September 11, 2001 --- Remembering

{In honor of the anniversary of September 11, I am reposting this blog from last year. Peace.)
On the morning of September 11, 2001 artist Judi Rotenberg was working in her studio when her husband, Richard Ross, came into say goodbye. He looked at the picture she was painting and said, "You must be painting that for me." She wrote across the bottom of it the words from the Song of Solomon, "This is my beloved and this is my friend." Her husband went to Logan airport and boarded American Airlines Flight #11. This is for Judi and for all the rest who lost their beloveds and their friends that day, five years ago.

The Dead of September 11
by Toni Morrison, written September 13, 2001

Some have God's words; others have songs of comfort for the bereaved. If I can pluck courage here, I would like to speak directly to the dead-the September dead.

Those children of ancestors born in every continent on the planet: Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas… born of ancestors who wore kilts, obis, saris, geles, wide straw hats, yarmulkes, goatskin, wooden shoes, feathers, and cloths to cover their hair. But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed and ungovernable; all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil-wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister, whether born of a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of hyperbole; of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness; ranking them, calculating their higher or lower status among others of its kind.

Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. Because the dead are free, absolute; they cannot be seduced by blitz.

To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say-no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.

And I have nothing to give either-except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot of its box of flesh to understand, as you have done, the wit of eternity: its gift of unhinged release tearing through the darkness of its knell.