09.12.01

If you read my journal entry for september 11, 2001, you'll know how my day started out.

So, skipping these minor details, i won't bother going into background. I'm sure September 11, 2001 will live in the collective American mind, complete with it's cross refrences and antecdotes just fine without me giving you any introduction.

Of course a day like this, this is monumental. Whether it's good or bad, it's momumental, and people will be talking about it for hundreds of years to come, it'll be in text books, it'll be in carved monuments, it'll have it's own name, like D-Day.

So i can't just sit at home and watch the news. I need involvement in this.

gathering my camera and a notepad and pencil, i prowled the small WPI campus, acute to the difference made in the activities and behavior of the american people.

The campus was almost dead. Air blew thick, cool gusts, the sun was shiny yellow, and the sky was blue with a few puffy clouds. It should have been a beautiful day.

Along the institute rd entrance, aside from the eerie quietness of the campus, I didn't notice any real changes. It could have been between classes for all the difference. The first thing I noticed, aside from the lack of people, was a single white sheet taped to a bench, "Prayer Tonight @ 7 PM at the Park." Two football players walked by, vaguely noticing my intent on the paper. I was, after all, the only moving thing in thier sight. As I stood in front of the bench, waiting for the wind to die down and the paper to flatten out, they slowed down and stood behind me to read what i was looking at with what must have seemed like reverence. We three silently observed and assimilated this new knowledge, this thing that was occuring directly in relation to the day's events.

"So it's not a joke. Thousands of people are dead, and it's all true, because tonight at seven PM, people will be holding their minds and bodies still in a group prayer." I thought about all this, as i watched the paper flutter in the wind. Already, I was noticing the other white flyers that had been previously invisible, lined along the brick walkway.

I took a picture of the flyer, recorded the specs on the image, and walked up to the entrance of a building. Classes Cancelled. Another example of the change in plans of a couple hundred people in an isolated, private school. I took a picture of that, too.

The campus center, i had read in one of my emails, was holding multiple screen showings of the news in various rooms. This, i suppose, is the place to be.

It wasn't until i got to the fountain in the middle of campus that i noticed how eerily silent everything was. there was no sound of distant traffic, no drone of a professor's lecture from any nearby buildings. No people talking on the walkway. It was as if the people had already started thier prayer, and i'm sure, most of them had.

The silence become deafening near the campus center. there were a few clumps of somber looking people walking in and out, all in no great rush, walking with thier shoulders slumped and their eyes leveled a little towards the ground. No one spoke.

sandwich boards standing outside the campus center had flyers stapled to their sides, all the wpi activities had been delayed, put off until the next day, or cancelled. I shot those too.

Inside the campus center, adults in suits and business attire littered the lobby. they all smiled and joked and made exaggerated arm movements, in unconcious efforts to lighten the mood of what was to be a very long, dark day. thier voices, however, never rose above library level.

In the lounges, the odeum, the room with pool tables on it, large and small screens were set up with fold out chairs facing them. Most of the chairs were filled with more somber eyed people. It looked like a funereal. It was a funereal.

People who had no chairs stood toward the back of the rooms, thier arms crossed over thier chests, as if holding themselves, their shoulders slightly slumped, eyes glazed over but facing the televisions, watching over and over and over the world trade centers with giant gaping maws in thier sides tumble like giant elevators to the ground. Watching the images of people clad in business suits running towards and past cameras, followed closely by thick, ashy clouds of soot and dust. I felt a wierd deja'vu, thinking of the images i saw in my head when i learned about the victims of mt vesuvius in pompeii in fourth grade... Watching people tumble like jacks out of the windows of crumbling buildings.

I took pictures of this too. But only one. It was recording the moment, like any wartime photographer. But it felt like invading a wake.

Images of the empty wedge, empty quad, empty buildings and classrooms. Images of people watching television all day long, curiousity mixed with a sense of duty. Everyone knows that today is a mark in history. And few want to miss it.

I set out today to try to record and temporary and permanent changes. Worcester isn't anywhere near as affected by these occurances as in say NY, or even Boston. At least, not yet.

There weren't many physical changes, which is partly a shame, since i wanted to capture alterations with photography. But there is silence. And there is the hum and mumble of a radio coming out of every gas station garage and every room you pass with a television. In more populated places, with televisions lining the glass store-fronts, i can imagine all screens focused on news broadcasts, people lined up thickly to observe what is going on. It's like the death of JFK. So there is sound.

there is also frame of mind. we went from a self-involved little country where 99% of it's citizens had no idea what we are doing with other countries, and 50% dont' even know where the middle east is, into a people shocked and aghast, like being woken up on a calm night to the sound of gunshot...or to being shot. Everywhere in America, people are thinking "Why?" and of course..."who?" The president and the left over pentagon people are screaming for revenge, their eyes and voices saturated in the fire of payback. the families of those killed, wounded, even unemployed, once they get over the initial shock, will have that fire in thier eyes too, i'm sure.

And as for me. There is fear of war. Not a mortal fear for myself, but a fear for the people, mostly the men, of my generation. the night before, i had pleaded with drooly to flee to canada if he was ever drafted. he told me it wasn't an issue, he woudln't be drafted, there was no war. well, now, there is a fire in the american eyes, and that fire will call for violence. If not war, then at least a large amount of troops and weaponry pointed in the general direction of the middle east.

As of yet, no one is sure why. as of yet, we only have a good suspicion of who. as of yet, we don't even know how many names will be on monuments to be built a year from now, right where the world trade centers used to tower.

It feels, i can only assume, as it must have felt for the american people during pearl harbor. Instead this time, there aren't spoons clinking out watery SOS signals, it's cell phone calls from a mile underneath rubble. And this time, there are a lot more grieving families, a lot more civilians lost, damaged cities and a need for blood drives.

So if people ask me if i think we will go to war, I say yes. Because i know that vengeful fires will burn long after the buildings are back up. Maybe not immediately...Bush isn't FDR, bush isn't even big bird. But eventually.