Nothing Goes Away

Guy on the radio the other night was playing a stretch of songs that addressed that day, this day, you know.  And pretty much all of them were awful. 

The playlist didn't feature any pathetic, defensive Shish Boom Bah, though that stuff is awful too.  These were folky things that revealed an culture so sheltered it could only react to a genuine tragedy by conjuring detached and bloated metaphors or digging through its own minutiae for meaning.

Beyond the contrived and inadequate artistry, and aside from the disgust at the pervasive, incessant need we have to express ourselves, there was comfort to be found in how awful these songs were.  Our culture would be more adept at expressing a reaction to something massive and traumatic were we forced to undergo massive trauma more often, we would realize it was a part of life, we pay taxes so we do not have to do that.

It seems to me the very best reactions -- other than the actual immediate actions of that day, the people who quickly turned and helped -- were those of silent shock and sadness.  Grow up and get past the panic, the irrational fear, the bizarre sense of national vulnerability that resulted from a procedural failure and an isolated incident.  Deny the opportunism and let go the eager and ignorant vengeance that made us snuff enough faraway innocents to match our body count God knows how many times over.  Set aside the outrage at these outrages.  Ignore the fools who crawled into thumbsucking conspiracy theories, dismiss the clowns who think themselves brave to mock the reverence of the thing (because in truth that's the only way they can feel comfortable about it, they unwilling to learn another way).

This day is for the people who actually died.  Try your best to clear those images and forget those sounds -- Jesus, those sounds.  Shut up shut up for just a moment and listen to the silence they have left behind.

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The reading of the names is a great ritual, as tedious as it might seem; the Towers of Light should be recognized - even as they get trotted out each year, as if they were holiday decorations - as one of the perfect populist artistic accomplishments of the decade.  Here, and not here.

Nine Inch Nails - The Greater Good (mp3)(buy)

A friend in the city -- I was not there when it happened, I lost no one I knew, I have no claim to this day -- had been most concerned afterwards about what he was breathing.  Some percentage of the ash in the air had been human and now there was a chance that someone he would not have even spoken to on the subway was stuck inside his lungs.  The thought made him sick, he likened it to cannibalism.

And I suggested that it could be  a good thing.  Toxins and practical hazards aside.  It's some Golden Bough shit, the primitive notion that by consuming a dead man his power and experience will become yours.  But after such an incomparable, unjust abbreviation of life, wasn't this absorption and recirculation a valuable demonstration of interconnectedness?  Instead of silently carting flesh out and burying it away, wasn't it of some consolation to know that everything cannot be lost and forgotten so easily?

I do not believe this song was meant to address human fallout.   Year Zero was Trent Reznor's post-Patriot Act fictional construct, it involved hidden websites, it's being pitched as a television series.  "The Greater Good" might have been meant to have something to do with government mind-control, perhaps involves a fictional narcotic.  Games, whatever.

From the first time I heard it this song has always been about this day, about my friend's concern, about the identities in the air.  It's easy to shrug off whatever doesn't fit -- "temptation, coercion, submission..." -- as distractions.  What's left is not easy.  It should not be.  The song feels quasi-mystical.  It's disorienting, almost insidious.  It is quiet and its words are simple.  It is not about how you feel.  It hangs like a fog.  It sticks.

tags: 911  nine inch nails  

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