Perhaps you remember the moment you heard about a significant international or national event.
When I heard about John Lennon being shot in New York in 1980, I was an undergraduate having coffee in the student common room. I heard about the terrorist attack on the twin towers in 2001 while I was sitting that Tuesday afternoon in a psychotherapy session. A client told me they had seen airplanes flying into the World Trade Center building on the TV before they left home. The information seemed so bizarre, I questioned first my hearing and then wondered if the client was sharing a visual hallucination.
Recently, I had the privilege of visiting the memorials to both of these events in New York. The 9/11 memorial has four parts. It is easy to forget that the entire World Trade Center – seven buildings – were destroyed on that day. It is unsurprising that the re-imagining of the whole area has taken different twists and turns and the end result is complex.
Ground Zero Memorial The hollowed-out foundations and footprints of the North and South Towers have been made into a water memorial with the names of those lost etched into the sides of each of the two enormous squares. There is a sense of continuity in the symbolism of the continuous running water. Each name is backlit so as to be visible at night. Touchingly, the birthday of each victim of 9/11 is observed with a fresh white rose, placed in a small hole next to each name. I was struck by so much care and attention to detail in this memorial; it is deeply respectful.
The Oculus or ‘Eye’ is the second memorial, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava as the main transportation hub for lower Manhattan. The strip of windows or skylights along the spine of the roof of this large white building allows for sunlight to pour in each morning. Amazingly, the windows and the building itself are positioned at a tilted angle so that every year on the anniversary of the attacks the shine shines directly through the skylight and illuminates the main hall at exactly 10.28am – the time of the collapse of the second tower. It is called the ‘Way of Light’. I find the precision of a path of light marking a moment in time a breathtaking idea.
The September 11 Museum is situated underground with a vast array of fragments and artefacts including the last column of steel to leave Ground Zero, a wrecked fire engine, recordings of survivors and first responders all gleaned from the sites, shopping lists, phones, pictures and audio snippets recording lives lost and last moments. The museum expresses the weight of horror, disbelief and heartache and the sheer magnitude of what happened.
One World Trade Center is not so much of a memorial as the rebuilding of a skyscraper, bigger and better. Including the spire it is higher than the original North Tower; it is the tallest building in New York and the Western Hemisphere with 94 stories and standing 541 meters tall. Unsurprisingly the development of this project has been serpentine and the result remains controversial.
The following day, I visited Strawberry Fields in Central Park, only a short distance from the place outside the Dakota building where Beatle and peace activist John Lennon was shot in 1980. I knew that Yoko Ono had arranged for a memorial to John there but I did not know what to expect.
It is delightful. There are some small meadows and a path that winds through a wooded area, and then a formal design element, a mosaic installed into the pavement, donated by the city of Naples, Italy. Compared with the complexity of the memorials from the day before, this was remarkably simple, a round mosaic set into the ground where several paths come together, grey and white tiny stones making a beautiful design with just one word in the centre – IMAGINE.
This last memorial moved me so much. It is a living landscape that changes and grows over time. The simple mosaic works on so many levels, pointing to the song of that name and the wealth of musical legacy left by the Beatles for the world. Yet it was the word ‘Imagine’ itself that was so inspiring, pointing me beyond the memorial, beyond the past, to think what would have happened if John Lennon had not been shot, if a disturbed mind had not taken that fateful decision, if our world wasn’t so wracked by violence, intransigence and determined retaliation. Imagine.