We all have our stories about where we were during the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 and we all have our different ways of grieving and memorializing our experiences. This year I joined David in his memorial tradition.
We went to the edge of the lake after dark and set up 2 rows of votives inside lunch bags (one row for each tower). There were 30 votive/bags in total, one for every 100 people who perished in the attacks.
Naturally, the candle lighter thingy I brought died after only lighting three candles, so we attempted a few failed solutions of looking for something flammable and using that thing to light the candles. I couldn't find anything that would work properly but I did find a scary looking blob of seaweed and sticks that looked like a dead animal washed up on shore, so I made David inspect it to make sure it wasn't a dead animal before I would continue.
We finally had to resort to gingerly lighting one votive off the other in the high winds off the lake. Not an easy task if you are trying not to burn your fingers and you value your eyebrows, but it worked.
I had never done this before and was worried about the whole thing catching fire and us getting in trouble for this or for littering or something but apparently there is a trick to it. You put sand in the bottom of the bag and it keeps the whole thing from blowing around and angering the scary beach police.
Hmmm... my row looks alot more crinkly than his here. I would have been ok leaving it that way, but he wanted it to be more uniform.
It was my idea to form them into rows to represent the twin towers.
The wind off the lake caused the paper to flutter and the flames to flicker. It almost seemed to make hem come alive, each as an individual, moving on its own.
I like the way that things like this can become abstracted when you look at them closely.
The result was really beautiful and moving. The beach was relatively empty, only a group of young people hanging out near the pier and a couple walking behind us. I wondered if anyone else would understand the relevance of our display, but figured that it was lovely on its own as an art piece anyway.
David was in Chicago when the attacks occurred, but had just come from living in New York. He said that for years he would perform this ritual at Lake Michigan, lighting three candles, one candle for each of his family members. This year he decided to light thirty candles.
It was a beautiful and touching display and I was more moved than I thought I would be. Although it was out of doors on a public beach, it was at night, relatively alone, which made it seem very private and personal.
I thought about how the materials here, fire, paper and wind, were representative of so many things. In one way they were elements present during the attacks: the fire from the airplanes and the buildings, the papers that flew from the offices and fed the fire, raining down on the streets below in ash and scrap, and the wind that whipped around the tops of the towers and blew the unimaginable debris across the city and its people.
In another light you could see these materials as symbolic of our lives and our place in the cycle of life, death and renewal. The paper, being our fragile existence, seemingly structured, but at the mercy of the elements around us, and the wind as time that moves the fire through us, reducing us to our purest elements, waiting to begin again.
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