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The Unreality of Memory
Notes on Life in the Pre-Apocalypse
Elisa Gabbert
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The Unreality of Memory
Notes on Life in the Pre-Apocalypse
Elisa Gabbert
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'A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery' Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less 'Masterly... Her essays have a clarity and prescience that imply a sort of distant, retrospective view, like postcards sent from the near future' New York Times We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase "Did you see?" The feeling that we're living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten.Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert's The Unreality of Memory consists of a series of lyrical and deeply researched meditations on what our culture of catastrophe has done to public discourse and our own inner lives. In these tender and prophetic essays, she focuses in on our daily preoccupation and favorite pasttime: desperate distraction from disaster by way of a desperate obsession with the disastrous.Moving from public trauma to personal tragedy, from the Titanic and Chernobyl to illness and loss, The Unreality of Memory alternately rips away the facade of our fascination with destruction and gently identifies itself with the age of rubbernecking. A balm, not a burr, Gabbert's essays are a hauntingly perceptive analysis of the anxiety intrinsic in our new, digital ways of being, and also a means of reconciling ourselves to this new world. 'One of those joyful books that send you to your notebook every page or so, desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled you to read.' Paris Review
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MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION
A couple of years ago, distracting myself at work, I saw a link on Twitter to a YouTube video that caught my attention. It was a computer-animated re-creation of the sinking of the Titanic in real time, all two hours and forty minutes of it. I did not watch the whole video, but I skipped around and watched parts, interested especially in the few interior views, where you can watch the water level slowly rising at an angleâsince the ship pitched forward as it sankâin the white-painted hallways of the lower decks, and later, in the ballroom and grand staircase, as wicker chairs bob around.
The strangest thing about the video is that it includes no peopleâno cartoon passengers. There is no violin music, no voice-over. The ship is lit up, glowing yellow in the night, but the only sound, apart from a few emergency flares and engine explosions, is of water sloshing into and against the ship. The overall impression is of near silence. Itâs almost soothing.
This is true until the last few minutes of the video, when the half-submerged ship begins to groan and finally cracks in half. Only then, as the lights go out and the steam funnels collapse, do you hear the sound of people screaming, which continues for another thirty seconds after the ship has disappeared. A caption on the screen reads: â2:20âTitanic is gone. Rescue does not arrive for another hour and forty minutes.â A few lifeboats (empty) are seen floating on the calm black ocean, under a starry sky. Then, another caption: â2:21âTitanic is heard beneath the surface breaking apart and imploding as it falls to the sea floor.â The video ends on this disturbing note, with no framing narrative to lend a pseudo-happy ending.
At once, I was obsessed with the story of the Titanic. I rewatched the James Cameron movie (which I first saw in high schoolâstill ridiculous, still gripping); I read a Beryl Bainbridge novel (Every Man for Himself) based on the night of the sinking, which felt like a novelization of the Cameron movie, though the book predates it, just; I read thousands of words on Wikipedia and what you might call fan sites, if you can be a fan of a disasterâlists of âfactsâ and conspiracy theories. I watched a documentary (Titanicâs Final Mystery) about a weird new theory of the root cause of the disaster: One scientist thinks that a sudden and extreme drop in temperature caused a mirage on the horizon that obscured the iceberg from the men in the lookout until they were nearly upon it. The same illusion could explain why a nearby ship, the SS Californian, did not see that the Titanic was clearly in distress. It is, of course, just a theory.
The Hollywood version of the narrative, which puts the blame on hubris, has a lot of pullâthe Titanic sank because they dared to call it unsinkable. Itâs the Icarus interpretation: Blinded by a foolhardy overconfidence, we flew too close to the sun, melting our wings, and so on. Itâs the easiest explanation, appealing in its simplicity, its mythic aura.
When I ran out of freely available Titanic material, I moved on to other disasters. I had an overwhelming desire for disaster stories, of a particular flavor: I wanted stories about great technological feats meeting their untimely doom. I felt addicted to disbeliefâto the catharsis of reality denying my expectations, or verifying my worst fears, in spectacular fashion. The obvious next stop was 9/11.
So far, 9/11 is the singular disaster of my lifetime. People who were in New York City at the time always comment on how âbeautifulâ and âperfectâ that September morning was, with âinfinite visibilityââpilots call those conditions âsevere clear.â As I recall, it was a bright blue day in Houston too. I was driving from my apartment to the Rice University campus a couple of miles away when I heard radio reports of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. I continued driving to school, parked my car in the stadium lot, and went into the student center, where a few people were watching the news on TV with that air of disbelief that can appear almost casual.
The live footage of a massive steel skyscraper with smoke pluming from a hole in its side was shocking, but I felt it dullyâshock in the form of incomprehension, maybe denial. I donât remember truly feeling horrorâthat is, understandingâuntil people began to jump from the buildings. They were specks against the scale of the towers, filmed from a distance, but you knew what they were. They became known as the âjumpersâ: people trapped in the upper floors of the buildings, above the planesâ impact and unable to get out, who were driven to such desperation from the extreme heat and lack of oxygen that they broke the thick windows with office furniture and jumped to the pavement hundreds of stories below. Leslie E. Robertson, the lead structural engineer of the towers, later wrote that âthe temperatures above the impact zones must have been unimaginable.â The people nearby, and still in the buildings, could hear the bodies landing.
An Associated Press photo dubbed âThe Falling Manâ captures one of these jumpers: a man âfalling,â as if at ease, upside down and in parallel with the vertical grid of the tower. (Itâs a trick of photography; other photos in the series show him tumbling haphazardly, out of control.) The photo was widely publicized at first but then met with vehement critique. Some people found this particular image too much to take, an insult to their senses. And though the jumps were witnessed by many, the New York City medical examinerâs office classifies all deaths from the 9/11 attacks as homicides. Of course, the deaths were forced, forced by sufferingâbut they were also voluntary. It seems akin to prisoners held in solitary confinement (or otherwise tortured) killing themselvesâmurder by suicide.
When I think of the jumpers, I think of two things. I think of images of women covering their mouthsâa pure expression of horror. They were caught on film, watching the towers from the streets of Manhattan. I do this sometimesâhand up, mouth openâwhen I see or read something horrible, even when alone. What is it for? I think, too, of the documentary about Philippe Petit, who tightrope-walked between the tops of the towers in 1974. At the time, they were the second-tallest buildings in the world, having just been surpassed by the Sears Tower in Chicago. It was an exceptionally windy day (itâs always windy at 1,300 feet) and when a policeman threatened him from the roof of one building, Petit danced and pranced along the rope, to taunt him. This feels like one of the craziest things a man has ever done. For the jumpers, death was not a risk but a certainty; they jumped without thinking. Itâs more horrible to contemplate than many of the other deaths because we know the jumpers were tortured. Death is more fathomable than torture.
A Discovery Channel documentary that I found on YouTube called Inside the Twin Towers provides a minute-by-minute account of the events on September 11, a mix of reenactments and interviews with survivors. One man who managed to escape from the North Towerâhe was four floors below the impactârecounts a moment when he opened a door and saw âthe deepest, the richest blackâ he had ever seen. He called into it. Instead of continuing down the hall to see if anyone was there, he retreated back to his office in fear. He says in the film, âIf I had gone down the hallway and died, it would have been better than living with this knowledge of âHey, you know what, when it came right down to it, I was a coward.â And it was actually our two coworkers down that hallway, on the other side, that ended up dying on that day. And I often think now, Perhaps I should have continued down that hallway.â
This is a classic case of survivorâs guilt, sometimes known as concentration-camp syndrome: the sense that your survival is a moral error. Theodor Adorno, in an amendment to his somewhat misunderstood line about poetry after Auschwitz, wrote:
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on livingâespecially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all.
This syndrome, along with post-traumatic stress disorder, goes some way toward explaining why so many Holocaust survivors have committed suicide.
_______
There is survivorâs guilt, but there is also survivorâs elation, survivorâs thrillâa thrill felt only by those a little farther from disaster. The September 24, 2001, issue of The New Yorker included a symposium of responses to the attacks. A few were able to acknowledge the element of thrill in observation. Jonathan Franzen wrote:
Unless you were a very good person indeed, you were probably, like me, experiencing the collision of several incompatible worlds inside your head. Besides the horror and sadness of what you were watching, you might also have felt a childish disappointment over the disruption of your day, or a selfish worry about the impact on your finances, or admiration for an attack so brilliantly conceived and so flawlessly executed, or, worst of all, an awed appreciation of the visual spectacle it produced.
I find Franzenâs moral hierarchy here questionable, that âworst of allâ most puzzling. Because to me, more than worry, or admiration (!), the most natural and undeniable of reactions would seem to be awe.
Itâs the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster. A disaster is not defined simply by damage or death count; deaths by smoking or car wrecks are not a disaster because they are meted out, predictable. A disaster must not only blindside us, but be witnessed, and re-witnessed, in public. The Challenger explosion killed only seven people, but like the Titanic, which killed more than 1,500, and like 9/11, which killed almost 3,000, the deaths were both highly publicized and completely unexpected. Disasters are news because they are news.
All three of these incidents forced people to watch huge man-made objects, monuments of engineering, fail catastrophically, being torn apart or exploding in the sky. These are events we rarely see except in movies. The destruction of the Challenger and the World Trade Center are now movies themselves, clips we can watch again and again. The ubiquity of cameras, which we now carry all the time in our pockets, makes disaster easier to witness and to reproduce; it may even create a kind of cultural demand for disasters. We also get to watch the reaction shotsâboth the special effects and the human drama.
Roger Angellâs version of survivorâs thrill in the same New Yorker issue is less chastising:
When the second tower came down, you cried out once again, seeing it on the tube at home, and hurried out onto the street to watch the writhing fresh cloud lift above the buildings to the south, down at the bottom of this amazing and untouchable city, but you were not surprised, even amid such shock, by what you found in yourself next and saw in the faces around youâa bump of excitement, a secret momentary glow. Something is happening and Iâm still here.
Angell is saying this is not an aberration; it is the norm. It is one of the terrible parts of disaster, our complicity: the way we glamorize it and make it consumable; the way the news turns disasters into ready-made cinema; the way war movies, which mean to critique war, can really only glorify war.
We donât talk about it now, but I always found the Twin Towers hideously ugly, in a way not explainable by their shape aloneâthey were long rectangular prisms, nothing more. Their basic boxiness was somehow an affront. I find the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building beautiful. I find the Eiffel Tower beautiful. It must be their tapering sweep, the way they diminish as they ascend, their detail suggesting fragility. How could anyone ever have found the Twin Towers beautiful? They seemed designed only to represent sturdiness, like campus buildings in the brutalist tradition that were said to be riot-proof.
A friend, a New Yorker, disagrees. She tells me the buildings âdid amazing things with the light.â Another, also from New York, says they were âsexy at night.â But all skyscrapers are sexy at night, from below if not from afar, by virtue of their sheer dizzying size, their sheer sheerness. They stand like massive shears, stabbed into the sky.
Despite their imposing, even ominous height, the towers fell in less than two hours; the Titanic took only a little longer to sink. But that happened gradually. When you watch a building collapse, it seems like it suddenly decides to collapse. Itâs a building, and then itâs not a building, just a crumbling mass of debris. There is no transition between cohesion and debris. It is terrifying how quickly an ordered structure dissolves. Where does it all go? Buildings, like anything, are mostly empty space.
_______
In the vocabulary of disaster, the word âdebrisâ is importantâfrom the French debriser, to break down. A cherishable word, it sounds so light and delicate. But the World Trade Center produced hundreds of millions of tons of it. The bits of paper falling around the city led some people to mistake the attack for a parade. In space flight, or even on high-speed jets, tiny bits of foreign object debris (FOD) can cause catastrophe. Space food is coated in gelatin to prevent crumbs, which in a weightless environment could work into vulnerable instruments or a pilotâs eye. Debris on the runway could get sucked into a jet engine and cause it to fail.
The Challenger explosion, like the sinking of the Titanic, is usually chalked up to hubris. But if hubris is overconfidenceââpresumption toward the godsââthe explanation is unsatisfying. Engineers at NASAâs Marshall Space Flight Center knew that the O-ring seals, which helped contain hot gases in the rocket boosters, were poorly designed and could fail under certain conditionsâconditions that were present on the morning of the launch, which was unusually cold. The O-rings were designated as âCriticality 1,â meaning their failure would have catastrophic results. But the engineers did not take action to ground all shuttle flights until the problem could be fixed. As the very first sentence in the official Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident puts it: âThe Space Shuttleâs Solid Rocket Booster problem began with the faulty design of its joint and increased as both NASA and contractor management first failed to recognize it as a problem, then failed to fix it and finally treated it as an acceptable flight risk.â What shocks me most when I read about the space program is the magnitude of the risks. The Challenger exploding on live TV in front of 17 percent of Americans was unthinkable to most of those viewers, but not unthinkable to workers at NASA.
From what I understand, NASA has always embraced risk. In his memoir Spaceman, the astronaut Mike Massimino, who flew on two missions to service and repair the Hubble telescope, recounts the atmosphere at NASA after the space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry in 2003:
When I walked in I saw Kevin Kregel in the hallway. He was standing there shaking his head. He looked up and saw me. âYou know,â he said, âweâre all just playing Russian roulette, and you have to be grateful you werenât the one who got the bullet.â I immediately thought about the two Columbia missions getting switched in the flight order, how it could have been us coming home that day. He was right. There was this tremendous grief and sadness, this devastated look on the faces of everyone who walked in. Weâd lost seven members of our family. But underneath that sadness was a definite, and uncomfortable, sense of relief. That sounds perverse to say, but for some of us itâs the way it was. Space travel is dangerous. People die. It had been seventeen years since Challenger. We lost Apollo 1 on the launch pad nineteen years before that. It was time for something to happen and, like Kevin said, you were grateful that your number hadnât come up.
The culture of risk at NASA is so great that in place of survivorâs guilt there is only survivorâs relief. But knowing the risks and doing it anyway must require some level of cognitive dissonance. This is apparent when Massimino writes that âlike most accidents, Columbia was 100 percent preventable.â This is hindsight bias; only past disasters look 100 percent preventable. The Columbia shuttle b...