It is sobering–and often plain awful–to be reminded, every so often, of just how precarious our circumstances really are in the steadily turning cogs of machinery we call “civilization.” I’m looking at photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s behemoth monograph, Aftermath, documenting the cleanup of rubble in “the forbidden city,” site of the fallen World Trade Center towers post-9/11.
The local library has set it out for display, buried, oddly, in a stack of home renovation books. My God. How quickly we shed the veneer of custom and class in terror and uncertainty. In one photo, notes (“I still have hope!” or “We love you Paul”) and tags (“Moondog,” “Buffalo P.D.” and “USA!”) are scribbled and smudged on the dusty exterior of a Japanese restaurant, stacked, as in Lascaux, as high as the human hand can reach. In another, a despondent, “Where’s Frank?” casts a haunting pall over an apartment lobby. One minute it was errands and phone calls, coffee and bagels with old friends, cuff links and Brooks Brothers; the next, utter confusion and panic, blood and hot dust, men and women leaping from windows.
A fireman involved in the cleanup operation, many months after that bluebird September day, says Meyerowitz, was christened “The Raven” because of his uncanny knack for retrieving bones from the debris. Human bones. What has become of him? “The Raven,” I mean. The bones, we know, belong to the dead and are easily categorized. It’s the flesh–life–that bewilders. It must be accounted for. It must go on. And these kinds of things are not supposed to happen, aren’t, God forbid, “part of the plan.”
What of Frank? I picture him middle-aged, mustachioed and balding, quick to smile and courteous to his fellow tenants–the kind of guy who’d greet a stranger, too, with a “mornin'” or a “how-are-ya, champ?” I picture him caked in soot, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, in the lobby of the north tower guiding shellshocked office workers out of stairwells. I picture him consulting with policemen, doing his part, a wet rag over his mouth. He doesn’t know what’s happened, but he knows it was fate that placed him there that morning. “Where’s Frank?” I don’t want to, but I imagine he never left.
Photo: Meyerowitz, Joel. Fireman Rescue Crew. 2001. Aftermath. Phaidon Press, 2006. Print.
Impolitic 