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.