17

This weekend, I was in New York and happened to "stumble on" Jenny Holzer's installation at the newly constructed World Trade Center 7. It's a scroll of poetry that glides along the street. I was looking out my window from the 21st floor of the Millenium hotel, staring down on the dark chasm of the twin towers--it was, after all, night time--and the whole lower end of Manhattan was strung out with the glitter of drizzle and bleary light, gharish at times, from the construction site. There, off on the wet streets, I saw large letters emblazoned and gliding along, bold and brilliant, wonderfully rich and soulful words forming, their diction proud, evocative, they caught me up, made my spine straighten, I could only see a snippet of this "text" flashing by, and yet I was arrested, hypnotized, stunned by the large silent letters sliding by. There was something about the gravity and the immense size of the words. It was not forming a textual whole. There was no whole that was discernible. The longer that I stood there, transfixed, and reading, waiting for some whole to develop, an end, a sese of relief, a resolution, the longer the poem seemed to shift, like a shape-shifter, an anxious yet stable voice immense in its silence, immense in its witness of words to the chasm and canyon that lay beyond it. As if the words being uttered in silence paid some kind of horrific and blessed and conscious cerebral best mindfulness, a collective mind's account, a reckoning, with the continuing fact of the 9-11 event. This was not one poem, but voices, poems, parts of poems, one river of poems, a confluence of poems all sliding by in this electric current.

The diction of these words, this river of words running along the Hudson and the rivers of traffic, the rivers of so many immigrants, so many dialects and languages and origins, so many stories, so close to Ellis Island and the traces of the ferry rides carrying the boatloads of Americans, the newest and oldest, this constant stream of words paying witness to the horror and the survival and the city itself, to the city and the life and the stories and the words and the sufferings of so many.

I was humbled, as if I had discovered something like time, or some secret dimensionality. And perhaps in some way I did.