Storming the Gates of Paradise (53 page)

That first impulse everywhere on September 11 was to give blood, a kind of secular communion in which people offered up the life of their bodies for strangers. The media dropped its advertisements, leers, and gossip and told us about tragedy and heroism. Giving blood and volunteering were the first expression of a sense of connection; the flag became an ambiguous symbol of that connection, ambiguous since it meant everything from empathy to belligerence. In Brooklyn that week, a friend reported, “Nobody went to work, and everybody talked to strangers.” What makes people heroic, and what makes them feel like members of a community? Years ago, I studied public art that sought to create such a feeling by providing outdoor commemorations of local history and community, as the brief exposure of the hull of the
General Harrison
did. But the larger purpose of public art is to make people participants in their communities, their cities, their politics—to make them citizens. For me, activism itself is a more direct form of that art, the spirit of activism that made the Forty-Niners rush to help put out the flames in San Francisco, that turned Manhattan into an island of
volunteers and the United States into a nation of donors and patriots, even though the question of what people felt connected to was itself open to question. I hoped that one thing to come out of the end of American invulnerability would be a stronger sense of what disasters abroad—massacres, occupations, wars, famines, dictatorships—mean and feel like, a sense of citizenship in the world.

There were spectacular heroes in this disaster, the firefighters, police, medical and sanitation workers, those who died trying to save others in those first hours and those who did what could be done at the site afterward. But I mean
heroism
as a comparatively selfless state of being and as a willingness to do. Wartime and disaster elicit this heroism most strongly, though there are always volunteers who don’t wait until disaster comes home, the volunteers and activists who engage with issues that don’t affect them directly—land mines, discrimination, genocide—the people who want to extend their own privilege and security to those who lack such comforts. In its mildest form, that heroism is simply citizenship, a sense of connection and commitment to the community; and for a few months after 9/11, we had a strange surge of citizenship in this country. In a small way, that sense of optimism and camaraderie I felt from the office workers at the
General Harrison
’s hull prefigured it and suggested that it can exist without conflict, without threat; that it can come into being in those pauses in daily life that are filled with art, history, memory, shared time in public space; that public ceremony and public space can bring it about.

Shortly after the bombing, the president swore to “eliminate evil” from the world. With this declaration, he seemed to promise that the goodness that filled us would not be necessary in the future, a future in which we could return to preoccupation with our private lives. Though oil politics had much to do with what had happened, we were not asked to give up driving, or vehicles that gulp huge amounts of fuel; rather, we were asked to go shopping, and this summer we were asked to spy on our neighbors. The United States has been a peculiar kind of democracy, one in which we enshrine and pay homage to certain rights and freedoms, though they grow dusty from lack of use. Less than half the eligible voters participated in the 2000 presidential election, which collapsed in chaos before the Supreme Court stepped in; in the wake of September 11, the fact that so many
Americans did not understand their own country’s foreign policy or how it is perceived abroad was recognized as a catastrophe of its own, one that contributed to this one. Calling for further restrictions on those rights and freedoms in the wake of the catastrophe seemed another way to consign us to the dreary luxury of private life just when we had emerged into public life with a wholeheartedness unseen since World War II. And that public life is where real democracy could take place.

The hull of the
General Harrison
has been buried again, and a commercial hotel is being built atop it, a hotel that doesn’t ask much of us or tell us anything transformative. That beautiful rupture in the fabric of downtown is gone. In Manhattan, the hole is infinitely vaster and more painful, and it can’t and won’t be buried in the same way. It’s an open question, to which there are many answers, none as simple as war, none as quick as bombs, answers that must be given again and again in the choices we make about what we know and how we participate, or don’t.

The seashore is an edge, perhaps the only true edge in the world whose borders are otherwise mostly political fictions, and it defies the usual idea of borders by being unfixed, fluctuant, and infinitely permeable. The seashore is the place that is no place, sometimes solid land or, rather, sand, sometimes the shallow fringe of that huge body of water governed by the remote body of the moon in a mystery something like love or desire. A body of water is always traveling, and so the border between the land and the sea is not a Hadrian’s Wall or a zone of armed guards; it’s a border of endless embassies, of sandpiper diplomacy and jellyfish exportation, a meeting or even a trysting ground. An open border but a dangerous one between the known and the unknown, which only a few sibyls, amphibians, crustaceans, and marine mammals traverse with impunity. The shore is also the site of the mutual offerings of the dead, our drowned, their beached, another edge effect, this washing up of corpses, metaphors, myths. The mind is such a meeting ground: its ideas are less often laboriously thought out than suddenly washed up from unknown hatcheries and currents far beneath the surface, the dry ideas of logic that drown in the sea; the dreams that, like whales, die crushed by their own weight when they wash up on shore in the morning; and amphibious poetry in between, for the seashore also suggests the border between fact and imagination, waking and sleeping, self and other, suggests perhaps the essential meeting of differences, essential as in primary, essential as in necessary. Wandering the coastline with downcast eyes to find what there is to be found, a material correlation to composing and thinking, is a disreputable profession with its own word, beachcombing.
Shopping at one’s feet for stories, for the unknown, for the thing lost so long one can no longer name it, for treasure that will transform, for that inhuman material that sets free whatever is most human and immaterial. For adults, there is the question of how to set the eyes—whether to beachcomb or more upliftedly regard the view of sea and land—but for children, who have not yet learned that rocks and shells will generally dwindle into rubbish away from the shore, combing the beach is irresistible. Beachcombing, to comb the beach as though it were the hair those mermaids are forever combing with one eye on the sailors, for there is a litter of images, metaphors, inspirations that are more portable and better-looking removed from the beach than its physical stuff. Generative graveyard, this coastline littered with shells from which the dwellers have been evicted, sailor-strangling seafoam, and, says Rachel Carson at the beginning of her book
The Sea around Us
, Mother Sea. “The sea floats her, ripples her, flows together with her daughter, in all our ways,” writes Hélène Cixous. “Then unseparated they sweep along their changing waters, without fear of their bodies, without bony stiffness, without a shell . . . And sea for mother gives herself up to pleasure in her bath of writing.” Fluidity, the biological body, Aphrodite of the unsanitary seafoam rather than of marble, generated when Chronos, or Time, threw Uranus’s severed genitals upon the open sea. The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don’t add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the faint suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup. A person who nearly drowns is more readily revived if her lungs are full of seawater rather than freshwater, for the sea, just as salty as the body, does not dilute the blood and burst the cells. It was the sea in which all life evolved, we were all told long ago; and somewhere further along in biology, blood became one kind of salty ocean circulating nutrients, oxygen, flushing toxins and detritus along the estuaries and channels of the body, and amniotic fluid another sea in which each floated in darkness the first nine months of life until, as they say, the waters broke. But where I come from, the first people say
that originally Coyote or Raven or Creator drew solid land up as a fistful of mud from the spreading waters, and the ones who live on the coast say that the dead go west over the sea when they die, the place that every river on this Pacific slope runs to. Another story from this terrain has the earth as Turtle Island, a swimmer forever afloat in the sea, and all these stories assert that the liquid is primary and solidity merely floats on it (and the night before I go to this coast to think out this essay, I dream I am carrying a tortoise or turtle before me in two hands, held out before me like an altarboy’s Bible, and the creature keeps leaking water, far more water than ought to be in its body, and only upon waking do I realize that the room around which we proceeded was my childhood bedroom). One thing leads to another: there are the seashells children are told to hold to their ears to hear the sea, and only later are they told that they are listening to the inward sea of their own body’s pulses echoing in the seashell that was itself once a favorite metaphor for a delicate ear: these are pearls that were his eyes, but seashells that were her ears. Pearly-eyed Alice cries an ocean and then swims in the sea that flowed from her eyes to the strange world on the other side of her tears, and the American artist Robert Gober’s Madonna comes flanked by two suitcases full of tidepool life that seem like allegorical wombs; for though it is obvious enough that rivers are veins and arteries, the ocean is everything. Call it a sea of amniotic fluid, the fluid in which life generated, but uterine hardly describes this most open space under the sky unless to the most wide-open imagination. The seashore, everything always in motion, a place that seems the essence of change, but the pelicans that skim the waves look like pterodactyls, and the trilobites scuttled blindly through the coming and going of the dinosaurs without any more interest than they take in, say, photography, with its womblike darkrooms and amniotic developing washes, or in politics or in poetry. The sea lapping like a cat at a saucer of milk or, rather, since it is the liquid which acts, the sea like a vast saucer of milk lapping at a recumbent cat. The sea laps at the land, or the sea is in the lap of the land, the ancient earth whose unseen depths cradle the seas and whose heights we inhabit mostly at the altitude called sea level, which global warming is due to change and with it outdate all the coastal maps. This is not quite the allegory meant in old
movies when sex was implied by a cut to the waves whose steady rhythm had more to do with hips than lips. “Yes, as everyone knows,” remarks
Moby Dick’s
Ishmael when he’s still on shore waiting to ship out, “water and meditation are wedded for-ever,” asking us to accept the play on the liquidities of language in which the substance and the cerebral act can be imagined as married like two members of the same species, a pairing like love’s parentage of severed genitals and seafoam. “In all rivers and oceans,” says Melville a little later, “is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” The linear narrative of following the coast, the plot, the history, the sequence of pages versus the steady rhythm of the tides, the waves, the desires. The book and the sea turn into each other at the end, a stranding of black letters on the paperwhite shore, and the pages of a book at the windy seashore blow one over another like waves, a curl, a comb of pages. The box of a book is a misleading shape, call it a pirate chest made to be opened, call it the long thread of a story wound up on the spool of a book’s solid shape, every page spread a valley landscape, though the term
gutter
urbanizes the intimate central cleft between the pages. Open a book and look at it endwise and it looks like a bird seen in flight far away, spine for body and pages for wings, a fat black Bible like a raven, slender art books with thinner curves of pages to either side like albatrosses. This book could be bound as a circle, the pages like spokes on a wheel, a turning investigation of the sea, a continuity that folds back on itself, a walk that went all the way around an island to end at its beginning; or it could be imagined as an aquarium, every page like the Madonna’s tidepool suitcases a sample so fresh that some pages seem to splash, to have depth the hand could plunge into to seize some of their treasure. Walk on the seashore: strands of seaweed lie hieroglyphically upon the strand and are sucked up by the sea and, like words turned back into fluid ink, waver in the water before being cast up on the sand in another equally unreadable version, roll of the dice, toss of the yarrow sticks. Reading the sea, transparent at one’s feet, green as arching wave and white as spray, its depths an opaque accumulation of transparencies with blue borrowed from the sky. Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is
another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.