9/11 and the Ludovico Media

I have always imagined Alex in A Clockwork Orange singing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down.’ I do not think about why I have imagined this,” he said, “nor why at times I thought I could hear Malcolm McDowell singing this song, clearly in my mind.

‘I did see the film by Kubrick,” he said, “before I read the novel by Burgess,” as he also read the screenplay, a copy he picked up second or third or fourth hand from a used books shop. He had read it before he decided to reread it as part of “my decision to teach it to an undergraduate class at a college in CUNY.”

He paused.

“I have not asked the question, although I most surely have an idea, why I think the song is an appropriate one for Alex to be singing,” he said.

What’s it going to be then? 

“I see why the book might have been disturbing when published,” he said. “Dystopian futures are always disturbing. I imagine how the movie was disturbing to many–Kubrick does get under your skin.” 

Midnight Cowboy received an X when it was first released in the late 60s; its battles with ratings allowed Kubrick’s film to avoid this and get only an ‘R.’

“Malcolm McDowell managed to be menacing and charming simultaneously,” he said, “and I still think it’s one of the top five performances never to receive an Oscar,” he continued. “I do see why there are still people disturbed by the film, or by the performance, again, which was uncanny in how likable he could remain while always seething terror.”

Perhaps “I do not actually suspend disbelief,” which is why “I can watch it and re-watch it while my spouse has barely been able to manage a multiple viewing first see,” I’m sure you do not understand as it was true for me at first, when I heard it, him say it.

“The thing I have found the most interesting–” what is it that we do find interesting, I mean, what is it that we intend to say by saying something is interesting?

But what was most interesting for him, was “how the Ludovico Technique was used,” he did say, yes, “what it enabled,” as he said, “and just what our broadcast media does to each of us, its viewers,” of course anyone could conclude as well. Yes, “spectacle and gaze. All of it amazing and amazed–the Labyrinth awaits,” he said, “each of us,” he said.

“Anyone having seen the film remembers how Alex was hooked up to an apparatus that prevented him from closing his eyes while forced to watch film and staged representations of violence intended to make him revolted by the idea of committing violence. The result was effective to an extreme, leaving Alex at the mercy of violence against himself (although perpetrated against him by some of his former victims, as well as his former brothers in violence, who have ironically become police officers, not so unlike many of us who knew criminal teenagers who then became cops). Yes, Alex was at the mercy of those committing violence against him, himself incapable of using violence in self-defense; but also made to feel intensely physically sick over others using violence against him.  The Minister in prison objects to the treatment because it robs Alex of free will. What then have our choices been since just another of history’s parade of events to live in infamy has passed before our eyes, or did it?” He asked.

“The Twin Towers,” he said, “have been absent for almost thirteen years; next September 11th, it will be thirteen years. December 1954 was thriteen years after Pearl Harbor; August 1958 was thirteen years after Hiroshima. Time passes like the flying arrow or reamins an ever worming tunnel we move through. But most of us experience time in the mind, a hop-scotch of experiences we call time passing, but we should know that all time is one, that past, present and future are illusions we cling to, as Einstein reminded us, out of vanity and hope.” 

He went on to say that there was “a hole in lower Manhattan’s skyline, one that smacked me in the eye every time I looked, or so I wanted to believe,” he said, “yet I had already noticed that the feeling of being pierced waned,” he said, “a stabbing pain in the eye having begun to fade.” He said that others “must have noticed it right away, felt one way or another how . . .” he hesitated? “Why is such a useless question.” He paused. “I refer the perpetrators of why, why, why to the nearest mental institution,” he said. “I am not trying to be crass,” he added. 

“The Freedom Tower stamds 1,776 feet above ground zero; it’s an insult in my mind because there are very, very few of us who have any idea, or the fragment of one, whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives, just what the historical context and contingencies were for the generation that gave us the Declaration of Independence or the Constituion. I would like to know how many of my knee-jerk conservative friends have actually read either at least once, let alone recurring over the course of one’s political life in America? I refer my knee-jerk conservative childhood friends to the fact that the American Independence movement was the most radical political move in history–and that it was a minority revolution, most colonists being conservative flag waving reflexive supporters of the British Imperium. They wanted everyone to revere and respect without thinking the British flag.”

A medium pause, whatever that might be for however many of you it would take to garner an accurate consensus, as if that were anything relevant to what you might think, do think, never these twain meeting in anything one might name precise, yes, no, otherwise maybe, what? 

“My verdict on the Freedom Tower is still out,” he said. “I don’t like the memorial where the waters washing over the dead are drained into a black abyss. There is no irony in that black hole; a political black hole that had become America’s political void was what lead to what happened on 9/11; and I know that there are plenty of ping-pong players between our Democrats and Republicans, as if political ping pong with slogans and verbal grunts is going to save We the People.” 

Nonetheless, nevertheless, however, yet . . . “this hole, this absence I became at times transfixed by, was bigger than the Towers had ever been  to my eyes. A paradox, perhaps; a conundrum?” He asked.

“There was something about the size or displacing power of absence I recalled from an essay I had written decades ago; and so I concluded that the absence might have greater density in our perception than did the sight of the buildings; yes, any object as a thing in space may not have the same density as the absence of it we do feel in space, physically. The absence of my lover is often greater than her presence, in the way it imposes.” He had written something about this, an absent presence more displacing than presence in itself. 

London Bridge is falling down . . .

“I could not help but sing the tune to myself as I watched with deadening rapidity the towers falling over and over on TV. I walked back into childhood then, in and out of it from moment to moment, the simplicity and the fear, the hope and the grim, the crushing hate and the ease of  forgiveness crushed by a desire for vengeance; a montage of emotions flooding on fast forward.”

We sometimes see absence more clearly than we do presence. “I know I took them for granted when they were there, persistently there,” he said, “agreed upon by all forever.  Who could have imagined their absence?” He asked. “And now that absence imposes itself on me with a force their presence could not.  Even with that absence fading in presence, what exactly is falling down, falling down.”

All Media in America is a variation on the Ludovico Technique–a thesis he presents to us.

“I cannot say anything about their absence now, although I wish I could; but then, how much do I actually wish this, another posture set, a pose imposed.  I must be content with a certain measured silence, a quiet that also signals for me a time to be self-conscious. All the world’s a stage implies we must be aware of our presence on the stage, at least aware enough to keep our performance organic, what we like to mean by saying more natural,” he said.

But what does it mean to be self-conscious? Is it a reflective pose? If so, then mirroring what?

“To be self-conscious or not to be only instructs myself,” he said. “I impose on myself as much as I do others by the poses I take. How do I take what it seems I am giving? All does fall down; the house of cards we build out of our selves. History; social science or one of the humanities, the humanities the study of humanity without the science purported by the social scientific community,” he said.

“History is the self-consciousness of a culture, a people, a nation, its intellectual elite? Can history be populist without necessarily becoming popular, subject to the demands of entertainment? What kind of history is a history that is entertaining in the way we mean entertaining in this culture? We do not remember as I had believed we would soon forget. 1987 was thirteen years after my cousin Michael came home in a bag from Viet Nam; he had stepped on a mine outside of Danang. His casket was closed and yet I can see no one from the day of his funeral. I don’t know what I am remembering when I try to look back. I helped carry his casket to his grave. That was the last day I was ever at his grave. I had not gone back to Pittsfield, my mother’s hometown in the Berkshires,” he said.

“Childhood was revisited that day into the next and the next one and the next one, each of them creeping in their petty paces as do all the days of recorded time,” he said. “The television screen another theater of a kind, and as in all theaters, we do become children again, and the sky can fall on our heads.  Chicken Little was a prophet,” he said.

“What more is there to say about me, about them, about this day, the event?” He asked. “The impact was the impact; but do we still feel it?” He asked. “I couldn’t say what it was I saw as I looked at the hole in the lower Manhattan skyline about a week after they fell; I couldn’t even say what it was I saw watching the Towers fall over and over again on TV, already one or another cut and paste montage for maximum effect–this effect being how horror-stricken we could become,” he said. “The image was replayed in mind as on tv. Lodon Bridge is falling down, falling down.  Power wanted us frozen. The Monied elite did not want us to ask how many people made money on the towers having fallen,” he said.

“The Woolworth Building hasn’t imposed at this angle in almost forty years, I said as I looked to the sky above ground zero every time I crossed the Manhattan Bridge by train,” he said. “There was a time when it was the tallest building in the world; the Empire State Building now again the tallest building in New York I said for how many years until the Freedom Tower was completed, even before so,” he said.

He was in lower Manhattan to get a birth certificate so they could go to Cannda, Montreal. Their hostess on the phone extending her heartfelt sympathy and solidarity to him in French and English. “I cannot however forget the smell, yes, the smell,” he said, “the horror of burning flesh,” he went on, “for a week still recognizable,” as he thought, “to the nose.” He said as much” to my fellow New Yorkers and I walking the streets around City Hall, Chambers Street and Broadway. People recoiled from me, as crazy as it must have sounded, but equally maddening to think that that odor was burning human flesh and no one recognized it. But then, how would we?”

London Bridge is falling down . . .

“I do remember having said–what? What did I say soon after the day they fell, yet another day that will live in infamy, of course, soon after that apocalyptic day, The Book of Revelation is The Book of Apocalypse.  Apocalypse is from the Greek and means ‘revelation,’ but today means something else because what John revealed was the End Time, the teleology of Christianity, which owed then everything to Hebrew millenialist teleologies. The clouds dividing on Patmos; the smoke eventually clearing over lower Manhattan. Coppola’s film comes to mind for many of us; Coppola’s film is a completely reworked retelling of Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness. I would ask you to read it, but I am not going to waste my breath,” he said.

“I looked for the Horsemen in the sky when the Towers were falling down, falling down, replayed on the television all week. What do I remember having said? Words never mean what they say at, I recall from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. How were we dying that day, what did die in us?” He asked. 

“What did we uncover there then? When will we know?  Can we? There were four of them that John saw in the sky dividing the clouds . . .  what then did I say in diatribes unfit to print? I later said their absence was almost as big as were the towers themselves, the largest buildings ever built, even after they were no longer the tallest, the debris covering how large an area? I forget. I felt something I couldn’t name for weeks for months, how long did it last? I noticed for a time we shared more comraderie in our travels  about town,” he said.

 

II

“It is now nearly thirteen years ago, soon to be more.  Will we remeber?  I doubt it. We haven’t completely forgotten but there are children ready to enter middle school this fall who were born after it happened. Children who were alive that day but who could not possibly have any recall of the facts as they happened, as they were made, are themselves perhaps entering high school? I am not a skeptic; in fact I have been considered by many to be an optimist. The fact is, do we really remember anything? Do we realize a decade has passed. What was the difference between 1941 and 1951, 1954; 1961 and 1971; October 1991 and October 2001? It would be other than optimism if I avoided the facts I use to infer our future lapse in memory. There are going to be gaps in our remembering; most of memory is fiction anyway, only I mean something else other by using the word fiction, other than those who are offended by my using fiction. But folk-tales are fictions, fairy tales too; legends the fictionalizations rooted in once historical facts,” he said. But then facts function through consensus; the Earth is flat was once a fact.

We watched with deadening rapidity day after day, in and out and out again . . . “I repeat myself; repetition can become motif. The North and South Towers of The World Trade Center falling down, falling down, first one, then the other, repeatedly on the news, over and over, the only gain being our deadened sensitivity.  The Ludovico Technique was never so effective.  My brother Alex’s forays into redemption aside, and for you, my hypocrite reader, I assume, as I do for myself, we will not long remember.”   

He asked, “Will we come to forget this day?” He paused. “What do you think, apart from your sanctimonious rants about Never Forgetting, now and then. Is that what you do for your lost loved one’s. I held my mother’s hand until her heart stopped beating; I slept at my father’s feet like a Viking dog the night before the morning he passed.”

Questions we asked rhetorically we are supposed to know the answers to, but we often times do not. We have come to ask questions to silence questioning, not to find or elicit answers. 

We were certain the answer was no, that we were going to remember, that we were not going to forget; we were wrong. “I was sure the answer would be yes. I was as certain as I am that we have forgotten Pearl Harbor.  We have also forgotten Hiroshima, not a special roll at your favorite sushi bar. I try, though, to remember, but then this is recollection; something similar yet disimilar to searching again the lost recesses of mind, or is it time–time is only ever a state of mind, at least as far as we have dogmatically construed it . . .” success has become difficult to gage.

“To see is to believe, of course, at least we imagine it is,” he said, “and then it is to know, knowledge something we have lost faith in. This knowing from seeing is a special kind of understanding, one where standing under is imagined although not really ennacted.  Of the body, of the mind, of course, we only learn through the crucible of recollection.  There has been little tranquility, though, in our collecting again the fragments of memory.”

How we remember today though is equal  to being blind. 

“Oedipus set himself on the road to truth after he gouged out his eyes; in blinding himself, Oedipus proclaimed a life of blindness needs no eyes.  Eyes were wasted on Oedipus, he himself imagined.  What are ours for? Would you or I have his courage? Could we be as just? Wh0 among us would gouge out his eyes for being socially blind or politically blind? How many on Wall Street for being economically myopic?” He asked.

“Anyone born on December seventh nineteen forty one is now over seventy years old.  The youngest possible person alive on that day is a certain member of the elderly.  Ask any incoming freshman in college to tell you what happened on that day–ask any one of these freshman to tell you what the significance of August 6th is, what happened on that day in 1945.  I have.  The responses were frightening, most frightening for how human they were, all too human. Historical awareness in a culture as contempo-centric as ours is terribly foreshortened,” he said. 

What did happen on that day, though?  What lessons can we learn from history–in fact, what lessons do we when most in America are too semi-literate to sustain enough reading long enough in time or deeply enough in acumen?

“History is primarily conveyed through a historiography too susceptible to the backspace key.  We love the eraser; educated people who resent usually do. Wilde was right when he said a fool can always ask a question that a wise man cannot answer. We imagine ourselves geniuses becasue we do so on and on and on as we have now for several decades; intellectual hegemony won by those who are no better than that famous emperor whose new clothes were so shocking to everybody’s fashion sense. We all have a new set of intellectual clothes,” he says.

We don’t study history as much as we imagine what history might have been, as if there were no way to discern facts, to weigh accounts, to manage our research, if we were to attempt such a thing. We are too in love with doubt as the highest form of wisdom, articulating an epistemology where there are no truths let alone a capital ‘T’ Truth, where all opinions are special simply because they are opinions. “No one corrects anyone’s opinion because then anyone would not be able to say anything about anything. We would have to know something and knowledge has become impossible, so why endeavor at all. I do no want conservatives or reactionaries in America to imagine I have not included them; for me, they are even worse,” he said.

“There is no knowledge; there are only an infinite number of opinions which leads us to imagine things like infinite possibility. However, infinity is unreachable, not knowledge. One billion is equally far from infinity as is one. But then knowledge today is confused with facts, facts themselves never knowledge, but who’s to say remains our favorite rebuttal,” he said.

“All historiography is more l’histoire in one sense of the word in French, a story told, something to tell, perhaps, or most likely a fiction, again, a thing made. I don’t have as much objections to the makerliness of historical texts as I do to the intellectual dilettantism that rules the academy. Anyone can say because where anyone can say no one can say you can’t say. Everyone respects another’s opinion no matter how ludicrous because he wants his opinions respected whether they deserve to be or not,” he said.

On any of the days that fall below the horizon of history, what will happen, what could, or would or should happen? He might have asked, did ask in other words. “The horizon of memory, the horizon of time, the one of being too.  9/11 will convege with December 7th and August 6th in a metaphysical parallax.  There are metaphysical ones as well as physical ones; the railroad tracks converging on the horizon is not an illusion, though; it reveals the curvature of the earth, which we see as flat on the ground we walk on, an illusion,” he said.

“Soon this day will be below the horizon with all the other days that were once days that will never be forgotten. Who remembers Gettysburg? July 1876 was 13 years after the battle that had decided the fate of North America and perhaps the future we call our present. A divided America would have done what to the Second World War?” He asked.

“Historical memory has always been selective. Who remembers Lindberg? Do you remember when we still called Veteran’s Day, Armistice day . . . the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918?” He asked.

“There were limits that day in the skies above lower Manhattan, the limits they set, the ones we had put in place prior to the event, the result had set another set; each differing by varying from the others.  The limits of remembering had been set too, much by the way we think, by how we react, not what we do, or how we do it, but by what and by how we determine ourselves capable of doing anything.  What is thinkable will always determine what gets thought, and in this we have no sense of our limits or our limitations,” he said, he says, will say, has said, could have said elsewhere, might have said in other words virtually the same.

“A clockwork Alex, I am; who are you; what have you become since?” He asks.

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