Today is 9-11.
The words and thoughts have haunted me all day, at work. Even a thousand miles from New York, I keenly felt this day with everything I did at work. It was cathartic to come to the memorial this evening, and see the memorial again, now officially live.
I have mentioned the ghostly towers earlier. Towers that are insubstantial, and yet stand, as silent sentinels of what was.
From Melody Regent’s speech:
What remains is the image in people’s minds – they way they used to rise above the Manhattan skyline. In other words, they exist as a memory, a ghost of what they were. But a powerful, resilient, defiant ghost. So we decided it would be a mistake to have them inhabited and used. Their power comes precisely from the survival of those memories, from the persistence of the ghosts and the pride that will never be destroyed.
None of us – Americans or citizens of countries throughout the world – will ever forget the towers, their destruction and the way in which that date fractured global history. This memorial is our small tribute to the event and to everyone who has been affected by it.
The photo above is of the brilliant center diagram of the memorial itself, of which I will now talk about more. The solar system overlay is new, however it is the radiating lines from the center is what you need to pay attention to.
Think about the solar system. With one exception, Pluto, the solar system is basically “flat”, with all of the planets at the same “height”. If you could take off in a rocket and head in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the solar system and looked down, you could see all of the planets and their orbits as a flat picture. You’ve seen this in many diagrams of the solar system.
Every moment of every day, there is an arrangement of planets that, if you were suspended above the solar system, you could see. A unique arrangement of the celestial bodies. What CS Kappler has done is to find that exact moment for when the first tower was struck, on September 11. The lines in the diagram draw out from the sun, to the locations of Mercury, Venus, Earth and the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and its four main satellites, and Saturn. All of the celestial bodies known in Galileo’s time. So, these lines freeze and define a moment in time, *that* moment in time, which we honor, and remember on this September 11th.
It’s, in my humble opinion, a brilliant design. Combined with the ghostly towers nearby, and the designer has captured both the spirit of the Towers, and the moment in Time in which they were struck.
From CS Kappler’s speech:
Come, then, to this place of remembrance and regard. Find again your cornerstone of hope. Take comfort and courage, if you have need, from this shared hallowed ground. Leave such gifts for others, if you have that need. Take this sharing into your heart, and share it with all the worlds in which you live.
And remember above all things — We are not helpless, we are not victims. We have been in a fitful, frightful sleep.
And it is time to awaken, to remember ourselves, to recall where we were going before the darkness fell, and set ourselves to that journey again. For it is a good place that waits, bright and hopeful, for us to come and build it.
The night of fear is done and the day of hope begun, if you but choose to make 9/11 a day to remember — not as the beginning of a dark age, but the beginning of the end of one, to think of this anniversary not as one more year of sliding into despair but one more year of rising toward the light.
As we stand here, and honor the fallen and redeem our hope, we acknowledge that nothing in this world lasts forever. And likewise, as I speak to you I know with no reservation that so long as a free and numerous people choose the work of hopeful awakening over fitful, frightful slumber, the best days of the Republic lie ahead, and it will be a very long time indeed before any moment surpasses us.
As far in the future as that day may be, nothing under the sun, not even the Sun, lasts forever.
Prim Perfect 