September 11ths

9/11/1906 

William James letter to H.G. Wells:

Dear Mr. Wells,—I’ve read your “Two Studies in Disappointment” in “Harper’s Weekly,” and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rem acu tetegisti! Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization....”Scoundrelly, as you say,”but understandable, “from the point of view of parties interested”—but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease...” 

9/11/1968          

John’s song for those despised people who dissected his lyrics for hidden - but almost always unintended - revelations and conundrums. One of two songs on The Beatles to give mention in its lyric to another Beatles song title (“Savoy Truffle” mentioned “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”), “Glass Onion” is peppered with references to the Beatles” recent output: “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am The Walrus”, “Lady Madonna”, “The Fool On The Hill” and “Fixing A Hole”. John also tossed in what may seem a cryptic line, about the “Cast Iron Shore”. This is a real place in Liverpool.

[9/11/2025: Many of the lyrics that I’ve written for the Songday series are very much in the John Lennon vein. He was very much into cryptic lyrics and word play–much more than Paul McCartney. This was probably a Yoko Ono influence and Fluxus and Dada indirectly. The technique of the constructed or abstracted lyric is either a form of cut-up or bibliomancy, a form of divination where a person randomly selects a passage from a book—often a sacred text like the Bible, but also secular literature—to interpret as a prophecy or message. The process involves focusing on a question or concern, opening the book to a random page, and then interpreting the passage that catches your eye or that your finger lands on. The meaning of the passage is then considered to provide guidance, inspiration, or insight into a situation or question. It’s interesting that this particular Beatles studio diary entry is on 9/11, and could be a source for lyrics].        

9/11/2001

Took some pix with camera, but settings wrong, pix overexposed, but I will try to use them in some way.

[I had just gotten my first digital camera a few months earlier and frequently overexposed. But it looks interesting inverted. Taken on Michigan and Grand in Chicago, now a potential "war zone"]

 9/11/2002 

First anniversary of attacks. Absorption into the events seems almost pornographic, now with so many images associated with them, unlike 12/7/41. Most people I talked to wanted to forget, not remember. (Quote in Tribune: “We must not just always remember, we must never forget.”

Remember for a while, forget for a while, keep things in balance. 

9/11/2004

Candlelight vigil at the lakefront here in Chicago honoring the war dead. It was almost totally silent. You got the impression that something was amiss. This war shouldn’t have been.

One of the things I liked about Reagan was his notion of a “quiet faith”—a spirituality that rests below the surface but is never expressed outwardly. In politics, one’s religious persuasion is a kind of secret to yourself, in only a language you understand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 AI-generated. I like the "early AI" (~2015) slightly robotic quality of the voice.

 

Neil Peart from Roadshow, June 2004:            

“In 30 years of traveling around the United States, I have seen how entrenched Evangelical Christianity was in American life. Just before setting off for Nashville, I had read that 83% of Americans called themselves Christians, and half of Americans believe that God created humans pretty much in our present born at one time within the past ten thousand years. It seemed pointless to try to fight that tide of faith, even with the weapon of the laws of logic, and I thought, “I give up.” my blustering was not going to change anybody’s mind, and there was no sense alienating people and making enemies. You can reason with people’s minds, but you can’t argue with their faith.”    

9/11/2005 

4th anniversary of attacks. There’s more evidence of proliferation of homegrown terrorism a la John Walker Lindh. 

[9/11/2025: Certainly Chicagoans are anxious and may feel more and more terrorized as troops and Humvees appear on the streets as if it were Baghdad...Irony can be didactic in retrospect]. 

9/11/2019 

Around the first anniversary of 9/11 in 2002, I wrote a guitar instrumental titled Forget September. My feeling at the time was that we needed closure—not more media coverage; We needed to begin to “forget” it—meaning we needed to move on, for at least the general public. (I called it “normalcy by denial” in one of the entries). It was already one year into the invasion of Afghanistan, so the idea of closure or normalcy was a fantasy. Music was an anodyne.

I used to frequently have conversations with an aunt who had memories of both world wars, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and the Korean War. I now realize more profoundly how many young people have no direct memory of 9/11. I also realized that there have always been lots of young people who have no memory of major events. I don’t have a memory of the Kennedy assassination. Not many people are living that have a good memory of Pearl Harbor, and the various annual commemorations that followed; They were all children then.

9/11/2021 

Same weather as 9/11/2001. If you want good weather in Chicago come the week of 9/11.

It all started last night (eve) when I started looking at the photos, then became unnerving. This is perhaps why I wrote “Forget September”. (Moving on) Perhaps at some point in the months following the event coverage of the event was crowding out the normal flow of life. What I want is the exformation, but how much information do we need in order to extract the best exformation? Some are lamenting the loss of history about 9/11 because of obsolesced formats, like Flash, but is it worth the effort to exhume it only to find not much of what we don’t already know? It’s not like it’s the discovery of the Nag Hammadi.

***

As I walked and biked around my neighborhood I was subconsciously scouting for that 9/11@20 photo. We tend to think there is a palpable vibe in the air when it’s just like any other pleasant Saturday. The 2020 lockdown had more photographic power, with towns looking like ghost towns, like lower Manhattan that week. I always thought 9/11 was the beginning of the Fourth Turning because it looked so apocalyptic, but we were still in a Third Turning until 2008.

9/11/2022

In September 2047, it will be the 50th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana and the 25th anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2051, the 50th anniversary of 9/11, as well as commemorations of events that will occur as 10th and 20th anniversaries. 

I had thought that YouTube’s algorithm results would have featured the annual 9/11 commemoration, but it didn’t. This is why organic memory is so important and is one of the good things about moderated and curated media: It reports on things that are more universal and traditional instead of relying on what algorithms perceived were important to me. We shouldn’t have to go hunting for our own news. We know what the concept of a Zebra is.

9/11/2023

9/11@50: Not 9/11/2051 but 9/11/1973, the military coup in Chile. A good summary of how coups can play out. I’m perhaps being too paranoid about the possible parallels. The trickster and the archetype of the destroyer are waving, ‘We’re still here!”