To Remember, If Only for a Second

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the L’Ecole Polytechnique massacre here in Canada. For those not familiar you can follow the link, but it was, needless to say, an event that left an enduring scar on the country with fourteen women dead, another ten wounded, along with four men in what the assailant, then twenty-five year old Mark Lepine, called his “fight against feminism”. The December 6 massacre horrified the entire country not just because of how cold and exacting it was as an act of violence, but also because of how overt and explicit the violence was. Lepine’s stated intention was to visit violence upon women because he felt that feminism had “ruined his life”.

And yet, unless you happen to be on a Canadian college or university campus or, perhaps, directly involved with a group that works on women’s rights and issues, the significance of the anniversary seems to slip by without even a modicum of acknowledgment. It certainly seemed that way yesterday, the day just sort of slipped by with only a conversation between my wife and I marking its significance in any real way. Just how ephemeral these cultural events increasingly seem was the majority of what we talked about, which  included me noting that the mother of all cultural events, 9-11, seemed to pass by without the same degree of notice that has been paid to it in the past. I say, and said, that as someone who keeps himself pretty plugged in on day-by-day basis. On September 11 I was looking for what the reaction to the day would be and as compared to previous years, 2009 seemed, I might go so far as to say, apathetic.

To some degree, the argument that after a certain point there just isn’t anything left to say is a fair reading of things. What could I possibly hope to add to the conversation after twenty years of remembering? And after eight years of remembering, living, as we do, in a world that has been fundamentally reshaped by 9-11, isn’t there a certain point where we need to start moving on?

And yes, we do, but I fear that in so doing we fundamentally fail to miss the point of the remembering. It is less an act of contributing to the conversation than it is an act of acknowledging the rupture that these events visit upon our lives.

The common diagnosis around our cultural amnesia is the Googlization of information processing, of which blogging is often seen as an entertaining but ultimately entrenching byproduct. There is, once again, a certain kernal of truth here within contained, that we have become a meta-nation of multi-taskers whose Heraclitian focus never falls on the same thing twice. We’re like informational sharks, always moving lest we stop and cease to breath.

And yet, even this condemnation seems to miss the mark in some regard. The “Google is Making Us Stupid” argument assumes that if we just slowed down, if we just managed to remain focused, we could finally re-embrace those elements of our humanity that produced the great achievements of yore. The idea is that we lack the discipline of the mind to really soak in the marrow of our great experiences, to peal back the layers and revel in the brilliance and/or the tragedy of our times and our human condition. Ah, if only we were smart enough, like the way we used to be.

But if there is one thing in which we are rolling in abundance, it is smarts. We are, contra the Google argument, a meta-nation of minds, networked together by telecommunications and fiber optics, wifi and bluetooth and 3G. We have become, in many regards, the great hive mind of the twenty-first century, each of us tapping away at our keyboards, sharing the clever snippets of our pollinating toil.

We are, in fact, all too mind, “machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines,” as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze spat out in his seminal work, Anti-oedipus.

What increasingly seem foreign to us in our life lived in the world is the way in which we allow ourselves to feel the great events that shape our world and our lives. We are clever beyond our means, but the feeling of things has gone out of us and no putting down of Google and picking up of anything will really bring that back because to feel is an active movement of opening, it requires something beyond the mind, a willingness to get messy and dirty in a way that the “nontroversies” with which Charles Johnson recently condemned the right — and let’s be honest, nontroversy is the piece de resistance of our political discourse regardless of your ideological leaning, the bleached currency of a pantomiming political class that runs throughout the whole system — are, in fact, designed entirely to avoid.

And so the importance of these events and the reason that their remembrance is so important is that they are the ruptures that force us to scramble from our regular programming. They get us out of the mind and into a space of pressing engagement with the depth of life and our own unknowing. In our state of shock we see the rosiness of one another’s cheeks, the spill of the tear across the lashes of the eyes, the quivering of the lips in a futile attempt to contain magnitude of what we are capable, the shaking frailty of the body as it crumples under the weight of confusion. We are real to each other in a way that it is vital we remain in touch, no longer machines on a set trajectory, we touch each other with the tender hesitance of a fumbling lover seeking guidance in the dark.

We  must remember these events, then, not to add anything to conversation, but rather to remain silent and relive those moments when we saw each other and felt like it might be okay to remove the mask, if only for a second. And in so doing, we work towards ensuring that they never happen again.

Tagged as: 9-11