Blood Tears: A journal of 9/11

From: mysteries@aol.com Date: Tue Sep 11, 2001 1:08 pm Subject: No Subject

I was just sitting to write a letter to you folks when i heard a boom that was wrong. I went to the roof and saw the World Trade center burning and exploding. I pray for the lives and the survivors. It is all too much

From: mysteries@aol.com Date: Tue Sep 11, 2001 2:16 pm There is one building where there used to be two.....outside my building people are running. i am about 20 blocks north.....i freak every time i hear a helicopter.....who are we?

From: mysteries@aol.com Date: Tue Sep 11, 2001 2:37 pm

they are using my corner for triage. No more WTC. I will never again complain that my daughter goes to school all the way uptown...long distance down at gallery. Streets empty but for weeping tourists and workers headed north. r.

My block is beginning to get the ash and smoke. Trucks streaming down the street with ash flying off them like snowey ghosts.

Tourists posing against the background of the buildings. Guiliani said people below canal should evacuate but i am three blocks below canal and i see no reason. They want to keep the streets clear for ambulances. Shari is at the gallery. The skyline is changed from the last time she looked. I would look out the windwo and see people look up and scream and run and then run to CNN and see another tower fall.

my throat is dry. Kevin Sampson's daughter not heard from yet but hopefully she was early enough to get out of there on her way to school. A group of white coated cops just got out of a truck. subways not running. From my roof it looks like Baghdad. Sirens weeping left and right but things are in motion and the people helping are heroes.

R. Simone called a few minutes ago from school...called shari to see how i was....and you realize its one of those moments where her perception of the world is changed forever in terms of what was before. I am kinda holed up in my building right now noticing the cops chasing people out of the neighborhood. If I left I might not be able to get back. now I heard a rumor of methane gas. Kevin's daughter is safe and headed toward the gallery to hang out. YesJAH! It is quieter now but i can feel a buzz in the air. The atmosphere is disturbed. The sirens do not stop. The visuals test the edges of comprehension. One's whole psyche cries. And I cannot forget for a second that there are places in the world that live with this all the time. The American sense of privilege slips its mask for a while. cops shouting downstairs. The Westside highway is a speed track for ambulances. We dont know the parameters yet.

It is quieter outside now. The strange migration from the south is only a trickle. the police still turning people away so I am not going out yet.

Sirens seriously reduced. All the heavy stuff is now taking place at the

hospitals I am sure. the air is still not so good. no gas! Every now and then a fighter jet or helicopter goes over and it is wierd.

Hopefully this is a real lull and not the eye of a hurricane. all subways, busses, etc still down.

School not out yet.

Thanks all... prayers still The streets outside are white. The police are gone. Smoke still billows from the site. no airplanes. no traffic. The light has a strange cast from the ash and smoke. It is 73 degrees. The quiet is eery.

There is no one untouched by this somehow and we can only grit our souls and wait for the horrible statistics to come.

But somehow the wound though raw and huge feels like it is being cauterized.

My sense of evil is reinforced but so is my sense of the common man as hero.

I suppose that it what it is all about and of course it is about what we draw from the art. and you know, somewhere in the back of my head is drawn this huge and devastating metaphor...those Buddhas that tumbled and those buildings today.

They were not separate events in the long run, though they were sacred and profane. They were all human symbols.

Everytime I go to my roof another building is missing from the skyline. A third building just fell with a fourth on fire.

It is like waking up after the worst fight with someone you love that you have ever had. The weather is sensual and clear. The streets are so quiet

because you are on essentially neighborhood arrest. noone but residents allowed below 14th street. The incessant sound of the morning muted voices on the television in the other room. now the building where your daughter learned to walk by climbing the long wide stairs over and over is on fire.

You try not to imagine. You try not to let the images of that building sliding into itself that you saw just a glimpse of stay with you. You try to stabilize the human forms pinwheeling through space. You wonder how you will explain things to your daughter when you see her...hoping she didnt watch too much at her friend's house. And you tap the floor three times and pour a libation that you have your daughter. your wife and that your life will have the privileged grace to continue.

You don't want to see the Arabs in this country subjected to the assholedness of what happened to the Japanese in WWII and you are reminded that we are still the same humans who ever were. It is an internal homeground at stake here, not because of property but because once again your idealism has been bludgeoned by the strange twists that sometimes cause the wrong type of rot in the world. It isn't evil you are so angry at, evil always is...it is the stupidity you can't understand. And the unwillingness of the world to fit into pat formations of natural moralities. And your eyes hurt and you realize that you have been crying and not even realizing it.

But you know that after the disease lifts you will be different and on some different level. And your basic soul responsibilities to the world will continue and that somehow you will forgive, somehow you will continue to seek

to understand and that somehow you will listen to the wounded but fierce Muse and continue to make Art, continue to do what is intrinsic for you to do because no one is waiting for it, no one is dependant on it except your own inner connection to the world. Perhaps our relative safety is as dangerous as anything else because it is ultimately an illusion. We are flesh after all. Because you know, now more than ever, what you never knew by not going to war, because now in some unnameable intrinsic way you are more connected to the rest of the world and what it lives everyday than ever...though you may never understand the human trajectory toward whatever...you have what you do as your core and ultimate solace and you are alive and so you continue to do what you do....

Had to get into the street today. Decided to go up to Wash Heights to deliver a scale to my diabetic mother. no trains till 4th street. Men in hard hats clean and ready heading downtown. Men and women in shrouds of dust and weary bloodshot eyes heading North. At Canal Street I passed a cordon of police and soldiers that was keeping people from going further downtown without identification and proof of address. Cop told me next trains were on 4th. The first time since Draft resisting at White Hall Street that I saw so many cops and didnt feel the madness in my belly. The day was so green and fresh. and then I turned around. And looked down Church Street. I live on Church and White. The damage is on Church and Barclay etc. and it was still there. and not there. The smoke billowing like a bizarre cartoon caption in the sky with no writing. The trucks the ants moving the sirens the dust the dust the dust. I thought about a nitemare I had from time to time of flesh and gaping metal and realized it was a memory of the future and not a dream at all. It started with a ball of fire on the Jersey skyline that belled up like a nuclear cloud and I always thought it was a nuclear bomb dream until today...it was so huge and inevitable and went beyond what the mind can easily accept as reality. and so I walked.

And there were no cars. People walked and talked quietly. The homeless have migrated north. I kept thinking no this isnt like Beirut. This isnt like Baghdad. This is just like New York. This is the swallowed pain and the

grimace, the pink mohawk and the transvestites, the brokers and the priests all swallowing the doom and looking only like New York. Up here. Clean on the front of your shirt and ashes on the back.

Hours later I maneuvered the trains and picked up the new Dylan and had to get off the train on Houston Street and Broadway. A cop asked me for ID and said Weren't you here this morning I said no I was never here this morning and he nodded and said how far do you live and I said White Street three blocks below Canal and he nodded and said keep going. The sun was metallic and contrasty on the closed stores and museums. I passed the gallery and couldn't beleive that Dean and Deluca was the only place open. The Dylan was seductive but I wanted to see my daughter ( hadnt seen her yet) since the planes and at Canal I was stopped again and I showed my passport and it wasnt enough I had to show something with my address and he said keep it out and good luck.

On walker and broadway a soldier sat with a machine gun on top of a humvee and I stopped automatically waiting for him to know me from 1967 or something but he didnt change expression and so I kept walking and the winds had shifted and for the first time I smelled the Smoke. And I peeked around my corner on Church Street and saw they had laid out the wrecked police cars and one amubilance and people were standing watching them in awe. My loft smellled of smoke and we put on masks and I told them to come down and look at the burned out shells.

Paper everywhere now. Stuff from the buildings and all the papers from the police cars strewn about marked private and confidential. Venetian blinds melted i nto the roofs of the cars. Metal chunks sliced through them like knives through halvah. They were more disturbing than dream. Even the police were stopping to look at them, laid out in a row at the curb like a museum but with the ash still strwaming from them.

We walked a little further and I saw this black and yellow form coming toward us so slowly. A fireman in full gear with no fire truck around. Red eyed and parchfaced slappped with dust and ash like he'd been dancing in a volcano. And he looked at me and he smiled first. He smiled dammit! and my chest caught and i said thanks. We are proud of you. and he looked down and kept walking to somewhere.

They are getting to the bodies and now it gets very very tough. In the subway I saw a man in a torn black suit with dust on him walking like a psychiatric patient with his arms frozen and unswinging by his sides. And when he passed I realized he was in shock.

Shock.

And nothing will ever equal the feeling in my heart and my head when my 11 daughter looked at me last night (we had been separated the first night and she had only seen it on TV now she saw it in her own neighborhood) and said quietly "Why did this have to happen?" And a million voices welled up in me to answer but I then realized there was no question to answer...it was her soul telling her she had grown up somewhat inside and entered the ambiguous world of young adulthood where evil constantly slices away the curtains of

naivety. and the only answer was to hold her and run down the inadequate words in my own mind.

Just last Saturday we took the train to Atlantic Avenue and ate Pastelli (chicken pie with cinnamon and raisins) at the Moroccan Star and looked in all the windows at the essential oils and dumbeks and the guys out playing cards on the street wearing shawls and fezzes etc. And I was telling her how incredible that neighborhoods could still have such integrity. And she loved it. We went into Sahadi and bought olives and dried fruits and nuts, and labn yogurt and halvah and stuffed eggplants. Some of it still sits in the refrigerator in ironic silence.

And I told her to remember how good she felt in that neighborhood. How kind our waiter had been playing with the little black Muslim kid at the next table. And I told her that the evil stupidity was but one part of the equation and the richness of the lives imbedded in culture were sill the other part of the equation. And that there were things in life that we were never going to have the mathematical precision to answer comfortably enough for her but that our lives are still spent reaching for those answers. and she went to sleep with a fan on to blow the smoke smell in the other direction and I sat in the livingroom struggling so hard to believe my own words.

R.

Messages Messages Help Reply | Forward | View Source | Unwrap Lines | Delete | Remove Author Message 4577 of 4609 | Previous | Next [ Up Thread ] Message Index Msg # From: mysteries@aol.com Date: Thu Sep 13, 2001 10:24 pm Subject: 9/13

Decided to walk up and see what was coming down in Chinatown. Its about four blocks east of where I live and I am there at least five times a week without even thinking about it.

I went out and first went west a couple blocks to see if anything was open.

Nada. and the air was gritty. Everyone wore masks today.

I cut south two blocks just to check on Kerry Schuss's gallery, he being on honeymoon in Paris and probably not allowed back in the country yet anyway.

All cool but lots of utility vans and reporters parking further up from ground zero. Squads of hardhats and dazed firemen. so I cut due east on White Street again. Usually I walk through the prison courtyard and look up at the strange sculpture that kind of looks like a wire electric chair. But two prison security guards didnt even let me get within a block it was all taped off. There is a perceptible change in the air as

some of the authority figures get a bit more irritable.

Not so much the beat cops as the private ones.

I walk north to Walker and turn east cause I know it merges with Canal. My jaw drops. The most crowded street in New York has about twenty people on it. and they have it cordoned off in such a way that noone can get into Chinatown. Chinese were showing ID but if they yelled enough they got through. What was going through their minds as their ways of life were cut off from them. My fantasy of eating dim sum and listening to local gossip with an open notebook disappears. I approach two cops and ask where there is any food as nothing but nothing is open. the usual crowded fish markets, the vegetable markets , the illegal stalls that sell turtles and frogs, th eon the street jadesellers and fortunetellers and shoerepair men all barred and empty. In my entire life it was never like this. The cops point North to little Italy and say you can get some pizza there.

In all the downtown world Little Italy is selling food. All work has stopped on the preparations for the Feast of San Gennaro but the little hero shops and some of the larger restaurants are open and cooking. I sit and have a hero and applaud with the rest of the sporadic diners as they dig five firemen out of the rubble. later it is found they were buried only today while looking for others but for right now the victory seems so major and upbeat. The patrona is so happy she brings me a bottle of water and says heah honey free bottled warta taday. I take it and it disappears like a drop I am so dehydrated from the air.

I head back down to Canal and the police wont let me past the barricade to go home. I hear there were 90 bomb scares in the city today but still I want to go home. suddenly i am not feeling so free ranging. Centre barricade directs me to Lafayette barricade directs me to Broadway Barricade directs me to Church barricade who says sorry another building just fell we are on an emergency contingency and you cant go past. I am three blocks south i say I left my daughter there (i lied) and we have animals. Sorry he says I have heard thirty stories like dat and i cant let you through. I cross the street and call Shari to tell her to call first before bringing Simone home from school (the subways are what you can imagine) and I sit with a growing crowd and watch the gap where two giant buildings used to be. The sun is covered with haze. Tons of recovery machinery goes through and then there is a lull and i decide to try again. A guy in front of me is wearing an American flag bandanna. "hey look at this" says the cop. And they let the guy through immediately. I take off my dark glasses and tell them my asthma medication is home and I work up some deep allergy coughs. They let me through and I walk past the new additions to the wrecked patrol cars (people are putting flowers in them now as shrines) and go home.

This is a new road. There is a deep darkness in it and a deep hope. It is thursday the thirteenth. I was supposed to fly to Florida Int'l University today and see Farris Thompson speak on altars. Of course they cancelled the flight and I wasn't sure anyway that I cared to be in the first wave of new flight regulations. Now my city is an altar and I am trying to figure out who it will be for. Suppose they lifted your city or your town or your village and put it in a new place that was familiar and strange at the same time with a constant smell of burning and a spume of ash like a malignant

cloud above your head.

One or two blocks south they have no water or electricity. You cough a little and your eyes burn as you realize you are a new kind of tourist in a little-known land called the Twentyfirst Century.

Normalcy?

You are looking for a new normalcy now. Still you look out your window and the hotel across the street is empty. You are the only family in your building. The wind blows south today. Your daughter won't look at the television. You suspect she is afraid you are going to cry.

Last night Van Maanen called you, frantic because he hadnt been able to get through since Tuesday. You laugh when you think about how you almost scheduled a show for him this month. You respect the vision in his art more than ever because you understand that he has been through this in the Tet offensive. You laugh because his work was turned down for the show Michael Bonesteel is putting together for AVAM about warriors. Van Maanen's work wasnt explicit enough or narrative enough. You tried to tell him that Van Maanen was a boy who came back a wounded soldier and who wasnt trying to relive his own war but was trying to see beyond it to grapple with death in its eastern and western meaning and to give death back its meaning again as the other side of the illusion called life. Sampson and Van Maanen have both been passed over for the AVAM show because they don't do cartoons. Sampson on the streets in cop hell. You laugh and you realise it has been a few days since laughter was a feeling. He remembers your dream about the ball of fire.

You take the phone to the window and you explain what you see. Traffic going the wrong way down Church Street, trucks still filled with unnameable shapes, and then one with two huge planters in it with two trees un harmed. People wheeling carts of water and food down toward the site. He wants to visit you at home and you say he can't till they lift the restrictions. You say we are two middleaged men who stand on the same side of the barricade this time.

He agrees. He hangs up thanking the spirits over and over.

Today you and your daughter will see if opening up West of Broadway means Chinatown is functioning again. Normalcy. You don't want to think about the economy. Last night you went to bed running down contingency plans. You are ready to head for the hills somewhere and take up cave painting. Your wife doesnt think that is lucrative. You fall asleep with hammers in your sinuses.

Normalcy. A new normal. This new normalcy does not automatically mean comfort. Water in the fishtank. Catfood. Changing your opening show and wondering if people will come and look. You postpone the Ghana movie paintings and decide to look at American Homeground. To understand, to check your notes.

You check on the kid more than you should. She is seated at the kitchen counter in velvety pajamas doing homework. Homework. You feel she knows you feel wierd.

Normalcy. To try and keep somehow in the dark howl of imminent war the ineffable routine of the heart.

Jimmy, Even if we wipe them all out Lady Liberty will weep at the atrocity that happened here Tuesday and is still moaning in lower Manhattan and Washington now. This is not the end of the bloodshed. We can feel that in the streets here. Can we walk that line? Can we make it a war for humanity versus a war for wounded pride? Thats what they are talking about in the streets. There are vigils at night on streetcorners with candles held by teenagers. There are kids worrying about being gang beaten in school. There are maniacs who planted 90 bomb threats day before yesterday. Our people.

I don't think anyone is cringing. But rage does not preclude strategy.

Rage does not preclude a cold logic that covers a hot humanistic heart.

And it doesnt preclude our fighting to understand inside and out the mindset that targetted us. It will make us see that there is not one kind of Islam any more than there is one kind of Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism. Know thy enemy. aren't we wiser than 1967? Aren't we? Can a real United Nations come from this? A boxer isn't helpless when he is struck on the chin...he is surprised. We are surprised. We are not helpless.

And we are grieving. That is natural.

Oklahoma and we healed and understood more.

We grieved after

We must be cunning and not clumsy. That will help our children live longer.

You have to see what is happening here to feel what will happen. If you

don't believe it hop on an Amtrak and see for yourself. A war is inevitable.

But once again some think the war is just going to happen 'over there' again and that is not the case. Those 90 bomb threats didnt come from the Taliban.

Yes no friggin question it is about good and evil. Yes no frigging question that both those concepts are ambiguous.

We need to strike evil on every front there is. And we need compassionate warrior eyes, wise eyes, deadly eyes and strategic eyes.

Not the eyes of colonialism and jingoistic superiority. Know thy enemy.

Evil goes as deep as the earth's core.

And more of the countries of the world seem ready to face the facts. Facts. Or we will be like the knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail who continues hacking away at nothing till he is an impotent torso.

Lady Liberty has been weeping for a long long time and not just for the continental United States.

Randall Today is the first time since the attack that I went to the gallery. For me Canal Street and Broadway is always a way of grounding me and tuning in to the world. If there is such a thing as 'normalcy' I felt I would find it there.

And as I walked by the vendors and stalls and Chinese and Vietnamese and Sikhs and Arabs walking by clutching paper flags as if it was ID it occurred to me that we seek familiarity more than we seek normalcy and we are only going to get changed versions of both. Our children now are growing up with

a memory of terrorism the way we remember the Cuban missile Crisis, and Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X's assassinations.

They don't have the cold War. People are out there.

The State Troopers are still blocking out my neighborhood which is no longer the upper part of ground zero but is now referred to as the Frozen Zone. No cars. I live in the Frozen Zone. Man. In the mornings I see confident rescue workers teeming South in droves and the evenings when the shifts change I see them walking back uptown slumpshouldered. disappointed and often shocked at the body parts now being found more often than survivors or bodies.

But people are smiling. And they are starting to complain a little which is a sign of health in a funny way. The survivors laugh in a funny New York way about their blessed existence. The other group of people I can see walking uptown are the downtowners with suitcases and carryon bags and dogs on leashes and cat carriers getting their things out of the buildings they are not allowed to occupy right now for safety or electricity and water reasons.

I walked into the gallery like a man who has been given sight back after being blind for a while. It felt right. It also felt strange as if I had somehow let the art down as a human.

There is no place on Broadway that is not displaying the flag. But sometimes it is upside down and backwards.

I don't feel unsafe. I am grieving of course. But that isn't the difference that the air is so thick with. Again I think of in terms of a love

relationship. The dance of being hurt in love is that it makes you wiser.

Raked across the coals you leap to your feet somehow and eventually fall in love again, hopefully not to hurt or be hurt in the same way in your next amorous endeavor.

We cannot be hurt in the very same way again. If or when it happens for these reasons it will open old scars and there will be some fresh wounds but the shock and surprise that comes the first time will not be this intense again. We will know what it is.

It is true that we are different Americans now. It is true that we can patch our lives and continue and make wonderful things happen.

But they are in a new dimension.

An interesting thing: I was writing a novel about our field. It was about the art scene in New York and the South and the Caribbean.

If I write and +do not refer to the Towers then I am not writing about the world as it is now. If I do include them I have to write cognizant of a new conscience.

And I see now that the novel has changed the way it has changed before. Now I understand categories like Post-War novel. etc. I look at the television and so much advertising now comes off as ironic or irrelevant. Music. Art. And with a chill I understand more than ever before what Jon Serl was trying to tell me. Trying to tell all of us. That the World changed after World War II in unspeakable ways. Because I was born in '51 of course it didnt feel that way to me. It was my world. Now there is a New World coming into existence for those born today. There is Pre-Towers for Americans and there

is Post-towers and we need to be open to all the possibilities when the grief and the anger and the new politics level off and spawn the new creativity.

Randall: Thanks for your observations. with the list.

I wanted to share this poem

JW W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939" I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. >> It's raining. this is the kind of rain you usually love.

This is deja vu rain where you make love or read plains Indian History or Kerouac and sit on the couch watching the drops wash away summer and turn to the job of insinuating the coming Fall. There has been a lot of deja vu in the last week as if the office where all your memories of the sixties and seventies was hit by rubble also and now the papers and memos you kept all those memos on are flying like moths through the grey air or else everywhere underfoot.

This morning it felt like I woke up just as I was getting to sleep. I heard the wife and the daughter in the other room fussing and getting ready for

school and the fan was burbling away and the cat was bitching about something and it sounded so silly and normal till 2 sirens went off one after the other to signal more remains heading north or a police official heading south. The streets around me are still empty of unofficial traffic though they seem to have set up a command center outside. And this time the rain covers secrets.

And it is just a little cold. And angry.

Last night I fell in love with a man named Bill Moyers who scrambled my brains the night before last with a program on Bin Laden and then last night an in-depth examination of a song called Amazing Grace.

Amazing Grace by white people and Amazing Grace by black people. For an hour or so it was all in perspective and I could get passionate about music and art and the noble ethereal intangible of human essence, So I'm fifty years old and trying to figure out some Red Cross of the soul.

I was talking to Sampson when I finally got phone service back to Jersey and we were babbling about him teaching kids to have the courage to make art. and my kid comes home crying cause her best friends father yanked his daughter out of school and moved her to a Catholic School in long island permanently.

And then Greenspan freaks everyone out by acting positive and you realize there are just the right times to shut up except to sing Amazing Grace.

When I walked to the gallery I saw this couple. I always see this couple. I remember my daughter running home one day laughing cause she had just seen the couple. They are in their mid-fifties and he wears long tan leather coats even when it is too hot out to wear long tan leather coats and she

manages to drape miniskirts and such over a very large frame at least 220 lbs or so and she always wears very transparent blouses with nothing on underneath and so you blink because it is quite alarming really and they work in Soho somewhere but I have never been able to figure out where and this morning I saw the couple walking with heads snapping from the cops and troopers etc in disbelief and they walked right by me and she had something on top that was green and seemed to have no opacity whatsoever and they were both wearing dust masks. What can you think at a time like this except you go girl. Amazing Grace.

So we cry havoc and we ask are we getting used to this?

Can we get used to this? Has the ball stopped rolling yet no it hasnt stopped rolling yet and the biggest enemy always is self-pity but somehow selfrighteousness seems wierdly appropriate. But if you walk through the galleries and the museums a very interesting phenomenon is taking place: on television as well and that is that what is pretentious and shallow is more pretentious and shallow then it has ever been and all the commercials are so ironic and silly and what is beautiful and strong comes through more beautiful and strong than ever before. Donald Sutherland on the Sundance Channel talking about acting.

Robert Johnson singing Dust my Broom. Chopin. Marley.

Billie Holiday. O man John Coltrane. Shari took Simone to the Met the other day and was heavily affected by Monet's Waterlilies and Leon Golub and for me it has been music and poetry and Ramirez and many artists in our field singing with an empowered eloquence. We have all been simultaneously tenderized. It hasn't

stopped and won't for a while. We can use it to absorb refreshed inspiration through all the pores once clogged by civilized complacency. Try it. The tears flow freely. But the laughter also.

Amazing Grace.

Amazing Grace. Amazing. Grace.