He arrived late by an hour, and the first half filled with readings was almost complete. The last of those were being presented, several commendations half-heartedly offered. Then he, James I think he was, was asked if he would like to read, and did he have copies for eveyone. Yes, he would like to read and he did have a page for all. He stood immediately to hand them out before the chairman could suggest they might pass them along. He mentioned with deliberate truthfulness that he would rather do it, because there were two poems, and because it would give him a chance to smell the women’s perfume.
Then he provided some background of his experience of the 9/11 moments, the ones he wrote about in particular, and then he read, forcefully yet curiously tenderly, as his piece opened with the sight of trapped workers in The South Tower breaking their office windows and “stepping into the up-draft”. When he’d finished there were immediate requests to speak about the poem, but the chairman begged their insistence pause, until the second hour commenced.
James seemed slightly annoyed that this structured approach to poetry should be held, be the way the meetings would go, but since he was the new-guy on the block there was nothing to do but wait, along with the others, who broke off into knots of talk and refreshments and serious discussions about what had been heard, and how these pieces might have been handled for their betterment. There was a mix he apparently expected for he relaxed almost as soon as he arrived, as though he were content with the docility he encountered.
He struck up a conversation with a Native Canadian next to him who adored Robert Frost, and they quickly got to speaking about their dreams and how much they provided each writer with grist for the bardic mills and what automatically emerged from her pen and his typewriter. She attracted him, it was obvious, for she had what he might have written, “a calm beauty fronting a deep desire to project and create.” Then the mid-evening break ended and discussion began, and one of the stronger members jumped immediately to James’ poem of the leapers and those who merely watched in spite of the poisonous gusts of debris and dust.
His go-around ended with several back-and-forths on what the idea of heroism was, and how it applied to the leapers and the watchers alike. Yet James describe the leapers as humans in an act that was of the divine, even of the sacred. Somehow the Jewish holocaust got worked in and why none of the fated didn’t fight back or resist what was about to be done. Avram Berg’s book The Holocaust Is Over: Time To Rise From Its Ashes might have come to his mind, but this would be an unnecessary diversion. And the chairman was about to squirm in his seat for the third time, and say that there were several more to be heard from before the nine o’ clock bell.
There were compliments for James and then other pieces were examined, where there was with almost all the critics an apology first before something was said. There was little overall compliment, and this, I suspect James thought, had to do with the restrictions of the chairman and his tightly held evening scheduling of time.
James was saying later he was glad he agreed finally to attend. He’d driven by the place once earlier in the evening but hadn’t parked and gone in. After he returned home he relented, and thus he walked in mid-reading of a poem didn’t have an opportunity to further discern.
The bathers decided on an action of quick self-destruction, that seemed to be to those who watched sacred, even divine, more noble in these Twin-Tower-Afire circumstances than would have been suspected if otherwise supposed. “Let us suppose someone could learn to fly jets well enough to guide them into a New York skyscraper. I know it’s highly unlikely, a real stretch, but let’s suppose.” Would the threatened victims, the tenants of those towers be anymore heroic than those who planned the scheme, learned to fly, then hijacked four jets in flight and deliberately guided them into three buildings and a nose-dive into the Pennsylvania countryside?
The ones in the towers decided very quickly they weren’t going to fry, and one or two of them might have posed a laugh once this decision was voiced into the frenzied room, the former office, and now, very soon to be their oven. “I’m not going to fry. Fuck that shit!” and amidst the screams for another bellow and roar from the encroaching flames, Jim and Dagmar and Reggie smashed chairs into the heavy glass for their exit into the updraft, their escape hatch razor sharp. First Jim, then Dagmar then Reg, and as each of them leaped into the wind there were screams now squeals of “Goodbye!” which then recoursed into themselves for what they were going meet, the octane fire now growling at their office doors.
In the meantime, Jim and Dagmar and Reg were floating toward earth concentrating on the fact that they weren’t going to fry, and that they would likely burst when the earth finally drew them to it unforgiving ground. But they weren’t going to fry. And then all the way to the 56th floor those who were sweating the octane heat heard the “Thud.” then “Thud, thud.” as their departed friends sounded their last, their body’s ordinance as their spirits exploded from their flesh.
We who survive assign the tag of hero. We’re the ones who make the judgement clear, and whether we acknowledge the watchers as worthy, that they, the assigners of the tag, who were there when those few decided to step into the updraft bath, they were heroes too. They lasted and remembered and suffered all those years until they too died from the dust the building was, the buildings were. And oh, how they wished they too could explode as Jim and Dagmar and Reg did when their pristine flesh erupted when it met their Mother Earth.
The swarthy pilots, the fearful in the rooms, those who jumped and those who watched or entered looking to save the few, they were all heroes. Their choice of side didn’t really matter. They were humans living out their lives in situations unexpectedly wild and obviously decried.
Susan Sontag was one of the first to write about the pilots, the beauty of the plan. That nineteen should have knowledge and nothing was known, so the powers they say, is remarkable. And given the death and destruction, the suffering caused abroad, where the pilots lived, such a small band of heroes have they created to draw attention to what we in turn alas will give.
Now the War On terror, for almost how many disastrous years. And what’s been accomplished, what’s been done, other than more destruction, more killing, the women and children first? We’re all heroes finally, over the threshold and into the beyond. To die alone lying in a ditch has I know equal merit and worth.