Nineteen Rooms for September 11
Jill Magi
1.
Though I could not see anything on the sidewalk, each step forward made a crunching sound.
I felt this layer of debris while walking to work from the subway ten years ago in October. All
day, dump trucks took pieces of the ruin to the pier, to ship away. By mid afternoon, sanitation trucks came through to wash down the streets. I noted this from my seventh floor office
window, nine blocks north of the site, imagining how other events of history are pushed
toward the spectral. Years later, I learn of mothers who walk the surface of a landfill miles
away, surveying, bending down to pick up a body never again whole. They travel to the
Middle East to discuss this with mothers there.
2.
Other points on the coordinates of event, proximity, bodies:
My boss sat with his eyes closed. Her hands hovered above his head. I watched, entered the
room, and sat down. The college ordered us to continue as soon as possible, so a colleague
invited her friend to give us free Reiki treatments. The official emphasis was to go on as normal. My sinuses cleared for those ten minutes, I thanked her, and she responded, “It is amazing
how our bodies can heal themselves.” I did not believe her.
We divided up the names and called each student, speaking with them or leaving a message to
call back and check in. An electronic mailbox contains recordings of a roll call of survivors. I
still say, “Two of our students died.” Even though I can remember the name of only one, the
doubling feels true.
3.
4.
A blade ran across the surface of my belief in everyone’s right to empathy:
During a train ride away from the city — I wanted to get several states away that November —
I ran a fever. The next day, during a hot shower, something fleshy dislodged from the back of
my throat. At the Thanksgiving table, a friend chastised me for thinking that the violence was
terror and unique and mine. He yelled, “Rosewood was an act of terror!” and though I felt the
floor drop away, I did not disagree. He is my elder. He was right; he was wrong. It was my city;
it is not.
I took this anecdote into the folds of my mind as if placing it inside an archive box entitled,
“To want to be held by everyone this fall and not that happening.” I researched Rosewood,
others. A steady silence began: an investigation: a different body: a new book.
5.
I think that I will not live as long.
6.
7.
While it was a the worst day that never I we have ever experienced, it is was is the day that
birthed provided still provides information about violence and continuance
[disgust at above sentence]
[to wish it never happened]
[I changed]
8.
9.
We gasped as we watched, leaving our mouths open for dangerous air. First instinct, to
open. Second, cover. This is well documented and we watched others watching, creating
a shared body.
I reach out and carefully pull fingers away, translating, during this ten years. Impossible
because there is not any one thing to say, yet I need to think together and apart, at a dinner
table, over a notebook, a sketchpad, inside a frame, this screen.
Do your own. Draw a floor plan. Each thing learned equals a room. Walk in and around.
Or walk the perimeter of the site. Circle it seven times and as you go, touch all sharp edges
without sanding them down. Declare, as you leave, “I remain, yours,”
10.
11.
When I visualize my body before that day, I walk quickly, pitched slightly forward to get there on
time, I am of above average height, and I am going to work. I see my skin, then through to my
bones, then red organs, connective tissues slightly transparent, off-white. There is uninhibited
pulsation, circulation, and what seem like simple and direct signals sent from top to bottom,
and reverse.
When I see my body now, I begin inside with the image of an internal prosthesis: a peculiar
instrument inserted low, around my belly, at the base of me. This prosthesis—less a replacement
and more like the origins of the word: to add, to put—is lightweight and hinged, made of something between wood and bone. It is star-like, bent at various angles, almost a compass, almost
a ruler, collapsible and with moveable arms, a sculpture that looks functional.
But its purpose is questionable. Does it hold my organs in place, boosting the work of my bones,
my frame? Or is it more outwardly focused: does it receive signal, instantly triangulating this
information with others around me, in my city, in the world, in history? Is a signal it detects called
“violent loss”? Because that seems like a horrible magnet to carry, because then I would be
doomed to constant tension, I want to ask: Does this instrument facilitate regenerative growth?
But it is not a question of “being the better for it.” It is impossible to excise this instrument.
It is incorporated.
This is what it measures: sound of a low-flying plane, a breeze coming in from the south, a war,
two wars, an angle of light, losses sudden or prolonged. It is the engine behind my decisive
exits: “Leave this space” comes to me as a signal and I unapologetically follow its directive,
even if exiting seems rude.
12.
There is a device called the umbrella swift, an expandable wooden framework used to hold a
skein of yarn not yet organized into a ball. The weaver or the knitter cranks the handle to sort
the tangled thread. Translation: threads of information wrap around this structure inside my
body in order to work out knots.
13.
14.
My ten-year task has been to familiarize myself with this prosthesis, and accept it by shedding
ideas of the natural body-citizen who is allowed to fixate only on the need to purchase a good
coffee before work, or simple ideas of self improvement, or knowledge that can be credentialed,
or the goal of a long life. To abandon the idea of the purity of desire, purity of soft tissue, and the
purity of my singular right to arrive wherever and whenever I choose, safely. For example, before
the event I recorded the total hours I spent writing during the week, nervously monitoring my
desire. After the event, this journal of progress is blank.
Instead, I run my hand over my body on occasion and feel small irregularities: as if a rib has
moved slightly out of place, or my pelvic cradle has spawned a new bone, a new route, some
misplaced horn. I take care of this spot, noticing. A week later, it disappears, and I wonder if it
was ever there. None of this is provable.
Running my hand over the façade of the old bank building on Wall Street, I note shrapnel marks:
from another earlier attack on networks of economic power and not the nation-state. Nothing is
new to the city, but to the nerves just below the skin of my hand, everything is. A security guard
approaches the site, the scar. I drop my hand, eyes, and walk away.
15.
16.
Four sentences to begin an autobiography abandoned:
The desire to touch the outside walls of office buildings was latent, suppressed.
Tuned not to commerce, and not only to the political, I am now a body tuned to a third space
of possibly unproductive relation: art.
I am drenched in skepsis.
I have not rejoined a church, but I pray and no longer campaign.
17.
18.
In a few days, a document disposal company will come to pick up my old notebooks. Anticipating
this, I stamped each with a number, photographed its cover, and tried to ignore most of the
contents of this collection totaling ninety-nine.
Midway through my project came a bright yellow book and I paused to look inside. Notebook
000036 contains an entry marked “7:30 a.m.” on the upper left corner of a page, and “9/11/01”
on the right. I note this anomaly: no other pages contain such a conscientious date and time
stamp.
Next entry: a list of names and phone numbers and comments such as “she is OK” and “left
message.”
In the notebooks from the years after, my handwriting is loose, I am not troubled by love, I am
trying to leave a full-time job, and poetry takes hold. I decide to keep all notebooks from that
fall onward, keeping a box of evidence for this conclusion:
Without the event, I do not think that I know art as well, if at all. If, previously, art was an
experience to collect, it is now a way to live.
I cup my hands around these words, making a frame: poetry city.
19.
Revision to room eighteen:
To decide to ignore the ten-year mark. Frame suppression as possible radical act, survival. Hands
not as cup: the event sifts through until another generation and geological layer, another fall.
Or, memory un-landscaped. For example, a Holocaust survivor who makes trips to Germany to
speak to school children and to tell public officials, “Please, no more memorials.” I remember
documentary images of him sitting in small chairs, next to children, around a table, listening. He
spoke, gently correcting, nearly crying as attitudes surfaced, possibly adjusted, and receded. A
classroom is alive and enacts the book, the memorial, the museum, the artwork that evaporates
as it remains.
As in that morning: before work, before I heard reports of what was happening, I sat eight miles
away in bright stillness and wrote, “Who will find me intact and emerging?” Ten years later, I
imagine the concrete of the slurry wall at the site, holes in its surface allow moisture to escape,
writing, “Intact is impossible and emerging is always,” and my notebook is open.
Nineteen Rooms for September 11 is a work created for the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 by
writer, poet, and visual artist Jill Magi. The essay draws, in part, on Magi’s experience working
in Lower Manhattan and as a writer-in-residence with LMCC, and continues her exploration
of body, meaning, memorialization and narrative.
Jill Magi’s book SLOT, to which she refers in this essay, is forthcoming this fall from Ugly
Duckling Presse. SLOT combines text and image and is a lyrical response to Jill’s investigation
of theories of memory, museum design, as well as art and memorialization. Her other
books include Cadastral Map (Shearsman 2011), Torchwood (Shearsman 2008), and Threads
(Futurepoem 2007), and her visual works have been exhibited at the Textile Arts Center,
the Brooklyn Arts Council, apexart, and Pace University. Jill was a 2011 artist-in-residence
at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, and a 2006-07 writer-in-residence with the LMCC
Workspace Program.
Nineteen Rooms for September 11 is commissioned by LMCC.
Copyright Jill Magi 2011
www.insite.lmcc.net