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9/23/01
My friends, I write this from Afghanistan where I am on a secret
mission for United States Special Forces in conjunction with Harper's
Bazaar and Vogue. |
| On a more serious note,
I must say that my own march towards death hasn't stopped and neither
have I stopped mourning the deaths of 9/11/01. Watching the first tower collapse was certainly traumatic, and as it happened I stood frozen except to cock my head at the impossibility of what lay before my eyes. Conceptually and visually this horror defied perspective. The sky may have folded up into a flaming box or the moon roll down 5th Avenue; but I saw it as so many did, staring into an abyss absent of physical law, into a hole ripped in the sky, looking into a 4th dimension where something that couldn't happen did, where straight lines crack & bend and massive turns small. The unstoppable force hit the immovable object and destroyed it. Later our mind's eye blinks and opens to a diminished 24-inch replay. I don't want the replay to erase the utter magnitude of destruction held in my memories, but I wish I didn't have these memories that I don't want to forget. People don't usually fall from the sky; men don't usually lie weeping on the street. Impenetrable smoke, crumbling and rumbling, shaking and screaming and cries aghast. A clear voice in my panicked head: '20000 people are dying before my very eyes.' Luckily, savagely, only 6500 are dead. But the rescue workers at Ground Zero are not looking for 6500 bodies; they are looking for thousands and thousands of body parts - the bloody arms, hands, legs, feet, torsos, limbs, fingers and heads of 6500 burned and mutilated people. Tonight my neighborhood again smells of burnt smoke. What strength has it that the wind and rain have not yet diminished this odor? I have read of atrocities. I never imagined that I would smell one. Life is precious but I reject prevailing notions. Life would be more precious without evil, without carnage, without anything malignant to remind us of how precious life is, and unto death I reject this monstrous event just as I reject the petty struggles of my own life. None of it is necessary to remind us of anything except for lessons unwanted, that love is not always stronger than hate, that there is a random chaos to life and that sometimes evil prevails. I'm no hippie. I am a machine. House divas wailing on about being strong and keeping on don't really do it for me these days, and I apologize for picking semi-obvious trance songs but they seem to express melancholy, transcendence, joy and transformation more than anything else I can think of right now: 'Lush 3.1' by Orbital 'Xpander' by Sasha 'Angel' by Lost Tribe Of course we can't wallow in sadness. We stand in defiance of anything that makes no sense, whether it be sadness, terrorism, war, death, evil, our own government, or even God if there is one. 'Schoneberg' by Marmion |
until next week remember..
when you dance, we are a part of what you feel.
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