A Critic at Large July 7, 2014 Issue
Stones and Bones
Visiting the 9/11 memorial and museum.
By Adam Gopnik
To get into the 9/11 Memorial Museum, you
have to pass through a world-class security arrangement—a conveyor belt
for shoes, belt buckles, cell phones; a three-second
hands-above-your-head body scan—overseen by a notably grim
private-security corps. “Stand there!” uniformed guards shout at those
in line moseying ahead. “Don’t advance.” A terrorist planning to commit
an atrocity at a museum devoted to the horrors of terrorist atrocities
might seem unduly biddable to his enemy’s purpose, but then perhaps the
security apparatus is itself a museum installation. At the other end, as
you exit, toward West Street, another uniformed man is obliged to spend
his day telling kids not to stand on the benches in the memorial park.
“You, there! Down.” It doesn’t occur to the kids that standing on the
granite plinths could be an offense, and they wonder at first whom the
guard could be addressing. They look bewildered—you mean us?—and
then descend. The idea that we celebrate the renewal of our freedom by
deploying uniformed guards to prevent children from playing in an
outdoor park is not just bizarre in itself but participates in a culture
of fear that the rest of the city, having tested, long ago discarded.
It is a rule in American life that commerce dwarfs commemoration. So let it be said that the new World Trade Center—at least, to eyes still a little in love with skyscrapers—is pretty dazzling. The building is genuinely handsome, its long isosceles, mirrored faceting giving it the illusion of being torqued, twisted right, even as you stare at it—a look that, in the past, was called futuristic. The stacked and window-dotted ringed top, meanwhile, recalls the aerie of a villain in a James Bond movie. Skyscrapers, to be successful, should be—as this is, once one gets past the fortified lower extremities—exuberant; the genius of the form is that hyper-scale should be met by unexpected playfulness, as with the arches and gargoyles of the Chrysler Building. There are no good dull skyscrapers, though the old World Trade Center towers came close.
Yet the better One World Trade Center (into which this magazine’s offices will move, next year) is at being a good Manhattan skyscraper, the more it seems to rebuke the memorial park at its base. It was always going to be hard to distinguish its clumpings of trees, benches, and memorial fountains from the ornamental bumps and abscesses that are the standard skirtings of Manhattan pillar-in-the-plaza construction. Shadowed by a big, cheerful building, their presence becomes one more of the site’s contradictions: a memorial park that in some ways resembles a conventional plaza “amenity.”
The centerpiece of the memorial—designed by the Israeli-American architect Michael Arad, who, in collaboration with the landscape architect Peter Walker, won the competition more than a decade ago—is a pair of chasms that correspond to the vacant footprints of the old Twin Towers. Although officially described as “reflecting pools,” they are not pools, and they leave no room for reflection. Wildly out of scale with the rest of the site in their immensity, they are subterranean waterfalls—two huge sinks spilling chlorinated water from their edges, which then flows up and over a smaller platform at their center, and down the drain, only to rise and be recycled. Their constant roar interrupts any elegiac feeling that the lists of engraved names of the dead which enclose them might engender.
In the pattern of falling, draining, and recycling, the sinks feel symbolically unsettled, too. Perpetuity is a favorite theme of memorial sites—that eternal flame on J.F.K.’s grave—but, emotively, these seem to suggest less the promise of eternal memory and more a cycle of endless loss and waste. In an open arena destined to become a common public space filled with common public errands, the crashing double sinks seem unsuited to the necessary reticence of an effective memorial. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” Emily Dickinson wrote piercingly; we want the formal feeling to contain the pain, give it shape, not just to theatricalize it for centuries. An ill–formed formality only fossilizes great pain. (One wonders, in any case, how forever after these fountains can be; the plumbing demands must be ferocious, and it is hard to imagine, a half century hence, that this will still be seen as the most fitting and functional solution. Peter Walker has been quoted saying that “they’re mechanical, and usually mechanical things only last thirty to forty years.”)
The 9/11 Memorial Museum itself, designed by the Manhattan firm Davis Brody Bond and the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, is the one remaining building on the site that retains the arresting “deconstructivist” spirit of Daniel Libeskind’s competition-winning 2003 design for the entire Ground Zero space, otherwise entirely discarded. (Nothing is as much like losing an architectural competition in New York as winning one.) It is what future architectural historians will recognize as a specific late-twentieth-century building type: the Holocaust museum. The 9/11 museum’s director, Alice M. Greenwald, previously worked at the Holocaust museum in Washington. It’s a career path. There are now more than seventy such museums around the world. A muted or off-center or jagged modernist hull, monolithic and windowless, opens down onto a tomblike, dramatically lit, vast inner space. A relative latecomer, Moshe Safdie’s redesign of Yad Vashem, in Israel, which opened in 2005, actually breaks the theatricalized gloom, and is skylit. The purpose of such museums, difficult to accomplish, is to memorialize the dead without becoming macabre.
The Holocaust museums do the work museums were made to do: display an unusual object and explain its original meaning. Their subject is a great crime whose perpetrators did all within their power to keep concealed, and simply making the story public has been a big part of the work of mourning. Every found photograph of a Jewish child is a memory recovered from oblivion. What happened on 9/11, by contrast, was a crime deliberately committed in open air as a nightmarish publicity stunt, one already as well documented as any incident in history. We can’t relearn it; we can only relive it.
This means that, if there is an absolute case for a memorial, the case for a museum is more unsettled. Museums first preserve, and then teach, and, although a few grimly eloquent objects are preserved here—a half-crushed fire engine, a fragment of the pancaked floors from one tower—nothing is really taught. Throughout the museum, the designers seem engaged in curatorial white-water rafting, struggling to keep the displays afloat while in constant peril from the enormous American readiness to be mortally offended by some small misstep of word or tone. They can be felt navigating the requirements of interested parties at every turn—the first responders, the victims’ families—so that pancaked floors are shown, but with an anxious label insisting that no human remains are within them. (Isn’t the point that no one will ever really know?) A side chapel has been set up with warning labels outside, showing the images of people leaping to their death from the burning buildings, so that visitors are both invited to look and discouraged from looking.
Forced to deal with the human reality of the terrorists along with their victims, the curators show the killers’ faces at a lower level and on a smaller scale on the wall than those of their victims, sensitivity taking the form of a kind of primitive image superstition. A videotape of the terrorists going through security on the fatal morning plays nearby on an endless loop. It remains nearly impossible to enter the minds of these grim-faced but ordinary-looking Middle Eastern men picking up their luggage and taking their bags and all the while thinking, Very shortly I shall cut the throats of the pilot and the flight attendant and then kill myself in the most violent way imaginable and, I hope, also kill as many thousands of office workers as I can take with me. Their act challenges not memory but the moral imagination; it always has.
Yet the sources of their fanaticism are left undefined. The “last night” letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause—that, in the last-night letter, God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times—is elided. It is disquieting to be reminded that the women-in-paradise promise, which sophisticates have widely thought to be a claim made by Western propagandists, is right there, too. The terrorists did not hate us for our freedom; they hated us for our lack of faith. (There’s a complicated sense in which the two go together, but they weren’t capable of making the complicated case.) Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot’s atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But it is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.
How did we get
here—to this familiar but apparently broadly unsatisfactory language of
commemoration, at once confusingly laconic in its architectural grammar
(what does all that falling water mean?) and luridly profuse in
its documentary imagery? The specifics of how it happened here are well
told by Paul Goldberger, in his book “Up from Zero.” Mammon and memory
went to war at the Ground Zero site, and, small surprise, Mammon won:
the developer Larry Silverstein, who had leased the World Trade Center
buildings shortly before the disaster, negotiated with both the Port
Authority and, more significant, with the governor at the time, George
Pataki, whose political ambitions led him to defer ostentatiously to
public sensitivities about the site, particularly about preserving its
old “footprint” untouched, while quietly accepting its future as a
revived set of office towers. After Libeskind’s designs were, in classic
New York fashion, interred under laurels, the design of the tallest
tower was handed over to David Childs, of the reliable corporate firm
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with the secondary towers assigned to a
group of celebrity architects. Two seemingly contradictory ideas—that it
was necessary to keep the site “sacred” and also necessary to rebuild
it for commerce—governed the design of the site from the beginning.
Those who lack faith in fixed order and stable places have a harder time building monuments that must, in their nature, be monolithically stable and certain. Happiness writes white, and pluralism builds poorly. An obelisk can never be an irony. A pyramid can never symbolize a parenthetical aside. An eighty-foot-tall monument to fair procedure would not be a fair sight. The most effective memorial in New York is the restored immigration hall at Ellis Island, and it is so effective exactly because it is a place not of enforced emotions but of unlicensed phantoms, where schoolchildren go to find the ghosts of their great-grandparents.
Indeed, liberal cities have not found it self-evident that their massacres should be enshrined in memorials and museums. There is no imposing memorial or museum in London dedicated to the Blitz, in which more than forty thousand civilians were killed, or any parallel memorial to the area bombings in Hamburg. Nor is what gets remembered the same as what gets a memorial. We have Holocaust museums in Washington and New York, even though the massacre of the Jews took place largely in Poland and the Ukraine. Yet we have no National Slavery Memorial—and are only now getting a National Museum of African American History and Culture—despite the fact that this horror has never ceased to shadow American life.
In a 1998 book, “Carried to the Wall,” the American-studies scholar Kristin Ann Hass shows that arguments about making public memorials to private lives lost began in the middle of our Civil War, and, specifically, in decisions made about how to commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg. She reproduces the pathetic lists—although merely a preliminary to identifying the fallen, they were not something that would ever have been attempted in an earlier war—of what was in the pockets of the dead: “E. Cunningham—$3.95, comb, and postage stamps; S. R. White—stencil, plate, and two cents.” What would, in an earlier battle, have been anonymous corpses were being claimed as individual men again. Hass shows that the idea of the popular particularized commemoration, name by name, began then, with the work done there. A “folk” tradition of preserved ephemera—the kind of thing we see in those “roadside memorials” that one finds from Naples to Newark, marking the spot where a motorist was killed—began to vie with the official tradition.
In the years after the Civil War, the search for an American memorial went on, as artists found statuary forms that could speak an accessible language of commemoration without betraying the egalitarian cause. The most widespread of these monuments were the small, unpretentious stone figures of Union soldiers sold in mail-order catalogues and soon visible in every American village center. The most artistically potent were Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s monuments to the heroes of the war, most notably the Sherman monument right here on the Grand Army Plaza and the bas-relief on the Boston Common made in honor of Robert Gould Shaw’s black regiment. Different as they are—the Sherman monument a full-scale piece of gilded heroic statuary, complete with a female figure of Victory leading the General on through Georgia; the Shaw memorial a quieter work, Shaw and his soldiers trudging on to death and Destiny—a powerful alloy of realism adds, in both, a life-giving touch to conventional symbolism. Though we rarely think of them this way, the Shaw memorial and the Sherman statue are model urban memorials to martyrs and massacres. They work both as monuments to the cause and as exemplary bits of urbanism, incorporated into public spaces that they solemnize without subduing.
There’s a reason for our amnesia about this accomplishment: Saint-Gaudens was so successful that we now register his works more as urban décor than as elegiac objects. That may be the fate of all big-city memorials: the Arc de Triomphe is a traffic roundabout; Trafalgar Square means pigeons before it means a battle off Spain. And so a great Frank Sinatra album uses on its cover the Sherman memorial in the twilight, angel and horse the same size as melancholy Frank, to symbolize nothing other than midtown. In New York, capital of liberal life, our memories tend to be either forgotten or imaginatively repurposed. We campaigned to build Grant’s Tomb; and now few New Yorkers go there. The Statue of Liberty was so resonantly reimagined as a monument to immigration that few remember it was built as an anti-slavery monument, uniting Republican France and the victorious Union government; the broken slave shackle around Liberty’s foot is today only a detail in specialists’ photographs.
While
those memorials were rising in the North, a second set of memorials—far
less original, though just as deeply felt by their makers—were rising
in the South, commemorating the men who had led the Confederate Army.
Controversial at their time (“If a man has done evil during his life he
must not be complimented in marble” was the view of the radical
abolitionist Charles Sumner), they have become so once again in our own
era. In “Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies,” an
account of today’s battles over Civil War monuments and memorials,
Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin,
explains why even the most egregiously offensive Confederate memorials
are essentially immovable: affection for the familiar mingles with
defensiveness about the past. Granite and bronze freeze opinion in
place. All that can be done, in effect, is to add a statue of Arthur
Ashe to those of J. E. B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in
Richmond.
In fact, many of the Great War memorials were made under the supervision of the British architect Edwin Lutyens—the man who designed New Delhi—who deliberately transcended his roots in Arts and Crafts elaboration to adopt a classical style. Lutyens’s classicism harked back to the late-eighteenth-century French fantasy architecture of Ledoux and Boullée, who had envisioned building vast public structures in elemental geometric forms. The muted, sombre eloquence seemed the only match for the war’s enormity, with an implicit retort against the hot rhetoric that had started the conflict. Figuration would have been an insult to the sheer numbers of dead; it would have attempted to give singular human form to a memorial whose meaning lay in its unbearable multiplicity. Numbers resist a face.
Lutyens’s purely abstract lines of crosses and headstones, “row on row,” provide the background to the greatest of modern American memorials, Maya Lin’s 1982 design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington. One way of defining Lin’s achievement is to say that she reattached the Lutyens tradition to a local and indigenous one. Indeed, Boullée and Ledoux had both, after long obscurity, been revived yet again, in the sixties, by the art historian Robert Rosenblum as precursors of American “primary structures” minimalism. The urge toward minimal geometric abstraction had always been a powerful one in American monument-making: compare the Washington Monument with Nelson’s Column. But the Vietnam memorial—two descending gashes of polished granite, inscribed with the names of the dead—pursued this line with a radical passion, taking the classical purity of the American tradition and of the Great War memorials, and further stripping them of any overt symbolism, even the easily overlooked symbolism of the Anglican cross.
Few people now recall just how confident right-wing opinion was that the Lin memorial was an insult and a failure, one that would have to be remedied by the—ugly and now overlooked—statue of a trio of soldiers, parachuted into the memorial site at the last minute. Its astonishing success was a marker in the triumph of American abstraction: no one could any longer argue that pure form was incapable of expressing profound emotion. The laconic eloquence of the minimal gesture, its potent lack of insincere rhetoric and overstatement, was apparent.
But the triumph was not straightforward: as Hass relates, the extreme simplicity of the memorial made people leave mementos of the actual men—an old medal, a playing card, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s—along the wall near the name of the fallen soldier. At first uncertain about how to handle this intrusion, the caretakers of the wall came to welcome it. Understatement permitted individual statement; the roadside memorial met the war grave. An arena that sad gave permission to a thousand small cries. It was as if the pockets of the boys at Gettysburg had been turned inside out and their contents shown to the world.
The Vietnam memorial remains the model memorial for our time, the polished wall a sounding board for the individual lament. Edward T. Linenthal’s book “The Unfinished Bombing” documents the evolution of the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. To commemorate the death of a hundred and sixty-eight people, most of them government workers, but also many children, a minimal sublime solution seemed the only decorous one, and this despite many arguments for a more melodramatic and literal representation. In the end, a simple “field of empty chairs” was created, one named for each of the victims, with smaller chairs for the children killed. By now, the public sense of the fitness of the style is such that symbolic fine-tuning takes place, directed by popular sentiment: it was decided, for instance, that the chairs of the dead should be slightly curved, so as not to look like tombstones. Minimalism, which began as the model of an inexpressive style, a rejection of symbol for pure structure, has become the most potent language of the elegiac and the evocative, the one common basis with which to build a memorial.
And
so the double bind we find ourselves in is even more double and more
binding than we knew. On the one hand, no agreed-on figural style can
any longer represent a society so plural and so quick to take offense at
“partial” representations; a sublime minimalist reticence seems the
best we can do. On the other hand, the pressures of lives require
feeling, and so the minimal isn’t good enough; we bring American relics
and personal scraps, the roadside folk-memorial style, to the temples of
sublime simplicity. The American memorial style is powerful as an
engine of pathos but is obviously limited as a language of
representation. It feels, but it cannot show.
The handbills still move us so because they touch so entirely on a central truth: these people came together one morning with no common purpose beyond making a living, and were killed by people whose evil lay in the belief that without a common purpose life has no meaning. The lesson of these handbills is simple: that life is tragic and precious and fragile, that there is an irreducible core of violence in the world, and of fanatics in love with it, and that we failed once in our responsibility to protect ourselves from them, and from it. They show, in the faces of fanaticism’s victims, why fanaticism is evil. He was not wearing sunglasses on Tuesday; he was a happy person who made choices. He may be lost now, but he is not faceless.
The attempt to fill the museum with personal ephemera—the vitrines are stuffed with relics and mementos of the dead; even tapes of final phone calls play on a perpetual loop—seems merely macabre by comparison. The power of the personal reliquaries alongside the Vietnam wall, as of the photocopied flyers on the downtown fencing, lies in their spontaneity and their essential privacy, their innocence of manipulative address. Orchestrated as part of an official design, they feel barked out rather than overheard.
Liberal civilizations, which depend on the assertion of the individual face, are better at sustaining meaningful lives than at commemorating the meaning of deaths. For the time being, we are left in a limbo of reflecting pools with no reflections, and shade trees that comfort none, and tightly policed plinths. Will any of the architectural memorials be half as moving, or as fitting, as the “Project for the Immediate Reconstruction of Manhattan’s Skyline” (as it was then named), which appeared a mere six months after the disaster: eighty-some searchlights rising at night from the ground to space itself, or so it seemed, forming two violet columns of lights where the towers had once been. Fragility and resilience, loss and persistence, spirit and substance—all of that was expressed by the two luminous pillars in a way that drains and benches and wall labels can’t. Improvised memorials suit self-organizing cities. Not long ago, I was dragooned into a memorial scheme for a ninety-five-year-old, recently dead in New York. In an instant’s impulse, and violating God knows how many Department of Health regulations, his out-of-town family chose to take taxis to his apartment after midnight and spread his ashes in the median on the avenue outside. It was where he belonged. Memorials don’t live easily in liberal cities. But memories do. He’s there. So are we. ♦
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