One Saturday, early in September, Maya Sharma, my wife, heard from two of her oldest friends from Stony Brook, who were coming in to the city, and wanted to spend some time with us. When they got in we did some shopping on Canal Street and had such a nasty lunch in Chinatown that Maya was almost immediately sick. She recovered herself a bit at the nearest open Starbucks before dealing with taxis or subways, and felt well enough to take a walk by the river.
It was a lovely day, with hundreds of people on the Battery Park City lawns. We walked slowly, and our friends fantasized about how good it would be to retire from Long Island to that part of Manhattan. We visited the palm trees (my palm trees, as I think of them even now) in the winter garden and had a beer (I had a tonic) just south of the marina, resolved to begin our next visit there and then continue walking toward the Battery. Of course there would be no next visit, no time soon. The pictures of the winter garden we saw next showed a structure resembling the rotunda of Hiroshima in old black and white photographs, similarly colorless because covered with the dust which had been the World Trade Center which once rose behind it.
Monday and Tuesday I reported to work as usual on the thirteenth floor of 101 Barclay Street, technology headquarters of the Bank of New York. From the sixteenth floor cafeteria there was an unobstructed view of the Twin Towers. You could look across the river to the part of Jersey City where my father's father was born in 1879, and I was convinced that with binoculars I could have seen my mother's mother's house on top of the cliff in Weehawken. I could look down on what is now the Kalikow building, with the grandest Doric interior I have seen anywhere, where my father worked when it was the world headquarters of AT&T, and across to the great mechanical clock on 346 Broadway, where I had my first job after defending my dissertation, and where I got to know computers in the form of an even then antiquated DEC-11.
When the first plane hit I thought there had been some kind of accident on the floor above me at the bank; then I saw everyone going to the windows on the south side of the building to see the fire a block away and far above. I looked up into a dark fire, like the fire of hell, maybe -- the burning was deep red within the upper floors, before the yellow flames and billows of smoke came out. After I saw the first body fall, seeming as tiny as a speck of confetti, I went back to my work station weeping. My boss was still at the windows when the second plane hit, poor man -- it was not the kind of thing you could turn away from unless you had to. I dug a prayerbook out from the stacks of papers on my desk and tried to recite Orthros, the morning office of the Eastern Church, but found my attention and my vision unreliable. Some of the verses were all too appropriate:
(M)y soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to the grave.
I am counted with those who go down to the pit; I am like a man who has no strength.
Adrift among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, and who are cut off from Your hand.
You have laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the depths.
Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and You have afflicted me with all Your waves...
I balked at what came next, and closed the book:
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name!
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits:
Who forgives you all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases.
Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies,
Who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.
We were told it was not safe to leave the building, but that we had to evacuate the south side, where my desk is located; I went to the printer room, where I was able to get online and send email, letting the world know, prematurely, that I was safe. It was the first some heard of the disaster. Not having had anything to eat, and not knowing when I would be permitted to leave, I went up to the cafeteria level, where some walkways were open to the lobby, which extends up to the the roof of the building with elevators rising like missile silos from the center, conntected to the work areas by glassed in bridges on every floor. Suddenly the south windows were covered with brown darkness and there was a sound of screaming from fifteen floors down: the first tower had fallen. I went back down to my cube and picked up my briefcase. Had I been permitted to leave sooner, I might be dead. Now we evacuated.
I walked down twelve flights of stairs and headed uptown. I guess I was about a half mile away when the second tower went down right behind me. I couldn't even imagine the numbers of people still in it. The walk was exhausting, which is good and gave me an excuse to rest without the television when I finally got home. I was one of a small army of refugees heading uptown, some of them still covered with rubble and ash. One of the oddest sights I saw was about a half dozen horse vans among the emergency vehicles heading the other way, in case mounted police were needed for crowd control.
I stopped for an iced tea and grilled cheese around Fifteenth Street after walking from corner to corner trying to get into a bus. I put my head down on my cloth briefcase on the lunchcounter and broke down silently for a moment, and the stranger on the next stool silently put his hand on my shoulder for a second. By the time I reached Times Square the trains were running uptown, so I was able to ride the last mile and a half. At the corner of 72nd and West End I met Steve from the All State Cafe, who told me Maya was inside with her sister in law. She had walked from Hostos Community College over the bridge into Manhattan, and found a Gipsy cab. Monica had walked to our house from the evacuated U.N.
For days I was still catching up on the details, but couldn't really comprehend them. I saw the terrible fires burning and one body falling before we were removed to the safer side of our building. Then the unbelievable collapse. The television pictures only made it more and more unreal. Everyone who owns a television has seen it all before in movies, with actors dressed as newscasters, or even newscasters hired as actors, saying that this time it was real.
There was a line about a block long in front of St Vincent's Hospital. I thought it was people lined up to ask about relatives, but actually it was the line to donate blood, men and women must have left home and office as soon as they heard of the trouble; they had to turn people away. For months there has been a bad shortage of blood, but as soon as this thing happened, folks headed for the hospitals to give. The need for blood was not so great now as everyone thought; survivors were too few.
I was looking forward to a Middle Eastern dinner and an exhibition of Middle Eastern dance Wednesday night, and was rather disappointed that the restaurant was in the no go zone. While the vulgar call it "belly dance," it is in its own way a celebration of life, which I felt a great need for, having seen thousands die, incinerated, vaporized, crushed in a matter of seconds; I also felt a strong need to reach out to our Arab neighbors, many of whom came here to escape persecution at the hands of fanatical Muslims. I was pleased to be able to attend the event when it was rescheduled a week later, though I was only able to get through the police lines because the restaurant owner told the officer at the barricade that he knew me; I was an audience of one. He had only had electricity since the morning, and the telephone service had not yet been restored. When the event was over I looked down West Broadway from the Canal Street station, and at the end of the street, there was nothing there.
I was glad when the leader of the dance community in New York scheduled a performance and workshop in Guedra in support of the rescuers. The Guedra is the solemn ritual trance dance of the Taureg, that proud warrior people of North Africa who never submitted to the Arabs or allowed their spiritual tradition to be extinguished by Islam. Morocco, a longtime colleague in Greater New York Mensa, was one of the first Westerners to be permitted to make a participant observer study of this most ancient tradition, and I can't help being reminded of the basic structure of it when the celebrant blesses the four quarters with the threefold and twofold flame in the course of a heirarchal liturgy. (The last priest from whom I received absolution had a Middle Eastern dancer at his ordination; I like to think it was my friend.)
St. Michael's Russian Catholic Church, my parish since I left the Latin rite, was behind the police lines, too, so there was no Vesper Liturgy of the Exaltation of the Precious and Lifegiving Cross Thursday night, with its mighty troparion quoted at the beginning of the 1812 Overture, which commemorates events of this season, the destruction of a great city and the defeat of a tyrant who overreached himself:
Lord save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance:
Grant victory to Orthodox Christians over their enemies
And by the power of Thy Cross safeguard all Thy people.
The kontakion, too, is worth quoting:
As Thou wert voluntarily crucified for our sake,
Grant mercy to all who are called by Thy name.
Make all Orthodox Christians glad by Thy power,
Granting them victory over their enemies,
Bestowing on them the invincible trophy,
Thy weapon of peace.
So too is that great and solemn hymn sung thrice as all touch their foreheads to the floor in the universal human gesture so loved by our Muslim brothers:
Before Thy cross we fall down in worship, and Thy holy resurrection we glorify.
Though our own little chapel was closed, Father McGuckin, an Ulsterman but by no means a Protestant, a professor at Union Seminary, made Maya and me welcome at Orthodox Vespers there Friday night, and by Saturday Manhattan was open as far south as Canal Street.
Saturday another of Maya's Stony Brook friends drove into town, and we made up for the meal of last week at the wonderful Vietnamese restaurant on Mott Street south of Broome. There was of course nothing of the disaster area to be seen but the pillar of smoke, the flashing lights of the police line at Canal, and the generator vans on Houston Street. Looking down Sixth Avenue or the block east of it, I pointed out the Grace building across from Battery park, an impressive sight and one that had not been visible from the Village for more than a quarter of a century.
The following weeks I worked from home, waiting for my call to the emergency monitoring station in New Jersey. Military jets flew overhead continually. America has made history but until now not experienced history, at least since the War Between the States, and most of us are from families who immigrated since then. The day of the attacks it was said that this would be America's second bloodiest day, second to that of Antietam, when twenty three thousand died in a couple of hours. But -- thank God -- the casualties are much less than was first expected, and even at the worst there could be no comparison with Dresden or Nagasaki, Nanking or London.
Three weeks after the Event I crossed police lines again, to buy ink for a German pen that can only be filled from a special bottle. It was the closest I came to Ground Zero. From where pedestrians were allowed the site of the Towers resembled a cross between a bizarre junkyard and a construction site; what really got to me was the blackened hulk of WTC Five still standing at the end of Fulton Street. What angered and depressed me bitterly was the sight of the so-called evangelists every block or so, well groomed and energetic in their shirtsleeves, in constant cell phone contact with the commanding officers I imagined back in their hotel suites uptown. Preying on the fears of the vulnerable, these ghouls mesmerized their victims with the picture of a demon-god who would feast on their souls' pain forever unless they made a total sumbission to Jesus as their personal savior. Now I have read of the voluptuous ecstasy of total submission, and its seductive appeal to certain people, and people in certain circumstances. In religion, it has nothing to do with Christianity. It's true name, in Arabic, is Islam. It is perhaps a more benign form of Islam than that which caused the destruction so near to us, but as implacable an enemy of the faith I profess and the religion I practice, which I take to be that founded on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
It now appears our own leaders may have groomed the man behind the September 11 atrocities to be the supreme warlord of the Islamic world because they didn't trust the Afghans to be bloodthirsty enough to drive the Russians out of their country. If so, this is a ghastly thing. We must pray that we do not do even worse in our attempt to destroy him. Perhaps the Muslims themselves will realize that he has incurred the death penalty under their own sacred law, not so much for taking innocent life, but for claiming to be a Muslim while doing so, and inflicting a lasting shame which could spell the end of Islam as a world religion.
When the bombardment of Afghanistan began, Americans were terrorized by the spread of anthrax spores aimed primarily at the government and news media. While Saddam Hussein is known to have been building an anthrax arsenal, according to the New Scientist the strain involved here seems to be one developed by the United States military in the 1960s, and suspicion is narrowing in on a group of the sort popularly called right wing, of the sort the executed Oklahoma City bomber reportedly hung around. In itself this does not rule out a Saddam or Osama connection, as even McVeigh seems to have been carrying around some Iraqi telephone numbers, which the powers that be are not anxious to discuss.
At first what little sense I could make of these events came to me in the form of a poem.
Invincible trophy, weapon of peace: Before the World Trade Center was built, my father would often come in under the cross of St. Peter's to pray. Behind it the first tower falls; the second, for the moment, stands. In the Christian imagination the mother of Jesus is always standing, grieving, at the foot of the cross. A recent icon shows the burning towers held in the hands of the most holy Theotokos.
St. Nicholas' Church was utterly demolished by the fall of the South Tower across the street. It had become a spiritual center for what was one of Manhattan's last Eastern Mediterranean neighborhoods when the Melkite Chapel of St. George was shamefully turned into an Irish bar. The original St. Nicholas, Dutch Reformed rather than Orthodox or Catholic, stood just within the stockade of New Amsterdam a few blocks to the south.
Satellite pictures, taken Wednesday, September 12, show where I was working the day before, 101 Barclay Street, the kite shaped building in front of the plume of smoke (closeup). The fires would burn for a hundred days.
Morocco's September Guedra in honor and aid of the rescue effort was a spiritual exercise of universal character, in which women and men of any faith and none could find consolation. In January, a few weeks after the fires were finally extinguished, she helped bring a kind of closure by hosting a revival of Isadora Duncan's Angel and Spirit Rising as interpreted by the Duncan Dance Collective and dedicated to the heros of New York, and performances of dances of Armenia, Iran, and Uzbekistan by the great Robyn Friend. We must be grateful that such artists continue to support those aspects of Near and Middle Eastern culture and society most anathema to the spirit of Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban. (For information about upcoming performances a few blocks from Ground Zero, look here.)
In these times, there is a great danger of taking the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and the bin Laden network of terror as the whole of Islam. A very different picture is presented by the late master M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen of Sri Lanka and Philadelphia. A moving interview appeared in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin in December, 1982, called Inner and Universal Meanings of Islam. It represents the religion of millions of Muslims, and ought to be understood as well as the other varieties of Islam. An excellent introduction to Islam in relation to the events of September and a shrewd insight into the hijackers' psychology can be found in Frederick Wagner's THE OTHER: Islam and September 11th, 2001 .
We Americans must always be aware that a great number of our neighbors of Near and Middle Eastern origin are not Arabs, even though they speak Arabic. Such are the Coptic and Assyrian peoples. And a great number of Arab Americans are of the Christian faith, the Maronites, the Melkites, and the Antiochian and Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholics. In addition, there are the small Druze and Yezidi communities, which constitute religions all by themselves. All came to America to escape oppression by Muslim rulers.
Many throughout the world are praying, meditating, lighting candles, and performing other works of the spirit for world peace. This includes a small number of people, mostly in Europe, invoking the intercession of the last Emperor of Austria, who came to the throne of an empire at war, a war he labored tirelessly and thanklessly to stop. A verified miracle has made him a candidate for beatification by the Roman Catholic Church. More information can be obtained from his Prayer League. I thought of him especially when President Bush presented Afghanistan with an ultimatum so like that of Franz Josef to Serbia, which plunged the West into civil war for three quarters of a century. When Franz Josef died, the Empror Karl courageously resisted the theory and practice of total war, state sponsored terrorism, as we call it, with which the Yankee General Sherman had so lamentably indoctrinated the Prussians. He was particularly opposed to unrestricted submarine warfare, the bombardment of civilians from the air, and the unleashing of Communist revolutionaries on Russia. It is entirely fitting that his son, Dr. Otto von Habsburg, should be a chief architect of the renewal of Europe. A charming postcard shows Archduke Otto as an infant, between his parents.