In the garden where the trees have names, I slept one afternoon. It was the end of summer and I was wearing long pants and semi-long sleeves, but I wanted to be close to the earth once more before it would be too cold. I was new to the campus and to the people and after a summer spent on another, virtually deserted campus, among a handful of friends, I chose to withdraw from the busy-leg-bearing faces that moved in all directions and to take my hour of rest in a quieter place. So I stepped towards the gate that I had used one other time to go out of the fortress and to the train that took me to the City and crossed the street to the "random park" that my companion on that trip had pointed out to me. She, too, was new to the place. She noticed things much more accurately than I did, but didn't take pains to express her observations. Instead, she called everything she noticed by the vague and somewhat defiant epithet "random."

"Random?" I had replied, awakened from the tired desperate state that a day of shopping and small talk had lulled me into.

"Yes," she said, "everything here is random: here's a random park, a random church—random everything."

I glanced over my shoulder at the park that we had just passed by, a rather small patch of land with trees surrounding a stone kiosk that reminded me of a prayer alcove. Then we walked back through the gate to the fortress, to leave our shopping bags and get dinner.

It was this "random" place that I chose for my afternoon rest on that day at the end of the summer. I went around the kiosk, trying to hide behind its wall from the cars that passed by with forgetful regularity, realizing with regret that I could still not hide from the uninviting noise of their engines. Looking for a patch of good grass to lie on, I noticed the names. There were little metal plates on the ground, one in front of each tree, bearing names and years. My first reaction was to step back onto the main path, so as not to bother the sleep of the dead. With a slight chill, I thought that the closeness of the church (the "random" one across the street) explained this pseudo-park as a final resting place. Yet there was no pattern to the trees, nor to the direction of the metal plates. Nor was there any sign to point out a cemetery. Reassured, I stepped once more onto the grass. Finding a sunny patch right behind the rounded stone wall of the kiosk, I lay my head on my school bag and closed my eyes, dreaming of a fairy land where trees have names and walk around and greet you with grandmother smiles and wrinkled uncle faces, pipes in their mouths and old woolen hats shadowing their disorderly brows.

I woke from the tree world with the half-real image of a big white dog sniffing my face. I stood and cleaned myself from the mud and grass. As I walked back to the street, I saw the dog and his master walk in the other direction.

That word keeps coming back to me. Today, as I was walking past the kiosk, I noticed some large stones with inscriptions. I found out that the random park is a Vietnam memorial and that the names belong, of course, to some of those who perished there. Yet the discovery didn't make it at all less random, for what I had experienced there during my hour of crying was that nothing made sense anymore. It all seemed like a magic game of scrabble wherein all the letters on the board start mingling and moving suddenly, forming strange combinations out of their own will. I say "magic," and not "cursed," because in spite of my weeping for the dark cloud of souls lost in the night and for all the suffering in the world, I have chosen to see the bright light, not the dim light immersed in tears and pain.

Tears and pain are with us at all times. We don't need the first noble truth of the Buddha to realize that. What happened on September 11 was an acute reminder of that truth. The most striking thought that came to me and triggered my bitterest tears was the banality of this event. Yet it is not pain that we should draw from a day-to-day event like death, for it was in the face of death that the entire world shuddered. It is not anger either, nor a need for revenge—no action can put back together the pieces that were broken from the world that day. Randomness cannot be responded to with precision. Not in a world where 1+1 doesn't always equal 2, where things happen for reasons beyond reason. Randomness is. (If you don't believe me, take a look at world history—better yet, take a look at the amount of world history that we know.) It is not good, nor bad; the usual normative judgments do not apply to it, because it does not follow any norms.

For us human beings, thirsty for the absolute, this relativity is just not enough though. We want a world that doesn't slip through our fingers; we want to be able to hold on to something solid. In this case, we need some universal measure for our tears and perhaps an answer that can erase the immense ‘why' that keeps our souls suspended with sadness and fear. I don't claim to have come up with this answer; yet I guide myself by a truth that death itself reveals to the ever-questioning student that takes on each of our faces:

In the secret cave of the heart, two are seated
By life's fountain. The separate ego
Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,
Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,
While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter
Neither liking this nor disliking that.
The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self
Lives in light.

(Katha Upanishad, Part I, 3-1)

Andrea Florescu is an international student from Romania studying political science, philosophy, and religion at Gettysburg College.

Lower Manhattan (top)
Emily XYZ

Lower Manhattan:
Wall Street, Park Row, Bowling Green, and Corner of
Chambers & Church
Tuesday 18 September 2001, 7–10:30 pm

In Hinduism there is such a thing as sacred ash, which is swiped across the foreheads of Brahmins and other holy men. In Catholicism, too, there is sacred ash, in the form of a little cross drawn by a priest's thumb on your forehead on Ash Wednesday. They used to say, Remember, man, that thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return. But at some point it was decided this was too heavy, and it was changed to a more innocuous blessing.

There is secular ash, too, like what's left after leaf piles burn in the fall. And then there is ash that should never have been, that everyone wishes would unpulverize, reorganize its particles and become again the thing it once was. The ashes of the World Trade Center fall into this category.

Where I get off at Wall Street Station there are two exits: Fulton Street and Dey Street. I choose Dey. Outside, it is already dark. You can walk down the street as far as you like, but to your right the cross-streets are closed off. Each opens on a different view of the slowly billowing white cloud that marks where the World Trade Center stood until just a week ago this morning. At Liberty Street, you can see part of the buiding's steel front sticking out of the ground, a famous view shown in many photographs of the debris area. Two blocks up at Dey, you get a good look at the charred remains of 5 World Trade Center, a low building that had stood just east of the South Tower. This is right above the candy store on the Concourse level where I worked when I first moved to New York in 1982. A fluffy beige dust still coats surfaces.

I wish they would put up two new buildings the same as the two old towers, 110 stories each. But I wish these would be made of rose and orange and lavender and blue steel, and gold-surface glass, to intensify the light, especially the sunset. I wonder if the Japanese architect who built the Trade Center is still alive, and how it feels to have created a huge beautiful iconic thing like that, and then to see it destroyed.

I pass the New York Stock Exchange, which is guarded by a gigantic flag draped across the front of the building.

I talk at Bowling Green with a young cop from the 100 Precinct in Queens, who was also an ironworker and so had worked at the debris field the media calls Ground Zero. He describes the many, many body parts he saw. Picked up a shoe from the ground, foot still in it. Says he doesn't talk to his wife about the things he has seen. Says the workers haven't gotten near the location of the towers yet, they are still just clearing stuff away from the surrounding areas. Says the work is being done by a construction crew who actually had to bid on the job. They are all union guys, of course, who are better (or at least more controllable) than the miscellaneous volunteers from last week. Some who were pocketing things they found like wallets full of cash (and ID). Describes himself as "traumatized." Describes the debris areas as enormous and says it smells like a morgue. I talk with him for nearly an hour.

At Park Row and Ann Street, right across from City Hall Park, one of the most ominous views: old St. Paul's Chapel. Behind that, the Woolworth building, now seeming very tall indeed, and quite dark—no electricity in this part of town at all, save that provided by huge generators to power big work lights. And behind the Woolworth building, the constant, swirling, steamy, billowing white smoke lit like a movie screen against the blue-black sky.

At Church and Chambers, another view of smoke and lights, only this time you really smell the smoke. Unpleasant: wood, plastic, electrical, chemical. There is a Buddha sitting and singing, with tears running down his face. In front of him three people are facing the site of the ruins and praying: hands in prayer position, bow from waist, touch hands to ground, kneel, touch forehead to ground, turn hands palms up, stand, bring hands to prayer, repeat the whole thing again. Then the teacher starts to laugh. The bowing continues. Finally, after maybe 15 minutes, they pause and I ask what they are doing. One of the three, a Chinese woman, tells me they are Buddhists and that they are bowing to the dead and praying they would go to heaven, which I guess is an answer she figured a Westerner would understand. She says they bow 108 times. They get ready to start again, and I ask if I could join them. She says yes. I don't count, but this round seems to be only about 50 or 60. But it is the one thing I've done since I got here that makes me really feel like I am doing something worthwhile, something that actually contributes. It feels like we are reaching out to the people who died and to the towers themselves and finally doing something for them, giving them comfort, assuring them that we know what happened and we remember them with love, sending them on their way.

How long have I lived in and loved this place, yet I never once touched my face to a New York City street. How many times I've left funerals or memorial services feeling lost myself. What is needed at times like this is a real prayer for the dead. Not a movie theme, not a "remember the good times," but a resonant old ritual that gives form and voice to great pain. The trash basket is in front of me. The recycling truck comes by. The police and firefighters talk. The pedestrians walk. Trucks pass through the barrier. The smoke continues to rise, and we stand up, hands in prayer, bow, kneel down, touch our foreheads to the ashy sidewalk, stand up again and again and again. Bowing to the smoke in the air and the ash on the sidewalk that is so many people, so many things, so many events and memories. Bowing, standing, taking it on our hands and foreheads and making it sacred. Bowing, standing, mourning, accepting, releasing.

Three weeks after the fact. People everywhere still talk about it, all the time. But the talk is different: less emotion, more acceptance. What Emily Dickinison meant by "the hour of lead."

The flyers of the missing people are slowly disappearing as the days go by. Last night on a memorial wall on Lexington Avenue there was a prayer card for someone's funeral where his flyer had been. Flags no longer look so strange in Manhattan, hanging from fire escapes, taped in windows, sticking out of cups on street vendors' tables.

My yoga school put a special message on their website calling for compassion for everybody and everything—not just the victims but the terrorists, too—not just the victims of this violence, but of violence everywhere, even animals. I know that in yoga, no life is separate from any other, so to speak of "terrorists" or "victims," Arabs or Americans, humans or animals, is to impose a separation that in reality does not really exist.

But what I can't get past is the image—which was not an image but a reality, a thing that really happened of an airplane flying straight at my office windows. This is what happened, and the people inside saw it coming. They saw it, some of them, and they knew the plane was headed straight for them; and they knew that within a few seconds they would most likely be dead. All my philosophy, all my ideas about what is and what should be, collapse like a stack of books when I consider this thing, which really happened, for more than a minute or two. Some of them had a good idea it was being done on purpose, and a few of them, in the last seconds of their existence, even guessed exactly what was happening. Then they were atomized by a force of which I can't even conceive.

Here my imagining stops, along with my philosophy.

I am not an enlightened being. I am a human being who practices yoga and tries to live right. But I haven't transcended any of the limits of my condition. I am flesh and blood, even though my teachers tell me I am other than flesh and blood, and that the body is the unreal part of me. I believe it—or I think I do—until some physical fact of life comes crashing in, like pain, or sleeplessness, or cold, or fear. Then I find what I thought were my convictions shredded like an old shirt. This happens when I'm exposed to ordinary discomfort, let alone imminent, gigantic, roaring, annihilating chaos.

So I don't know about having compassion for the hijackers. I do believe that compassion is stronger than hatred. And so, if for no other reason than to be stronger than them, I will try and find compassion for them. With enough compassion maybe we can destroy them completely. That's how I feel—that there really is an "us" and a "them."

The people who did this are dead, along with the people they did it to. At the back of my mind is the idea that this will all be over soon, and the Towers will come back, and all the people will come back, and this will just be a weird thing that happened. We'll all joke about it and it will be over. We'll get back to bitching and buying makeup and hustling our various services and talents. This is what I feel will happen soon, any day.

Compassion, no. But I can find a certain understanding of them, along with a strange and highly qualified admiration. It takes an inhuman amount of nerve and self-possession to pilot yourself into kingdom come. This is the same fearlessness and singlemindedness I try to develop by practicing yoga, the same qualities yoga tells me I need to fling myself into the next world.

Heroism and monstrosity. Just depends which side of the line you stand on.

Emily XYZ is a poet and performance artist who has been featured in the PBS-TV series The United States of Poetry and in a 1998 Nike ad honoring female athletes. Her work appears in the anthologies Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Holt, 1994) and Verses That Hurt (St. Martins, 1997). This article was originally a spoken word piece which aired nationally on National Public Radio. Printed with the permission of the author.

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