Introduction to 'Eastern Seaboard - September Morning'
The morning of The Events, I was awakened by a phone call from Karen Cypriote. “Wake up,” I heard from the answering machine. “The world is coming to an end.” I was neither surprised nor agitated: I was calm, deliberate. “Finally,” was all I said as I arose. No wonder. Raised on Götterdämmerung, my contemporaries and I have always lived in the rain shadow of Hiroshima.
Why have I come to call them “The Events”? Because a date is just a date, and yet, to be concrete is to invite pain. One way or another, it hardly matters. Everyone knows what I mean. Until other events intervene, I suppose.
From my chair before the TV all day, I found myself writing down idle details: insouciant seagulls glide across the long shot of Manhattan; The USSs George Washington and John F.
Kennedy are diverted; the meaning of “triage” is explained; fathers try to get to P.S. 89; Fidel Castro expresses his solidarity; the cloud is silvery by night; the next night it is gold.
For a day or so, the eerie objectivity of shock seemed to reign; protestations of horror aside, exigency seemed to preclude the coloring of reports with much spun stuff. I knew it could not last. Soon, sentimentality was due. Symbolism, and the giving of portentous names, would hold sway before long.
Writing for me is like a bodily function. I do it whether I want to or not. I knew it was silly, pointless, presumptuous to write poetry on such a day. Since the matter was not optional, however, I gave more thought than is my wont to what I was about to do. I could write no
paeans: others would write them better. I could write no laments: unfettered, I sink readily into bathos. I resolved just to try to write something with a little dignity, avoiding sentimentality if I could. I have no idea if I succeeded.
Two things conspired to inspire me. My job at the time required a long unconventional commute down back roads through the teeming Pennsylvania countryside. Natural images of eastern North America in autumn suffused my brain. And I was struck, watching TV and looking out my garret window, by the clarity and brilliance of the day in question. One of the strangest of many strangenesses: eschewing the dark and stormy nights we have been indoctrinated to expect, horror chose broad daylight to stalk about in.
Symbolism would be superfluous. I knew that, whatever I wrote, it would mean something different from, something other than, what it once would have, just as everything did: a tree, a child, a book, a good deed. Mere juxtaposition would be more than enough.
And I shall never see a clear and bright and blue sky the same again.
Page(s) 28
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