The Golden Ass

Ground Zero
Less than a month before 9/11 and towards the end of a deeply monastic time away when I was at Virginia Tech for summer classes - in which I dove deep into T.S. Eliot, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the work of the Prophetic Imagination via Architecture - I had this dream and, in preliminary preparations for my fifth year thesis project of Architecture School, wrote this the following day:

Starting Under The Over

Last night, I was flying through the air with my family in our Explorer. I was in the back seat, and my sister was driving, saying we needed to get fuel. But we couldn’t find a place to land, because there were air planes dropping bombs all around us, and air planes crashing to the left of us, and air planes shooting others down to the right of us. I don’t think we were in any danger, though, since we were in a car. We weren’t really a part of the action. I don’t really know where we were, but because of the military activity centered where we were, and because it was air planes, and Oceana Air Base is the only place I know of of that sort, it must have been Oceana Air Base. And, because I don’t remember the whole place and all the events as they unfolded, I don’t know the structure of the place I was in. But it must be circular in some way, because we kept returning to the same spot. In fact, the returning is all I remember.

It is now today, and I don’t know how last night ended. So, with so many powerful projectiles causing death flying around me last night, I am probably dead. That I can only be most certain of. With everything destroyed, something needs to be built to house what we do, and it should be in the place where things were before last night, because things want to return to their beginnings. But, from my perspective, I am not certain where that was, so the house can be built anywhere.

But, I do know that the playing filed is all leveled out. All the explosions occurring after the projectiles hit something did that. Maybe that’s the way it should be anyway, since Jesus came out of Nazareth. So, since I am staring OVER what has been destroyed, and I KNOW that the playing field is leveled OUT to us, I will build a house of the absolute highest, reflecting the low LEVEL that everything in my house is able to stand upon. The Spirit that the World comes out of will set everyone FREE together.

Second Plane Hitting On 9/11

Let me give some context to that. I had been studying Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus is trying to get back home, which we most intimately know as the place to which we return. I understood this as a quest in which we all join and from which we all get interrupted by war. That pattern will be interrupted by a kind of return to the garden, as I understood the story at the time. I also understood the dawn of modernity to be a larger than previous interruption in that quest, since modern modes of production, consumption, and travel render place relatively meaningless.

I also understood that Jesus "moves mountains." I learned that, in the Old Testament, "mountains" were symbols of (mostly unjust) tyrannical political power. That image of Jesus defanging the powers of this world was coupled and violently juxtaposed in my mind with prominent modern images of a large, open, flat, frontier-like, and horizontal ground upon which our institutions, buildings, and society in general ideally stand. A brotherhood of equals pursuing life and liberty came only at the cost of much bloodshed - of others (think of the cost of "manifest destiny"). I also understood intuitively that my very own country WAS just such a "mountain" - particularly in the eyes of many every other nations around the globe. For my 5th year Architectural Thesis project, I therefore originally wanted to design a building of worship, where images of a return to humanity's beginnings would be acted out with both liturgy and with acts of self sacrificial love modeled after the one who shed his own blood rather than that of others, where rules humble faith rather than the false hubris of modern (old fashioned American) certainty. However...

(Image of A Typical Flat, Expansive, Open, Modern Ground Zero - built throughout the late 1950's - That Ignited My Imagination Before There Was A "Ground Zero" In NYC)

Towards the end of August, 2001 - and within a couple of weeks of 9/11 - this was what I ended up writing for my initial presentation of my 5th Year Architectural Thesis Project, which was initially to redesign the US Capitol Building:

Love Death Out of Fire in Water: Intro To Thesis

One night while the whole country was sleeping, the capitol building exploded – all by itself. We are now rebuilding a new one in impressive fashion to help “ensure” that it does not again explode. Near the center of this new house of a government body is a tombstone (from the old capitol building). On it is carved the words “RIP – STONE of the old capitol building.” This center houses figures of the country represented by the government body that this building houses. They hold up Nothing.

One night, long before this night, a Light-line appeared around the face of Shadow. This was near the beginning of civilization. Someone hinged up a rock and called it alive because it was able to speak. This is here-say. The machine begins to move Something.

A little while later someone made Democracy. He stood as the center of his world. He is able to raise his voice above others. We are behind him now, and that is why we don’t see our representative go in the capitol building.

One evening, soon after that, near the end of mere Humanity’s lifetime, was when the whole country fell asleep. The rock Someone stood upright one time disappeared. What’s left over to stand as the center of the Democratic world after that is Nothing. This leaves a big confusion somewhere between Social and Democratic. One might call this place a Waste. But I don’t know whose waste it is. So, something big enough to overpower attacks. The attacked might as well surrender as flash its wall. That way, light can get in for the attacked to see the swell approaching the shore.

The Pentagon after the plane crashed into it on 9/11


Some of that is a bit cryptic, so please let me do some explaining as best I can - without killing it. The title was an ode to The Wasteland. With my reference to "sleeping," I intended to make a metaphorical statement or commentary on what no one else might term our "social status." By the same token, I was also borrowing a New Testament term for death, since I experience and interpret our current US Capitol Building as a coffin rather than as being full of "living stones."

With Dante's effort to "save the voices" - and Eliot's commentary ("the voices are dying with a dying fall") - in mind, I was thinking a lot about the difference between direct rule of people in relation to "the problem of representation," which is a peculiarly modern problem. "Demos" in Greek means both land and people. The columns of Greek cities and temples are figures that are not only measured in relation to man but also represent him - as standing up upon the land that both feeds and is ruled. But, more importantly, that land was revered. Without it, humanity has Noplace to live and is Nobody (like a Cyclopes).

In a modern capitol, however, this representative con-figuring is reversed. The actual people, no longer bearing the weight of their actual bodies and voices, are merely representative figures. We don't trade goods. We don't even hand over cash. We make invisible digital transactions. We don't relate to our economy as the local environment of house or city ("economy is rooted in the Greek word that means "house"). Instead, our lives are governed by a nebulous and "invisible hand" referred to as "the market." Our buildings don't demonstrate or express any actual force or truth of nature. They instead represent conceptual images of products people want to copy, identify with, and then thus buy. We don't have our voices. So, I could give countless examples, but the picture I'm trying to paint is a society that runs on "Nothing." And, the "figures" who "rule" said society "hold it up." Unlike ancient Greek columns, they "hold up Nothing."

Fittingly, then the modern city isn't actually moved by the public speech and voice of these figures who "hold up" their city. Instead, all of the complex machinery that actually moves our world on its monstrous scale occurs in places no one can see. The actual, human element of everyday life has been removed - or at least relegated as far off to the margins as possible. How is anything but drowsy, blinded sleep possible at that point (or perhaps social media, blogs, and radio talk shows where everyone supposedly "has a voice")? One reason we often have such a hard time treating each other like human beings is because our humanity was left in the dust with above-noted modern socio-economic-political systems that we identify with, give our allegiance to, and take for granted.

The monstrous scale and corresponding vacuousness of our world is what gives it definition as a "society" - rather than as a city, household, or kingdom. We don't "live on the land." "We are the hollow men." This is why I can't stand our current Capitol Building and relished the chance to reimagine it. It's the perfect and complete image of the monstrous vacuum that powers our world and gives us an image of our own emptiness. Coffins aren't technically empty, but we imagine that the bodies inside of them are.

Our "society," then, is centered around and consists in Nothing. This obviously leaves a void. And, voids by necessity must be filled.

In the situation in which we find ourselves - where we are not only interrupted from our quest to find our home but where that interruption is so large as to be a monstrous vacuum (like a black hole) - that void tends to be filled with fear, anger, anxiety, frustration, and rage. This tends to lead to forceful and powerful attacks against perceived enemies, which, in turn, tends to lead to the placing of shields or walls of war as a reflexive response in the process of scapeagoating defensiveness.

America reaped what she sowed. America had done to her not only what she did unto others but what constitutes the very structural fabric of our world. Needless to say, when 9/11 happened, my reaction was not surprise. I was horrified and saddened - while also in some lamentable sense pleased that a deceitful and hidden truth of injustice and disorder was being revealed in plane sight for all to see - but I was not shocked. I also immediately knew that we would react to our enemy's Trojan Horse-turned-flying-projectile the same way as the Cyclopes - by hurling great projectiles in the general direction of enemies we can't see. Coffins don't have windows.

The attacked might as well surrender as flash its wall. That way, light can get in for the attacked to see the swell approaching the shore.

I, at the time when I wrote that, then knew a couple of weeks later that we would react to 9/11 like a blinded Cyclopes who lives in a dark cave. I, however, did not foresee Trump's Great Wall nor the swell of potential angels needing hospitality approaching Western shores.

All of this was in my mind as I anticipated visiting the 9/11 Memorial two weekends ago. It remained as I stood there - at that place where our old world came down and a new world of even greater violence and iniquity was born - numerous times with tears in my eyes.