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Monday, September 11, 2023

Grinding Slowly

The mill of the gods grinds slow, yet exceedingly fine.

The expression is itself older than dirt, its originator lost in the dust of history. But I think of it today as teachers and parents face one of the great challenges of lurching forward as history shrinks in the rear-view mirror. 

Today, my local fire department is hanging an American flag, but my local newspaper has not a word about 9/11. My news feed has scanty mention of this anniversary. 9/11 , it would seem, has become one of those events that we mark on "special" anniversaries--the fives or tens. And yet, today, adults will try to convey to young humans the impact and import of 9/11 even as we grown-ups wrestle with the shuddering echoes of that day in our bones.

Nobody in elementary school, high school, college--basically nobody short of their mid-twenties--has any memory of that day at all, and we can show them films and news footage and dramatizations that struggle to keep the events fresh and alive and they won't get it. They can learn the facts, but they will never feel the impact, feel the shot down to the very bone, of that day and what came immediately after. Our priest yesterday quoted a four year old-- "September 11? Oh, that means they're going to show the planes again." We study the artifacts, the outcomes of events, but nothing recaptures the human gut-kick of living through it. 

It has always been this way. History is littered with these moments, some huge and important and some small and less significant. The Challenger explosion. The first Star Wars. The fall of the Berlin Wall. First steps on the moon. If you didn't live through it, you don't get it.

I was six when JFK was shot. I can't claim to have memories. Maybe memories or memories. Sad grownups. Look further back: JFK's death was as close in time to Pearl Harbor as we are right now to the 9/11 attacks. That day was supposed to live in infamy; how many Americans could name the date right now? Remember the Alamo? I doubt it.

The further back we travel in time, the further events get from the bone. The Norman Conquest meant a social upheaval of Britain, a displacement and sort of cultural subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons, and while most English speakers don't know the Battle of Hastings from the Isle of Sodor, we live with the effects today. Why are Latin-based words considered more refined, proper, and scientific? Thank the Norman Conquest. But the Conquest means nothing to us on any kind of emotional level. Ditto the earlier conquest of Brits and Picts by the Angles and the Saxons. We get the vaguest echoes of these events in tales of King Arthur, stories that in their various popular forms have become hopelessly jumbled, as if centuries from now folks watched stories about Marshall Dillon patrolling Seattle in a 1963 Corvette while armed with a laser pistol in hopes of protecting the locals from attacks by Egyptian soldiers riding elephant mummies. 

An awful lot of grief and pain and trouble has just been ground into dust by time, and that is a human thing, both on the macro scale and on the personal level. 

Part of the trick is to preserve the truth even past the point when people are carrying in their bones. And that's hard because when you feel that truth in your bones, you want to make other people feel it in theirs, and you mostly can't. You can try, as we see too many people do, to somehow conjure up those same feelings by trying to reproduce the rage and reaction to something that's so wrong. But manufactured outrage, like manufactured orange flavoring, always misses the mark, always turns out to be some other thing. Stray too far and you end up sounding ridiculous, like the author who keeps pitching to me about how white folks also suffer from racism directed against them. 

We seek remembrance in ritual as well, a song or act or form that we can repeat, so that something like a memory of a memory of a memory hangs somewhere close to the bone. But over time we lose the thing as the ritual replaces it, becomes the thing itself.

Once the path of raw, immediate, right-now feeling has been traveled to the bone, that path is closed off. It's the product of a particular moment, a particular intersection of time, place and the person, and nobody will ever stand at that intersection again. After that moment, another path is required, a path made of thought and understanding, of comprehension and constant wrestling with what it was and what it means. Maybe that path can be opened by a bit of genius art or writing, perhaps by laborious explanation and discussion and reflection and search. But once the wheels have moved past that moment and started to grind, you can never get back there again. 

Some older people are going to get frustrated, even angry with some younger people today. Some middle school student, confronted with a sober lesson about 9/11, is going to crack wise, fail to Take It Seriously. Some adult, trying to convey the impact of a moment that they will never, can never forget, will become frustrated, even angry, at some young people who just can't get it. That's okay. That's where we are; the place where 9/11 recedes into the past.

And this is what language is for. This is what teaching is for. We use language to convey our thoughts and feelings, to somehow move them over that wide gap that separates human from human. We try to understand and we try to explain and we try to help people get it, or at least some piece of it. Yes, we use language for simple things like shopping lists and IKEA instructions, and we use it for immoral things like trying to convince people that something not-real is real. But our best and highest use is to solve one of our most fundamental human problems.

We experience things, many of which hit right at the bone and shape our understanding of ourselves and the world and how to be in that world, and all of this is important enough to understanding ourselves and the people around us that we try to somehow convey it, to power it across the gap to other humans around us, and we have no better way to do that than grunts and symbols and marks created to symbolize those grunts and symbols, all resting on the very individual brain bank of experience and knowledge and perception. It is such hard work. Such hard work. And we never stop trying to do it, imperfect attempt after imperfect attempt. 

It is the hardest trick of history--how much weight to carry? To carry too much of the weight of history breaks us; it is natural and healthy that the wheels of time grind so much to dust, leaving just the important bits to carry. It is unspeakably hard for those who are trapped under the weight of a history they can't escape or carry alone. But there are always with us people who want to declare history weightless right now, to alter and reduce it to a weightless nothing so that we don't have to feel the discomfort of carrying the weight of too-recent sins. But weightless history is not good for us. Carrying some weight of the past strengthens us to walk into the future. The debate of what to carry, what to feel, what to understand--that's the challenge of history, of living as time-bound beings carried steadily into an unknown future and away from an unclear past. 

So I am in favor of patience for the people who are trying to do that work (and impatience for the people who are deliberately trying to distort and manipulate the process). And today, on top of everything else, I remember not just the complex and complicated horror of that day, but the miraculous struggle of trying to connect with each other, to share and convey what we think we understand about how to be fully human in the world. 


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