September 19, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Back in 1996, when I was teaching at a variety of CUNY schools, simultaneously, including at one 2-year campus where I taught developmental reading to kids who possessed NYC high school diplomas but few educated skills, I had the brite idea of using a Jacques Cousteau article on global warming as a vehicle for teaching vocabulary and critical thinking on a subject larger than good grammar. In front of the class during that special session, as I explained the delicate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide, between animals and plants, I mentioned in passing how OIL develops (of course!) from the decomposed physical bodies of formerly living same said symbiotically related (even to us!) plants and animals, thus the term fossile fuels, I can still hear myself joking… However, none of my students in that class were acquainted with these interesting OIL facts; rather, they were visibly disturbed by my inadvertent presentation of How Death Becomes Oil, And Is Therefore So Useful To Modern Life. “What did she say? What did she say?” Students broke into spontaneous discussion asides and shifted angrily in their seats. While they hadn’t been paying attention, I had morphed from their mild English teacher into a full-on mad-witch, betraying their fragile horizons with an incidental fact I took absolutely for granted. I don’t remember how I extricated myself from that particular room altercation; there were so many! Wait. I don’t remember why I started this New York anecdote in the first place. Ah. I wanted to write about Death, and its oily surfaces. But now it’s too late, and I’m cross-eyed tired, so I’ll have to sign off right here and write Part 2 next time. Pues, adios.

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September 11, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Once upon a time, on 9/11 in 2001, I had recently moved from New York to California, which, for me, ended up meaning that I would “have people there,” as we started saying. Due to my M/W teaching schedule, I would be off that day, (it was a Tuesday); plus, I happened to have been recovering from an emergency appendectomy, which meant I wasn’t sleeping well, so I had been listening to the radio all night long. At about 5:30 am., West Coast time, I thought I heard John Dupree, then on KPFK, making some kind of a sick joke, talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center; (I never did like him). I changed stations to my local NPR, but everyone was saying the same thing. I proceded to rise from my bed and open my window, imagining I might somehow see my morning-person neighbor, a guy from Jersey, up. Somehow he was. When I called him on the phone at that odd hour, and simply said “Ed?”, he said, “You have to come over here and watch this.” Now I, up to that (and this) point in my life, have managed never to outright own a TV, but I got to Ed’s place in time to witness the second plane hit. We watched both towers list and collapse, we heard the debris storms whistle through lower Manhattan, and we gasped when those poor people jumped… And a lot more, of course, mostly images I never saw after that Tuesday. Maybe I didn’t want to see them, since, when I moved again just a few months ago, I came across the front pages, printed on the next day, that I had saved from the NY Times, and from the LA Times, and I put them in the recycling bin. Because for me, the most memorable, the most socially salient aspect of the 9/11 event had consisted in how people everywhere, for a few short days, stopped participating in life-as-usual. Everyone sort of ceased participation in the repetitive activities that tend to fill up, and clutter up, a life, and we stared thinking about more important “things.” I rode my bike to the Queen Mary, watched the sun set without the sounds of planes or helicopters, and when I wore my Brooklyn College T-shirt around, strangers would pull over in their cars and ask me if I was okay, in a nice way! Later, I seem to remember the “president” telling us we all had to start shopping, immediately, or the “economy” would, what was his word, collapse? So it occurs to me, now, when I think about 9/11’s aftermath, that without each person’s continual and constant partcipation in whatever “this” that-we-call-living represents, the whole “thing” could not go on: Not as is, not without our acquiesence. Which is fine, I guess, if it’s what we want. When and if we do things differently, “things” will change. Meanwhile, back at the majoramericanmassmedia, there appears to be some fetishizing of the 9/11 dead going on, am I right? Yet with so many more dead and damaged, and so much more destroyed, absurdly, horrifically, since then, world wide, why mark 9/11 so vehemently, so obsessively, so nationalistically? Yes, on that day we saw real people really die. It wasn’t a cop show; it wasn’t embalmed. We watched real people see, smell, taste, hear, touch real people who were really running falling screaming crying dying, in “real time,” with their own eyes noses lips ears hands, and that was all very shockingtraumatizingupsetting, to say the least, not to mention the personal ramifications for some of us, not to mention that actual New Yorkers got hit way harder, way more viscerally, and for way longer. But in five years more, will these memories, our memories, merely serve yet another mediagovernmentfrenzy over whatever icons rationalize that OIL which requires rationalization? Will we think about those three little days, when we made our own actions, our own worlds, new? Or will we become our own objects, remembering the past as it’s currently being reified, as I write this text? Will we remember only where, we were, not who, not what, we wanted to be?

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