There is a basket underneath
the table where I write that has the obituaries for everyone who died in
the World Trade Center. I also made a scrapbook of photographs and articles
from newspapers that interested me after the attacks. I don’t look at them
very often but I know they’re there. I’m resting my foot on the basket
under the table right now. I didn’t know anyone who died that day but my
memorials created a relationship to them. My memorials constructed lines
around that day that I can look inside and measure, even rest my foot upon.
So my life continues. Two
September 11s have passed and I still walk through my neighborhood the
same way every day. If I’m going to the grocery store, I exit my apartment
building turn right and walk up Shrader to Haight, pass Amoeba Music on
the left and straight into Cala Foods but if I’m going to buy cigarettes
or walking to the bookstore I turn left and walk up Cole to Haight. When
I walk this direction I pass the Bill Graham Center for Health and Recovery
and that’s when I see it – a small and waning formation of shrubs and dead
flowers honoring homeless people who aren’t there anymore.
The last time I noticed
them, and it’s almost rare when I do break out of my memorized paths from
point A to point B, it was night and it was cold. The kind of cold I can
only feel at night in San Francisco after the day’s been so warm and blinding
bright, after the sweat and exhaustion of a full day of school has dried
and tightened my arm skin and legs; this was what it felt like to look
at this small site when I knew I was supposed to look at it because I was
going to write about it and think of Robert Smithson.
The monument is ground into
a quartered off spot of dirt in the wide concrete sidewalk in front of
the recovery center and instead of the obligatory maple or oak tree jammed
into the sidewalk like the neglected flag of some country that has been
destroyed by its enemy, smaller bushes and shrubs uncomfortably crowd in
on each other and hold still. It’s not attractive or well maintained and
honestly easy to ignore. It takes too long to notice the washed out and
eroded plastic covered newspaper editorials staked into the greenery that
describe specific initiatives and politicians that are hurting or helping
the issues at hand. I tried to read them but I couldn’t make out the whole
story, so I filled it in with other stories that I know that might be appropriate.
The details aren’t important
here. The names of the flowers, the shapes of the twine and stakes leaning
in extreme gestures, wanting to fall to the ground, the parking meters
looming behind them reminding the memorial who’s winning – none of this
matters. None of these elements alone tell the truth. The discarded shoe,
pink and high heeled, laying like a dead body in front of the Goodwill
across the street doesn’t tell the truth. The homeless woman walking passed
me, babbling, stretching her arms above her head like a runner beginning
a race doesn’t tell the truth. It’s not my neighborhood, not my interpretation
of this monument, not my foot on my basket in my apartment. It’s just the
moment I noticed. What matters here is that a moment existed when I noticed
someone else, outside of myself.
However, I might be wrong.
Maybe these sites are not for me to notice the homeless or to the homeless
or about the homeless. Maybe I invented that because it was easy, because
it makes sense – because I could point to it and think about just one thing
at a time and then put it away, only to pull it out on days that I think
about the World Trade Center and Robert Smithson.
Winter 2004
