Fearful Symmetry

In the summer of 1991 I worked as a gofer in a small law office in lower Manhattan, on Chambers Street near City Hall and about six blocks from the World Trade Center. The towers were just part of my urban landscape, with a post office and a subway station I sometimes used. But I remember one bright afternoon wandering over to the central plaza and walking right up to one of the buildings. Unlike the Empire State building, which rises in step-wise fashion (for structural reasons? so that jumpers don’t land on the streets below? I don’t know) the sides of the towers were sheer: you could stand at the base, press your back up against the building (warmed by the lunch-time sun) and look straight straight up, inducing a kind of inverted vertigo. Which is what I did.

Ten years later, about six weeks after 9/11, I had to be in lower Manhattan for a meeting at the MLA offices, not far from the law office where I worked that summer. Naturally I walked over to “ground zero” at the end of the day. I circumnavigated the site, trying to see what I could see. At one point, along one of the side streets off of Broadway, I found a gate where a convoy of trucks was assembling to exit with their loads of debris. The trucks were big flatbeds, and each one bore one of the towers’ enormous steel girders, bent and twisted and caked with muck, like something that had lain under the sea for hundreds of years before being hoisted, wet and briney, to the bright surface.

In my mind I want to reconcile these two images, find a way to superimpose them in their fearful symmetry, but that’s hard—something won’t snap to grid.