Chapter 5
September 11
The World Shifts
ATHENS, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
NYC, 2002
“What were you thinking about September 11?” Akiko asks. “Everyone has a story about that day.”
I was leaving in a few days, flying to Cancun, and from there heading south. The phone rang and a friend of mine, Dimitris, was on the other end of the line. Andreas grunted as he held the receiver between his shoulder and his ear as he sketched on a pad of paper. He hung up the phone and proceeded to draw.
“What did he want?” I asked.
In no hurry he answered, “Some plane in New York crashed into a building, I don’t know… whatever.” I paused, looking at him. “What do you mean, a plane…. Let’s go see on TV.” I hurried into the den and switched on the monitor. There it was, staring us in the face, absurdly surreal, yet sadly real.
I was in Greece on September 11th, and had seen the second tower being hit live on Greek TV as I was packing my bags at home in the basement in Kifisia, a northern suburb in the outskirts of Athens. My heart had dropped the moment of the collision; I heard a ringing in my ears, then it was silent, the moment stretched to the longest a moment can. Then shock, panic, sadness, horror! All together these emotions overcame me. I stood there staring at the screen in disbelief; it looked so much like a Hollywood terrorist action film, and you were expecting some superhero to come save the day.
But no, the towers burned for 20 minutes or so before they collapsed, inducing once again a vacuum in my chest, and a chill through my body. All those lives... gone!
It was like a movie, was my first thought, some apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster, the manifestation of the collective energy of millions of people being fed a myth that finally had manifested into reality. I thought of all the people who worked in the movie industry, who had participated in the production of some terrorist movie. The makeup artist, the props, or the pyrotechnics, all of these people had been co-creating the myth that had finally accumulated and backfired.
I wondered how many people were watching around the world right now, feeling what I just felt as they tuned in to their TVs just as I had. The nature of the attack was such that, once the first tower had been hit, all cameras in NY traced and focused in on the smoke coming from the tallest building on fire, and then LIVE only a few minutes later, the second plane hit the second tower.
One more thing about where I was. Athens, where men invented the theater two and a half thousand years ago for exactly this, a crowd in one room feeling one thing at once. The largest calibration in history, and I watched it from the city that built the first room for it.
I wrote an essay about it, I say. Not about where I was or what I felt. About what it meant. About collective consciousness.
Can I read it?
It's in the manuscript. Here,
CALIBRATING THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS Mass Televised Live Events: Sports, Olympics, 9/11, War
Since the earliest of times, men have sat around the campfire exchanging experiences and stories. These conversations formed communal identities, and the foundations of culture and civilization. From ancient Greece's early theaters, to Rome's Colosseum, to Shakespearean performances, humans have always been fascinated with the ability to collectively experience emotions through drama. As the stories unfold on stage we identify with the characters and plots, and allow ourselves to embark on this unpredictable emotional journey.
Today, this communal emotional odyssey occurs on a much larger scale due to advances in technology. The television concentrates the attention of billions of people around the world through televised events like sports. For example, in a soccer match, as the ball moves across the screen, fans of Team A are overwhelmed with excitement and enthusiasm when their team is on the offense, while supporters of Team B feel anxious and fearful that they may lose. However, just as the ball is kicked in the opposite direction, Team B is suddenly thrilled and Team A upset. There is an exchange of emotion among all who are watching the drama unfold in real time.
If you could represent these collective feelings on a dial underneath the field, from the ecstatic release of a goal on one end, to the defeating embarrassment of receiving a goal on the other, the dial would point in the opposite direction every time the ball moves across the screen. These feelings are calibrated within the parameters of a fixed game. The rules and regulations of the match allow for a specific range of emotions to be experienced collectively... thus the simplicity of the narrative allowing a larger number of people to participate. That is why more nuanced sports, such as cricket and baseball, are not as popular as soccer. These collective events that occur every week in every country in the modern world, escalating to final matches that will determine the champion every couple of years, are a continuous loop.
Mass televised events essentially 'program' the viewers to collectively experience certain feelings. Why is this important? Well, there is a theory that the earth is evolving from a planet that expresses itself as an aggregate of man's consciousness, into an entity of collective sentient significance. It would need to be able to identify how these emotions would be on a global scale. But how can emotions like shock and awe be programmed on a collective scale? How can we altogether experience rare and traumatic unscripted events?
From a purely analytical perspective, examining how collective consciousness responds to mass televised trauma, the attacks present a case study in global emotional calibration.
When the first tower was struck, live images of the skyscraper ablaze played on every news network around the world. People were glued to their television screens. Suddenly, we all witnessed another plane hit the second tower. Most viewers were collectively traumatized, shocked and stricken with grief and despair. Yet, in more remote parts of the world, some people cheered and celebrated at the demise of these American icons. It makes me wonder if things that seem impossible become slightly more likely because of fulfilling such global scale needs.
This demonstrates something I'm trying to understand: the same event calibrates vastly different emotional responses depending on one's position in the collective. The hijackers weren't acting alone; they represented grievances shared by others, however twisted the expression. I'm observing that from a collective consciousness perspective, there were groups who wanted this outcome, and the polarized global response, grief here, celebration there, shows how a single event can expose and amplify opposite emotional currents across different parts of the noosphere.
Three ways a crowd gets its dial read. War, out of the fear of death. Sport, a fixed game that calibrates excitement, anxiety and the taste of winning. And the festival, which concentrates celebration and self-expression for no useful reason at all. The first two had the cameras. The third was still ahead of me. So the question I carried was a simple one.
I have always wondered what could replace that ultimate fear of death. Was there an antithesis to the eternal horrifying battlefields that echo into antiquity? Was there a place, an event, a human cultural construct, that could force us to be our better selves not because we were protecting the lives of our children, but because we were celebrating being alive? In short, can we be pushed to the limits of our humanity not out of the fear of death but rather from the love of life?
Akiko finishes reading. Looks up.
It was unpredicted, it was unrehearsed, it came out of nowhere, it was original, no one would expect it. It's almost like you have the subconscious which has this crazy reaction to some traumatic event, and then there's the system that comes to rationalize it and plan the equivalent reaction, and puts all of their cameras there, so that they in the collective consciousness are perceived as maintaining order, and that they have the final word at the end of the day on the whole thing. The authenticity of the event could never be replicated by the establishment. That is why authenticity will always have a higher respect in the realm of the hero’s journey and that is why the establishment will always be one step behind the underground.
You saw what was coming. The war. The fear. The simplification.
No, I say. I was leaving anyway. A year of planning. The bags were open on the basement floor when the second plane hit.
So it changed nothing.
It changed everything. It just didn't change the plan. What I thought in front of that television was simple.
I need to leave. I need to see what else is possible. I need to find the people who are still dancing.
That same evening, at dinner a few hours later, my parents had insisted I cancel my trip, or at least postpone it. I was not having it. I had been planning this trip for a year, and even this burning building in Babylon was not going to stop me. If I did not get on that plane on the 13th I would sooner or later end up in the Greek military, a mandatory requirement for all men who intend to live in Greece and who are done with their studies. I knew my parents thought that it was a good time to get my military service out of the way. I was 23, had just finished my undergrad, did not have a job yet, and had recently broken up with my girlfriend after 3 and a half years of being madly in love with her. For all of the above reasons they felt the timing was ripe. I think they also secretly got a kick out of it; they felt I needed some perspective, discipline, clarity, toughness. They had stereotyped me as some hippie, with shallow self-righteous rebellious half-baked leftist theories from the States, who needed a crude Greek awakening. They felt that scrubbing some toilets on the Greek-Turkish or Greek-Albanian border would clear out the stale marijuana smoke that had been clouding up their firstborn's brain.
I gracefully avoided confrontation and mentioned that Cancun and the Mayan Riviera in the Yucatan jungle would be the last place for any sort of conflict like the one we had just witnessed on TV that afternoon. I excused myself and two days later I was on a plane via London to Cancun.
Babylon city, NYC.
The 13th. Bags by the door, a taxi ordered. Half an hour before it came, the phone rang.
THE PHONE CALL
“Hello”
“I am so glad I caught you, when are you leaving?”
“Hey George, how have you been? I leave in half an hour”
“Well I just wanted to let you know that Damian and Cassie got busted crossing the border to Mexico”
“What?”
“Damian got a new car for graduation, and they planned to drive to California, through Texas. When they got to Texas they decided to go even further south. They got busted and had to bribe their way back to the States”
“wow, that’s unbelievable it wasn’t really their style”
“I know, I just thought you would like to know, take care man, have a fun time, write me some emails.”
“Thanks, Don’t worry I will”
“Ciao Amigo!”
I heard the honk of the taxi outside waiting to take me to the airport. I hung up, bewildered, and picked up my bags. The elevator door closed and a smirk ran across my face; I was off.
I flew out of Greece in turmoil; something was changing in the world.
At the airport I decided to write her an email.
Akiko stops typing.
Did she write to you? While you were traveling?
I nod. She did. I kept the emails.
Can I read them?
I pause. A year later, and it still stings.
Yeah, I say. I'll show you.
So as I enjoy my last moments of civilization before leaving for the southern hemisphere I write to the one I loved the most, what do I think.... well a lot of things I guess it kind of like her cooking, whatever comes in, pops down swims through, I realize she has things to do but yet my ego wishes she would drop everything in vain of some unfulfilled dream that had to be completed before one of us lost their youth. Nelly Fertado... she looks like her, reminds me of her, and if the girls in brazil are like her, then the breeze might finally cool my sweaty neck. In the humidity of a Manu Chao song I pack my bags to think of a more adventurous ride in the second part of the world, I think we are in the transition to something big, our dreams now are more real than ever before, the world is getting smaller the ideas traded faster, the commonalities are easier to be found, the twins fell and the tribes now beam their voices to orbiting tons of titanium, we are awakening, we are at the beginning of a new era I wish I could step into all of this with the woman I loved the most, anger, fear and regret hold me down from flying into the new world and let me be a maestro rather than a player, how to cut off the threads that she and so many others left dangling on me and tangle me into my web of nihilism and devolution. ENOUGH I SAY the pathetic voice that holds me on the cliff I jump from every morning and by the blue afternoon I am back on it.
Dancing that is the most important, it is the way we trance-send our selves into the new dimension where time is no longer linear and dreams are no different than what is. I am here now, and now again I feel.... oh I want to feel her lips with my dry finger, and see that reflection of a blue spirit in the eye that so wisely spoke here and there always nailing me to what I had always inspired to be. Serendipity, that’s who she is, the artist and the model that was to shy to let him Draw her and went on with the goods…. Why was I so stupid? Why don’t I tell her I loved her the way I did? How did she slip away? How did I let go? As Tarzan swings from the tree and the vine he holds onto so dearly keeping him swinging, I lost the vine and I am falling and I haven’t landed yet. What would the swinging babies look like if they were born into a world with swinging parents and internet to weave themselves into their own part of the dream web we are connecting, can we change the world? Can we look a each other after years and forgive....? Can we stop BEING SO CHILDISH... XEKOLLA!.... un-stick mother fucker! I am stuck and I cant, why do you run to the screen to see these letters one next to each other saying things that stir your stomach? Its the same reason I let you cry in pocket park, its why I write its why I still live.... a hope a glimpse of what I dreamt was feasible, why???? Because I am a pathetic romantic, I will visit you tonight in your dream ... I love you these and many more are the things I think of.
Nikos
I think I am going to stop writing for a while I need to fly
Her reply is dated Friday the 21st. Nothing in the subject line but Re. “Until April,” she said. I kept it.
Fri, 21 Sept 2001
I can't promise you things, I know that I really want to see you again, to see what still exists between us; I am thinking of going to Italy this summer, and I think, in the back of my mind, will Niko be in Greece, maybe that's when I can go to him. or I think about going to Mexico and wonder if you will still be in L. A. and think, maybe I can go find him there. Like I said, I look for your name on my inbox every time I go to the computer, but I can't come to you right this minute, I am doing things here that are important to me, and I will be here until April. If you told me that you could not talk to me anymore, I don't know what I would say to you. I feel like we aren't finished with each other yet, but we can't do that finishing right now. Does that make sense? I am also scared to see you on some level, but also excited, I have never met anyone like you either, I don't think either of us will ever see anyone like each other ever, I hang onto that, and these conversations as some weird reality about what can happen in the months ahead, I don't know what else to say. Do your thing, I’ll do mine, and some day within the relative near future our paths will collide, I just feel it somewhere within my chest. What do I cook??????? Everything, fish dishes, homemade pasta sauces, casseroles, stews, pies, stir fry's, the idea.... just a vision of how I want my life to be. A day-to-day vibe that I want to achieve, it has to do with being my own boss, working with my hands, and worshipping color. What do you think?
Cassie
War and Festivals
Interlude
In a sacred valley a long, long time ago, two tribes gathered at either edge of a vast valley. For some reason unknown to us, but deeply felt by them, the tribes decided to go to war.
Before the battle, for 5 days and 5 nights, clansmen from both sides prepared themselves by putting their best foot forward. They strengthened their armor, sharpened their swords and spears. They cooked their favorite meals and made love to their wives as if it were the last time. They passionately told their children the stories and fables that they would want them to remember forever. Propelled by the fear of perishing on the battlefield in the days to come, the clansmen pushed themselves to their creative and expressive limits. Their survival depended on the excellence of their being.
After 5 days and 5 nights, the onslaught commenced. Even in battle, the heroic tribesmen exuded the choreography and characteristics of their particular lineage, in an elegant display of physical agility. They dodged arrows and spears, while they danced across the battlefield whirling their swords with magnificent grace. It was almost as if the heroes of each tribe were protected under the guise of a god, one which was harbored inside each individual fighter. This notion of a divine armament was, however, a direct consequence of the collective tribe to which each hero belonged.
After 5 days and 5 nights of merciless slaughtering, the battle ended and the men’s bodies piled on top of each other, bleeding sorrow and failure into the ground and soil beneath. Amongst the agonizing cries of the slowly dying, children, mothers, and wives sought to find their loved ones’ remains, scavenging through the mounds of rotting corpses.
As the sounds of pain and anguish echoed through this blood-drenched valley, along with it emanated: the failure of humanity to coexist. If one were to ask Ares, the ancient god of war, what war is good for, perhaps he would answer: war and struggle only exist in order to push humanity to the limits of your collective, creative expression, make you dig deep into the essence of your humanity to see what you are made of and force you to excel.
Fast forward thousands of years to modern times, to the playa of Burning Man, or the festival grounds of Boom or to some ruins of an ancient Mayan temple’s full moon party.
For 5 days and 5 nights before the festival begins, people from all over the world gather together to collectively put their best foot forward, and create a transformative magical experience. Each of the pilgrims arrives bearing exotic foods, music, art, smokes and spices, and with the joy and happiness of life, they are pushed to the limits of their humanity embracing their divine creative spirit, not out of the fear of death but out of the love and celebration of life.
The event begins, and for 5 days and 5 nights, on this unique and novel piece of land, the feet of 10,000 people, 10,000 individual souls, move rhythmically in sync to the beat en masse. Each of them ecstatically thumping their feet, engulfed in an unprecedented euphoric high. Through the musical feedback loop this ecstatic joy is amplified, released into the ether. Celebration of existence emanates into nature as the dancefloor with the synchronized feet massages Gaia.