In Memoriam

As of this writing, twenty four years ago, two hundred and thirty people had but 2 hours and 15 minutes to live. They were people like you and me, they were women and men, young and old, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children. They were students, they were engaged, they were friends, neighbors, relatives, participants in a vast web of social entanglements that would be, in two hours and fifteen minutes, torn asunder, literally, over the twilit skies of Long Island. I am speaking of the detonation of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

The first question that pops to mind is Why? What difference does it make? Planes crash with perturbing regularity and, though the United States has managed to go a lucky two decades without a catastrophic structural failure (the last would be American Airlines Flight 587, just two short months after 9/11), the rest of the world has seen calamities in recent years that rival the horrors we knew in the past. Malaysian Airlines' twin 2014 disasters spring to mind. Indonesia has had its fair share recently, if I recall correctly. This year Iran, in a stunning display of history's capacity for the ironic, shot down a passenger jet it believed to be a hostile aviation unit. Fair enough. What's so bad about TWA 800, then?

The answer to Why is in the How. A short circuit in the fuel tank led to a spark that, mixed with explosive vapours in the central coolant system, produced a blast that tore through the fuselage, tore the cockpit from the body, and sent the ascending plane spiraling upwards, functioning engines still thrusting the plane upwards before it careened across the sky in a long, wide arc and began its turbulent descent, left wing shearing off, creating another fireball on a plane already aflame, before finally, finally, crashing into the ocean. The whole thing took maybe a little longer than a minute, but it was enough time for every passenger still conscious on that plane, and there were quite a few, to experience the full and complete terror of a fiery mid-air breakup. There are few plane crashes in history that can match the sheer horror which met the passengers of TWA 800.

I once said that the problem of experience is the most profound problem facing us today and I stand by that statement. There are singular experiences so terrifying, so horrific, that they not only produce obsession but demand it. I am sometimes given flack from people who question the motives of anyone who would focus on this aspect of the tragedy. They're dead, they're victims, but we ought to honor them by memorializing who they were in life, yes? No. I don't think it does any good to wipe clean from the annals of collective memory those last minutes of their lives. For all the talk of denying the "experiences" of marginal groups of people, there is a surprising willingness on the part of just about everyone to deny, turn away, shield our eyes, from uniquely difficult moments in history. Recall the jumpers on 9/11, recall (and I will not type the key words for this as I am intimately acquainted now with Google's algorithms) certain incidents that befell certain popular locales of a certain kind of sport in Europe during the latter half of the 20th century. To witness extraordinarily public deaths tend to conjure up in people the image of the voyeur, peering into a moment of great "privacy" that ought not to be shared. This public/private mismatch is, I think, what might account for some of the horror. The public element exposes an experience, sometimes from a mere few inches, afflicting people faced with a nigh unimaginable situation. And to think we might bear witness to that pain from just a few inches without necessarily partaking in it as at once horrifying and intriguing. There are spaces so close to each other, but so different in nature, that to view that offending space is to see something one ought not to. As Herodotus reminds us, Heracles' dynasty ended when King Candaules forced his bodyguard Gyges to watch as his queen undressed. When she discovered this transgression, she had Candaules killed, and so ended the dynasty of Heracles. Such acts produce grave consequences. In the case of the queen it was beauty that produced tragedy. In the case of these disasters, it is death that produces suffering. But both necessitate a fascination. Why do beauty and death stir in us such similar emotions?

TWA 800 was not quite so public, and so any reconstruction of what it was like to be in that aircraft necessarily involves some mental legwork. It is impossible to know. But it is possible to imagine. This tension is the source of some of the obsession, undoubtedly. It is the knowledge that this happened, and to imagine what it was like, that ought not to be shunted off into the dark. In an hour and twenty five minutes twenty four years ago, the only people in the world who will ever know what that was like got to find out. There's little room for metaphysics here. It is all a mechanical process. It is the physics of death that we know, and from this we can only hope to imagine.

I would imagine that in a moral universe whose arc bends towards revenge I ought to be punished for the transgression of deigning to know and worse - to imagine. I've often used and exploited the memories of those people and the knowledge of their final harrowing moments as a kind of exercise in self-indulgence. It is all purely selfish, as any voyeuristic act must be. I have lorded it clandestinely over others. I have used my knowledge of supreme tragedies to inflate the ego. I am no stranger to terror. I revel in it. I see it as not only a useful organizing principle, but also a useful governing one, as the French and Russian revolutionaries did. But this is small scale terror writ large, this is terror that aims to turn the private into the public, to disseminate a knowledge of terror, to hammer it home, to produce obsessions and hauntings, that is a vengeful memory. But whose vengeance? It is the deliberate spread of anomie, but I maintain that buried beneath all of this there is merely the impulse to make others understand that such experiences exist, have existed, ought not to but did, and that to forget them is to make it as if it never happened. So perhaps some justice is being served, in a roundabout way that serves both parties.

But for now let us simply bend our heads, close our eyes, and remember. Life and death cannot be separated and should not be, whatever the horror that death brings us, for without it the story of a life cannot be complete.

An Addendum to Percy

I'm trying to account for my growing rage at Catholics. It's rather funny, because not too long ago I felt political Catholicism was the path to national regeneration. I suppose I do still feel something like that. At least in the sense that I see Catholic summer camps as a useful model to build on. But one could say that about any religion. It is a dreadful thing to recognize that it is others' happiness that stokes fury in oneself. But having come to the conclusion of a great work written by a great Catholic author, I must allow myself a moment of reflection.

I'll admit, Lancelot kept me guessing the whole way through, and while others seem willing to afford the character a more generous interpretation, as one the author means us to reject, I am too familiar with the scathing screeds he brings forth, too familiar with that train of thought, to dismiss it so casually. The truth is that he is a jumbled mass of confusion, but only because at base he is a confused protagonist, and maybe the confusion has - truly - been transferred from pen to paper, from the heart to the ink. Lancelot's "big secret of life", for instance, rings both true and false to me. He sees it that all women at heart, their function, their own (un)conscious purpose, is to have sex. But Percy ups the ante. They do not merely want to have sex. They want to be assaulted. They want to be raped. And conversely, it is man's job to rape. To assault. It rings true because the dominant impulse in man really is sex and power - two corollaries that are inextricably bound up in each other - while it rings false because it disregards the distinction between persuasion and force. For Lancelot, the two collapse into one another. Perhaps this is just an example of extreme hyperbole and what he really means to convey is simply that women consent to being raped. That sex, necessarily involving a dominant and submissive party, is essentially rape, regardless of what the involved parties think. But Percy appears to hint that this isn't right, and that Lancelot's view of the world really is wrong, when first his promiscuous wife Margot and the women he plans to steal away with, Anna, both reject sex as a necessity, chastise men for fixating on it, and in Anna's case admonishes Lancelot for intimating that she enjoyed her own sexual assault.

So there is a mixture of truth and lies here, the kind that makes it difficult to discern where truth ends and lies begin. The root of the problem in my mind is that Lancelot is suffering not from merely having gone insane (although he may well be. it is often the irrational who see things more clearly than the rational) but from realizing that he has all along been a purveyor of inconclusive experiences, much in the same way that Joseph Conrad's Marlowe found himself horror-stricken at the sight of Kurtz in the jungle, and at truths half-glimpsed in the hollowness of his heart - instantiations of greater uncertainties. That's enough to drive anyone to madness. It may well take me there. It certainly hollowed out Lancelot. And at the end this hollowness is given voice by what I take to be the real terrible secret:

What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn't seem important, no. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no "secret" after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the "answer" as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father's sock drawer. As I held that wretched Jacoby by the throat, I felt nothing except the itch of the fiberglass particles under my collar. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail.

Lancelot effectively concedes defeat. He tried and failed to find absolute evil, and with it vanished any possibility of grasping anything close to the infinite, or God. It is funny that he mentions Jacoby, for just before Lancelot cuts his throat Jacoby nearly reveals what it is he "really wants" and notes that he suspects it is the same for Lance. Margot explodes before she can reveal whether she really thinks there's any hope of salvaging them. Lance's Percival-priest has something he wants to say to Lance as the two finally come to grips with where they stand, but the book concludes with a simple Yes and nothing more. And why not? All has been revealed. Percival played Lancelot's little game, humored him, let himself get strung along, perhaps even discerned nuggets of truth in his ranting and raving. And at the end perhaps Lancelot has established not his much vaunted new reconciliation between man and woman but between man and man, between confessor and confession, between two opposing ideas. Percival knows where he stands and he intends to tell Lancelot all about the Holy Grail.

So is Lancelot right? Does Percy sympathize - empathize, even - with his protagonist? Yes and no. Epoche strikes again. I daresay it is much easier to throw one's hands in the air, shrug the shoulders, and follow Pyrrho into acceptance. Hah, how's that for psychiatric language?

Fuming in the dark

Here I am, at the "epicenter of instability in the world", caught in the liminal space between old day and new, the sun set and shadows cast across the hotel room. Why does it feel like I'm marooned on some far flung polar fringe, when in reality I'm smack dab in the middle of the global superpower's capital city?

The clock is about to strike twelve, and in a funny way the clock is ticking down on (and has been for a long while) my life. But that's just hyperbole, isn't it? Nothing ever happens. The old day passes into the new, the sun always rises and never ceases to set, the present drowns in the past, becomes another trophy in the past's long march backwards, gathering spaces in the annals and recesses of memory, until it consumes all, until it eats everything propped up to resist it.

How's that for bombastic language? Unnecessary, I'd think. And to the extent it reflects my views on time, rather uninteresting. For who hasn't felt like this, and who hasn't said or thought these things? I am just now reading a Walker Percy novel, my second in five years, titled Lancelot. It tells the story of a man nearing or at middle age, who discovers an adultery, and not merely any adultery, but an adultery that produced the daughter he believed was his. This discovery catalyzes something like a religious awakening in him, and for the first time in a long time he becomes aware that he has been merely wiling away his life and times, and that by conforming to his set-stupor he has submerged himself into a kind of unconsciousness, completely unaware of time's passing, and this stupor has stoked in him a kind of aimlessness, a lack of conviction, an inability to set a goal, to know "what to do".

Evidently he changes his views, for while this awakening is surely an inspiration, something catastrophic occurs (I have not yet finished the novel, so I do not know what the nature of this disaster is) that changes his views on time. Locked up (voluntarily, perhaps) at an institution of some sort, he confesses to his nameless visitor an altogether different view of time:

You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason why I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent, or terrible or doom-struck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

He goes on to compare himself to a tape head, to see the past as an encroachment of banality on the present, and the devourer of future possibility. In doing so, it robs one of a way out, and condemns them to a life of stagnation. Maybe Lancelot's awakening was true and sincere, albeit brief, and whatever tragedy occurred at least left him with this newfound knowledge without possibility to act on it. The pure possibility grasped in the present was ripped away not by time's banality, but by whatever bad fortune struck him down and killed his wife. Frankly, I do not yet understand Lancelot, am unable to get a good grasp on his true motives, what he really believes (perhaps because he truly does not believe in anything, perhaps because he is truly a madman). Do I believe in the banality of time? Do I believe that the encroachment of this banality is the source of the acute sense of anxiety that befalls one (me) when the thought of its passage strikes? I believe in its banality, I suppose, but not the rapacious all-consuming quality he ascribes to it. After all, the Biblical discussion of banality is supposed to be liberating. The futility of all action. I have quoted it before. "Nothing new under the sun". What is the problem with that? This has all happened before, and what has happened before will determine what happens again.

But it is true (and it is really this that is more important than anything), that what Lancelot undergoes is a strictly theological experience. He awakens to the reality that the life he leads is something less than reality, or at least reality as it ought to be - in an ideal sense, in that sense that means happiness, contentment, peace, tranquility, ataraxia. He is much like Percy's more famous protagonist, Binx Bolling, whose own struggle to find that "something else" electrified me those five years ago. Who doesn't feel terribly hollow? Who doesn't feel fulfilled? Bolling muses that that something else might be God. Lancelot awakens to a world in which the ought does not quite conform to the is. He would much prefer to deal in absolutes, believes even that he once did (love is infinite, love is absolute), but confronts the disquieting fact that the world (we) appears to have moved on from such simple binaries, has adopted the psychiatric language of "madness" and speaks often only of "troubled" individuals. There is no room for God here. No room for lost causes. Maybe there is room for sin. But the jury, as of page 176, is still out.

There is that question I always ask myself, when considering Percy and his characters. Am I awake? How would I know it if I was? There is always that sense of something just out of reach. One revelation, one epiphany, one striking moment of absolute clarity to rip me straight from the doldrums and onto a higher plane of understanding. It has never come. Time marches forward. It is all banal. The cancellation of possibility is horrendous, a horrific consideration that haunts me awake and asleep. But what we are concerned with here is habit. Temporal reinforcement tightens its stranglehold, squeezes the neck, throttles you. Leaving the "well worn path of my life" is not easy. But I have come to learn that it is that interior state, that psychological barrier, that is hardest to break through. Once you have triumphed over yourself, everything falls into place. It is a problem of time (an incidental one), but not the problem of time.

Still, extenuating circumstances have precluded me from acting and I do not believe I will have enough time to act before I am off to start my "new life" in our nation's storied capital. So the destabilization paradoxically intensifies with this newfound willingness to change. The old not yet dead, the new waiting to be born and all that. I am indeed caught in a liminal space and my frustrations have only grown with this progress. I do feel like a tape head, the worm eating away at future possibilities. How much easier it would be to simply find God! But reading about the dating lives of Catholic integralists on Twitter makes me want to raze the Vatican. Despite the feeling that things are slipping away from them, they have somewhere they can go, somewhere they belong, a community they can live, laugh and love with (maybe, maybe, maybe, this is the impression I get. One can still, after all, go to Church, if nothing else). I'm much too craven to take such a step. Think of all the possibilities that might be canceled!