A moment of silence.
Today is September 9th, 20211. A year ago the skies were Martian Orange in San Francisco. Just prior to that I took a solo trip to the desert and contemplated my mortality.
Two days from now will be the 20th anniversary of 9/11. There are some wounds we are not meant to heal from.
Three days from today will be the 600th day of the pandemic. Four years ago I was playing rugby in New Haven and definitely got a mild concussion. I said nothing about it. I got up and pretended I was good. I did split my forehead open right above and within my eyebrow. I got six stitches. Five years ago I was in New York City, depressed, but freed of the environment that caused such turmoil.
And six years ago, I was aimless. I’d returned from Karlsruhe, Germany and folded myself right into the linen closet of engineering. Dark, cold, lonely, untouched.
I want to think about drowning. Every poet and writer has had something soul-fracturously brilliant to say about water, and about drowning, and suffocation, and slow death. Toxicity, asphyxiation, apoplexy. Attrition, languishing, how much we fight or don’t fight, accept, reflect upon, and release ourselves.
People drown every day, b.
I’ll connect two things. One, Netflix’s The Old Guard, in which an Iron Maiden is used as a torture device to imprison an immortal being for eternity. Sisyphean and Promethean2 in effect, the prisoner drowns, eternally, dying, undying, dying again. Solitary confinement, its own decompositional and dissolving punishment, was enough. Spikes, and water, and salt, and darkness but add to it. I’m sure small fishes that can flit their ways through the eyelets eventually feast on decomposing flesh, should it get to that state on a non-human.
And two, the engineering mechanics of fluids. Suspensions of dust, particulates, gases, everything that moves through and with fluids, the air, the water, magma, they behave in an ordered fashion. Consistently. Even the uncertainty and randomness is prescriptive. I bring this up on the eve of the 20th year-in-commemoration of the WTC attack3. The way those towers fell, how concrete and insulation and wood splintered and disintegrated, the wind path and forces and everything in totality, was governed by gravity and natural law. A consequence of (evil, if principled4, as always) man, confined by and subject to what has been and what always will be. When you learn things as an engineer, you learn to approximate, to assume, to understand, to appreciate the complexity, but focus on the principle of the thing.
Those stuck in the clouded fog of war, those stuck in the choked dust haboob of the mid-morning of the 11th, certainly drowned. Many died immediately. Many were forced to die thousands of times over since then.
Drowning doesn’t seem to just happen once, it is a fixed state that folds its way through time. I, and many of us drown ourselves, others are drowned. Not everybody drowns in the same fluids. Some rot and expose our entrails, some plague our brains, some plague our hearts, some plague our dreams.
Torture, is imposed, subject to natural law, and sentenced to permanence, until perishing, and is subsequently passed on thoroughly through space and time and legacy and memory and kinship.
I’ve inserted myself5 into a narrative of torture, death, 9/11, a plague, and it would be a stupid shortcut to say well hey, “something something…American experiences as a Black minoritized person…something something” huh. I’m just writing about things that still hurt us and sting as if the seeds on a strawberry could sense my hesitation and decide to swell in my throat in response. What should be sweet — memory — causes my hesitation, causes my pain.
I don’t think there’s any amount of therapy, or time, or expressions and recognition of grief, or drowning, or CPR, that can heal us from some things. I don’t think true death absolves us either, as we just pass these things, burdens, pains on to our loved ones.
I hope as we hit 20 years after 9/11 and two years since Covid-19, we begin to learn some things about how to respond to the natural laws of the world that govern our behavior as we respond to trauma, to torture, to drowning. I don’t think it’ll stop the desperation from filling our lungs and depriving us of oxygen. But it might make drowning again and again and again a little more familiar.
Elsewhere:
Remember, I just say stuff as it crosses my mind. Header Image Credit
Greek isn’t overrated, but the abusive haranguing and exhaustion of their mythology as a cudgel for white hegemony to justify its crude cruelty is tiring as hell. Ayn Rand n nem was really dragging it with whatever the hell she was on. Really, I’m curious to continue looking back into who all else had myths about the theft of fire for the use of humankind. The Vedic texts have one, Agni, and the Ojibwe have one, Nanabozho.
Really, I struggle to think of it, and to name it (refer to it as) something other than 9/11. To break out of national myth and remember the world as it is, without the exceptionalism, despite the indelible, seared smoked branded, signed sealed delivered, markings the date and event has had on the nation of my birth and inhabitance. Saying nothing of the real tragedy and anguish of the loss of life, and, I hesitate to say, the symbolic assault on the most fundamental of Americanness: property, and symbolic notions of wealth production.
Niggas always get in trouble talking rigorously and critically about serious shit. Fuck them dudes, period. I hope they suffer in the fiery expanse of hell, or the afterlife. Amaterasu! May curses follow them from here to there and to the next life. They adhered to what they was finna do though. That’s all.
Consciously; unfortunately. Yes I know it’s incomprehensible and useless and no I do not do this with a single whiff of self-importance. Besides what business does someone who was barely in elementary school on the other side of the country remember vividly about that time? More than enough.