Dear Brave Souls:
Here is a witness story by a male friend, native to NYC, who saw the Towers come down on September 11th. His piece was written four days later as people walked in Manhattan dropping shatters of heart everywhere as they walked.
They were not only looking for their loved ones, for meaning, for understanding. They were gathering up the threads, preparing to weave story, to think, feel their way through, to add to The Story of Our Times, each in their own way. Like this one… one of the millions… sadly. Bravely. One of the millions who carry the scars of that day still… and yet most… walk on, walk on, into new and renewed life. Even though heavy draped in scar.
A Vision From the Ruins.
by Ned Leavitt
I am an eyewitness to the moment of death of World Trade Tower #1. From my home in Soho I saw in an instant the whole top of the tower begin to collapse in upon itself. I screamed involuntarily to those in the street below, “It’s going, the tower is going!”
And then as if in slow motion it pancaked downward, the solid shape vanishing in a rising plume of black and yellow dust. Just like those perfectly planned demolitions you watch in amazement on TV. And it was gone. A gaping hole in the sky where it used to be.
These images have returned to me again and again both when I’m awake and when I’m asleep. In fact there have been an overwhelming number of images that are crowding into my psyche. But one image has remained with me from the first time I saw it. That is the shell of part of the ruins of the towers reaching to the sky like charred skeletal fingers.
While this is a horrific image it also has a kind of terrible beauty in it. It contains part of the essence of the design of the towers – those distinctive rising ribs that defined the upward energy of the towers… rising to such impossible heights. And it also contains the signature of the essence of their destruction – those distinctive ribs now charred and twisted starkly against the emptiness of the sky.
There has been talk of rebuilding. Of clearing the rubble and removing what is now known as “the pile.” “The pile” is a frightening and almost incomprehensible chaos of destroyed materials, and the desire is to clear away this overwhelming mess is completely understandable. I myself have roamed the streets looking for a way to volunteer to help with the clean up.
But I have also been struck by another vision. As I looked at the images of the ruins of the towers I remembered another ruin. In 1961 I was in Berlin and saw for the first time the “Gedechtniss Kirche” – the shell of a great church that had been bombed during World War II and was left as a memorial while all of Berlin was rebuilt around it.
This ruin had the same kind of terrible beauty that the charred ribs of the trade towers possesses. In 1961, I was a young American with no experience of warm who came and stood in front of that ruined church which had been destroyed almost 20 years before in war.
That ruin impacted on me in a way that nothing else could. I had been raised to be a spiritual person with values of compassion and love of humanity, but these values were somewhat abstract to me up to the moment of seeing that ruin.
The moment of seeing the ruin gave me a physical sense of the meaning of death, destruction, hatred, and war. I had passed by many monuments to war and many graveyards during my young life, but nothing stopped me in my tracks like this astonishing shell of a building once dedicated to living worship… and now a stark and powerful memorial.
Humans have a reverence for ruins. We spend great efforts to unearth traces of lost civilizations to feel a sense of connection to those who came before us. We travel to Machu Picchu, and the Mayan ruins, and Angkor Wat to try to absorb some of the essence of our human ancestors.
The World Trade Towers were not everyone’s idea of architectural beauty. But they were inhabited daily by tens of thousands of individual human beings whose lives were full of purpose, aspiration, energy, struggle, despair, hope and beauty. And they were destroyed by a terrible purpose which brought about a great loss of life and a great amount of suffering and anguish, fear and despair.
Nietzsche said, “one must descend into chaos to attain the shooting star.” We have had a mega dose of chaos from the moment the first plane struck the first tower. I personally heard it go right over my head and heard the impact. I strongly believe that we must preserve a part of this brand new ruin that has come upon us.
Just as I learned as a young man so much on an intuitive and visceral level in that moment of first seeing the ruined church in Berlin, I believe the presence of part of the remains of the World Trade Towers should remain among us.
I think it would be a great loss to pulverize this ruin and bury it in a land fill. It would be like disrespectfully disposing of the bodies of the dead by tossing them into an unmarked mass grave. Let this ruin remain among us to teach us, give us a focus for our grieving and to inspire us to compassion and to an awareness of things that we cannot know until we know them.
The “shooting star” that can grow out of this chaos is as yet unknown. But there is a terrible awe that I feel on seeing the stark beauty of the ruins of the towers. And beauty is the source of great inspiration. Our souls are deeply moved in the presence of beauty. We think brand new thoughts. Previously unseen visions arise in our imaginations. Visions that can perhaps inspire us to take a further step in our evolution as a species – a step away from our old outmoded tribal impulses to be warlike and vengeful and toward a humanity that is capable of greater mutual nourishment, compassion and love.
As I complete this letter, I hear CNN commentators in the background and soon I will return to absorbing new information and new images of this life-changing event. I send this letter out as a seed. I do not know who has the power to make a decision of this magnitude regarding saving the ruins. But my hope is anyone who agrees with this vision will forward the letter and with the amazing magic of internet communication it might reach someone who can say “yes” to this vision.
My hope is that a movement might start to intentionally transform this chaotic and disturbing pile of rubble into a symbol – a symbol of the evolving spirit of our human family – a symbol that says that we have experienced the forces of chaos and destruction.
And [that] we who survive have chosen to honor the undying creativity of the human spirit by allowing “ground zero” to be transformed into a cradle – a cradle from which arises an enduring vision of transformation – a ruin that is allowed to survive and become transformed from a meaningless tangle of chaotic rubble into a shape of stark beauty to help us remember and transform our own chaos into beauty, and our destructive impulses into compassion and hope.
Ned Leavitt
New York City
September 15, 2001
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CODA
as we know, the holy ground of the 9-11 trade towers was not kept as memorial monument in its stark reality. The ground was too ‘valuable’ as real estate, at ba-jillion dollars a square foot in Manhattan real estate. Over years, new towers were built. A memorial was placed there. Controversies arose about many things, including that many speculated that the new trade towers would now be terrorist targets also. However, the ground beneath and around the ‘new towers’ remains holy for reasons having nothing to do with real estate ownership. May all families and friends of the lost loved ones, be comforted.