From the Ashes

I know exactly where I was on this date ten years ago. Much like Kennedy's Assassination and the Space Shuttle explosions , Americans remember where they were on those days. After finishing this post and having come to the Internet Cafe to post it, I received an email from a friend who had been discussing this very issue with her children. These are days to be remembered.

I was a young Instructor and Student Advisor at The University of Texas at Austin for the Liberal Arts Honors Programs and Humanities. I was teaching a Tuesday-Thursday 11:00-12:30 class called, “The Curse of Socrates.”

We had been glued to the television all morning in the LAH office, watching the events of the morning unfold, stunned into muted horror. Vicky, our secretary, was running triage of students coming in to just have a place to sit, while Elaine and I were managing phone calls from concerned parents about what was being done on campus. When the second tower went down, minutes before 11:00, I was in shock, but I had to go to my class and see what the students were doing.

I walked into the room and a full range of emotions met my eyes: anger, terror, fear, shock, disbelief, paralysis, confusion, and despair. It was a heavy moment, them looking to me to say something, do something. Just as the bell rung, in walked Mark, a normally deadpan student, had not heard what was going on, looked around the class, and when I told him, he just said, “Whoah, I guess I should watch TV more often.”

Our reading for the day had been summing up Book Three from Plato’s Republic as well as the prologue to Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy, (Out of the Spirit of Music).” In the reading for the Republic, Socrates and co. had been discussing the necessity or not of music as part of education, and Nietzsche’s work deals with his thesis that Art is the “progeny” of the creative and destructive forces respectively of Apollo and Dionysus (also serving as the inspiration for Rush’s epic “Cygnus X-1” from Hemispheres).

How were we to talk about philosophy at such a moment? It seemed ludicrous on the surface, so I told the students, “No holds barred, tell me what you are thinking.” And, they did. The next ninety minutes was the most candid discussion that I believe I will ever experience as a teacher. They did not hold back, and they ran the gamut. Some of the boys were talking about joining the army, which one did. Some people changed majors soon after, realizing that “you never can know.”

However, at one point, the conversation turned to “Now what?” “Now what?” indeed. What do you tell twenty year-olds is important after what they had just seen and witnessed? What is important? What really matters? Reaching a point of being at a loss for what to say, I turned to Nietzsche for help.

What do we do in the face of tragedy in life? How are we able to communicate the feelings of despair, disillusionment and vulnerability when our world is just pulled out from under us, leaving us hanging on to the edge, for fear of falling into the abyss. Nietzsche’s answer was that you have to stare at the abyss and realize that that is indeed part of life. To turn away, to forget or to deny what has happened is the greatest injustice you can do. Instead, when tragedy strikes, or when we feel our world crumbling beneath our feet, there is one thing to do--create.

From that point on, the discussion turned to how people have used tragedy, terror, war, and individual suffering to be the catalyst for great art. Not to be obsessed with it, but to, as Nietzsche advised, to look at it and see it as part of our existence, the destructive force of Dionysus, faced with the creative elan of Apollo, yields great art. I was reminded of this when I recently visited the Shaivite caves on the island of Elephanta off of the coast of Mumbai. The most imposing and striking carving is the enormous Trimurti of Shiva, depicting his three faces of the creative, preserving, and destructive elements.

On that day, many of those students later said that for the first time they understood “Art” and why people make it, and how powerful it could be. I remember that Adam, one of my students, had told me how amazing that it was that he was finally able communicate with his sister, who was in the Arts, because of that awareness. At the beginning of the hour, Adam, a staunch patriot, had been one of those ready to storm out of the class and get on the next military transport to kill whomever was responsible, consequences be damned.

To wish that the world be free of violence and acts of terror is a lofty and noble goal, though unfortunately, though not pessimistically, is one that is not rooted in reality. At this point in my life, I just don’t see that as happening on this planet, which is ultimately where Socrates will get to with his ideal city. Humans are complex, and in our complexity we have a staggering capacity to harm others. Perhaps one could say that it is out of self-preservation, but I don’t really cotton to that line. I think that people are merely quite capable of doing very bad things. Period. But, what happens when those bad things, and how we respond to them, that is the creative power that is likewise as staggering in the condition of being human.

Nearly without fail, each one of my students later told me that in all of their other classes, life had gone on as usual that day, as if nothing had happened, not a word was spoken about the events. A pure nearly campus-wide tsunami of denial had engulfed the 40 Acres and the sight of the Twin Towers crumbling to heaps of ashes and molten steel mixed with flesh had proved to be too daunting to look at, the abyss too deep. I had not been not sure what I was going to do, walking from the Gebauer building to Calhoun hall, that is from the LAH office to my classroom, I really wasn’t. It was one of the longest short works that I have made in my life and a lifetime of decisions went through my head, but I will never regret my final decision to open up that conversation, for the result was truly inspired on their part, it was a collective work of art.