The Architecture of Memory: 9/11 and the litany against forgetting

On the southern tip of Manhattan, 16 acres remain gaping, six years after September 11. Construction cranes rise out of the hole, diligently assembling a new skyline. Developers say that by 2012, at a cost of $3 billion, a complex of office buildings will again scrape the sky. Its centerpiece, the would-be-iconic Freedom Tower, will rise 1,776 feet, making it the world’s tallest office building. From its apex will rise an illuminated spire, echoing the Statue of Liberty, the intense beam of light reaching over a thousand feet into the heavens. Below, at street level, the names of the dead will be inscribed. In Washington, D.C., freshly poured concrete awaits a collection of 184 memorial benches, each overhanging a lit reflecting pool and inscribed to a victim of the attack. By Sept. 2008, according to plan, the benches will be arrayed in order of the victims’ ages, from 3 to 71, beneath a protective canopy of maple tress. In rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the wind comes in low and constant over the field of a reclaimed strip mine. Above the site loom two dragline excavators. Enormous crane-like machines, this terrain belongs to them: A place of digging, stripping bare, only now recovering its barest protections. They stand several stories high, weigh 2,000 tons; their scale dwarfs anything in the human landscape. But they have done their excavating, unearthed enough. Now they stand unmoving, rusting skeletons reaching into the sky. From an outstretched boom some 200 feet in the air blows an American flag. Here at Shanksville lies a blank field and a story.

A scarless field

Six years ago, passengers on United Flight 93 realized their role in a suicide plot and decided to rush the cockpit. A struggle for control ensued; the plane came low over the ridge now behind us, its wings rocking. It passed so low — on its side — that one witness claimed, “You could probably count the rivets.” It struck the ground at 563 miles an hour; smoke rose high into the heavens, a black exhalation from the earth. Nearby photographer Val McClatchey captured the cloud’s rise over an archetypal red barn, seconds after impact, and later titled it, “The End of Serenity.” The Boeing 757 left a crater 115 feet wide and 10 to 12 feet deep. No one survived.

These facts, this story, bring thousands to Shanksville every year. Many expect to see something bigger, something greater. Something monumental. Instead, the community volunteers — the Flight 93 Ambassadors — point to an American flag mounted on a fence about 500 yards away, just inside the tree line: That’s where it happened. That’s where the plane came down. Sacred ground. See how the hemlocks are burned?

But nature has reclaimed her dominion; beyond the scorched trees there is no crater, no obvious, comforting scar in the land. Crime scene investigators replaced the contaminated topsoil, and time has done the rest. Nature heals. Nature forgets. Nature is indifferent.

Human beings, however, are not — or at least so we tell ourselves. We like to believe that we recognize and account all suffering, that we honor heroism. We like to believe that human memory does not yield so easily to the wearing force of time. We like to believe we can stare long enough at those faraway trees and, yes, see where the burning jet fuel left its mark — that we can read the ash and know its meaning.

Here lies the problem: Absent the obvious symbolism of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon sites — the gaping pit where international commerce formerly towered; the charred base of the military establishment — Shanksville has only a naked field, tabula rasa. “A common field one day. A field of honor forever,” says the Flight 93 National Memorial Mission Statement. But how will that field look to the future?

Remembrance takes many forms; memory is a process of constant renewal, not an end product. Shanksville — like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — stands at the vanguard of that process. Here, private grief becomes public, shared. History takes shape as we, together, decide how we will remember; what we will emphasize, what we will discard —how we will see ourselves through the lens of memory. This is the question of all commemoration, public or private, personal or national: What will we choose to salvage from the wreck of time, and what will we let go?

Memory or memorabilia?

The Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, its name admitting the impossibility of eternal remembrance, does not aim for the monumental. Its tributes have a more human scale: A 40-foot (in recognition of the 40 passengers) length of chain-link fence stands on the ridge overlooking the crash site. Here, as at Oklahoma City, Columbine and the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, thousands of visitors leave their own memorial offerings.

Such open commemoration bears overwhelming fruits. A large wooden cross dominates one side; nearby, a plastic binder holds a handwritten copy of Book of Wisdom, Chapter 3 (“But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them”), alongside the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (“O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love”). An oblong stone, painted black and inscribed, “We remember 5000+ victims,” shares ground with a purple My Little Pony and a plastic Pooh Bear. Dozens of baseball caps hang from the fence, some personalized and others only logos: The Anaheim Angels, UCLA, VFW. Personalized license plates: FREEDOM and USA4ME. A laminated story of “The Tradgety of 911,” by eighth grader Sarah Marie Reynolds. Stylized flags of the Pentagon and Twin Towers. American flags. A stuffed lion. White plastic crosses.

One homemade plaque reads, “For our heroes of 9-11-01. Never forget them lest we be attacked again. — Bob and Cheryl Hargest.” That “lest,” strangely archaic, makes remembrance an act not just of preserving, but of constant vigilance. We must stand guard against forgetting; Santayana’s over-quoted maxim about those who cannot remember the past being doomed to repeat it — or having it repeated against them.

Perhaps that “lest” arrests our mourning process at the most basic level: “Never Forget.” You’ve seen this slogan, on T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, wall hangings, lapel pins, mousepads. Perhaps you’ve seen the iconic towers, superimposed with an American flag, encircled by a pentagon. Maybe you’ve noticed the oval, European-style bumper sticker reading “9/11” and “Never Forget.” And maybe you’ve seen the more ominous expression, “Never Forget, Never Forgive.” We must remember to never forget, the bumper stickers, T-shirts, and magnets warn us ad infinitum — I have a pen which reads, “We Will Not Forget,” followed by “Texaco Xpress Lube” and the business address.

It seems strange, this collusion of grief and consumerism, but “Never Forget” has its comfort. It illustrates Edward Linenthal’s concept of “venerative consumption.” September 11 memorabilia, says the professor of history and religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington, becomes both a sacred relic and commercial commodity. The “Never Forget” headband offers a way to express solidarity with the victims through the everyday transactions of capitalist society.

But how does the litany against forgetting make meaning of September 11? As an affirmation of American values, “Never Forget” emphasizes capitalism and national unity. But otherwise it falls flat; those pop-culture effluvia fail to advise us how to remember.

In the immediate aftermath of tragedy, such an uncomplicated response strikes us as appropriate. On the Penn State campus this April, following the student shooting at Virginia Tech, “We Remember 4/16/07” T-shirts appeared in a matter of hours, simple declarations of empathy. “It’s almost as if in the early days there’s not much else to say,” as Linenthal puts it. Yet seeing those same shirts six months later, worn with seemingly no more thought to their message than to the average Abercrombie and Fitch polo, gives one pause. What exactly do these casual commemorators wish to remember?

I put the question to James M. Kristan, who claims to have the largest private collection of September 11 memorabilia in the world. “My collection is a whole story in itself,” he says. “It’s indescribable. I’ve got at least 1,500 square feet of stuff laid out. I had to get a warehouse donated.” Kristan’s documentary, Moving On from 9/11, details his struggle with post-traumatic stress syndrome following the attacks. He eventually made pilgrimages to all three memorial sites; I met him in Shanksville, where his sleeveless shirt revealed a shoulder-wide tattoo of the iconic towers, with the legend, “Never Forget 9-11-01.” He’d driven 10 hours, straight from outside Grand Rapids, and would drive back that same afternoon. He’d brought DVD copies of his documentary, which he described as his gift to the families.

I asked Kristan what we should learn from six years’ perspective. “I don’t know. I’d need a little time to ponder that.” It seems important to note that after six years he — and we — still need a little time to ponder, to reflect. Kristan later answered: “The most important thing about 9/11 is: Never forget that horrible day. Never forget those heroes and everybody we lost, the innocent victims to the senseless cowards the terrorists.” The passage of time brings distance but not perspective or clarity; we can only, it seems, “Never Forget.” The process of commemoration stumbles after its first step. 

Selective memories

Increasingly, we demand this kind of “instant memorialization,” as Don Stastny calls it, in which not-forgetting becomes the central duty. Stastny, architect and adviser to the Flight 93 Memorial International Design Competition, notes how in places such as Oklahoma City, Columbine and Virginia Tech, temporary memorials formed almost immediately. Permanent memorial designs appeared mere days later, often by the hundreds, as concerned citizens made themselves heard.

Yet in that rush to remember, Linenthal notes, “You’re doing it so soon that it’s the first generation’s take on the meaning of what happened, how that meaning should be represented, what should be remembered, what should be forgotten, what can’t be said that maybe could be said a hundred years later.” Those permanent memorials by their nature stand for decades, and as first drafts of collective memory will have their blind spots, their telling lacunae.

What might we be able to say about September 11 that we cannot say now? What might we learn if afforded the time and space — and perhaps most importantly, the desire — to reflect? To offer but one example, Tom Junod’s Esquire article, “The Falling Man,” details his quest to find the subject of one iconic September 11 photo. As Junod describes the man, “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. […] His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did — who jumped — appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself.” Global tragedy has framed, not dwarfed, this man’s decision.

As Junod discovers, the photo’s haunting intimacy — capturing the choice of horrible, purposeful death over horrible, arbitrary death — proved too much for many viewers. Newspapers received angry letters from subscribers; many press outlets self-censored the photo. Just as filmmakers had digitally removed the twin towers from movies released soon after September 11, many editors chose to erase the Falling Man from our national memory.

Describing his ideal memorial, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “Those who visit should be able to relive the experience in a way that does justice to the enormity of the events.” Such reliving would, presumably, include the Falling Man; as cultural critic Slavoj Zizek says, “The true choice apropos of historical trauma is not the one between remembering and forgetting them: Traumas we are not able or ready to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. We should therefore accept the paradox that, in order to really forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly.”

Remembrance, then, demands both strength and humility in the face of enormous events. Even though, as Wyatt Mason points out, “The destruction of the World Trade Center is the most exhaustively imaged disaster in human history,” but the proliferation of images does little to further our comprehension. We have not yet exhausted the possible narratives, the stories we use to make sense.

The opposite, in fact; we continue to tell stories about that day. In New York City, a group named StoryCorps has allied with the World Trade Center Memorial Museum in an effort to record at least one oral history for every life lost on September 11. Those stories, 2,973 of them, offer a different kind of memorial; they offer us voices preserved as though in amber, confronting the simplest and most profound questions: “Can you tell me the story of what happened to you on September 11th, 2001?” “What was your first thought when you realized what was happening?” And of course, “What do you want people in the future to know about what happened on 9/11?” None of these questions promise simple answers, nor should they. Instead, they hope to speak to human experience in a way stone monuments, perhaps, cannot.

So often our speech stumbles when trying to comprehend September 11 — as Norman Mailer puts it, “We speak in simples as experience approaches the enormous.” We speak in simples, grasping at archetypes: The planes, the towers, the terrorists. The heroes. The victims. Even our shorthand reduces the enormous to the vaguely comprehensible: The events, the attacks, the tragedy — or simply the date, 9/11. We speak of a mythical pre-9/11 world, as though we are all the Falling Man, coloring our present with postlapsarian menace. The Falling Man, despite our existential horror of him, is part of the story. A story that continues to unfold.

Forebodings of Ozymandias

If we cannot say what that story means to us, we can say even less about what it may mean for generations to come. “A field of honor forever” rings with admirable hope, but memory’s half-life guarantees nothing lasts forever. Our memorials may outlive us, may outlive the people we know, but they may also outlive their meaning. We should acknowledge that our plastic 9/11 pens may outlast their message.

As Stastny puts it, “Twenty years from now, when a new generation comes to look at this, they may have absolutely no recognition of who the people were, or what the real meaning of this place is. We ask our jurors to look for designs that will still have validity, because they may bring a certain point home.” Call it the “Ozymandias” criterion, in honor of Shelley’s famous sonnet on the fleeting nature of life and art: Permanent memorials must carry their own meanings forward to generations who have no direct experience on which to build their own stories.

In the story of Shanksville and Flight 93, I’ve already seen one memorial fail the “Ozymandias” test: Paul Greengrass’s United 93. On a Saturday afternoon, I waited in line at the local Blockbuster. In front of me stood three young men in cargo shorts, striped polo shirts and backwards baseball caps. One of them leaned forward and asked the cashier, “Hey bro, is this a good movie?” He turned the DVD case around: United 93.

“Uhm, well, it’s about September 11...” the cashier began.

“OK, cool,” the consumer replied, evidently pleased with his choice. The three left the store without further discussion.

For those three, perhaps 11 or 12 years old on Sept. 11, 2001, the answer to the question of “too soon” was, in fact, “too late.” For them, the events of September 11 had already taken on the sepia shade of distant history. Like World War II, it was an event mined for entertainment, whether the final production had the earnest reverence of Saving Private Ryan, the testosterone-fueled explosiveness of Pearl Harbor, or the pop-intellectualism of a Ken Burns documentary. “Never Forget” holds no power here.

What, then, can a memorial accomplish, beyond triggering memories of the event itself? For Stastny, a memorial should be “experiential” — marked by space and reflection — rather than “objective” — the typically monumental memorial. A useful memorial, in other words, speaks to the living, offering more than an unapproachable headstone. For Linenthal, such reflection provokes the “hope that visitors will not only remember the dead in these particular situations and what they’ve done, but also extend that sense of caring to victims of terrorism and political violence around the world.”

Dissenting voices

For the September 11 memorials, such expansive empathy seems unlikely. Early plans for the World Trade Center site included an International Freedom Center museum. It would have staged exhibits on various genocides and crimes against humanity to illustrate the difficult process of establishing “international freedom.” Critics balked at placing the September 11 attacks within a larger struggle for freedom, however, with The New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff declaring the museum’s design “Orwellian,” a “theme-park view of American ideals in an alluring wrapper.” After much politicking, then-New York Governor George Pataki banned the IFC from the World Trade Center site.

Of course, the practicalities of memorial-building influenced his decision. Fundraising for a $3 billion dollar rebuilding has enough challenges without adding a controversial design to the mix. Developer Larry Silverstein’s insurance settlement following September 11 paid $1 billion, supplemented by $250 million from the State of New York and another $1 billion in bonds issued by New York’s Port Authority. (Such impressive sums tend to attract intense scrutiny; MSNBC’s David Shuster, for one, has questioned the impartiality of the design competition, suggesting Pataki exerted influence in exchange for political donations.) New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stepped in, helping raise over $165 million. Potential major donors such as Cantor Fitzgerald and PricewaterhouseCoopers have withheld donations, however, until the grouping of victims’ names has been determined. The Pentagon memorial hopes to raise $32 million, but large donations have come slowly. And in Shanksville, the initial fundraising brought in only $10.4 million — in two years. The National Park Service has taken over, hoping for at least $30 million. But as time passes, donations only get harder to come by.

One memorial outside any of the crash sites does include multiple voices, despite the difficult political-economic environment. In Phoenix, Arizona, a state-sponsored 9/11 memorial included panels that put the attacks into historical context. Among the inscriptions, visitors read, “Middle East violence motivates attacks in US,” “Foreign-born Americans afraid” and “Terrorist organization leader addresses American people.” Needless to say, the inclusion of such timely, newspaper-headline sentiments provoked controversy. When right-wing bloggers quickly denounced the memorial, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano responded, “This Memorial is unique, bold, dynamic, educational and unforgettable. The thoughts and remarks etched in stone will serve as learning tools for all of us, our children and our children’s children.” That memory and thought might work in concord seems to have struck many as anathema to “Never Forget.”

The Flight 93 permanent memorial has its own unintended controversy, whipped up primarily by California blogger Alec Rawls. Architect Paul Murdoch originally titled the maple-tree landscape in his design, “The Crescent of Embrace.” Rawls claims the design celebrates the Muslim hijackers of Flight 93, the crescent is a symbol of Islam and oriented toward Mecca. Tom Burnett Sr., father of one of the victims, agrees: “I told them we’d be a laughing stock if we did this,” he said to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Burnett has refused to allow his son’s name to be used in the memorial.

Mike Rosen of the Rocky Mountain News offered a simple solution: “Just come up with a different design that eliminates the double meaning and the dispute.” Double meaning, for Rosen, is one meaning too many. For him, disputation has no place in memorial.

The World Trade Center site has taken a similar approach. In 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson describes the design as “an orgy of nomination: the ‘Park of Heroes,’ the ‘Wedge of Light,’ the ‘Garden of the World,’ ‘Memory’s Eternal Foundation’” — all overseen, of course, by the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower. Presumably there’s no misinterpreting that singular message. Yet, Simpson wonders, what depth of reflection can such a memorial provoke? “One might think that any democracy requiring this sort of browbeating in the name of architecture must be in deep trouble,” he writes. Democratic memorials might dare to risk multiple meanings. They might dare to invite active participation — reverential to be sure, but with an understanding that debate and discussion also serve memory.

For former New York Governor Pataki, however, “In the end, there is no right way to remember. It is only right that we remember” — a slight expansion upon “Never Forget.” Again one thinks of the Ozymandias criterion, imagining “the decay / Of that colossal wreck” at the third or fourth centenary of the Freedom Tower, its names worn smooth by time. What then will it mean?

It’s unsurprising that a politician would evade such a question, but that doesn’t mean we all get off so easily. “Never Forget” marks a beginning, not an end. As long as people can share it, the process of memory is never complete, always in contestation, necessarily unstable. As Stastny puts it, “I think a memorial, like a city, is never finished.”

A twice-told tale

We remember in stone and in story; neither lasts forever. All memorials are temporary, subject to the ravages of time. Shanksville, for now, has no elaborate cenotaphs, no Freedom Tower stretching for the sky. The fence collects its tributes; benches record the passengers’ names. There is a small wooden building, not much bigger than the average bathroom. It offers shelter from the wind, the breath that always blows here, always animating, always threatening to erase.

On the coldest days, the Flight 93 Ambassadors huddle inside this humble outpost. There you’ll find them, ready to tell the story. When I visited in January, I found Emily Jerich and her husband, Stan, waiting. She asked whether I’d heard “the story.” I had, many times, from many different sources, and I learned to appreciate them as variations on a theme — not “the” story, but a collection of voices, reading from the same event, each with its own rhythms and revelations. The stories were extended names, ways of finding home in an event so challenging to our comprehension. Admixtures of dread and hope, they did not try to deny time, but only to understand it, to find a place within it.

Jerich recounted her version of the story, emphasizing a Bible found in the wreckage, not open to a particular page as some claim, but flapping in the wind. She speaks in conditionals: If the plane had waited only four minutes, if it had flown only three more seconds. Had it waited four minutes, the plane would have been grounded. Had it flown for three more seconds, it might’ve struck Shanksville’s only school. She calls her ambassadorship a duty, is proud and humbled “To be here, to guard the place, to tell the story.” Later, another ambassador arrives, Sue Strohm. She tells a less detailed version of the story, saying she realizes she’s there to listen as much as to speak. “The plane went over everybody’s house,” she says.

And everyone has their story.