Volume CXXXII, Number 1 September 13, 2002 f

Tragedy demands personal reflection
GENEVIEVE CREEDON
STAFF WRITER

I remember last year. It was about this time, eight in the morning, when I read an email from my brother, an NYU student whose room faced the Twin Towers. He had seen a plane fly into one of the towers. That was all he had written, and I hadn't believed him because I thought it would be all over the news, but it hadn't yet hit the news.

By the time this article is published we will be several days past the year anniversary. We will all have figured out how to conduct ourselves today-how to observe the solemnity without repeating too much of the pain.
Maybe this will sound ridiculous, but the only thing I really want to do today is take a shower. Because I didn't take one last year. I forgot.
Of course, our emotions and reactions last year were new, fresh, and unprecedented. Now, we remember, when we do, that an event has altered the world and our lives, but have we changed? Have you changed?
It is a question I have played and replayed in my head since I returned to campus, and I don't know the answer, though it is important to me. I know I have to change. My life has to change, but I don't yet know how, in the same way that I didn't really know how to feel last year, as I watched planes fly into buildings on a screen.

I can't sit in front of a TV for long these days. I get frustrated, feel as if it is a waste of time. Watching staged, unreal lives flash before me has simply lost what little appeal it had ever had.

And I think maybe September 11 is all about reality, about different realities and changing our conceptions and perceptions of what is real, because for so many of us, that day still feels unreal, and maybe it is in all ways but one-the way we allow ourselves to think about it.

I hated the summer, because every conversation I had involved talking about that day, but not really talking about it, just glossing it over with the "wasn't it awful" comments. And those comments make it distant, established, static, and as far as I am concerned, September 11 is none of those things. It is real. It is conflicted. It is poetry.

I think of how the poet Kenneth Rexroth defined poetry as a "sacramental relationship that lasts always." I didn't want this article to be about September 11. I wanted it to be about change, about changing reality and our relationship to it, but I don't know how else to say it. I want September 11 to continue to shower down on me, to shock me, to cause me pain, to alter me. I want it to be my "sacramental relationship" to reality.