The Diary of Blake - Remembering 911
An excerpt from my brother who is no longer with us who experienced 911 from his rooftop in New York. Dedicated to all of the people that loved him, we miss you Blake.
"Staring at the wrecked towers, the first the only response it could elicit from me where exclamations: shit, sweet Jesus!, Jesus Christ, words you say to vocalize your speechlessness. From the neighboring roofs, most of my neighbors were in the thrones of the same kind of exclamatory muteness. No Way! Shit, Oh My God, NO. What we had left to deal with the event were ejaculations of blasphemy, negation or profanity. Our shouting wasn't exactly communication, though it is hard to say whether I would have been quite so vocal had I been alone on the roof and upon the rooftops, it was like a response of an audience dapping or booing (though what we were doing didn't have the force at either of those tones); we were neither talking to each other, nor ignoring each other. Instead, alone but attentive we were sharing an impossible experience. There were those who taught by religion to more immediately respond to the suffering of others or perhaps just too radical breaks in their routine...were praying. Some people, more and more as the morning drew on, and the disaster matured into the sensational catastrophe the rest of the nation watched on their television screens, were crying. It was hard not to be touched by this public outpouring of grief, which in our city is something we rarely see directly. Here where people, unanimously crying for the people that they couldn't see and didn't know, people who were, in my neighborhood, more likely than not their class enemies. Perhaps these people, predominantly woman, of course, had already become aware of the direct threat to their own wellbeing and their tears came from fear. It’s possible that so much was true of a few but it didn't seem that way. My neighbor, a weathered 40 plus hipster who had apparently quit everything for reasons of strict survival, asked me for a cigarette. Remarking the occasions and in the attitude of gallows humor which for me, personally was in inescapable in the face of such extravagant carnage. I thought of Kirk Douglas' character in the film "Airplane" an association that has more to do with the response of someone like me to the WTC incident than I immediately care to recognize. With his own version of a simpler humor, he joked "it's all a Bruce Willis Moment", which I guess I took a mean of masculine response to the sanitized horror we were witnessing. he was shaking so bad he could hardly light the cigarette that I rolled for him. In another moment, I would be shaking so much that I would be incapable of rolling one myself.
At the end of the next block down, Avenue C, there is an abandoned tenement squatted by a troop of mostly friendly agnostic street punks. This AM, they were all on the roof and in contrast to many but not all of the onlookers, while the gutted tops of the Towers were burning, they were partying, cheering and emitting the occasional hoorah like “Burn Baby burn". I myself have always seen the WTC like most of the more skyscrapers, as symbols of the unfriendly NY, the NY I wanted no part of; the NY of Giuliani, the NY that wouldn't let me keep the comfortable illusions I might have kept in another city. Yet as we watch the Towers burn and began to realize that we were no longer watching shiny debris falling from the gaping holes in the structure, but that these little plummeting black things propelled a bit farther from the edges of the structure than the chunks of falling window glass were actually human bodies, people who with God knows what hell at their backs, absolutely desperate people, were unless they were either being pursued by certain painful death, were acting on the panicked and, as it proved, correct assessment, that it was better to commit suicide than endure the fiery death in their office building which their situation promised. This apparent detail was enough for everyone I knew who saw it to immediately render concrete the life within the otherwise arguably grotesque and anonymous monoliths of the Trade Center. Architecturally, I still feel is an obscenity and a shrine to the worst ambitions of our country, and the braggart monument to the smugness of a social philosophy which had the building only been an empty assemblage of steel, glass and board - barring concrete walls, might have commanded my own approbation.
But what makes building special are the people that inhabit them. And as Theodore Adorno said "People are always better than their culture".
The squatters down the street maybe did not have anything else resident in their lives that would have made their own cheers ring false in their ears. I was so upset that I could only see their reactions as ignorant and callous, until a friend reminded me that shock cashes out, in a situation like this, in many different ways. I was in someway sympathetic to their cheering misfortunes of who they must have seen as their oppressors, darkly, yet they had no ambitions toward their status. And what for them were representatives of a privileged and antagonistic class, were also to my mind fallible, often selfish human beings many of whom had no difference from their squatter counterparts except to have been born to privileged and entitlement. The idea that was poverty necessarily confers virtue has always seemed repugnant to me. Class has its very definite political advantages, but pretending that the disenfranchised hold a moral advantage by virtue of this is an idiotic idea. Poverty debases most people and the drive to debase people to the point where someone can legitimately point out their defects is a strategy of the capitol. In any case, their cheers filled us with revulsion that they were completely insensitive to the human drama that was unfolded in front of our eyes, to say nothing of the political implications of the event (loose explanation)...
My friend, as he continued filming said that they were ignorant. I felt the same way, even though one time, he enlisted my help to expel a young drunk from our building that neither of us recognized but had been living in the building and occasionally peeing in the elevator. I watched as the Towers burned in disbelief forgetting about the hour I had promised to be in the office. I wouldn't have made it anyway thinking, the images of the gouged, blackened Towers are going to be like the images of the challenger in 1985. I saw those stumbling back from the nightclub at 7am in the Los Angeles morning, stopping in front of an appliance store, where a crowd had been gathered around in assembly of televisions tuned to the same channel; except with the Challenger, as I suppose the destruction of the WTC, it really didn't matter to which channel the television was turned to."
-Blake Ferris 09.11.2001