Today Has No Title
On her album Universal Mother, Sinead O'Connor says in her song "Famine": "We're all suffering from post traumatic stress disorder." It comes as part of a not-so-successful but sincerely educational rap about recent Irish history. The line has its appropriate effect.
(The song includes a stranagely Machiavellian line that speaks to the shitstorm we're currently wading through and stirring up: "An American army regulation says you mustn't kill more than 10 percent of a nation because to do so causes permanent psychological damage." That's one grim trial and error scheme.)
And I'm thinking of this today because 9/11 information is being jammed down our throats. And because that makes me think about what is happening down in the minds of people in Iraq and Israel and Palestine and Lebanon, what is happening down in the minds of people way out in Wymoing and in Atlanta and everywhere.
I don't find a tremendous amount of importance to numbers ending in 5 or 0. I don't feel any significance to being five years from 9.11.2001. The 5 shouldn't make one feel more or less, but maybe it's a necessary cultural waypoint, a reminder that people should evaluate their feelings from time to time.
But I found myself unable to look away from the 9/11 documentary aired last night about the French filmmaking brothers based within a firehouse close to the World Trade Centers...how everyone in the company, save for the minister, survived even though all of them save for one probationary firefighter and a filmmaker were in one of the towers when the first one fell.
I avoided this film when it first came out. I've avoided the two dramas released this year about 9/11.
Yet last night I watched it holding my head and feeling sick. (I feel sick just writing about it.) I tried to watch football instead but kept turning back.
The sounds of the suicides were haunting.
I woke up from that sound punctuating a dream but the dream had left all but my heart.
This is the same thing that happened to me five years ago. For a number of months I kept waking with the feeling of having dreamed about plane crashes, but only one thin horrible postcard image remained in my thoughts--the plane hitting the towers as caught on film perfectly and by chance by one of the French filmmakers.
I don't know what unfolded in those dreams. They made my heart race. They kept me from sleeping. But I don't want to know what went on in them. I think I'm the sort who'd rather bury stress (which is not to say I think we ought to forget these things). It's just that I rarely understand how one achieves closure.
There are just some things we'll never talk out. I'm curious to know if this is something felt by the generations of Japanese directly affected by the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It caught me quite by surprise one day while watching a British detective movie when a character told another about "closure," for he said it was an American concept. He suggested it was a nice idea, one maybe they needed in their own culture, but there was a certain reserve in the tone that signed a distrust.
-cK
(The song includes a stranagely Machiavellian line that speaks to the shitstorm we're currently wading through and stirring up: "An American army regulation says you mustn't kill more than 10 percent of a nation because to do so causes permanent psychological damage." That's one grim trial and error scheme.)
And I'm thinking of this today because 9/11 information is being jammed down our throats. And because that makes me think about what is happening down in the minds of people in Iraq and Israel and Palestine and Lebanon, what is happening down in the minds of people way out in Wymoing and in Atlanta and everywhere.
I don't find a tremendous amount of importance to numbers ending in 5 or 0. I don't feel any significance to being five years from 9.11.2001. The 5 shouldn't make one feel more or less, but maybe it's a necessary cultural waypoint, a reminder that people should evaluate their feelings from time to time.
But I found myself unable to look away from the 9/11 documentary aired last night about the French filmmaking brothers based within a firehouse close to the World Trade Centers...how everyone in the company, save for the minister, survived even though all of them save for one probationary firefighter and a filmmaker were in one of the towers when the first one fell.
I avoided this film when it first came out. I've avoided the two dramas released this year about 9/11.
Yet last night I watched it holding my head and feeling sick. (I feel sick just writing about it.) I tried to watch football instead but kept turning back.
The sounds of the suicides were haunting.
I woke up from that sound punctuating a dream but the dream had left all but my heart.
This is the same thing that happened to me five years ago. For a number of months I kept waking with the feeling of having dreamed about plane crashes, but only one thin horrible postcard image remained in my thoughts--the plane hitting the towers as caught on film perfectly and by chance by one of the French filmmakers.
I don't know what unfolded in those dreams. They made my heart race. They kept me from sleeping. But I don't want to know what went on in them. I think I'm the sort who'd rather bury stress (which is not to say I think we ought to forget these things). It's just that I rarely understand how one achieves closure.
There are just some things we'll never talk out. I'm curious to know if this is something felt by the generations of Japanese directly affected by the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It caught me quite by surprise one day while watching a British detective movie when a character told another about "closure," for he said it was an American concept. He suggested it was a nice idea, one maybe they needed in their own culture, but there was a certain reserve in the tone that signed a distrust.
-cK
posted by cK at 08:22
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