September 21, 2023 : Issue #51
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
Welcome
This time out, from the Archive, a pair of meditations pertinent to the 9/11 anniversary just past—and an uncanny Chinese/Japanese echoing rhyme.
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From the Archive
A KAABA 9/11 CONVERGENCE
This piece originally appeared as the first of my Pillows of Air columns in The Believer, back in November/December 2013.
The hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, which every devout Muslim is required to undertake at least once in their lives, begins with the Tawaf, the first of seven ritual actions taken during that October week, consisting of a counterclockwise circumambulation around the Kaaba, the holy of holies, a massive black cube building slotted in the middle of the vast interior plaza of the Al Masjid al Haram mosque (said to be the first house built for humanity to worship Allah, indeed long before the days of Muhammed, all the way back to the time of Abraham, who was said to have worshiped there).
The pulsing, well-nigh mesmeric quality of the mass devotion evinced during the Tawaf was gorgeously and hauntingly evoked several years ago at a show on the hajj in London’s British Museum when the Saudi artist Ahmed Mater placed a simple cuboid magnet amid a field of iron filings.
But the Tawaf is only the beginning. Subsequently, the pilgrims (numbering upward of six million a year) make their way out of town to Mount Arafat, where Muhammed is said to have made his farewell sermon during the first hajj. Then on the way back they pass through Mina, where three tall pillars symbolize the torments the devil visited on Abraham as he proceeded toward the sacrifice of Isaac; there the pilgrims engage in the Ramy al-Jamarat, the ritual stoning of the devil, literally casting stones at each of the pillars in question before returning to the Al Masjid al Haram mosque for one last farewell circumambulation about the Kaaba.
Or, anyway, that’s the way they used to do it. Since 2004, when the swell of crowds became too vast to contain, the pillars have been replaced by long walls, with catch- basins below to collect the pebbles. But that’s the way the young Osama bin Laden, son of a billionaire construction magnate whose domain conspicuously included the holy sites in Mecca, would have done it as, year by year, he found himself becoming more and more devout.
Years later, when Osama’s righteous anger turned on the Saudi royal family and the United States (and specifically the way the former had allowed the latter, which Osama had come to identify with the Infidel, to station its troops on the holy soil of the Arabic peninsula), is it any wonder that his attention might have turned to another pair of towers?
A pair of towers that cast itself as the very epicenter of the entire American capitalist system: “the World Trade Center,” after all. I for one always thought of those two crisp, clean vertical bars as the twin slashes piercing the S of the traditional dollar sign, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the towers suggested similar associations (one might almost say provocations) to others, though I was a bit taken aback recently when, scanning the internet, I came upon this unsettling cover image from a 1987 issue of Fortune magazine:
I’m hardly the first to have made the association between the stoning of the devil ritual in Mecca and the events of that terrible day in September 2001, when Osama and his colleagues hurled their terrible projectiles at the Twin Towers of New York:
And what to make of the afterlife of that convergence? The way, for example, that when the time came to choose a design for the memorial to the dead from that horrible event, the committee unanimously alighted on a solution that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Kaaba back in Mecca: a sort of counter-Kaaba, an empty Kaaba, a Kaaba-shaped hole?
One which now elicits pilgrimages as poignant as those back in Mecca:
But what to make of this further curious convergence? The way that the attempt to build an Islamic cultural center a couple of blocks away from the scene of the 9/11 memorial a few years afterwards presently ran aground of hepped-up protests to the dubious effect that such placement would constitute a virtual act of sacrilege?
Whereas, meanwhile, back in Mecca, speaking of sacrilege, the years since 9/11 have seen a gargantuan kitsch edifice come lumbering into dubious being, towering Trump Vegas–like over the holiest of holies, the thoroughly unholy Royal Mecca Clock Tower apartment building and commercial complex:
Its principal developers, incidentally? Yup: the Bin Laden Family.
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The Main Event
Back in the summer of 2011, perhaps since I’d developed something of a reputation for writing about and holding convocations around the need for proper memorialization of fraught historical passages, and coming on the thoroughly anticipated tenth anniversary of 9/11, the editors at the Chronicle of Higher Education invited me to contribute some thoughts on how that event might be being remembered fifty or a hundred years on. I’m not sure I gave them the response they were expecting.
Memory and 9/11
The Chronicle of Higher Education / Sunday, August 7, 2011
Though I live in New York and was as horrified as anyone that first morning, almost from the start I began to feel myself peeling off from the general tenor of response, the grand consensus.
Of course, I felt horrible about the loss of life—2,606 in the towers themselves; another 150 or so in the crashing planes—and for the families of the victims, especially the kids (I too lost my father suddenly, absurdly, unaccountably, out of nowhere, in a car crash when I was 10, so I could relate). But they were hardly the only people around who suffered grievous losses that year (there were more than 40,000 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2001; nearly 6,000 workplace fatalities; 440,000 smoking-related deaths).
Nor was this even the worst such catastrophe New York itself had ever faced: On June 15, 1904, a steamboat called the General Slocum burned to the waterline in the East River, costing the lives of more than 1,020 of its 1,342 riders (at a time when New York City's population was only 3.4 million, compared with 8 million in 2001—certainly a comparable disaster). One of the facts about the twin-towers cataclysm that has been occluded over the years is that if you were in the buildings when it happened, there was an overwhelming likelihood that you would survive.
Get a grip, I kept finding myself thinking, as the event grew ever more fetishized over the ensuing months—the gaping hole in the skyline acquiring an idol-like status, all political life (and prior common sense) seeming to get sucked into its yawning vortex. New York was not the first city that's ever faced a terrorist attack, I kept having to remind myself, nor the first city ever to have been bombed (hell, we ourselves, as Americans, had repeatedly bombed a good many of the rest of the world's cities, including Santiago, Chile, the bombing of whose La Moneda Presidential Palace we had effectively financed and egged into being at the outset of the military coup that ended up replacing the country’s democratically elected Salvador Allende with the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, exactly 28 years before our own 9/11 disaster, to the day, an operation that in its turn would come to cost over 3,200 oppositionist lives in a country of only 10 million people).
Maybe it was just that we'd imagined ourselves immune from the forces impinging on other people's lives, immune from history (history previously being defined precisely as something we did to other people, not something they ever did to us); and now suddenly that old historical machinery was clanking away big-time, the chains catching hold, and it didn't feel at all good.
Nor can it be said that, historically speaking, we went on to acquit ourselves with much distinction. Londoners during the Blitz had had to endure this sort of thing day after day, for weeks on end, but they didn't crumple. Under Churchill's leadership, it was as if the more the Nazis threw at them, the greater their focus, the more uncanny their calm: Far from buckling, they bucked up. They retained perspective.
For when you're under murderous assault is precisely not the time to turn your entire political culture inside out. That's what the terrorists want you to do, that's what they are literally dying for you to do. But you're supposed to resist that temptation.
Instead, in thrall to the serpentine blandishments of fear, we spooked ourselves (or at any rate allowed our political class to spook us) into the grotesque disfigurations of the Patriot Act; the witch hunts aimed at Arabs and South Asian immigrants (many of them second- and third-generation American citizens); the botched invasion of Afghanistan; the calamitous Iraqi fiasco; the preposterous fetishizations of Hallowed Ground and the Families and the Heroes; in sum, the hysterical deformation of virtually all of American politics, which in turn allowed the egregiously incompetent President George W. Bush that second term with its Katrina debacle, burgeoning deficits, and the whole clueless build-up to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Not that everyone got it wrong, of course. The late Susan Sontag, for one, saw things clearly from Day One. Writing in the first issue of The New Yorker after the attacks (the one with that indelible Art Spiegelman black-on-black cover), she concluded:
Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.
Those words got her roundly excoriated, even by the magazine's editor. (After which, remember, The New Yorker, like so many others in the mainstream media, went on to endorse the Iraqi campaign at its outset.)
But I digress. You ask, How do I think 9/11 will be remembered 100 years from now? Forget 100, let's say 50. I suspect people in 2061 will no more remember the World Trade Center disaster than we today do the General Slocum. (The only reason I happen to know about that calamity is because one time I pursued an obscure reference in Joyce's Ulysses, all of which famously takes place the very next day: June 16, 1904.) And this is because such people as will still be around in 2061 will be too busy dealing with the rampaging effects of global warming. To the extent that they will be thinking about the first decade of the 21st century at all, they may set themselves to pondering what on earth the people back then could have been thinking as they let warning after warning go unheeded.
The ten years just passing, as we all must realize if we are being honest with ourselves, constituted the hinge decade, the decade when something substantial had to be done if the world were going to avoid the exponential catastrophe into which we have now embarked. (You can't go on sagely noting, year after year, that we only have ten years left within which to confront the crisis, without at some point those ten years having run out.) Perhaps we could have done both: honored the victims of 9/11 while at the same time tending to the far greater devastation bearing down on us. The point is that, obviously, we weren't able to, and in almost every conceivable way, the result has been an utterly squandered decade.
Shame. Shame on us.
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As I say, probably not what those editors were expecting. Though I pretty much stand by all of it. Interesting at any rate how this year, 2023, press coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup in Santiago, Chile, seemed to overshadow that of the—where are we now?—twenty-second anniversary of those terrible events in downtown Manhattan.
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INDEX SPLENDORUM
Same imagery in an only seemingly diametrically opposite register
This past June, along the Yotsukura Beach off Iwaki City, in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima, an area that had been thoroughly devastated by the 2011 earthquake and its resulting tsunami, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (under the patronage of Yves Saint Laurent of all entities), unleashed a spectacularly beautiful daytime fireworks barrage under the name, “When the Sky Blooms with Sakura.” Sakura being cherry blossoms. See for yourself:
At first blush this exercise in aesthetical rapture seems the diametrical opposite of 9/11, though one of the eeriest aspects of that latter catastrophe (oft noted at the time and in the months immediately thereafter) was how (notwithstanding everything else) hypnotically gorgeous the entire unfolding spectacle had been—and conversely, Cai Guo-Qiang’s offering, though sheerly beautiful at one level, in addition, given its context (a Chinese artist working in Japan, the Japan not just of Fukishima but of Nanking and Hiroshima as well), at another level seems to positively toll with wrenching, throbbing memorializing expressiveness.
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
(1983)
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NEXT ISSUE
Not sure, but for a bit of a change of pace, it just might be Bearded Women Breastfeeding.
AND OH YEAH, DON’T FORGET!
On the occasion of his 95th birthday
HANS NOË
Sculpture
September 7 - October 31, 2023
curated by Lawrence Weschler
sponsored by David de Weese
at the National Museum of Mathematics
11 East 26th Street, New York City
(on the northern rim of Madison Square Park)
Noë in conversation with Lawrence Weschler,
Chaim Goodman Strauss, Alva Noë and others
Tuesday, October 17, 2023, 6 pm
Do try to catch it if you can. We’re very proud of how it came out. Access to the show is included with the admission fee to the Museum, though there will be two occasions in the days ahead when entry to the entire museum will be free—today, Thursday, September 21, from 3-6 pm; and Sunday, September 24, from 10 am to 1 pm—during both of which Weschler will be present and offering private tours. (We will presently be announcing other free dates for October as well.)
For more, see here.
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