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Birds of Fire — September 11, 2001 — A Prophetic ElegyI live in hazard and infinity. The cosmos stretches around me, meadow on meadow of galaxies, reach on reach of dark space, steppes of stars, oceanic darkness and light. There is no amenable god in it, no particular concern or particular mercy. Yet everywhere I see a living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity, an endless breathing of light. And I comprehend that being is understanding that I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human. [John Fowles, The Aristos, London: Pan Books Ltd, 1968, 1:76, p. 31.] The teachers at Public School 234, on Chambers Street, had to evacuate 6-and 7-year-olds. . . . Many of the children were screaming for parents who actually worked in the towers. As one teacher stepped into the street, a small child saw the burning bodies falling from the tower and cried out, ‘Look, teacher, the birds are on fire.’ [Editorial, The New York Times, September 18, 2001.] ONE Only the innocent see in perfect metaphors— their defense against an overwhelming world. They see in a primal awareness what cannot be known— what takes wing when everything else falls down. There are innocents who see only localities as the real world, and their beliefs as absolutes; they pluck wings lest everything else fall down. There are innocents who see their overly wired world as a global habitat and the beliefs of others moot; deliberately wingless—they deny falling down. There are those who would dare try to change the world in a knowing innocence that flames into wings. TWO To not write poems in the face of holocausts, to radicalize guilt in the face of radical evil, is to let wrong win and ourselves be ever diminished. Shall we just gape and stutter as things fall down in media images made flesh and not cry out in the measured, tragic mode with words of prophecy? Through its mesh of words poetry dares to will a starker truth from a radical imagination’s reconciliation with this barbarity done in the name of a God we claim to share in revealed books, invoking “His” name through faiths at prayer for their benefit while thinking themselves betrayed if another is suddenly favored. We must reimagine God, not as a world Creator placed above our needs, whims, deeds—hates, but as a creation formed in our own image and likeness. We must find in ourselves the voice of radical redress to cry out at injustice and condemn such deity whose dark side we ignore for rash hope in its help. THREE I had often sat in the spacious Trade Center plaza watching the fountain wear down its stones, or looking warily up at sheer, striated façades that did not step back to let space inside, or step down to give any sense of a way out, but just kept going straight up from branching columns that made them appear strangely unstable. Walls ought to thicken not thin at their base. Perspectives up, unlike railroad tracks, provide uncertain vanishing points; the zenith has no horizon. Looking straight up induce an odd imbalance in eye and mind, when things exceed human scale. They stand for too much money—God—or sudden death. The Sphere helped to center things around the fountain only to ask what acid was eating its golden skin to reveal structured interiors the Towers masked. The plaza prompted memories of archaic hurt that weighed down despite the columns reaching up like Gothic vaults—or Atlas—to balance space in time— opportunity with insecurity— life by death—with all the might of what might happen. FOUR AOL’s tiny headline tucked amid its ads could not be believed: World Trade Center Attacked; Twin Towers Collapse. TV showed fireballs, smoldering towers, reporters and people fleeing clouds of debris chasing them panic-stricken down the streets— as they do in all my favorite films of disaster and mayhem when comicstripland explodes so ordinary folk can save it with commonsensical or ironic wit. The view from my southern window, with smoke drifting east, somehow did not disturb the day’s clear beauty: the local flock of pigeons soaring the blue sky, the sharp tonal grays of moving light and shadow the presiding sun cast upon the asphalt’s black of people and traffic proceeding on out of context, the preternatural calm of an ordinary day. . . . The TV covered the unbelievable until one station reversed the film and backed the plane out of the building—then crashed it back in—and you knew the plane was flown by someone you could not understand— and the panicked flock from the fireball were people falling. FIVE Innocents memorize the Koran in another tongue (as I once learned the Latin mass), knowing only its authority, the better to be faith-defenders, willing to die for their masters, having no other goals than saving their local beliefs unto global dominion— than saving their souls unto a bodily paradise. They are recruited as children and taught the glory of jihad, the holy war against the infidel—the Crusaders— who plundered Constantinople and Jerusalem and in new ways still afflict the children of Islam. “Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it. On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you to destroy that vile race. Christ commands it. Let those who wage private warfare against the faithful now go against and vanquish the pagan infidels. All who journey and die whether by land, sea, or in battle shall have immediate remission of all their sins. This I, Pope Urban II, grant through God’s power with which I am invested, and before the witness of this Council at Clermont, in the Year of Our Lord, 1095.” I tell the modern world’s symbol of paganism, America, and its allies. . . that these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. . . . I swear to God that America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Muhammad. [Osama bin Laden, October 8, 2001, as quoted in The New York Times.] These children who hate by rote teach us why we are hated— for history must haunt the West’s unconscious hubris. We do not know how to fight the hate of innocents radical in their evil, absolute in their cause, devoid of worldly interest, ignorant of sovereignty and the rule of laws—promised eternal bliss, They infiltrate our flesh like the virus seeking food to replicate and we can defend ourselves only by turning beliefs back upon themselves in the name of a civilization we can only defend by denial— by not seeing in our innocent righteousness the mutuality of flaming birds as they are— the mutuality of good conscience and its crimes. SIX The crash caused a shudder that was not like the usual winds that made the building rock like a child’s safe cradle. It made papers—the day’s work—fly out to the streets below — bills, briefs, accounts of profit and loss. It spread flaming fuel that melted glass and steel and made the vast concrete floors thirsty for water. Those alive ran to the twisting windows and jumped to a quicker quietus—fiery birds snuffed— their bodies projectiles endangering the fleeing below. Those trapped above the impact had private moments to express love, rage at fate—or try to escape down stairwells past firemen unable to imagine steel splintering, concrete crumbling, and the weight grinding down the seemingly eternal stuff of elegant restaurants, conference rooms, wine cellars, fancy bars, computer bankss, files, family photos, sky lobbies, elevators—the stairwells walled in sheetrock—all now to be ground down— floor upon floor—bursting the limitations of stress— erupting symmetrical plumes of crushed stuff under such grinding weight that nothing solid held, nor could exist, nor not change state in the grinding down that refined concrete—metal—glass—flesh—bone to a seeming ash that was not ash—but mortal dust— compressed to memory’s immortal diamond. SEVEN Knowing the ins and outs as he fled three steps at a time down the stairwell past the firemen, the lawyer understood in a flash the perfect out for his life would be a neat certificate of presumptive death. If he reached the ground then he could just walk away and find a whole new life free of family and job. He made it, nearly slipped on a dead bird, recused awareness as you do about guilt in a brief, and vanished among the missing—a number beyond habeus corpus. There was the gleaming wall of the tower against the blue sky the people behind me screamin— pounding on the door a few faces in windows pointing at me in terror as I said the prayer leaving myself to Allah’s will. . . . The tense accountant behind him stopped counting steps and counted the firemen until the glance of their eyes froze him and he just keep falling until he lurched through the doors, counted the dead birds amid the papers blowing about and. . . realizing. . . fell into himself with all accounts unbalanced. I banked the plane so it crashed into more than two floors. . . then the flash—a tearing pressure and I am wandering without weight amid others through a silence of feelings directionless without any time or sense of purpose. . . . Torn, burnt, she asked for help. A young man carried her down eighty floors, talking away the terror of pain and blood until they reached the doors and an ambulance to fly away—and then went back into the building before it fell. His name was Eric. It seems we are all the same beyond any violence or hate. . . . But I am here alone among these silent shadows who wander about unthreatening—while I cannot find my place in the gardens of Allah my friend. . . . The old lady, fearing her legs too weak for the stairs, took the elevators down as far as she dared, then walked behind the accountant wanting to cry out to the firemen to turn back but knew they would not just as at Auschwitz no one heard her childish cries when she saw darkness around heads and knew fates she could not say. Then she recognized the birds and saved the fireman who carried her away. EIGHT Faint scents of smoke drifting from the wreck wafted through my unscathed street like abandoned wraiths. They made me wonder if some molecular remains of humans were mixed in with the dust of the fallen buildings. A ghoulish fantasy on such a lovely day, so quiet except for sirens accompanying fleets of wreckers and derricks heading south toward the smoke— and away from us innocents exempt for the nonce— just as crowds of people flowed north from the devastation the day before, when transportation was down and they walked the five miles north as the smoke went east. It had happened here before in our haunted past time when the British returned to burn the President’s house, or Confederate guns could be heard in the very same rooms— but not in our real time, in our smug security that such attacks happened elsewhere or across oceans; that we crossed oceans only to spread democracy; that nothing like this happened here—only in history. And we, rootless, seldom faced with digging and finding a graveyard, were not yet used to living in history. NINE The painting leaned against a sunny wall, unattended. Eight feet tall, it showed the plumes of pulverized matter shooting from the falling towers, each crowned with a single flame. It was the first memorial I saw. Within days others were conceived: ghostly towers of light; trophies of wreckage; the towers daringly rebuilt, the hand-made posters for the missing somehow preserved. But a Memorial now is rash; we must wait the sum of damage done; we may well, alas, need more than one— or one for ourselves. The best memorial would be whatever leads to eradicating the reasons for the deed: localized faith, distorted dogma, opposed deities. In the meantime we need remember only the date of the day we learned to question right and how to heal wrong. TEN In the two and a half hours the victims could hold to life, they communicated by cell-phone and e-mail to those they loved. Just as TV showed the sun rise at the Millennium around the planet, we can reach out almost anywhere. Yet globalism is the myth of isolated minds. For we still live within localities, feed upon their roots and worship still the deities long ago created to help protect us from Nature. How else pray to the same God for opposed bestowals? And how to survive this innocent yet mortal love we must construe a crime against what mattered most? We do not. None alive will survive this wreck of values, consciences and all we hoped for virtue. Hope here is the therapist’s ploy when the missing are sought that permits its fantasy to prevail until the actual state of things sinks in—and a memory is buried. Hope here is the difference between pastoral or moral theory that confronts what is as opposed to what ought to be. Or when, like the doctors marshaled to treat the injured and tended rescuers instead, you know that no one survived that grinding down of our presumptions into a dust that shrouded even survivors as ghosts. Shall we all become the Grand Inquisitor, who knew the bleak truth about redeemers, who knew the doomed needed certain truth even if a lie? Shall we be as the loving layman who grants absolutions to the desperate dying when no one ordained is around to forgive? Shall we understand that now we must face up to our fate at Nature’s whim, despite the maintenance of myths. Shall we mourn our myths having killed for them? ELEVEN The Zionists took the Palestinians’ land as our ancestors despoiled the Native Americans— the difference being our greed and their simple hope for a wanderer’s pillow of stone on which to sleep in peace— to go home to a God-bestowed land. But where is justice here? How to negotiate it? Who is innocent here? Certainly not the terrorists waging their war. But are they not also human, akin to forest fires that reseed earth’s cycle with a rain of charred birds? You should feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short. . . . Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out ‘Come hither, friend of God. . . .’ If you slaughter, do not cause the discomfit of those you are killing, because this is one of the practices of the prophet. Peace be upon you. [From unsigned instructions to the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, offering spiritual guidance and practical advice, The New York Times, September 29, 2001.] Consider that state of grace, not so long ago lost, when we explained our very own manifest destiny as the will of our very own God—and were thus absolved. Yet are we the image of God, or did we create Him in ours;. who then wrote the books that spawned such acts of bad faith? How to forgive ourselves when others will not? Our new century cannot escape these questions justified in God’s three books but left unanswered— nor thank the terrorists enough for forcing answers. TWELVE None of the old prophets and seers could see beyond the year 2000 either because history stopped then or their myths wore out. Pices gave way to Aquarius, as it were—Christ to Antichrist—or perhaps just something different and thus more frightening. The old myths prevail as hearsay—frozen in time and many places. Their adherents cling to archaic strength and the rest of us, appalled, watch the rising terror of falling buildings and wandering wraiths in our streets and hearts and ask if a future is ours, or whether time has stopped. We are at an epochal point that seems without purpose. The past is gone, or at least is not very useful, and the present stands without prophets—those who renew vision. THIRTEEN Let those who pray for the Dead know that the God of books is as the papers blown away with their mortal dust. We are alone in ourselves—in our own image and likeness, beyond “salvation” in a Nature that has no final fate. Let those who have cursed the God of radical evil know that all who tore our towers down and afflicted our lives, are of no religion’s truth, but the cry of the dispossessed amplified by the world’s deafness and lack of compassion. Let those who promoted gods of earth, wind or sea-sound who spoke from out temples, or preached a sect’s book, know they are of no further help however we mourn them; they stood for old myth—from now we must stand in ourselves. Let those who still believe past seers know that they could not see as far as we have journeyed beyond a critical mass in time. We are the new prophets who must claim the courage, and find the voice, to say what we see. Creative mythology. . . springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores. . . in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out. [Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, NY: Viking Press, 1968, pp. 6-8.] Let those who doubt themselves know that radical hope springs from themselves—from like sensibilities’ root in our planet’s evolving—from all we add to it of our lives’ perceiving—from the poems of our loves—from our dreams’ children. Let those who are fearful for their virtue learn to know that dark and light are one as the planet turns in the sun— to measure their days in opposites—to stop blaming deity‘s darkness—to unite their prophecy with the light of survival. Wherever you find a prophet of world-historical significance you find a foreteller, and you find “epochal thinking.” By this kind of prophecy the signs of the times are interpreted as parts of a pattern, of an old pattern in the structure of the society which is passing away or of a new pattern of life which is coming into being. [James Luther Adams, “The Prophethood of All Believers,” in The Prophethood of All Believers, ed. George K. Beach, Boston: Beacon Press, 1986 (first published in 1947).] Let those who feel lost know that the East’s sun engenders new life. You adapt or reject the old myths as the sowing of genes accidentally determines— for the sun that enlivens consumes as well in equal measure. Let those who feel exposed know that the South’s light shines on hazard and glory—that the glance of a lifetime’s love can come with a smile or storm—that we are as one with the day’s variety—that we cultivate at midnight and at noon. Let those threatened know that the West’s sun when dying must harvest in us, that we are as it, a galaxy’s spark which is one of trillions of which we guess only the number. Trust the sunset’s beauty that plunges down into night. Let the sleepless come to know the lights that turn at the North are as a winnowing of genes only we can transcend by renaming the constellations—by imaging universe in a new Zodiac born of radical prophets. Let such vision be known as everyone’s vocation: a great renouncing of books that maintain old myths. Let it kindle from flint, lens or laser our century’s mandate: a sacrificial flame that fashions bright wings. Revised as a poem July 2002 and August 2011 Text of Birds of Fire © Francis V. O’Connor, 2002 / 2011 250 East 73rd Street, Apt. 11C, New York, NY 10021 FVOC@aol.com |
