Motus Mentis

Avast, ye scurvy bilge rats. Just in case you didn’t know, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

It’s video week at waka waka waka. My friend Jess sent me this clip, which is a prickly discussion between Matt Lauer and George Bush on the subject of torture. Here are two men who obviously loathe one another; they are trying as hard as they can not to attack each other physically, and just barely managing. They are standing almost toe to toe, and while Lauer is trying awfully hard to be deferential (you’re always “one down” when you’re with POTUS), W is right up in his grill, jabbing away with his index finger in a way that would certainly get my Irish up. It’s hard to believe this is the President of the United States being interviewed by one of the nation’s foremost news anchors; the whole thing seems more like two ill-tempered dads getting into it at a little league game.

New York City has a rapid metabolism; a lot happens here, and even when it’s something unpleasant, the wound closes quickly, and rarely leaves much of a scar. September 11th was different, though; it hurt us very badly indeed, and though we don’t have much of a limp these days, we are still shaken, and today here in Gotham the old pain was back again, throbbing and aching, and the gaping hole where the towers were still feels like a missing front tooth.

Everyone, as far as I can tell, knows someone who died that day. Our family was lucky – we’re all still here. My wife and I were still at home in Brooklyn when the planes went in, and our son, then thirteen, was safe at school nearby. But my daughter, who had just begun her junior year, was at Stuyvesant High School, about five hundred yards from Ground Zero. She and her classmates gazed in horror from an eighth-floor classroom directly facing the doomed towers, and saw the first one fall before they were evacuated onto West Street and left to find their own way northward amid the panicking throng. My wife and I, watching from our rooftop across the harbor as the ghastly pall of smoke blew directly over us, had no idea what had become of her, and grew more and more anxious as the day wore on. It was not until five or six that evening that she was finally able to get through to us on the telephone – tearful, but safe.

As I say, New York is a resilient place – vibrantly alive if any place on Earth is – and we’re fine, mostly. But there are some wounds here that will never fully heal, and today you couldn’t be in the city without being aware of the presence of a great, almost unbearable sorrow, the collective grief of the millions who mourn the thousands who died.

As I look out my back door I see, rising from the site about three miles away, the brilliant columns of light that pierce the sky every year on this day, towering to the very zenith. I hope our neighbor, firefighter David Fontana of Rescue Company One, who gave his life, on his wedding anniversary, to save the lives of so many others, can see them too.

It’s been a long day, and having just got in from a long drive back to Brooklyn from Cape Cod, I’m rather too worn out to say much tonight.

But I do want to note with shock and sorrow the bizarre and untimely death of Steve Irwin. He was a delightful character, and an iconic figure in his native Australia. His fearless and hyperkinetic enthusiasm, his genuine love of animals (and his immense skill in handling them), and his goofy smile, khaki shorts and broad Aussie accent won him millions of fans the world over (I was one too, in case you can’t tell), and I join them all in mourning his loss.

My old friend, the painter and art collector Patrick Goldsmith – whose peregrinations have taken him often to the remotest East – took up, a few years back, the art of the sonnet, and a collection of his work is available online. Called The Wayfarer Sonnets, they are intended as companions to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, and I do hope you will take a look. You can find them, in print or downloadable form, here. Just the thing for those of you with a Tao jones.