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I don’t know how to sleep anymore. Ruined buildings and bodies reach across screens. When closing my eyes, I hear women screaming, mothers wailing, the word precision.
As if trapped in a film reel, sentenced to repetition, the mind keeps whirring back to the period immediately after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In public spaces, paranoia spilled from grief, suspicion was fueled by fury; loyalty (as constructed by shifting notions of "patriotism") became the defining point of attack.
The birth of the Department of Homeland Security.
The word homeland.
The word security.
The chorus of flags. The desire for revenge. The sheer horror of the building debris. The images of humans searching for bodies in the rubble.
What does it mean to be intelligible to another in such contexts? What is the purpose of art?
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Brief recollections from my life in DC return: the official Islamophobia turning heads on the sidewalk; the sudden salience of "looking Muslim"; the language of threat; the abstract "homeland security"; the shape of the Pentagon.
It is 2:13 am and I have given up on falling asleep. It is impossible to avoid meeting memories on the terrain they carved in the brain. My dog snores as I watch documentaries.
In the documentary video narrating the "story of Flight 77," the camera follows an FBI agent with cropped brown hair as she describes walking through the scorched and blackened part of the West Wing. Pieces of airplane metal curled into ribbons and scattered between building materials. In the disaster, the agent is "struck" by the presence of a simple, white sailors hat, a singular object that managed to remain completely white in all the dirt.
The camera flashes to a staged reconstruction of what the agent is describing; the stark contrast between the color white and the gray dust, charred metal, and building parts, is emphasized.
The agent speaks slowly, says it was almost as if "the hat had been dropped from the sky"— or had come after— even though nothing could have come after, since the agent is the first human permitted to walk through this area.
The uncanny white hat becomes a memorial image, a strange memorialization. The memorial form implicates us in its mental construction rather than its physical staging. The mind is summoned to preserve the ruinscape with the white hat.
It was strange, the agent adds. It was one of "those things that sort of stand out because they don’t make sense."
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In cinematography, "directing the eye" refers to using frame composition, camera movement, or lighting to make clear what is most important in the frame.
The light settles on a man in a suit sitting at a large desk. The completely white hair on the man's head argues with the dark wood walls behind him. He is talking about a red shoe.
"Such a stark color, the red in that gray scene, that it stood with me," he tells the camera. A tiny white mustache sits above his upper lip, motionless. There are no extraneous gestures.
"What stood out for me was a single, red, high-heeled shoe."
The man says the shoe was in the middle of one of the Pentagon's completely demolished corridors.
The shoe was very red, unpaired, totally alone. Its partner was never found.
The man wonders if the shoe was left by a woman trying to escape. He uses the word "running": was she running out of the building?
The shoe is the thing which is left behind. Alternately, the shoe is the thing that was blown off. The shoe has a story about what happened in the last minutes of a life, but the shoe will not speak.
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Near the end of Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates ponders the difference between writing and speaking. He quotes an Egyptian god as saying that the invention of script damages the power of memory in those who write. Then he criticizes writing for its failure to take part in conversation, or to dialogue.
A text is like a painting, Socrates suggests, and it can bring images and ideas but it shouldn't be taken seriously, since the "true" writing is written upon the heart.
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Walter Benjamin recounts a story from the third book of Herodotus's Histories. For Benjamin, this story shows us the "nature of true storytelling" as distinguished from information or data:
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
A story does not expend itself.
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In 2021, a giant red stiletto appeared in Santa Barbara. It was visible from the northbound lanes of the 101 just above Ventura. Local news media tried to solve the “mystery of the red stiletto.”
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“A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.”
And there are so many red shoes now.
There are so many white hats.
There is violence upon violence: “things that sort of stand out because they don’t make sense."
There are shoes, hats, hostages, mass murder, bombs, men in uniform, state officials, retirees increasing their investment portfolios to focus on bombs and weapons—and behind this, behind the atrocities and events, behind the social trauma, behind the families grieving alone, there is that lie called homeland security.
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Dear friends, fellow humans, friends and strangers, I beg you to imagine a future that risks being radically different from the failures of the present.
I encourage you to continue writing, creating, thinking, protesting, hugging, honoring, memorializing, and bearing “with-ness” to the human condition.
Each morning
I wake
in the shape
of an ancient
song: weapon
desperate
to betray its
design.
I implore you to read Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ceasefire Cento” —