Why We fight

It is not surprising that recalling 9/11 inevitably leads to a recitation of personal histories, and a cataloging of facts:  This is where I was, this is what I felt, this is what the teachers did. These archival remittances place us here and now, and allow us to interpret the mass recitation and repetition of similar stories: you were here, you felt this, you did what?
I thought I had said enough of 9/11, but biography is increasingly important these days and so I go on.    This day was an incredible disruption, it was chaos that sprang up for a moment and was full of potential; as an event becoming almost anything it desired. The images on the news were incredibly stunning, and played over and over so everyone could see. When I watched the footage from the ABC Special Report with Peter Jennings, I was struck by the images of unreal smoke billowing out and the horror of jumping 100 stories. I hadn't seen these spectacular images in ages and things began to rush back although I remembered nothing new. How strange to see the city like some horrifying snow day; when things are so different.

With chaos there is a logical desire to consume the facts, to know and see and record and record and just record to look at later. And sometimes people want more dead more days off to evidence something. The more there is the more that adds up to something

Peter Jennings is candid. Peter Jennings is wildly real. His discourse is calm and frustrated and rational. His conversation with Larry Eagleburger is sobering, and somber and normal. What happened to TV news? The US's presence in Afghanistan, the Russians, it was all there and that is barely mentioned on TV these days. Waging a war on terror/How do you wage a war on terror?

When I got home from school I saw one thing that really made me go crazy. It was footage of a bunch of Palestinian kids waving flags and burning flags and spitting and screaming ecstasy in the street. Celebrating the declaration of war on our country!!!! Do you remember this? Did you see this? So I started yelling at the TV and packed a bag to go to war.   I was crying and pointing to the screen to my mother. Do you see it?  And this footage was a hoax, it was totally out of context and it was captioned and they didn't let us know that until they issued an apology.  I'm thinking the whole time that this is my fault because I had a bad luck charm that was this tiny beaded indian chief and I had brought it out of my drawer and held it when I walked to school.  The mass event was me. To tune in nationwide and watch Enrique Inglesias and all of those awful songs with my family and my sister singing and our friends calling in because their uncle was dead.

And later when I was in high school my class got to talking 9/11 this and 9/11 that and never forget about JFK jr. and I raised my hand and said it was me. I shot JFK and got kicked out because it was ridiculous to keep going on like that and so I was left alone in the hall.

I used to draw planes meeting and even crashing in to buildings without people because there are no people in a drawing and it's so hard to tell sometimes.  The mass event is simultaneously singular and multiple; an evacuation and a crowding in. When we see a collision we realize planar dimensionality, we realize relative depth.  We see there where we are not, we witness a meeting of here and there.  The object colliding is somewhere in the middle of here and there and so facilitates our recognition and interpretation of what it is we are looking at.  When two objects collide it marks the intersection of point and line to plane. An event that instantiates our recognition as a process simultaneously real and imagined.

Time is so annoying

Solution- We must see things over and over and over until we remember things exactly as they are. And we must record and catalogue everything.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4ltYrlKvw