| How
it came to be
Everyone around
the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic
destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant
replay, burning-- and burning itself into our collective retina.
I saw it that way too, but first saw it unmediated. On September
11th my wife (Françoise Mouly, the covers
editor of this magazine) and I had just stepped out of our lower
Manhattan home. Those towers had been our taken-for-granted
neighbors, always picture-postcard visible a mile south of our
front stoop. That morning, out of the very clear, very blue
sky, a plane roared right over our heads and smashed into the
first tower. The scale of the disaster was at first unclear:
as many have since observed, it seemed "surreal"--
and we had to get over our stunned disconnect to realize that
this was no movie, and that our fourteen year old daughter,
Nadja, was in the heart of the growing pandemonium.
Nadja is a freshman
at Stuyvesant High School, right below the towers. A half hour
after the first blast we had made our way into the lobby of
the school to find her. It took an hour to locate her among
the 3000 disoriented students in the ten-story building. Some
of her classmates had parents who worked in the towers; some
had seen bodies falling past their windows. While we were there,
the building momentarily lost its power and shook, as the South
tower crumbled right outside. We got Nadja out a few minutes
before the school decided to evacuate and we made our way home
on the promenade alongside the Hudson. We turned back to see
the North tower tremble. The core of the building seemed to
have burned out, and only the shell remained--shimmering, suspended
in the sky--before ever-so-slowly collapsing in on itself. Françoise
shrieked "No!... No!... No!..." over and over again.
Nadja cried out: "My school!" while I stared slack-jawed
at the spectacle, not believing it real until the enormous toxic
cloud of smoke that had replaced the building billowed toward
us.
We began planning
how to get uptown to get our ten-year old son, Dash, out of
the United Nations school he attends.We stopped at home long
enough to retrieve some phone messages and heard, with relief,
the voices of some friends who lived under the towers and who
we had feared dead. Among the messages were several from The
New Yorker, telling Françoise to make contact, that a
new magazine, with a new cover, had to be put together in the
next three days. That too seemed surreal.
***
Whenever I've walked
north in the hours and days that have followed, I've turned
back--as if toward Mecca-- to see if my buildings were still
missing. Not especially well-equipped to help in the search
for survivors, I applied myself to searching for an image of
the calamity. Despite what felt like the irrelevancy of the
task, it gave me a way to fend off trauma and focus on something.
It has been painful reconciling myself to the new emptiness.
I wanted to see the emptiness, and I wanted to find the awful/awe-filled
image of all that disappeared that morning. Surrealism was inadequate,
and after doing several vividly colored Magritte-like drawings,
I had to turn to Ad Reihardt's black-on-black paintings for
a solution. To my everlasting admiration, Françoise repositioned
my silhouettes so that the North Tower's antenna breaks the
W of the magazine's logo.
What's on your computer
screen is a very rough approximation of a cover that can really
only be seen in its printed form. Greg Captain, the head of
The New Yorker's prepress department helped assess the
best way to print this image and took a fourteen hour drive
to our printing plant to oversee the delicate operation. In
a sense, the printed cover, like an etching, is the only possible
"original." Those sillhouetted towers were printed
in a fifth black ink on a field of black made up of the standard
four-color printing inks. An overprinted clear varnish helps
create the ghost images that linger, insisting on their presence
through the blackness.
© art spiegelman,
September 23, 2001. nyc |
