One of the memories of 9/11 I’ve never shaken: I took a subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to write about the event (I had to lie about my intentions to the MTA staff to get on board). When I popped out in the West Village, I found a man with an easel and canvas planted right in the middle of empty Sixth Avenue. The sun hadn’t even set on that day, and he had already nearly completed a richly colorful painting of Lower Manhattan smeared in smoke and debris.
In a moment of crisis, I didn’t know what to make of this. The words “Who does he think he is?” came to mind. I was probably also jealous of his nerve and alternatively affronted by the fact that he was making sure to draw attention to his act by making a public stage out of an empty New York thoroughfare. At a spot near Houston Street where many people fleeing lower Manhattan were likely going to be marching past.
This happened before the age of cell phones. If somebody had taken a picture of him and it had gone viral, I always wondered what the Twitterverse would have done with him. Would they have hailed him as an example of superior coping skills or would they have called him a crass opportunist trying to draw attention to himself and his own cuteness while thousands of people lay dead a few miles south? I can’t help thinking now that, given people’s desire for bloodlust in the wake of the attacks, that this artist would have been canceled, stalked, doxxed and threatened.
But that’s why I’m using this little anecdote, hopefully to illuminate a bigger point. We all felt varying degrees of helplessness that day. Everybody. (If you’ve ever interviewed a 9/11 first responder, you know what I’m talking about.) Human beings aren’t good with helplessness. We must create ways to compensate and cope and feel some agency over world events that make us feel tiny.
For some of us, that meant getting in a car and driving away from town (perhaps with no explanation to anybody). For others, it was helping rescue workers. For those who couldn’t even help with that, it meant telling tasteless jokes (yes, they were being told in New York the day of. I heard them). Some created meaningless conspiracy theories. Others attacked innocent Muslims. Most Americans simply supported any military action put on the table.
And if we’d had Twitter, I would imagine it would mean going after the tragedy painter. “I’m going to cope by fighting with another person coping.”
My own coping mechanism after pulverized bits of the World Trade Center snowed down on my neighborhood in Brooklyn was to write a story or two about it. It wasn’t good enough. We all come face to face with our own limitations in a crisis, and that’s what makes the events of like 9/11—yes, it was a very beautiful day in New York—so personal to many. Trauma is a part of your body. It doesn’t forget.
So I’ve accepted that the painter was coping. It’s in human nature to act when we think we’ve got a picture of things. We also have to accept that the real picture of things is always going to change.
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Beauty is Imperfection 