Writing in the dark
Consciousness on overload
A memoirist seeks to untangle the mass of contradictory emotions following the tragedy that changed our lives forever.
Editor's note: This is the second in a series of essays in which writers respond to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first essay, by Rick Moody, can be found here.
By Caroline Knapp
Sept. 20, 2001 | The sense of purposeless exhaustion set in around Day 4, Friday night, a fatigue that seemed both bone-deep and unjustified. Like me, most everyone I saw and spoke to that day was safe, insulated from the disaster, mere spectators: We hadn't lost loved ones, we'd only seen the devastation on TV and in pictures, we weren't involved in rescue efforts and so our weariness felt out of proportion and strange. I walked my dog that afternoon; the people I ran into looked uniformly shell-shocked and felt uniformly guilty about it, as though we hadn't quite earned our despair. Fear and horror -- the dominant sensations earlier in the week -- had given way to a vague heavy-hearted despondency by then. The stories of individual tragedy were beginning, cruelly, to blur. Even language had failed us, leaving most people I know with a single empty fallback word: "stunned." I'm stunned. I don't know what to do with myself, I'm just stunned. I went home that night, watched TV in a teeth-clenched, blank-faced way, and then fell into the darkest sleep.
I am not used to harboring such a wide variety of conflicting emotions at one time. Usually, it's one feeling at a time, maybe two. Anxiety here, contentment there. A dash of melancholy on a bad day; a flash of joy on a good one. By Friday, and persisting well into this week, that simple synaptic system was all out of whack, consciousness on overload. This may be normal, but it's also deeply disorienting. The magnitude of the physical devastation; the fear about what it may unleash; the sense of sudden vulnerability; the reach of the grief, each life lost touching an incalculable number of other lives: This is more than an ordinary brain can process, and so the mind is left to flit from one sensation to another. It cannot land on just one, it cannot absorb them all.
Which is why the neurons seem to be firing from all directions. I feel enveloped in safety, insulated within my own little house and also deeply jittery. A plane flies overhead and I freeze: What is it? Who's on it? Is it about to crash? I feel compelled to watch footage of the towers collapsing over and over and over and then compelled to look away, not sure what's voyeurism and what's an attempt to grasp the ungraspable. One emotion surges only to be supplanted by its opposite.
A blind man tells a CNN reporter how his guide dog, a yellow Labrador retriever with the most noble gaze, led him to safety down 87 flights of stairs, and the heart melts at the miracle, man and his brave attendant. Moments later, an executive breaks down in sobs on camera, 700 of his employees unaccounted for, among them his own brother, and the heart tightens and sinks, a stab of pure sorrow. The most heartening pride at human kindness mixes with despair at human hatred, often in the same instant. A woman I run into tells me she started to weep without warning on a subway train in downtown Boston and that a total stranger, a man sitting beside her, took her hand and held it, simply and firmly, for the duration of the ride. She felt so touched by this display of compassion she cried even harder, but then, when she left the subway station, she saw fresh graffiti on a wall: NUKE ISLAM.