“The Birds Are Burning”: September 11, 2001
By Bronwyn Jones
Sun contributor
I walk to the island in my mind. I start in Leonia, New Jersey, the town I grew up in. At some point I am sixteen again and wearing heavy-duty hiking boots as I trudge up the stairs to the pedestrian walkway that leads across the massive, vibrating George Washington Bridge. The broad, serene Hudson River lies far below and the buildings of Manhattan stretch out to the distant lower end of the island. The World Trade Center isn’t there yet. I remember the feeling of space, and slight dizziness, suspended at such a great height; the exhilaration of crossing from one state to the next on foot.
Now it seems my whole life has been defined by the view from that bridge, the lifeline out of the suburbs to the culture and excitement of the big city. My father, an artist, painted that view over and over; before the lower deck was added, before Route 80 was completed, before the huge high rise apartments crowned the Jersey Palisades. One painting is a night time landscape looking up at the underside of the bridge and over to Manhattan, a complex, fiery string of lights reflected perfectly in the vast expanse of inky river water. It was, it is the island of my dreams, always.
By the time I was seventeen I had driven, bused, walked over the river countless times. From the Port Authority bus terminal at 175th Street, the number 5 bus took me on my daily journey through Spanish Harlem to my high school at West 91st Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. It was housed in an old brownstone. There was no dress code and we called the teachers by their first names. Instead of gym class, friends and I often walked south on Broadway to Lincoln Center. I remember the feel of the black, mica-flecked marble of the central fountain. I can feel its smooth sun-warmed surface beneath me and the cool spray from the water forced into gigantic plumes rising high into the air.
That summer I stayed with a friend who lived nearby on Riverside Drive. In the evening the two of us would wait outside the New York City Ballet Theater and often at intermission exiting patrons would give us their ticket stubs. We saw second halves of many ballets from perfect mezzanine seats.
My wisdom teeth were pulled that summer and I recuperated at my friend’s apartment. I remember her father taking pity on me one night and kindly trying to find something I could eat without too much pain. Back then I didn’t really understand what he did for a living. I saw him again for the first time in years on TV just days ago. A civil engineer and author of the book, Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail, he has been called upon by the media to explain to us all the structural mysteries of the two World Trade Center towers that we have watched fall over and over again on our TV screens.
New York City is not only a place I grew up in, lived in for years, it is my interior landscape and soul home. The memories blot out everything else. When I cook now, I smell the city’s garlic smell, overlaid with auto exhaust and the steamy, rank exhalations from manhole covers on the uneven streets. I see the buildings, hear the noises, feel the textures of the different neighborhoods, run hard through rush hour crowds to catch up with people I love.
After I graduated from high school, the Empire Szechuan restaurant up on Broadway and 99th Street became a favorite hang out. It was open late. I lived in a large apartment at West 98th Street with five female musician roommates, and after a concert at either Manhattan School of Music, where I was a harp student, or down at Lincoln Center where all my roommates were ushers, we ate bowls of hot and sour soup. They were deep, round bowls full of thick pieces of pork, tofu, tree ear mushrooms, with a slick of chili oil shining on the surface, lightly dusted with black pepper. We had long conversations over platters of freshly folded and fried dumplings, mounds of chicken and peanuts, shrimp still in their shells and thick with chopped garlic. We knew the waiters and it would be years before the restaurant became a citywide franchise.
These images and sensations have come back to me randomly and with urgency. They seem vivid and then fade as I try to touch them with language, even as neural pathways in my brain are shifting to accommodate the pictures of charred rubble, the pulverized concrete dust and entombed fragments of human beings. The newer images threaten me with a dark, vertiginous emptiness. The ache is a dry socket, white bone exposed. It is huge. Its thudding pulse pulls apart my sense of home.
We have all been stunned, and we mourn all over the country. Yet, if we were patient this horrible experience of loss could give us, so rich and privileged by comparison, a new understanding of the suffering elsewhere in the world, suffering we have glimpsed but so often taken for granted. We could begin to see and feel the ravaged landscapes of the Khan Goulis Palestinian refugee camp, we could peer into the homes of the women in Kabul who risk their lives holding clandestine schools for young Afghani girls, we could hear the anguished cries of the children of the Afghan woman who is led out onto the floor of the crowded stadium in Kabul and executed with shots from a Kalashnikov to the back of the head, we could look deep into the dulled eyes of Iraqi children dying from chronic dysentery. This empathic journey is the hard path toward every place on the globe where the ordinary dreams and hopes of human beings, the landscapes of place and community in their minds and hearts have been completely destroyed. Gone. And for all the children everywhere born with this enormous loss already etched into their young hearts, there may not be love and justice enough in their abbreviated lifetimes to approach healing, much less hope and the promise of fulfillment.
This is the door that opens to the tiny closet in Ursula LeGuin’s mythic story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. It isn’t a stretch to see America from the perspective of someone living in deep poverty as the land of Omelas — a place of wealth, freedom, celebration, power, and imagination. In LeGuin’s story, Omelas is evoked as a pre-lapsarian world of handsome, athletic men, women and children; of festivals and beauty, kindness and expressions of love and generosity unencumbered by greed or manipulation. However, all that is good in this land depends for its existence upon one spot of pure misery. Omelas, in all its magnificence, would cease to be if it weren’t for the suffering of one child locked since birth in a dirty closet where it sits naked and shivering in its own excrement, never to know light, love or relationship. Periodically, citizens of Omelas take their own children and briefly look together in dismay upon this child.
We are there ourselves now, in a metaphoric sense, able to peer in and taste the despair, the wordless fear. But LeGuin’s story doesn’t end with those who shrink in horror at the plight of this child, yet go on with their lives. Her story ends with those who walk away from Omelas, unable to accept the contingency of their prosperity upon anyone’s abject misery, a child least of all.
Children everywhere will walk into the future we leave for them. Their young imaginations will try to transform what they can of the darkness and the tragedies.
A mother, rushing away from the burning World Trade Center towers, clutching the hand of her little boy, later tells a New York Times reporter that her son looked up, saw the falling bodies of people on fire and said to her, “The birds are burning.” But it is we, the adults, who must be the true alchemists, the peacemakers, the stewards of this planet for the next six generations. Right now we can make the choice to do no more harm. For all the children, everywhere, already on this earth, we can refuse to define justice in terms of retaliatory violence. We can feed our youngsters, hold them, love them, and bring the burning birds back: the phoenix, alive and strong, arcing upward out of the ashes.
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