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boundary 2 29.1 (2002) 272-288



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MEMORANDA
TO: boundary 2 readership
FROM: boundary 2 editors and contributors
DATE: (varies)
RE: 9/11/01

Lindsay Waters

(10/13/01)
Life against Death

In Memory of My Neighbor, Paul Friedman, Murdered September 11, 2001,
and for Audrey Ades, His Wife, and Richard Harry Hyun Friedman, His Son

caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus broken shoe the vast highschool caw caw Visions of the Lord

–Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

We Cannot Go On

Strange vigils we've been keeping for our dead while around us dimly the battlefield spreads. How to continue? What to continue doing? What could it make a difference to do in the face of death on this scale? Some days it seems that the guiding words are the line that states that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but then I think we must fight falling into the abyss with any tool available. In the face of such horror, shouldn't theorizing just stop? War is the matrix within which all relations between the living are killed, whereas art is the matrix in which new possibilities for living are envisioned. The act of violence that started this process was a high-concept strike against people and the symbolic process itself. It is imperative to try to grasp what it was in its essentials.

The days since terror struck I have felt like a sleepwalker, like the ones I saw in the old Life magazines from 1942 marching to Bataan after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and seized the Philippines. In the pictures the walkers seemed to have immense difficulty moving forward because they needed to console children and spouses, and they wanted most of all to lie down and die. Sleepwalking now seems so normal that I wonder if it didn't begin a long time ago. 1 About thirty-five years ago the big cities of the United States fell into decline. That is when the World Trade Center arose, opening in 1972 and 1973. But things had been looking up recently. By [End Page 272] the '90s a big change had taken place: Manhattan was almost, once again, the brightly lit riverboat she'd been in the early twentieth century, and her crowds looked like nothing so much as the passengers on the Mississippi steamer the Fidèle in Melville's novel The Confidence Man. From Tribeca, Soho, Chelsea, on to 57th and 59th Streets on up to Broadway near Columbia to 125th Street, the city was hopping with people from everywhere in the world. "Though always full of strangers, [Manhattan, like Melville's Fidèle] continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them, with strangers still more strange." 2 It felt like it was once again the number one, preeminent global city.

In the '60s in America there was a feeling that life had to be lived in the streets. There was dancing in the streets; there were marches in the streets. Democracy was in the streets until the streets erupted in a violence that was followed by long silence. But by the '90s many of us felt the only place to find life would have to be in the privacy of our homes under the headphones, in front of the tube. And so "life came to be lived underground." 3 It was a time of great public complacency, so great that a sense of foreboding came upon some of us. The strong affective response audiences had to movies like The Truman Show and the rise of environmental movements indicated that some people felt the urge to wake up from the dream that these sunny days could continue forever. And by the late '90s some were daring to say that the identity politics that had become the norm since the '60s had become a trap, and some of us were eager to escape from what I call the Age of Incommensurability, according to which people made it a virtue not to understand the ways of other peoples. 4

Some people were asking themselves...

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