Peter Reed, a member of Newark Academy’s Humanities Faculty, offers two reflections on the World Trade Center, one in prose and one in poetry. The photograph, “Apocalypse Now,” is by alum Josh Charow ’16.
“Sacrificing Before the Toe of Zeus–A Supplicant Before the Towers”
by Peter Reed, December 2003
The World Trade Center cast more than a shadow. It cast the looming, sinister energy of an undeniable apparition, rooted in bedrock, moving like a symphony. It hummed the energy of an invisible city pent up behind massive, impenetrable facades. It hummed of vertigo. Or the blinding sunlight it reflected. The pain in the neck. The terrible realization of the sheer mass of thing. The mass impossibly soaring impossibly upward, gigantic. The inability to see the tops. Why did it feel so weighty? Why did it arouse the butterflies? It really was surreal. Like being outside of time. And maybe it was a good thing that the plaza was a world unto itself, closed off, clean and vacuous. Like an airport, emptied of travelers. Horrible weight, like cleaving magnets, attracting and repelling. The numinous incarnate. And that deafening, dull roar. Like a primordial whoosh from deep within the earth. Steel. And much broader than it looked from a distance. You wanted to wrap your arms around it but couldn’t as it cried out for embrace in desperate silence. The steel was not cold, but organic, living and breathing. It lived, animated by the sun, by Ra. There was no city there, just a black hole. The Empire State Building is on the street, right there on Fifth Avenue, in the thick of the fray. Hemmed in, revealing angles are scarce. Not so with the World Trade Center. That plaza allowed one to stare up, to enter into a trance with no fear for pedestrian traffic. You could enter the conversation with them, or at least listen in, contributing nothing but an ant-like presence. Like sacrificing before the toe of Zeus. Command its attention. Just try. Resist the urge to be swallowed up, consumed in shimmering steel. Those feelings poofed up in smoke, scattered up and down Flatbush like so many charred legal documents I proofread for Brown and Wood, flotsam never to be lived again. Only recalled, simulated, forged in a memory better suited to ideas than sensations. They belonged in that place, as devotion in a shrine. Now there’s just a hole. A mocking chasm. Like in Berlin Mitte. Try to walk away from the World Trade Center once it had you in its grasp. Like trying to walk away from the face of God. You must and yet you can’t. You want to and yet you don’t. Only a Herculean act of will and no looking back can break the spell. The neck usually gives out before the spirit. The act of will is no such thing, just a surrender to bodily pain, and then only after much resistance. Walk away in fear and trembling. Spooked yet strangely fortified. You’ve done it. You can do anything. Withdraw, purged and invincible as you just stared down. Iowa City is too small for catharsis.
“Apocalypse Now” by Josh Charow ’16
They blew up the World Trade Center.
It wasn’t poetic.
I hated working there
Proofreading limited liabilities
With Jean in the airless bowels of an airborne
Mine, a closet within a closet within a space
Station or a sensory deprivation tank.
So they blew it up.
People screamed, people leapt. And maybe one was mousy Jean.
Evidently they did not like working there either
After the aeroplanes hit.
So they leapt like children. They leapt the leap we’ve all imagined
Once or twice with foreheads pressed against cold glass
Peering down and out in happier days.
They no longer need imagine such a fall.
Nor the visionary pilots such a crash.
Two boyish “I wonder what would happen ifs” at once
Accomplished.
The pilots crashed, the people leapt
Head over Prada heels and ties
A thousand Supermans not flying.
Flightless supermen now
Extinct.
Run uptown, downtown, scramble up from subways, pour down from buildings go home, go home!
Exodus to Brooklyn, trail of tears to Queens, as if the MTA and not the aeroplanes had struck.
And I drove home a thousand miles to see what I could not, what I’d never see again.
I crossed the bridge but where were you, Tower One and Tower Two?
Your watch was broken.
I saw an apparition of inversion, garbed in silvery nonexistence resounding loud and clear.
David Copperfield, full of who-believes-in-magic, made the Statue of Liberty to vanish once.
I saw it on TV. He used a giant cloth and it was sponsored and boring.
And Cristo wrapped the Reichstag, amused, I watched and nodded.
But your absence did not bore, did not amuse.
And though I could not see I
Choked on the unfathomable hole
charring ad nauseam and on.
It screamed its agony in silence and it was real.
I heard as in a dream when one sees but does not see, runs but does not run.
And next to me sat numb a man and numb a woman, solemn, leafing through a
Picture book
Noses down (now you see) it
Noses up (now you don’t)
Contrasting past with present
Taking in the
Presence of the absence
Speechless.
And unable to contain my grief I hid my head convulsing tears.
And when I raised my head again (Behold!)
You still weren’t there.
You, the looming quintessence of Always There.
Like bouncers or
Like Tweedles Dum and Dee you stood
Stupid and stubborn but still you stood.
Ill-placed at first as Gulliver in Lilliput
But now in absence wrong, amiss as yellow
Big Bird smiling a happy tune in concentration camps.
For you obtruded, withstood the jeers and gradually seemed right
Bulldozing your way into the sacred crib of our imaginations where
Sense of place lays its soft infant skull, dreaming beatifically.
Our will was no match for yours so groaning, we relented.
We let you in.
Making up with presence what you lacked in grace
You towered because you were towers.
And once in high school idling around our lockers
We talked of favorite buildings and David
Shocked us all by naming you.
By way of explanation he smiled naughtily, triumphantly and said
“There are two of them.”
And so there were.
And when they blew you up I thought of Dave and his
Titanic clichés, not joyless, but shimmering on borrowed time in twilight.