I Was Going

[collisionwork]

I was going to

I was going to write something about 9/11, and then I wasn't, and then I just kinda was, but it was about something else, really.  And then I realized it was all about the same thing anyway, and maybe useless and maybe not.

And then, bit by bit, I'd written enough that I'd passed a point of no return, and had to finish it, one way or another.  So I did.

I was going

I was going to write

I was going to write nothing regarding this past day, or anything that might have happened on it in past years, at least as of Sunday morning.

I was going to rehearsal that morning, driving up Ocean Parkway, across the Prospect Expressway, down Hamilton Avenue, onto the BQE, under the Brooklyn Heights, across the Brooklyn Bridge, around Park Row, and along the West Side Highway, to Central Park.

 

Glen Jones and X-Ray Burns (“Jonesy!”) were on the radio, at WFMU, 91.1 East Orange, NJ.  Just about as we hit the Prospect, Jonesy started a set of songs that seemed to be, for the most part, a melancholy “end-of-Summer” mix, beginning with The Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up,” then The Dictators’ “I Live for Cars and Girls” (not exactly as melancholy, but somehow fitting), Frank Sinatra’s “Summer Wind,” Springsteen’s “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” and others I’ve forgotten, but fit.  I think the Sinatra was playing as I arced around the Brooklyn Heights, and traffic was slow; we were traveling slowly enough for me to slide my eyes more times than usual to my left, and the hole in the sky that I always try to avoid looking at, but never can, so

 

I was going

I was going to write

I was going to write an entry (short and sweet) about this weekend’s first readings of Temptation with the cast, in Central Park, and how well everything went, and what my hopes were for the next step, and some of my practical worries about how to make things work, and so forth and so on.

I was going to write this at some point last night, but by the time we got home I wasn’t in the mood anymore.

I was going to ignore this day, or rather, just treat it like any other day and get on with my business, as I have every September 11 since 2002, when it was still fresh, and I was quiet and meditative about the whole thing.

 

But after the combination of Jonesy’s music and the cognitive dissonance I always feel when looking at a space which every little spark in my brain tells me SHOULD BE FILLED with something familiar and ISN’T, I felt like I had to say SOMETHING and

 

I was going

I was going to write

I was going to write a piece (in great and excessive detail) about music, the albums that I played over and over and over and over in the days after 9/11/01, the ones that got me through that time, not merely by soothing, by blanketing, by stifling my emotions, my confusions, my fears, for that would be nothing to praise, but by expressing, externalizing, processing these feelings for me.

I was going to write about David Bowie’s Heathen, Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft,” and my own homemade version of The Beach Boys’ unfinished Smile, from the original 1967 tapes.  Three albums suddenly, strangely, perfectly and unintentionally appropriate, for me, at that time.

 

Nothing remains . . . columnated ruins domino . . . the coo-coo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies/I’m preachin the word of god, I’m puttin out your eyes . . . don’t forget to keep your head warm . . . who ran the iron horse? . . . George Lewes told the Englishman, the Italian, and the Jew/You can’t open your eyes, boys, to every conceivable point of view/They’ve got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5/Judge says to the High Sheriff, I want him dead or alive/Either way, I don’t care/High water everywhere . . . and I’m still so afraid . . . she belongs bereft with her liberty . . . freddie-or-not, here I come . . . steel on the skyline/sky made of glass/made for a real world/all things must pass . . . columnated ruins domino . . . I demand a better future . . . columnated ruins domino . . . columnated ruins domino . . . columnated ruins domino . . .

 

I was going

I was going to write

I was going to write something about my feelings on that day and since only about the events of that day, and what it had left behind in me, not at all about what it led to, the mistakes, the politics, the exploitation.  Not a mention.  Unimportant in this light.  Vulgar.  But in the middle of this I just received an email from my brother David (he’s my first cousin, but orphaned, and raised and ultimately legally adopted by my mother) informing his friends and family that he is in the “final stretch” of his tour of duty in Iraq, and not to send him any more packages or mail there, because he’ll probably be home before it gets to him.  So my mood has changed, and if I am not yet sighing in relief, I am beginning the inhale that will lead to the sigh.

 

I was going

I was going to write

I was going to write, at first, so much more, about so many things that have been filling my head for the last 48 hours, fighting their way in despite my efforts to ignore the temptation to give in to memory, bad nostalgia, self-aggrandizing garbage and just move on today with the important things, making art-stuff happen.  And for a time

I was going to write some grand, beautiful statement on the whole thing.  Oh, yes, I surely was.  Right.

 

But this morning, as I sat for some time, variously looking at an empty computer screen and the bedside clock, slowly moving past 9.00 am, it all seemed so stupid.  I had work to do on the show, I needed to get groceries, I needed to go to the post office, I needed to clean the cat box.  These were things here now, not five years ago.  These mattered.  These had to get done. So

 

I was going

I was going to

I was going to the Duane Reade to buy litter, having dropped off the Netflix at the post office, and still feeling like I should say something here on this day, stupid or not, and came up with a conceit called “I was going,” in which I could simply bullet-point a list of items I had wanted to talk about in more detail, within a framework in which I noted that I was going to attempt to write (in more detail) about the connections of all these things that were ganging up on me in my head – memories of 9/11/01 - the music I listened to at that time - the Ionesco shows I was directing at the time - the Kirk Wood Bromley show I was about to act in - the discussions about whether any of these shows were going to happen, should happen - Laurie Anderson’s live performance of “O Superman (for Massenet)” as recorded at Town Hall on 9/18/01 versus the original 1981 studio recording (“here come the planes . . .”) - having an old school acquaintance, Rick Sanford, call me up that night out of the blue to ask about me, and before I asked about him, remembering that he worked in the NYC Medical Examiner’s office, and imagining what the next weeks would be like for him – Jonathan Richman performing “Lonely Financial Zone” to a suddenly sobered and silent audience, 11/01, at Bowery Ballroom – having a drink, 3/03, sitting on what had once been the stage of my theatre (and home) on Ludlow Street, now a bar, thinking about my day job, my life, thinking about the previous 19 months and realizing I had to change a great deal of where my life was going immediately to be true to anything I believed in, and that this mattered much more now – hundreds of people, covered in dust, walking past my office towards uptown, the supermarket across the street bringing out all the cold bottled water it could to hand out to them - Kirk Bromley reading, simply, beautifully, the Gettysburg Address at the 10/01 Inverse Theater “Verse Circus” poetry evening (I read several poems by Rumi) – walking around for weeks and weeks muttering “world gone wrong, world gone wrong” to myself, and signing off all of my emails with “calling out from a tin can at the other end of a string in a world gone wrong,” leading eventually to the necessary creation of a play in 2005 – growing up spending many weekends in Lower Manhattan at my dad & stepmom’s loft, 64 Fulton Street, a short walk from the Towers, and sitting on the edge of their bed, age nine, watching Citizen Kane for the first time on a little black and white TV, tinfoil on the rabbit ears, one Tower visible through the window, the source, I believe, of WOR-TV Channel 9’s signal, bringing that movie to me – Pat and Vivian, my bosses, a pair of tough women, fazed by nothing, running back into our office, Vivian crying down the hall as Pat looked dazed, saying, “they’re gone, they fell down, they’re gone” as I emailed everyone I knew, so many of them temps who occasionally worked in the Financial District, trying to get everyone to check in (and Daniel Kleinfeld taking my list over, creating a webpage that by the end of the day was an unofficial list of “who’s safe in the off-off-broadway community), and despite one friend being trapped in a building a block away, and another on the 1 train nearly under the collapsed towers having to escape out a tunnel, no one I knew was gone – many other fragments in time&space, somehow circling around this day now and forever  . . . so

 

I was going

I was going to write

I was going to write that piece instead, once I had completed the work I needed to do today on Temptation and around the home.  Just a list.  Just fragments.  And started it, and had nothing come out right, neither now being the grand statement I had wanted nor the list of topics mentioned in brief.  Now it was all just I, I, I, ME, ME, ME.  Just a vomiting of things I needed to put down, I suppose -- the kind of blogging that a mutual LJ Friend accurately and sharply criticized (in a “friends-only” post that I would otherwise link to here).  But if part or all of what I try to do in my work, as I said in a comment at Isaac’s recently, is to get people to look through my eyes for a little while, then why not think back on that moment (9.03 am, I’m told) when my eyes and I stood 1.25 miles (just measured it on Google Earth) from the Towers, looking right at the giant hole belching smoke in one of them, outside the office I worked in on Clinton between East Broadway and Grand, unable already to believe my eyes, when the second airplane hit.  I was on the opposite side of the building, so I didn’t see the side it hit, just what came out the other side, and a fireball I never expected could exist in reality.  And the first thing I thought was that I was seeing hundreds of people die, right there, right in front of me.  And that everything had just changed, not just like for me alone, as when I saw a man killed in a stupid street fight on 8^th Street in ’91, or was beaten up by cops on Avenue A in ’88, though it kind of felt the same (yet somehow more personal, despite being involved and closeup before and a mile away on 9/11), but for all of us in NYC. 

 

I was going

I was going to

I was going to finish what I had written, unsettled and unsatisfied and ultimately incomplete.  I couldn’t get across, should have known I couldn’t get across, the feeling of cogs slipping in my head, of still, to this day, being unable to fully believe it wasn’t all a horrible dream, that it couldn’t be possible for those building to be gone, that I couldn’t have seen what I actually saw with these eyes.  But there weren’t words good enough, and instead, over many hours, off and on, while I did other things I had to do, should be doing, I added pieces here and there, all out of order, to this jumble, listening again to Heathen, and Smile, and Laurie Anderson’s Live at Town Hall, and “Love and Theft,” and then on to Dylan’s Modern Times, and The Best of LOVE, and the Steely Dan comp Showbiz Boys.  And those were good, and what I needed again, much more than actually writing anything.  And I reread one of those poems by Rumi I read in 10/01:

 

“No Flag”

 

I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

I've made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham, and Abraham's father, Azar,
who was also famous for icons.

I'm so tired of what I've been doing.

Then one image without form came,
and I quit.

Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I'm out of the image-making business.

Finally I know the freedom
of madness.

A random image arrives. I scream,
"Get out!" It disintegrates.

Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
and wind.
No flag.

 

I was going

I was going to

I was going to write down, finally, one last anecdote from the days following 9/11/01, a personal moment of fear that sums up what that day ultimately did to me.  But though I figured all day I’d get to that story, more and more I’ve found myself unable to write it.  I keep trying to finally just put it down, and can’t do it, though the “writer” side of me has figured all day that this was the fragment that everything else was going to be building to, something to bring this to an actual conclusion of some kind.  But in the end, it seems to have turned out to be too personal, too painful to set down in this context.  Suffice to say, there was one point, just for a couple of moments, on another day soon after, when I thought that Berit and I might be about to die together, and I looked in her face and saw terror, and I’m sure she saw the same in mine.  False alarm, but the fact remains that I had that irrational fear, and the legacy that remains for me of that day is just fear (and I never want to experience that with Berit ever again).  On some level, the terrorists have won, at least in my own head – I had just reached a point in my life in ’01 where I had been able to let go of almost all fear, of failure, of mortality, of loneliness, whatever, and I felt secure, my own man, happy with myself.  Now, well, yes, mostly the same, but now with sudden irrational anxiety attacks when planes go by and they seem just a bit too low . . . or when I have to take an elevator up in buildings of any real height.  And I’m angry – angry at myself, angry at the world, for irrationality to have taken over so much of my life, when I thought I was just getting over it.  I personally know no one who died that day (I’m about two degrees away on that, even), but I still know I saw many of them go in an instant, right in front of me, and my brain still can’t quite deal with that fact in its entirety.  So in writing this now to release a lot of these things – if I get it out I will let these thoughts and fears of the last five years go away, dissipate, like the spectres they are.

 

I was going

I was going to

I was going to post something on September 11, but I decided that would give more meaning  and weight and power to that day that I didn’t want to give, so I waited and posted it on September 12, planning to follow it with the most crass and gut-busting humor-link post I’d been saving up.  Because in he end, making one person laugh with a dumb joke is probably more important than all of the above.  Really.

 

As for this poore Relation , I pray you to accept it , as being writ by one of the ƒeverall Actors themƒelves , after our plaine and rude manner , therefore doubt nothing of the truth thereof : if it be defectiue in any thing , it is my ignorance , that are better acquainted with thinking then writing.  If it ƒatisfie those that are well  affected to the buƒineƒƒe , it is all I care for.  Sure I am the place we are in , and the hopes that are apparent , cannot but ƒuffice and that will not deƒire more than enough , neither is there want of ought among vs but company to enjoy the bleƒƒings ƒo plentifully bestowed vpon the inhabitants that dwell herein.  While I was aƒƒembling this , I had almoƒt forgot , that I had but the recommendation of the relation it ƒelfe , to your further conƒideration , and therefore I will end this benediction without ƒaying more , ƒave that I ƒhall alwaies reƒt

 

Yours in the way of

friendƒhip , I.W.H.