I remember driving to school ten years ago today quite frustrated about the lesson I was to teach later that morning in AP Art History. It was only my fourth day in this brand-new course of this massive survey of world visual arts, but I just wasn’t “feeling” this lesson. According to my very new syllabus, on September 11, 2001 I was going to teach about these votive figures from ancient Sumer. Ordinary citizens in the city-state of Sumer, oh circa 2500 BCE, would pay to have a statue placed in a temple to pray for them continuously. Usually I had a good sense of the art works, but as I drove to school I remember wondering how I would successfully engage the students on these ancient ancient bug-eyed statues.
As I drove up the hill at Hackley, I remember looking at the perfectly beautiful morning, struck by how gorgeous it could be on that early September morning.
As you might imagine given the date and the tumult unleashed 90 minutes later, I didn’t need to worry about the lesson that day. After my first period 20th century history class, the headmaster called the school to the auditorium to explain what had happened in Manhattan, about 20 miles away, in the previous half hour. There was no formal school for the rest of that day.
Of course as we all know today marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on that gorgeous morning. It’s hard to think of that date now without mental images of the destruction, grief, and loss that swept over America and the world following those tragic events. The loss of thousands of lives was compounded by the depth of loss felt by New Yorkers in general, and corporately about the lost sense of security as a country.
There are many, many events and forums today in which to discuss 9/11. You don’t really need one more blabbering blogger discussing or remembering that day. I wouldn’t have anything new to say about the incredulity we all felt about those planes and those smoking buildings…but remembering that art history lesson may offer another perspective about that day and the reactions around me.
All through that day and into the night I spent in one of the common rooms on campus at Hackley, eyes glued to the television set. At various times I looked around the room and the scene was the same all evening—bug eyes at the television and the incomparable disaster it showed in nearby Manhattan. I saw more than one person punch a wall in anger and grief. But mostly I saw people silently watching, straining to take it all on, clasping and folding their hands in a strange disbelief over and over as they stared in fear and wonder and pain and hope. What would happen next? Was this the beginning of more attacks? How do we make sense of it all? What horrific and unexplainable events—how could we make sense of it all?
As I watched students and adults drink in this sorrow, I thought of those Sumerian votive figures that did not get taught that day. Those figures, two of them seen above, are made of ordinary material representing ordinary people. They stare in fear and wonder and pain and hope at the unexplainable forces in their lives. How do we make sense of weather disasters and food shortages and injustices and wars? In that void of sense and logic, artists made these votive figures to stand in for the real people, so they could beseech the gods day and night, seeking solace and answers. As I watched the people around me, they were doing the very same thing—seeking solace and answers. These New Yorkers were bug-eyed too, awestruck at the events unfolding around them. That afternoon those 4,500 year old bug-eyed Sumerian votive sculptures all of a sudden made a great deal of sense to me. That morning I couldn’t imagine a connection to those statues. Hours later I had a connection I would never forget as people around me hoped and prayed for relief from this sorrow.
Today people in the United States will gather together and light candles, read names, lay wreaths, hold hands, cry at the loss of life and innocence, render requiems and pray for mercy. Ten years after that day I live in the Middle East—something I could not have imagined a decade ago—and am only miles away from where David wrote the psalm crying out for mercy: “My eye wastes away with grief, yes, my soul and my body.”
Tomorrow I will teach about ancient Sumer again—this is the 9th year I have taught this course, and I will teach those votive figures again, and I will explain as I do every year, that I was to teach those sculptures on that beautiful sunny morning but the world stopped and I found a poignant and heartbreaking connection to those ancient gypsum sculptures.
It doesn’t provide the balm in Gilead, but it is one of the ways I remember that sunny morning and grief-stricken day.
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