911 revisited

Here is a short entry I wrote in 2006:

Monday, September 11, 2006

911, Savannah, and the Collective (Un)Conscious

Today, as the Multimedia news world attempts to gag us with platitudes about the horrors of 911 in New York, many of us are switching off the televised photo ops and political posturing that seems to be necessary for those in the public eye to maintain their status in the Collective Conscience of the nation. Maybe we should get more in touch with the Unconscious, the groundwork of far more than one catastrophe.

Bridge to New York

photo by Jameson

This blog contains plenty of images that ought to give us pathways-- the clay tablet from Uruk depicting tortured prisoners in Mesopotamia, the image of Saladin, defending Moslems from the horrors of the Christian zealots, Delphi, the Oracle of which should remind us of the irony of misleading predictions, Munch's Scream which transcends time and place... Or San Martin, horseback, the image of a leader virtually unimaginable among the world's puppet masters today.


Bridge to Savannah
photo by Jameson

In Savannah, over Labor Day, Dar and I read Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (click). That novel spoke to the Jungian Soul, and portrayed a rich reality deeper than the holes left in New York. Read another review (click).

It is as tragic that those holes have become cliches as the lie that has linked them to Iraq. To the extent that we have given in to fear and yielded our freedoms and our common sense, the terrorists have won.

Thousands of people tossing tiny packets of shampoo into the bottomless trash of our airports-- that is the archetypal symbol of our defeat.

9/11/2019:

Today I would write more about capitalism and terrorism, both of which, in my view, are dreadful. The twin towers were not symbols of anything intrinsically valuable; nor were they beautiful. They were two monoliths of power and wealth. Take away the loss of life, and the destruction of the buildings poses no irreplaceable loss. Aesthetically, the loss of the Parthenon was greater. Americans, self absorbed, ignorant of history, lacking empathy for countless losses to terrorism of others, magnify their own loss as somehow more important than others. And therein lies the reason Americans are so despised. 

Jameson