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That morning...
Views & Voices
By Professor Robert Mooney
The events of September 11, 2001, galvanized a nation,
including a community of writers compelled to respond
to a painful moment in American history. Robert Mooney,
assistant professor of English at Washington College,
is among 120 poets, fiction writers and essayist represented in
September 11: American Writers Respond,
published this fall by Etruscan Press.
That morning I was completing a revision of a novel that centers on an act of
terrorism, a hostage situation set in 1982 perpetrated by a World War II veteran demanding the return of his son, a soldier missing in action in Vietnam for twelve
years. My intent, my hope, the operative writer's fantasy for this one was to compose a work that could be described as something like Dog Day Afternoon as conceived by Dostoevski and edited by Virginia Woolf--tense action rendering a kind of psychological realism that would examine something essential, or at least interesting, regarding the character of our culture and our time. There is no violence in the novel, only its promise, or proximate intent. But I was steeped in the idea of the imposition of one's will through brute force in the name of a "just cause," the terror of victims, the pontificating conjectures of news hounds, the scrambling of authorities, the excuses of government officials, all of it homespun--that is, distinctly, if not exclusively, American--sprouting through the cracks in our history, spreading over the ground of our shared and eternal present.
Then my wife Maureen, a nurse at the local elementary school, called and told me that the World Trade Center had been struck by a 767 airliner. We assumed it was a terrible accident, but moments after I turned on the television the second tower was hit. Then we learned of the bombing of the Pentagon, object of my own protagonist's wrath, only 65 miles southwest of where I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, close enough for us to receive the Washington TV affiliates, so it was now local news, too. But seeing the disaster unravel on a 13-inch screen forced a psychological distance far greater than the geographic, like watching an event occur through the wrong end of a telescope. It all felt less real to me than the events in the novel I was revising-too much like tricks of the camera for our entertainment, like so many Hollywood clips. But not only was it real, it became personal when, much later, I learned that an old college friend, Billy Minardi, never made it out of Tower One. At the time, I couldn't get hold of friends, the lines were jammed in New York and Washington, who knew what else was going to happen and perhaps was already happening just then. The not-knowing shoved me into a kind of panic of the type I remembered feeling in the early hours of the "Great Blackout" of 1965 that plunged most of the Northeast into darkness and the rumors, at least in my neighborhood, had us under attack from the Russians.
But as September 11 darkened under the horribly multiplying cumulo-nimbus of vaporized brick and steel and human bone, it quickly (too quickly, it seemed) became the consensus that "everything" had "changed forever." Indeed, in the succeeding days and weeks it did begin to seem that even if life did find its way back to being something like "the same," what we would once have called "normal," there would be a different feel to it, a shadowed and shadowy ambience, as though not all lights could be switched back on after the terrible darkening. For a culture that tends to deny death, we were all the more sobered by having to deal with it on such a monstrous scale right here at home. Because the mass-murders were perpetrated in careful orchestration by a people other than us and famously hostile to us and declaring their enmity to be representative of a substantial portion of the world population, these crimes not only have us thinking of ourselves as more of a collective self, as a united people, but also perhaps more curious as to the nature of the supra-American world we have tended to ignore. It is almost as if the force of history itself slammed into us that Tuesday, as though it had been happening without us "out there" somewhere, gathering momentum, powered-disproportionately, and ironically-by our own energy.
This is not to say we or any nation or principality or tribe deserve to be molested by such barbaric acts planned by sociopaths and carried out by indoctrinated minions; it has been difficult for many, though, to ignore the concomitant approbation, if muted--though in some cases outright jubilant--demonstrated in more than a few corners of the world in response to our suffering. Before the events of September 11 even many of our allies were murmuring against our apparent disregard for the concerns and fears and legitimate interests of other peoples in the world. Some of this ill-will, these accusations of arrogance, may simply be part of the burden of having assumed the role of "world leader," being the most powerful, the richest, the most fortuitously positioned, the most historically blessed, for the nonce. Even so, it may provide occasion for us to reconsider the playwright Eugene O'Neill's warning after the Second World War when we were debating whether we should return to a modified isolationism or assume the status of what would come to be called "superpower": "What will it profit us," he asked, paraphrasing Matthew's Gospel, "if we gain the world and lose our soul?" There is no possibility of isolationism in this incredibly shrinking world, and we have learned through this disaster that there are no suburbs in the global village. But if we do, as a people, possess something like a soul to nurture or to lose, we might begin in greater earnest to consider that if we are to lead the world of nations, we first ought to join them more fully. That means that "their" own wishes and desires, "their" sufferings, a comprehension of "their" anguishes, even an empathic (as opposed to simply strategic) understanding of their psychoses, if they be that, might be undertaken as well.
When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist prepares to leave Ireland, he writes in his journal that he means to forge in the smithy of his own soul "the uncreated conscience" of his race." Literature is the conscience of every race, every society, every people. Out of the common material of our language, our novelists and short story writers and poets challenge our certitudes, remind us of the richness of our humanity, speak to the innermost in us, enriching and revivifying our spirit, re-identifying and activating something like a soul. Partaking in the literary endeavor, as writer or as reader, is, if nothing else,
an exercise in empathy. At its best, it places us, often uncomfortably, in the skin of other human beings and offers parallactic perspectives from which it is more difficult not to understand sensibilities foreign to our given experience. Hatred, Graham Greene reminded us, is a failure of the imagination, and our best literature deepens our humanity by cultivating and guiding intimate understanding of other lives. Mohamed Atta, the 33-year-old man who commandeered American Airlines Flight 11 and piloted it into One World Trade Center, could not have had much of an imagination. He could not have nurtured any true sense of empathy, a feel for the lives of people beyond the ken of his daily experience, or his willful myopia regarding what he had experienced-though he had ample opportunity to cultivate if not a magnanimity at least a common decency. He did not know my college friend Billy Minardi; he could not possibly have envisioned fully enough Billy's gentle manner, his ready generosity, his capacity to love and what that meant to so many friends, to his wife Stephanie, to his three children-William, Robert, and Cristine, ages 12, 9 and 5. How could he, and do what he did? And then multiply that cruelty, that egregious and deadly paucity of imagination, that appalling dearth of empathy, by nearly 4000, and then hundreds times that to take into account the aggrieved loved ones. Me?
I want to detest Atta and his cohorts and comfort myself with the nobility and righteousness of that detestation. I want to see these men as not-human, barbaric, soul-less, and wish good riddance to the whole murderous lot of them. If Graham Greene is right, though, I have to consider that even the malfunction of the human heart that plans and executes mass murder and devastation can, somehow, be comprehended, must be understood, and so even as my anger rises against these simple men devoted to their desperate causes, my own heart, such as it is, must go ever further out to them, too, else I end up their comrade in all that we hate.
Robert Mooney is assistant professor of English and director of the O'Neill Literary House. His novel, Father of the Man, was released by Pantheon Books this fall.
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