. It yearly reminds us, surfacing, cycling, bobbing up and down in our consciousness, like a buoy to mark the strange, underwater topography of our sunken dreams. Who knows the depths we've left to plunge, how far we'll drop from the widening sky? As we quit the continental shelf completely, beyond the deep blue gloom to seek the abyss, we'll slip into the black unknown, leviathans like imploded stars from which no report of meaning can escape.
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