20 years ago today…. I was still so, so naïve…
So I wonder what it was that drew me to the twin towers that day. It was around June 2001. My first trip to New York. Though based in Ireland, at the time I subsisted on the Yankee dollar, working from afar for New York University running a theatre programme out of Dublin for affluent American kids with a parental vagary that their child of Irish extraction should return to the old country and immerse themselves in Guinness and indigenous drama under my tutelage.
As part of my contractual obligation that had begun that year, I set out on what would become a biannual trip to the Big Apple to meet and entice prospective travellers back across the watery divide. I’d never been to the States before and in truth I was one of those few people it seems who wasn’t instinctively enraptured by the pan-galactic wow-factor of the New York vibe. So it was with a degree of reticence I touched down at JFK airport and made the long (and expensive) taxi ride to my hotel in Lower Manhattan. Despite the journey I wasn’t tired – in fact I was instantaneously restless, as if I had arrived unintentionally in a place that needed answering but for which I had no dictionary or road-map to even know what the right question or direction were. A walk was what was needed to survey the scene and see if my instinct that I didn’t belong here was in fact mere European snobbery.
I don’t remember if I set off to find them or whether in a way I just stumbled upon them. But how did one just stumble upon the twin towers!? My detachment instantly evaporated. Two giant, impossible edifices, Babylonian in their implacability, Babel like in their defiance of the skies above. The giant plaza was a bustle with nonstop comings and goings but I just stood there and stared up at their steepling impossibility. Brazenly (oh the days!), a surprisingly pressing instinct took me over and slipping down to the concrete slabs, I stretched out fully on my back to take in their giant insistence spread-eagled against a crystal clear sky. Behold! Such an acute, out of time vista.
The bizarrely adorned exterior steel casing (later I learned installed to safeguard the buildings from threat of demolition by a wandering plane… the mere idea of such a thing…!) seemed to stretch up to eternity, like so many bony claws with never ending finger nails, an implacable, unending monument to raw power and intent. I lay there in something close to a reverie for perhaps 15 minutes; no passers-by seemed to care or think this act in any way out of the ordinary. Hey, it’s New York after all!
I wondered if I had the nerve to make it to the top. Gingerly I rose and headed into the foyer. I don’t know what I expected to find, but certainly not this; the windows that had been previously lost against the towering exterior, took on a graceful if grandiose Gothic aspect and the dwarfing scale of the interior rose up in tandem with them to the belly of the ceiling high above. I remember feeling very, very small as I ascended a wide set of stairs in search of a public lift system, and as this feeling grew I slowed to a pace quite out of tune with the hustle and bustle all around me, only making it half way up before stopping, and peering down into the teaming life below. An unease that had been growing on me ever since my arrival suddenly became quite intense. Something told me this place wasn’t safe. This place was wrong, was a defiance against some invisible law. This huge, heaving, solid certainty was not one bit safe. Why I thought that, I could not say – but I felt it – it crept across my skin; the impossible weight above, pressed down on me, only held in place by some hubristic proclamation of its intention to remain despite and in defiance of gravity itself. Though I knew it was irrational, a persistent voice in my head kept telling me it was all about to fall. This very instant! Get out it said, get out before it’s all too late….
So I did. I turned and fled, feeling most foolish - never making it to the top.
Three months later, 10th September 2001, a production I directed of Shake-speare’s Richard III opened in Dublin. A play that examines with timeless, minute perception the impact on the body politic of psychopathy allowed to run riot. I had no idea why I chose that play to do then but it had come to me as an insistence so I followed my instinct. It was early afternoon Irish time, say a little after 9.00am New York time on the 11th, and I was walking to the theatre to meet the cast to give them their post opening night notes ahead of that evening's performance. One of them ran up to me from behind, wide-eyed, voice shaking; ‘Have you seen? Have you seen the television…? The twin towers in New York are under attack… It's like something out of Hell...‘ The rest as they say, is history for all the world’s a stage.
Still in a state of shock, I had to step out in front of a full and sombre house that night and ask them if they thought it appropriate for the show to go on under such circumstances. A momentary still of hollow silence followed and then an elderly gentleman from the states slowly got to his feet and in a shaking voice full of dignity said that he and his wife had come here specifically tonight to bear witness to this play as it was for them the only way they thought they could make sense of what had happened – that these words needed to be spoken and heard. That this was the purpose or art. That it was of vital importance to them that we go on. And so we did.
Two months later, November 12th, I was back in New York. Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ had begun in the weeks before and US ground troops were pouring into Afghanistan. The anthrax false-flag was still ongoing and security at JFK airport was intense and threatening. Anyone landing on US soil was viewed with seriously mistrust and no amount of personability broke through the look of ice in every eye. I instantly regretted being there again.
I stayed in the same hotel but the landscape surrounding it was utterly changed. And of course there was this big empty hole in the skyline. And a big hole in everyone I saw. Ghosts everywhere, dust and despair and so, so much anger and pain. I sat at the window of my hotel watching a never ending line of dumper trucks still hard at it removing the debris from what was nothing but a gigantic wound in the ground. I was much later to learn that I had witnessed the deliberate destruction of the forensics of a crime scene.
The day I landed, a now oft forgotten and still in some ways inexplicable event took place; American Airlines Flight 587 out of JFK crashed into the neighbourhood of Queens, killing all 260 people aboard along with 5 people on the ground. Subsequently blamed on pilot error, at the time on the day everyone was convinced they were back! The city was in panic and I remember deciding to stay in my room and get prepared for anything to happen…
It took seven years for me to shake off the brainwashing of the time. I think it was that early SOTT video Pentagon Strike that finally cracked my edifice of denial. And now here we are 20 years on going through the endgame that was set in motion that day… it seems like an eternity ago but also just more of the same never ending dream like state that we slipped into that autumn and never really awoke from. I try to remember this when I get so despairing about how it is possible that so many educated people have totally fallen foul of the Covid con; the bewitching started a long, long time ago and 9-11 was one of many – if still the most absurdly obvious – spells along the way. And if that didn’t wake enough people up back then to their impending peril, nothing else to follow surely could…
So here we are. Waiting, waiting for the next grotesque move by the beast. It’s surely coming soon. For those towers just keep on falling.
Any memories from the day of your own folks?
So I wonder what it was that drew me to the twin towers that day. It was around June 2001. My first trip to New York. Though based in Ireland, at the time I subsisted on the Yankee dollar, working from afar for New York University running a theatre programme out of Dublin for affluent American kids with a parental vagary that their child of Irish extraction should return to the old country and immerse themselves in Guinness and indigenous drama under my tutelage.
As part of my contractual obligation that had begun that year, I set out on what would become a biannual trip to the Big Apple to meet and entice prospective travellers back across the watery divide. I’d never been to the States before and in truth I was one of those few people it seems who wasn’t instinctively enraptured by the pan-galactic wow-factor of the New York vibe. So it was with a degree of reticence I touched down at JFK airport and made the long (and expensive) taxi ride to my hotel in Lower Manhattan. Despite the journey I wasn’t tired – in fact I was instantaneously restless, as if I had arrived unintentionally in a place that needed answering but for which I had no dictionary or road-map to even know what the right question or direction were. A walk was what was needed to survey the scene and see if my instinct that I didn’t belong here was in fact mere European snobbery.
I don’t remember if I set off to find them or whether in a way I just stumbled upon them. But how did one just stumble upon the twin towers!? My detachment instantly evaporated. Two giant, impossible edifices, Babylonian in their implacability, Babel like in their defiance of the skies above. The giant plaza was a bustle with nonstop comings and goings but I just stood there and stared up at their steepling impossibility. Brazenly (oh the days!), a surprisingly pressing instinct took me over and slipping down to the concrete slabs, I stretched out fully on my back to take in their giant insistence spread-eagled against a crystal clear sky. Behold! Such an acute, out of time vista.
The bizarrely adorned exterior steel casing (later I learned installed to safeguard the buildings from threat of demolition by a wandering plane… the mere idea of such a thing…!) seemed to stretch up to eternity, like so many bony claws with never ending finger nails, an implacable, unending monument to raw power and intent. I lay there in something close to a reverie for perhaps 15 minutes; no passers-by seemed to care or think this act in any way out of the ordinary. Hey, it’s New York after all!
I wondered if I had the nerve to make it to the top. Gingerly I rose and headed into the foyer. I don’t know what I expected to find, but certainly not this; the windows that had been previously lost against the towering exterior, took on a graceful if grandiose Gothic aspect and the dwarfing scale of the interior rose up in tandem with them to the belly of the ceiling high above. I remember feeling very, very small as I ascended a wide set of stairs in search of a public lift system, and as this feeling grew I slowed to a pace quite out of tune with the hustle and bustle all around me, only making it half way up before stopping, and peering down into the teaming life below. An unease that had been growing on me ever since my arrival suddenly became quite intense. Something told me this place wasn’t safe. This place was wrong, was a defiance against some invisible law. This huge, heaving, solid certainty was not one bit safe. Why I thought that, I could not say – but I felt it – it crept across my skin; the impossible weight above, pressed down on me, only held in place by some hubristic proclamation of its intention to remain despite and in defiance of gravity itself. Though I knew it was irrational, a persistent voice in my head kept telling me it was all about to fall. This very instant! Get out it said, get out before it’s all too late….
So I did. I turned and fled, feeling most foolish - never making it to the top.
Three months later, 10th September 2001, a production I directed of Shake-speare’s Richard III opened in Dublin. A play that examines with timeless, minute perception the impact on the body politic of psychopathy allowed to run riot. I had no idea why I chose that play to do then but it had come to me as an insistence so I followed my instinct. It was early afternoon Irish time, say a little after 9.00am New York time on the 11th, and I was walking to the theatre to meet the cast to give them their post opening night notes ahead of that evening's performance. One of them ran up to me from behind, wide-eyed, voice shaking; ‘Have you seen? Have you seen the television…? The twin towers in New York are under attack… It's like something out of Hell...‘ The rest as they say, is history for all the world’s a stage.
Still in a state of shock, I had to step out in front of a full and sombre house that night and ask them if they thought it appropriate for the show to go on under such circumstances. A momentary still of hollow silence followed and then an elderly gentleman from the states slowly got to his feet and in a shaking voice full of dignity said that he and his wife had come here specifically tonight to bear witness to this play as it was for them the only way they thought they could make sense of what had happened – that these words needed to be spoken and heard. That this was the purpose or art. That it was of vital importance to them that we go on. And so we did.
Two months later, November 12th, I was back in New York. Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ had begun in the weeks before and US ground troops were pouring into Afghanistan. The anthrax false-flag was still ongoing and security at JFK airport was intense and threatening. Anyone landing on US soil was viewed with seriously mistrust and no amount of personability broke through the look of ice in every eye. I instantly regretted being there again.
I stayed in the same hotel but the landscape surrounding it was utterly changed. And of course there was this big empty hole in the skyline. And a big hole in everyone I saw. Ghosts everywhere, dust and despair and so, so much anger and pain. I sat at the window of my hotel watching a never ending line of dumper trucks still hard at it removing the debris from what was nothing but a gigantic wound in the ground. I was much later to learn that I had witnessed the deliberate destruction of the forensics of a crime scene.
The day I landed, a now oft forgotten and still in some ways inexplicable event took place; American Airlines Flight 587 out of JFK crashed into the neighbourhood of Queens, killing all 260 people aboard along with 5 people on the ground. Subsequently blamed on pilot error, at the time on the day everyone was convinced they were back! The city was in panic and I remember deciding to stay in my room and get prepared for anything to happen…
It took seven years for me to shake off the brainwashing of the time. I think it was that early SOTT video Pentagon Strike that finally cracked my edifice of denial. And now here we are 20 years on going through the endgame that was set in motion that day… it seems like an eternity ago but also just more of the same never ending dream like state that we slipped into that autumn and never really awoke from. I try to remember this when I get so despairing about how it is possible that so many educated people have totally fallen foul of the Covid con; the bewitching started a long, long time ago and 9-11 was one of many – if still the most absurdly obvious – spells along the way. And if that didn’t wake enough people up back then to their impending peril, nothing else to follow surely could…
So here we are. Waiting, waiting for the next grotesque move by the beast. It’s surely coming soon. For those towers just keep on falling.
Any memories from the day of your own folks?
