A Field Of Swords

I've been sick and when you're sick the clock loses meaning, seems
foreign to the body and its consciousness. Today I went back to work
thinking myself strong enough, and within a few hours realized it
wasn't a good decision. But I wanted the company, so I stayed and
waited for a second wind of energy. It arrived only when I reached
home and found a rack of packages in the mail for me, bearing music
from around the world. I must say, networking for the radio show,
an independent musical voice, has begun to produce some lovely
results. I went down for a nap listening to Live At The Talbot, a
collection of great folk performances recorded in the Cambrian area
of mid-Wales.

The nap lasted six hours. It was dark outside as I woke to the
sound of a woman's voice on CBC radio, asking a question. An
American man with a husky confessional tone in his voice answered.
His name was Joel Meyerowitz, a photographer who at the time
of 9/11 had been outside of his home in New York City, and had
rushed back to be part of the witness, the registry, perhaps even
the beginning of the recovery in the days immediately following
the attack on the World Trade Center.

I had Joel's voice in the dark with me and the volume low. I could
have turned it up, but rustling the covers would have caused me
to miss a word and his were so resonantly and beautifully chosen
that I didn't want to risk missing anything he said. When he'd
gotten back to New York, Joel tried to go down to Ground Zero
but could only get within four blocks. When he took out his old
wooden box camera to attempt a photo, a policewoman rushed up
behind him and said, "This is a crime scene; you take a picture,
I take your camera. Mayor's orders." I can hear her New Yorker
accent. Only a few press photographers were allowed inside the
yellow tape and they were limited in their access to the site.

Joel argued with the cop. He's a New Yorker, after all. In the end
he relented and did not take a photo, but that night on his way home
he told himself, "This has to be recorded, this is history, there must
be photographs." The next day he called the New York City Museum
and set up a meeting at which he offered to create a photo archive
of what had happened at Ground Zero. The museum's staff were
enthusiastically behind the idea and went about organizing Joel's
credentials for access to the site.

He began his sobering project, but even with his papers in order
he was disallowed often from going where he needed to go. One
night he was backing up with his camera trying to fully capture
a wide-angle view of the remains of the South Tower and actually
backed right into the laps of some secret government detectives
who were sitting on a bench on their break. It was a genuinely
funny moment, and they got talking, and Meyerowitz explained
his project and the limitations he was running into. There were
six of these men and, perhaps because they were detectives and
used to looking at things carefully and close-up, as a photographer
does, they all understood Joel's frustration. They gave him their
cell numbers and from that point on if he was hassled, he simply
phoned them and was granted full access to make his archive.

He described the site as "a field of swords," the crushed, sheared
steel pointing sharply in all directions, the smell two weeks after
the event still sickening. He recalled one event where word went
out that five bodies had been found. It was down below ground
level in the rubble of the South Tower, and he made his way there.
There were some beams from a stairwell that had collapsed like
folded hands, forming an upside-down V under which the bodies
were found. There were five bodies, firemen's bodies, in tact, all
under this teepee of mortar and steel. The spokesman stood
in the still-smoking remains of the South Tower as the skids were
brought in with the flags, for transporting the bodies out, and he
said something then to the gathered people that sent a chill up
Meyerowitz's arms and spine. "The beams we found the bodies
under are from the North Tower..."

So there I am in my bed, ten o'clock at night in the dark after
a long nap, disoriented, listening to a photographer tell of his
remembrances of the weeks he spent chronicling the aftermath
of 9/11. I am forced to picture a section of a North Tower stairwell
descending through the air, carrying six NYC firemen to their
death. The mortar beams descend, held together by reinforced
steel, and land in such a way as to form an A-frame hut of
protection for their dead bodies.

The broken-up materials at Ground Zero are eventually taken
away, to Staten Island I think he said, where they are laid out
for further examination. Day and night there are people kneeling
in the rubble, combing it with rakes, looking for evidence, for
pieces of lives, mementos which may provide identification clues.
These fields came to be known at The Raking Fields. They would
find a wristwatch, the charred remains of a child's photograph, a
woman's shoe, a hardshell case with eyeglasses still inside, the
lenses undamaged. Meyerowitz went to the Raking Fields to join
in the work sometimes, wanting along with so many others there
to make themselves useful.

The CBC interviewer asked him what he had found that had
impacted upon him the most. He paused. One day, he said, "I
found a shard of steel, maybe 15 inches in length, that had pierced
through a bible, tearing it open..." He then described how he had
carefully lifted it from the rest of the rubble, how the steel was
like a sword being used as a bookmark. "The page the bible had
been ripped open to was Exodus, chapter 21...an eye for an eye,
a tooth or a tooth."

Joel Meyerowitz's photographic archive of Ground Zero has been
travelling the world the past three years, to all the major cities,
including those in the Middle East. In the visitors log, people
sign their names and add their comments. The most common
things they express are their shared sorrow; they say, "thank
you for making this real for me." For many, around the world,
the repeated imagery was of the planes entering the towers.
Meyerowitz, through his persistence and vision that a true
historical perspective not be lost, created an archive of photos
which tells the human side of this story. Away from the actions
of politicians, he lights a candle for compassion and shared grief,
and tells of a city trying to find its breath, searching toward new
meaning in a field of broken swords.

DL

If you click here, then click Exhibit, you will be able
to view some of the photographs Joel Meyerowitz took
during the autumn of 2001 at Ground Zero in New York City.
http://www.911exhibit.state.gov/