Look with your eyes, not with your hands.


Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.



A grad student muses on her life, film, friends, politics, reality televizzle, and music.

 
9/11, Take 2

I think I may have talked about this about this time last year, but I certainly remember feeling it (then) and even feeling it two years ago. Maybe because this time of year to me connotes the beginning and is usually associated with a move and lots of newness, but something about 9/11 makes me feel very far far away from New York. It could be a distance imposed because of media - that physically New York is far and only exists on a television monitor with a fuzzy signal, or it exists as a recreation, a city with a persona described by a writer in the Times. It is a surreal tragedy - one that exists on television for so many of us and then all of a sudden, can take on a new dimension after a long subway ride way downtown past Wall Street.

Wisconsin feels like a world untouched and not a part of that... Vermont felt very far away from all of that. Countries and populations have one way of dealing with memory, commemoration, and histories - people seem to need that on one level, but the personal level is still very messy and hard to figure out. We are suppose to live in this technology Eden where barriers and distance become only fine physical divides because of invisible webs. (Forgive me for waxing a little poetic here - I don't know what brought this on) But this particular tragedy didn't have the galvinizing "we are all American" kind of patriotic effect on me. It made me acutely aware of how big and distant this world can feel - how a city that is still just around the corner, geographically and culturally, can feel imaginary or how a war in a country that much further away and all the more exotic and foreign can feel even less material and even more strange, absurd.

Now I admit that this doesn't make sense, but I want to get across my ambivalence. Partly ambivalent because I might not have invested enough of the emotional capital into this whole event to assign the right meaning to it. Maybe I am tentative because I still don't understand that dialogue about memory. Anyway... That's what I make of this mess.
posted by lmjasinski at 2:25 PM