9/11

During the interval of Augusto de Campos’ plurivocal poetry reading accompanied by his son, Cid on the guitar, a person from the audience turned on the short-wave radio to hear the news. I could hardly believe that while the living spaces of Sao Paulo, the most populous and popular of Brazilian cities, was being projected on a white screen, the twin-towers of New York’s Trade Centers had been bombed earlier by hijacked terrorist planes.

Somewhat similar to the virtual incredulity of a writer who had warned me of a possible tragedy towards the end of the 90’s, this feeling of incredulity describes my state of mind on the 9th of September 2001. Neuropsychologists define incredulity as a prediction error in which the discrepancy between our sense of reality and our expectations produces a state of uncertainty that destabilizes yet allows us to adapt as best as we can.

Then, as today, my incredulity takes the form of questions that I ask myself. Would the lack of security around The Trade Centers on 9/11 be the result of incredulity? If so, where does incredulity spring from? Since we knew that the attacks would occur, why were we so lenient in our vigilance as not to take heed of the danger? Did we feel so empty and yet so powerful inside ourselves? Who were the 2’753 victims whose names are inscribed on the square-designed memorials? How do they resemble the Holocaust victims of the Yad-va-Shem memorial in Jerusalem?

The scope of these questions is so enormous that it leads me to rationalize, rebel, and feel guilty at the same time. I recognize my mixed emotions about the attacks: my rebellion against the attacks fills me with guilt because I survived while the 2,753 victims who worked and used shared spaces in the Trade Centers did not. Although it might seem absurd, the survival guilt I felt at the time led me to defend myself against the unlikelihood of the attacks and to empathize with the victims.

Just like writers and readers share and create their idiosyncratic metaphorical and moral spaces, my rationalizations which are actually defenses against the aggression of the exterior world, made me ironically realise that we share the same space in our given world albeit our sense of territoriality might lead us to war against our aggressors.

A few days later, I boarded a plane from Geneva Airport for London Heathrow to resume my doctoral research on modern poetry and psychoanalysis. The airport was as empty as a snow-filled day. Sometimes, snow makes me despair. I carry on.