Depth and Dichotomies: September 11

When my husband called on September 11, 2001 and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center, I didn’t picture jets, fires, crumbling. I pictured some idiot in a little plane, losing his way, crashing.

But in a sense, that’s what metaphorically happened. Far before September 11, 2001, we somehow lost our way. And September 11 was like the definitive wrong turn, enabling us to further divide the world into good and evil, terrorist and freedom-lover, left wing and right wing, Republican and Democrat, Christian and atheist, the dichotomies giving us carte blanche to strip each other of our humanity.

I saw this at play in President Obama’s speech about health care a couple of nights ago—the shots of Republican Senators smirking, the cat calls. Tragic, when whatever one might think of Obama’s policies, one thing continues to stand out that has earned my utmost respect. He is a uniter, rather than a divider. Continually, he rises above these arbitrary dichotomies, trying to find common ground. It’s admirable, and it’s where we need to go as global society if we want to have any hope of saving the planet, if we want to find our way home.

My daughter is taking a class in conflict resolution and peace studies. She told me last night that the reading has been focusing on whether violence is innate or learned. “It doesn’t matter,” she claims, because there have been studies that show that people can resist these urges toward violence, the urges to make someone or something “other.” This is what we need to do, to stop thinking of those who are different, or who believe different things as other, to find the common threads that link us, even if they are as simple as the need for food and water, for love and for a healthy body. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as competitors and start thinking of ourselves as collaborators. It’s the only way we’re going to survive.

This is not what I intended to write about today. I intended to shamelessly promote my 9/11-themed children’s book, Playing Dad’s Song, about a boy in Brooklyn who lost his dad on 9/11 and how learning music helped him heal from his grief. I wanted to write about my trip to New York, my childhood home, shortly after 9/11. My friend, Greg, and I walked through the streets of Brooklyn and saw posters of the missing, “altars” dedicated to heroes at the local police and fire stations, and Greg recounted story after story of people helping each other, bonding together; yet, I could tell he was suffering from a malaise that seemed to hang over the entire psyche of the city, thick as the soot that rained down after the towers crumbled.

I wanted to write about these things, because, as I said on my Facebook status today, New York is the home of my bones. My friend Lew, a fellow New Yorker transplanted like me to western Massachusetts, corroborated that feeling with the words “deep home.” If the lessons of the decade have taught us anything, it is that need to find depth in a culture that shuns it. And in that depth we need to find home, the home of humanity, of bonding together. It’s why I write and read fiction. I’m searching for depth, for the connections that bind us together, rather than the dichotomies that force us apart.

Simmering

After the rush of finishing a first draft, it’s so tempting to rush back in and tie up the loose threads, but I’ve learned from experience that I have to let things simmer. What does this mean for me? No writing!

At least, no writing on the WIP for at least a week—two or three is probably better, in order to really get some distance to see both the flaws in what I currently have and the opportunities to make it better. Sometimes this is a welcome relief, as pulling the book in first draft stage feels about as satisfying as pulling out my own teeth. But this book seemed to just fly. Not that it was effortless, but I found that when I could get into the characters’ heads, it felt almost like channeling.

All the more reason to wait—to bring my reasoned, critical voice **after** the elation has subsided, to transform that giddy, falling-in-love feeling into a more mature long-lasting love, which is what I need for my long-term relationship with the book, and what the book needs to develop a long-term relationship with its readers.

But, I am impatient and will need to distract myself with other tasks—hopefully more productive than my latest time wasting addiction—4 X 4 Sudoku. At least it’s another beautiful day in Massachusetts, a day for harvesting and bicycling, and a couple more marketing tasks, and who knows, maybe I’ll even get back into blogging!