Groundzeroland

. . . the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.

—Don DeLillo, Mao II

It was late in the evening of September 11 and a network special on the day's events was coming to a close. A famous news anchor was saying—these were his final words, solemnly delivered—that tomorrow, when New Yorkers awaken, they will awaken to an altered skyline. Not words about the memory of the dead and the imagination of their terrifying destruction. Nothing to the effect that "our hearts go out" to the ruined families and friends of the dead. Instead, words about a rupture in the perceptual field. A "defamiliarization," as the aesthetic theory of the Russian formalists would have it: that was the deep horror we were left to contemplate by the famous news anchor, who we must not rush to conclude was a shallow, unfeeling man. Let us recall that for most of us—the very greatest majority of us—the thousands slaughtered are abstract. We have no personal connections with them. We never really did, or ever really will, grieve for them, though we may think we do so in the world made by Oprah, where human beings assume God's role of feeling everybody's pain.

The famous anchor was in effect predicting that New Yorkers would have an experience of the sort prized by the most advanced imaginative writers and art theorists of the last two centuries. In the perceptual world something new would collapse into view. And tomorrow's newness—awful, to be sure, in more than one sense—would be signified by an absence of two heretofore boring buildings; a hole in the familiar. Those New Yorkers without connection to the dead, the injured, and the displaced would grieve (and fear) not for the dead, the injured, and the displaced, but for themselves, undergoing now the terror of the new.

And the rest of us, who do not live in New York? We would like to be invited to make a pilgrimage. We would take our children and our disposable cameras. Acquire the tickets. Then wait in line for as long as it takes to enter and to view. It would please us greatly if Mr. Giuliani, America's mayor, would announce on CNN that we are all welcome to visit Groundzeroland.

* * *

This much do we learn from Anthony Tommasini, a classical music critic for the New York Times, whose provocative report was widely reprinted in American dailies: on September 16, 2001, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German pioneer of electronic music and a figure of international renown, was asked at a news conference in Hamburg for his reaction to the terrorist strikes in the United States. He responded by calling the attack on the World Trade Center "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos," and went on to speak in apparent awe of the terrorists' achievement of "something in one act" that "we couldn't even dream of in music," in which "people practice like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for a concert, and then die."

This is our fascination: the transformation of the World Trade Center into a narrative of spectacular images. Terrorism for the camera. The small section of smoking rubble, that pathetic piece of the Pentagon, a squat and ugly building, holds no appeal. But Stockhausen is not interested in the images. It is the event itself that entrances him. The event itself is what he means by "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos." His incendiary artistic analogy is seriously intended, and he pursues it: "You have people so concentrated on one performance, and then five thousand people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment." In the face of such achievement, might Stockhausen be the lesser artist? A touch of envy—envy of terrorism—appears to creep in. "I couldn't do that. In comparison with that, we're nothing as...