Dan Schneider on W.H. Auden, 9/11, & The World Trade Center

Dan Schneider on W.H. Auden, 9/11, & The World Trade Center
Excerpt:

he Twin Towers Canon (1) SOUTH TOWER Cured of humanity, the taller World Trade Center despises its creators, growing ever more dull in their reach for the sun, to cast upon it, its Light, which reveals, to its makers, a vision to benight even the wonder of children, drawn to the taller aspects of aspiration, those laid low by design or at least gray proficiency. This is a sure sign that what uses once modern merely fades to the center which thrives on uniqueness. So, this tower is taller than the north one? Both of them are incredibly dull in the afternoon. Has either, once, lit up the night like the Empire State? Has it ever given light to a young boy's design? When it is cast in this light no lecture on the intricacies of its design can rescue its reputation, which sinks as the night whispers its way westward, out from behind the Center which slowly grows lightward, from within. The day grows dull as the tower is left to its dreams. It is taller than its dreams. It is real. Reality is taller than dream. So what if it is uglier in daylight than Yamasaki's vision? No vision is as dull as that made to become part of another's design, or another’s fraction of dream, part of a center that cannot be comprehended. Much like this coy night Mankind hopes vaguely, yet dreads precisely. In the night all our dreams are leveled, only fear grows taller, like a goodbye a loved one cannot voice. The center sinks into its own peace, the low dudgeon of twilight, which ramifies its structure, as if by some design of a god of the inanimate, or something dull as the joys of big boys with their toys, or even dull as knowing the ultimate artificer of night is poetry- itself an artifice, a design of the anima that propels life through dream, taller than a child's, which are ever fading, as the light gives its last, a burst of orange, over the Center receding. It stands, a dull icon, in the taller canyons of cumulus clouds, which design the last light, outside the night's tower, disavowed of its center.

(2) NORTH TOWER We have lost ourselves to marvel, much as the skyline has lost its appeal to those beings below, smaller than the circle of night. Yet, entranced by its starlight they look ever upward, as I do to you, this night, as my eyes fill with a grandeur, an unequal pull, greater than these engineered Twin Towers. I enter this ardor that you inspire. And, as I enter my being- within I construct our own skyline, of transnebulous beauties, which can only lend pull to your presence. In this night only I grow smaller as your hair shadows the tower, the wind, making night sheer illusion, when its fluid is cast with the light, of Manhattan at night, all my depths become that light of love, a parabola that will arc and enter the dream of a boy floating wary above the night, which stood out starkly, a kind of immortal skyline, against eternity's blackness, never made smaller than the dream of love. Nothing is real. Nothing can pull as eternity, save you beauty, which I feel pull in my silence, full as the unblinking summer light which faded with the hours. It never grows smaller for your eyes are oxygen, your glance what can enter, and power this dance that ignites beyond the skyline where a scared star leaves its place in the immortal night, and rinses your eyes of their doubt. You see me, this night, for the first time, on this skyscraper. You feel the pull as I touch you with my words and fingers. The skyline recedes, as if a memory lost to the sharp light of the now, where something other than love can enter this joy which increases, and can never grow smaller, like the future, itself, which can never grow smaller, the murmurs of tomorrow, which gets us through this night, nothing but a part of our love, which can enter, and recede, with your kiss. You are that hope, which I pull on in the breeze of adventure, which dares to alight, on your being, as your eyes disavow the skyline, as the east meets morning. The skyline would grow smaller, without you, if our love were to pull, as the night, what kind of love could it light? Or a new love enter?

Requiescat in pace [1972-2001]!

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

  A bit more alliteration & assonance lift the music, & we’ve come almost all the way back to the ‘real world’ after a 2 stanza aery. There is a reference to a famous WW1 quote by a British diplomat, Edward Grey, on 8/3/14, which stated ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our life time.’...

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