Every few years, I get the bug to write an essay on 9/11. Few days of my life have drawn me to continually reconsider, to try and understand something… deeper. Given that today marks the 25th anniversary, the itch was especially sharp, asking me to find something greater in a period that has been scrutinized more thoroughly by writers with more to say than one long, continual piece of introspection.
Then again, I wasn’t there. On September 11, 2001, I was a 12-year-old out in Long Beach, CA, getting ready for middle school. There was so little I could do but turn to the screen and, in a moment of strong cognitive dissonance, did my best to believe that the news was printing fiction. This was what you saw in action movies full of big explosions and mayhem. Even still, it looked so real. Unlike those movies, there was no cutaway over the next couple of weeks. Most of the fall’s new TV season postponed premieres so that we could stare at Ground Zero for endless hours, watching the rapid chaos followed by the slow recovery. Everything was uncensored. Destruction came like jump scares throughout the day while the casualty count was regularly updated.
One of the curses of being a child during that time is how much of your memory disappears. Not through an act of repression, but just the passage of time. This year marks the strange revelation that my existence has been twice as long after that day than before, filled with formative milestones that are more readily at the fingertips to discuss. Even if I have traces of that time to fall back on, my instinct is telling me to focus less on that day and more on the time since. Has the recovery led to a more prosperous future?
There’s difficulty with not immediately derailing that innocent question by noting a few things. New York’s mayor from 2001 is currently espousing racism about the current leader attending a ceremony. The president, meanwhile, refuses to attend if he can’t give a speech beforehand, despite it not fitting decorum. Add in that he spent the day 25 years ago calling into a TV station bragging that he now had the tallest building in the city. There’s a lot worth unpacking around how the leaders we bestowed trust in haven’t made the best decisions since, but that’s not what this essay is focused on.
Every time I go to assess my feelings on 9/11, I come back to certain themes. It’s one of helplessness and uncertainty, that so much would take growing older to understand. Despite there being better art about that day, I’ve struggled to not pick the example that’s most derided by audiences as one that spoke to me on a deeper level. Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” remains my ideal portrait of that time, of somebody trying to make sense of an adult world without the faculties to process anything beyond his immediate struggles. The book, to its credit, is an affecting collage of portraiture and stylized prose attempting to find depth through stray observations. Maudlin, maybe. However, no other work has shaken me so deeply about the subject. I’ve read Don DeLillo’s “The Falling Man” and Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” and while impactful, they are too didactic. Maybe Jonathan Ames’ “The Alcoholic” gets closest to runner-up to Foer, which I think wins entirely because it’s about someone my age without a clue of how to properly grieve.
Ever since I’ve gotten older and the world that defined those years disappeared, I’ve found a need to continually find new perspectives that humanize the timeframe. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) gets closest, in a somewhat fictionalized manner, to understanding the unfulfilled nature of revenge that defined the postscript. The stage musical Come From Away best expresses how I feel the world should be in general after tragedy. I’d even go so far as to argue that Spike Lee’s HBO documentary from 2021 is deserving of consideration as reflecting greater concerns I’ve had in the then-20 years since.
This is all to say… what can I really propose for a 9/11 essay that commemorates a quarter century? I could address my surrealistic experience with internet culture. For as much as I can handle George W. Bush memes related to that time, nothing reflects how much of an open wound that day is than hearing certain dark humor chestnuts found in variations of “Another plane has hit the tower” or parodying conspiracy talk. As someone who still fixates sometimes on people falling from buildings, it’s hard to not think of the tragedy in a way that still feels abundant. The tributes hosted by Robert De Niro may be less frequent, but in my mind, it was a day to “Never Forget,” where the monument is a lasting reminder of this country’s belief that there is strength in numbers, and that everyone does their part out of compassion.
Then I remember another factor of time, especially two decades’ worth. Whole generations have been born since then. There are 17-year-olds who never experienced a breathing second of Bush’s second administration. Whole worlds are cognizant of life after but not before, who fantasize about the 90s in ways I spent my 20s watching New Hollywood masterpieces. There’s something real, but it’s also foreign. Arguably, the detraction here comes from Gen-Z growing up without awareness of prosperity, that housing collapses, and, for lack of terminology, “2016” being a thing before they had any adulthood agency. For as much as I could criticize their poor-taste jokes on 9/11, is there any way to feel good right now without being the least bit pithy? After all, the former mayor gave an election fraud speech in front of a sex shop while sporting leaky hair dye just six years ago… why should we trust his diplomacy in times of crisis?
Maybe what I wanted from a study of time was more of a respite. I wanted to believe that in a quarter century that the grand utopia evolved from the ashes to give America better opportunities. To be honest, there are millions of reasons to love this country, and there are several people who restore hope every day. However, there is concern in my heart that we are removed enough that 9/11 has become history that lacks immediacy. People who still feel it in their bones are becoming rarer, as values have been replaced by a president more obsessed with renaming half of the country than building up prosperity. In some ways, it’s allowed the true colors to appear, as this week has more talk about the president falsely owning the moon than reminding the nation to reflect on this moment that permanently changed our society.
I get that we could never keep the tradition alive of making 9/11 tributes feel as visceral as they did in the immediate five-year span. It’s impossible to recapture that pain as well as that optimism. Even by the 10th anniversary, there was a sense of peace starting to fit into the public narrative. Part of it is seeing a fuller picture of the aftermath and knowing we’ve survived this long since the tragedy. Even so, you want to believe that the day would always be spoken of with the same reverence as Pearl Harbor.
Instead, it feels like a reminder of the shortcomings. A quarter century should’ve been long enough to witness the bridge to something greater. When figures once hailed as heroic are reduced to racist attacks against the new mayor who is Muslim, you notice the shorthand of how our search for peace and understanding failed. Even as millions have bettered their lives while recognizing their own mortality, it’s disconcerting how little has improved elsewhere. I believe part of the social contract is leaving the world a better place for the next generation. By the tone of those tower jokes, it doesn’t sound like the next group has yet to receive their vote of confidence.
Despite all of this, I’m trying to maintain an emotional connection to what that day should feel like. Having rummaged through several perspectives, it’s hard to find something that can recapture the feeling, at least without the manicured approach. We all have too much distance to create something raw. Nobody’s about to put out a record as unstoppable as The Beastie Boys’ “To The 5 Burroughs.” What is there that can transport me to another time short of archival footage?
The story of William Basinski is well known to fans of electronic/ambient music. Throughout 2001, he created “The Disintegration Loops,” which reflected the decay of sounds being scraped together. He claims that he finished his final project on the morning of September 11 before anything happened. Having seen the aftermath of the Twin Towers, he dedicated his project to those who lost their lives while playing the recordings for everyone in their apartment to mourn in harmony. It gave everything a new context, even sporting the billowing smoke on the various entries’ covers. Whereas most tributes held language crafted from deep, internal angst, this was poetic, symbolic of an all-too-unfortunate parallel.
It wasn’t until conceiving this essay that I chose to listen to “dlp1” in its entirety to see if it struck any deeper emotion than what had been intellectualized for decades. What I found was that it made me feel many things. More than the tragedy, I found myself yearning for the flawed imperfection of analog, the fear of losing your history to a faulty strip. If something about the years since has felt joyless, it’s the lack of humanity in tech, the way AI makes everything too convenient to the point you don’t accept risk or difference. There’s no endearing blemish to carry through your childhood. All that’s left is highly polished immediacy.
Even so, the decay is not supposed to be a testament to eternal bliss. Instead, it forces you to sit in the moment with patience. I’ll accept that an hour may be interminable for some to sift through a gradual change, but for me it was an electronic meditation. You grow comfortable with the contrasting melodies for so long that you don’t notice the small shifts at first. With scratches picking up, the audio wears thin before being replaced by hums. You wonder if that percussive measure has just disappeared or if you’ve been filling in the blanks. The contrasting harmonies fall further apart until suddenly it becomes orchestral, something completely different from the start. It’s mechanical yet beautiful. Most of all, you become attached to the sensation after a while, immersing your entire being until you reminisce about what was lost. Time has gone by, yet you anticipate the future. What’s come before has disappeared, yet we have this small piece to preserve a greater sense of the legacy no longer on this mortal coil.
I’m not sure that I love “The Disintegration Loops” as much as the more traditional atmospheric work of Claire Rousay, but I won’t deny the emotional impact it carried, especially when I applied that additional subtext. From the moment we’re born, things shift. We may have cyclical patterns that define us, but those too shall evolve. Much like the city that Basinski crafted the sounds in, it was about to see a radical shift. The question becomes what this decay represents, whether positive or negative or neutral, and what its greater significance to 9/11 becomes. The tones are bittersweet, feeling like a dirge for an idea I can’t fully express. When I try to place it, the scratches and pops embody destruction but, even so, the beauty is at the center, holding on for dear life.
I’m sure somebody who spent more time with this project will have a more prescient note on how these themes compare to history. For now, I see it as the necessary tool to make me see beyond the rhetoric and return back to what I’ve struggled to understand this whole time. As a child who couldn’t fathom what any of this meant, how do you soundtrack that feeling? Irony is that I couldn’t think of appreciating Babinski’s work for at least another 15 years, even more before it “made sense.” I’m not sure if this counts as the most important tribute to 9/11 given its timeline, but it gives you a freedom the others don’t to really engage with yourself and ask what any of this means on a metaphysical level.
The answer will always be much too complicated for me to put down in words. Right now I can only hope that I hold onto what I can, if not for the anecdotes, then for the sense of growth and change to reflect the values I saw during that time. Maybe we've got a ways to go before that happens, but if tragedy has taught me anything, it’s the power of community to help when it’s needed most. From rubble will come a new day, a new understanding. Let that never be forgotten.
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