After Amis: September 11th

"....that was the defining moment"

AT 8.49 on the morning of September 11^th, 2001, a newsflash interrupted a commercial break on America’s CNN channel. It conveyed shocking images of smoke billowing from one of the towers of New York’s World Trade Centre. Initial reports were abundant with speculation but scant in detail – had this been an accident? What kind of craft had struck the Tower? How many had lost their lives in this monolithic hub of fiscal activity? At 9.03, the unthinkable answered those questions in a single and appalling motif of organised devastation, with the north tower likewise impacted by a passenger plane, a moment that compelled Martin Amis, in The Guardian, to observe -

"It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty; that was the defining moment." *

mirroring, it must be conceded, the benign voyeurism that, though of something irrefutably wicked, momentarily prevails in the mind of the viewer, our instinctive outrage tacitly supplanted by our innate and tangible attraction to drama.

Barely had the dust of those attacks settled than the jargon of the atrocity, “9/11”, “Al-Qaeda” and “Radicalism”, became firmly embedded in the empirical glossary of the Western consciousness. Everything seemed either directly associated with the event, or a mere footnote to its significance – we were all drafted into the climate of this savage, spontaneous modernity, the inhabitants of the “post-9/11 world”, an act of singular barbarism that had purportedly transferred the “threat” from the hypothetical to the realm of a malevolent normativity, affronts to liberty uniformly met with disbelief but couched deeply in a reluctantly accepted “state of fanatical play”. Each new instance of terror abjectly perverts our morality, to be sure, and yet expressions of revulsion seem accompanied, paradoxically, by a de-sensitization through which, if condemnation is primary, they are individual statements of shock located in a broader resignation to the “culture of the maniacal” rather than the “phenomena of the extreme”.

If, at the visual heart of arguably the most photographed event in human history, lay a litany of tragic images, an appalling confirmation of death on a mass scale, then, at the ideological core of the savagery resided, curiously, a twisted conception of Being. Sometime after the attacks, a four-page transcript was found among the belongings of pilot Mohamed Atta. If the pages were littered with intimations of death, then such “philosophies” were inextricably bound up with a malevolently-attained reward of immortality. The closing passage read –

"When the hour of reality approaches, the zero hour….wholeheartedly welcome death….

end your life while praying, seconds before the target….

Afterwards, we will all meet in the highest heaven…. ." **

Death was purely an interim necessity en route to a cruelly-won salvation. Even the moment of impact, the ultimate experiential horror, is confined within a grim metaphysical prospect – the “zero hour” saw the conspirators, in the final moment of their lives, acting independently of temporal and moral parameters, their thoughts centred not on fate but a belief in the “life to come”. The ‘….hour of reality….’ saw the terrorists ascribe greater actuality to an imminent “existential metaphysics” than to the world from which, through a terrible liaison of brute determinism and abhorrent iconography, they would depart for the ‘….highest heaven….’, an elite First Principle reserved for those who

"….strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world"

For the terrorists that morning, their objective was not the glorification of death, but the elevation borne of that sacrifice.

It is the sublime or the morbid within human nature which dictates whether that union, Being, is realised for the most altruistic or corrosive of anthropocentric ends. 'Being' is the Rosetta Stone of what divides experience and negation. That most seamless species of Being, the insatiable rivalry of horror and goodness, reveals the exhortions or superlatives on that seasoned tablet to be the most grotesque polemic or the most patient, benign etching.


* 'Fear and Loathing', The Guardian, September 18th, 2001
** 'A Nation Challenged: Notes found after the Hijackings' (Editorial, New York Times, September 29th, 2001)