letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
heaven
``Anybody
who dies in the war on the American side will not go to heaven,'' the ruling said.
``But any Muslim who dies on the side of Afghanistan will die as a martyr and
go to paradise.'' --News Report on Taliban Clerics' Reaction to US Military Involvement.
1.
In
the beginning, we are told, was the word. And now, well after the beginning, words
are again at the crux of the current situation. Words like "crusade," "Jihad"
and last but not least "paradise" or "heaven." Love, too is one of these words,
but the word referred to (in the beginning) is God.
These
and other words flow from particular books--three books--The Torah, The Bible
and The Koran. Those who have taken charge of these books add yet more words to
the brew of thinking about what it means to be on Earth. Each book however, espouses
a world view that is in many ways exclusive of the other books. Embroiled in a
history and politics that has wrought havoc on the world--as well as advancing
science and culture, creating things like algebra, nuclear reactors, Disneyland
and Minimalism--these books and those who wield them, hold billions in their power.
The power to explode. The power of belief.
2.
A
friend sent this message last week:
Write:
DO Q33 NYC
Then
convert it to the wingding font. This is what you get:
DO
Q33 NYC
3.
Many
artists no doubt feel the image of a commercial jetliner disappearing in a ball
of flame into the World Trade Center is an image that ends all images. Artists
can't compete with this image of Hell. The Western imagination has been blown
apart by the real, the real delivered in real time by television and the internet.
On
September 10th, I went with a poet and a painter to see Apocalypse Now Redux,
the 3 and a half hour remake of the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece.
The
next day several hours after the attack on New York City and Washington D.C.,
public trash bins in Paris were sealed to prevent nail bombs from being placed
in them. Military police with Uzis were in evidence on Metro platforms. I saw
mice crawling into and out of openings in the trash cans.
According
to a BBC World report these days there are no visitors to the Pyramids in the
Valley of the Kings in Egypt because most of the visitors were, or used to be,
American.
And
no, my ex-girlfriend didn't call or e-mail to see if I was still alive.
4.
The
shorn 7-story siding of the World Trade Center left standing after the destruction
of the buildings retained a cathedral-like eminence. It was removed two weeks
after the attack. It will be incorporated into a memorial. Is art making's purpose
now to define our age and thus create memorials?
Do
we look at Van Gogh's Starry Night differently now? What do we see?
5.
I saw a man walking in the streets of Paris wearing a New York Yankee baseball
hat. I had no idea if this man was French, American or Algerian. It was one of
those moments that speak now about the world. A year ago it might have indicated
a love for things New York, or rooting for the Yankee baseball team over the New
York Mets team in the World Series. Images stand still while the world shifts
and implodes, giving those same images new meanings. This is the "nature" of found
objects. Out of context they give birth to their newness in their being found.
Reborn, these simple objects startle as they emerge from their ordinariness.
I
made a bumper sticker for a friend of mine who sells "sticky paper" in New York
using the Twin Towers and the simple line of text: Pray for Peace. He thought
the use of the Twin Towers was "too strong" an image. "People are too sensitive
right now."
I
have two students who I teach English, they're Vietnamese, though Paris born.
This summer they went to New York and California and came back with snapshots.
One shows the boys, 11 and 13, standing on Liberty Island (where the Statue of
Liberty stands), the Twin Towers in the background, echoing the brothers' "brotherliness."
It is not a work of art, but the picture yields meaning unlike other images in
my house.
6.
The
September 11 issue of the New Yorker features a cover by Art Spiegelman of a black
New York City, the Twin Towers in a deeper black, barely visible… The date September
11, 2001 runs up the side of the cover in large white type.
I
had a dream the morning of September 12. I am driving by the World Trade Center
and I see the towers are gone; I reach out for them and my arms are missing; phantom
limbs, phantom response. A reflex about loss.
Another
friend in Boston, a mother of three, sends me this:
"In
the end there is not much to say. In the end there is no real place for words
anyway. In the end it is simply too big, too high, too long. Too deep. I hear
the low growl of far-away thunder and my mind thinks to appraise it. Way off to
one side I see a flash of blue light and I register it on the floor of my stomach.
My head turns up and out to greet the horror it is expecting...
It
is not fear, not really, not only. There is some of that, surely, I find a little
more of it each day, like copper on my tongue. But more than that it is something
that is not, something that is no longer. Something that has been taken away or
extinguished, a light, something that brought with it much more than itself and
took more than itself away. I look around me now and scarcely know what it is
I am missing. I reach out to locate myself in the dark and my hand claws at empty
space. It is the absence… absence I am coming to know. It is the touch and taste
of hollow."
7.
A
friend's friend writes an e-mail describing the first day of school for his little
girl and the "sound" of the airliner over his head in Lower Manhattan, and the
"shadow" that follows. This e-mail has been sent to about 1,000 people.
Other
e-mail messages tell me: "We're okay," and others, forwarded hundreds of times
carry poems by Yeats, Auden, and William Carlos Williams; still others contain
conspiracy theories, plans for attack, plans for peace, reasons why. The connected
world seeks words, consumes them, forages for more. Words, dead or alive, circulate.
William
Safire, New York Times "On Language" columnist examines the lexicon of conflict.
He probes the words "crusade," "defense," and launches into an analysis of GWB's
speech before the US Congress and Churchill's line: "'We shall not fail or falter;
we shall not weaken or tire. . . . Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.''
8.
On
September 28 Jeremy Stigter, a Paris-based Dutch photographer and film maker shows
a group of writers and artists his 9-minute film titled "Three." He created the
film in June. With it's Ravi Shankar sitar soundtrack, "Three" is the kind of
art we are likely to see in the near future. No, it's not a Doris Day rerun nor
is it about family values; it doesn't exactly have a message. It just is his film
of rapidly streaming lines and squiggles washed in sepia or blue or blood red.
It could play anywhere, say in a club; or, even, in Bill Gates's house ; its images,
rough drawings, and doodles, on film, tell a story that is no story at all. It's
not Ulysses, it's not an "art film," it's not an answer to any question, it just
simply is something someone did and showed--after September 11th in the context
of an informal art event.
In
the galleries Anne de Villepoix opened an new space (43, rue de Montmorency -
75003 Paris) with work by French art star Fabrice Hybert called Mex-Mixt. Inside
amidst some French cut bonsai trees, sloppy (and expensive) collage paints, and
several piles of dirt was the "Peinture homéopathique n°18," a 350 ceramic tile
monument created in Mexico this year. (www.annedevillepoix.com).
In the back room one found "Vendanges Energy" (37 minutes, 2001), a porno film.
It all seemed a bit too big, too important and completely besides the point; I
couldn't recognize the genius in it.
Maybe
I wanted to see something out of Afghanistan that could compare with the images
I saw on the www.rawa.org site produced by The
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. These pictures show young
Afghans holding "trophies" of hands separated from their owners for stealing….
Images taken by stealth in the Kabul soccer stadium cum execution grounds.
9.
On
12 September I get an e-mail from a friend in New York. The one-line message:
"Frank is OK." Frank is a New York City Fireman.
10.
"The
wastebasket is a writer's best friend." -Isaac Bashevis Singer, writer, Nobel
laureate (1904-1991)
While
writers the world over claim there are no words to utter in the face of those
images of death we witnessed, words continue to pour in--newspapers, magazines,
the internet. Some words from Central Asia shout: Death to America.
Oddly
enough, there is a revival of poetry in America these days--"people need to hear
a human voice," and special supplements to the attacks here in France. There's
plenty of argument and debate (from Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert at www.zmag.com,
among others). There's also the media reviewing the media's attention to the attack--from
the branding of the "war" to which news outlets will show or not show the planes
hitting the Towers and crumbling.
We
can't escape the mediatized version of the world, the global village connected
by words and images. In fact, it's the preferred way to experience the world.
Why? Because it's safe. What happened in America was "too real." Which means:
Not safe. Were we ever?
Of
course some artists are not making pictures or movies about exploding buildings
(something Hollywood has long specialized in). Some artists continue to work out
their pictorial theories, they examine paint, new media or like the majority of
people who wield a brush, they produce watery landscapes.
11.
Picasso's
Guernica (1937), his depiction of the German Luftwafer's bombing of the medieval
town in Spain ordered by General Francisco Franco, probably comes closest to the
wreckage and fear in NYC, but does it really do anything? Now, I mean. What is
the purpose of art now? To stop death? Or explain it?
This
image of a boxcutter (used by the hijackers) appeared on the internet at dailynews.yahoo
12.
Real
images have superceded any of these famous words, of course. Images of the Towers
being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke. These contrast with images
of Heaven. And isn't Heaven what this struggle is all about? One illusion of Heaven
against other illusions of Heaven. Fought to the death?
In
the West, Heaven is often painted with rosy-cheeked angels, harps, the Lord Almighty
on his throne or reaching out his finger toward Adam. Or a warm light bathing
all those who've made it through the Pearly Gates into the loving security of
fluffy clouds and perfect weather.
One
version of Paradise now being promoted by marketers of terror to suicide prospects
is a Heaven with 72 virgins (or 40 or 67, the number of virgins seems to vary).
In any case, the deal is: XX number of virgins per martyr.
My
question is: How do they know this? It can't be guaranteed, can it? Are they sure
they are virgins? What's so good about virgins? And in Heaven, what kind of happiness
will a virgin offer? Funny how that's so attractive… virgins. What do virgins
know? They are pure? How old are these virgins?
What
do the women get?
The
debate about what Heaven is like is as varied as there are people who contemplate
it, in spite of the fact that several mainstream views pervade global culture.
My idea of Heaven comes with a 24-hour cocktail bar, bunnies in short skirts and
cancer-free cigarettes.
What
would I do in Heaven anyway? Watch reruns of my life on Earth? Meet with angels
and other dead people? Exchange views about mortality? Religion? Philosophy? Eat?
Drink? Make art? Or just float in the light of God? Maybe that's all you need
in Heaven.
It
is clear by any rational or irrational thesis that to get to Heaven you first
have to be dead. For some of course, how you die is critical. And who you pray
to. It's the ultimate career move.
13.
Heaven
is tricky.
Heaven
is a minefield.
Gravity,
too, belongs to God.
©
2001 Matthew Rose mattrose@noos.fr
affiliates
