Do you ever sit and wonder about – things?

I sat and wondered all the time when I was younger, even in my late twenties. By my thirties, there was too much on my plate. But I’ve recently returned to the practice, especially now that I am heavily medicated. 

Oh, update: I had a partial knee replacement last week, and although this hurts as bad as the original injury in ’94 (Oh my lord, almost thirty years ago! Time flies when you’re busy avoiding life.), I think the drugs must be better this time around because I am functioning mentally, when I’m not sleeping, anyway. I’m even sitting here, returning to this blog. 

Yeah, it’s been a while since the last entry, but busy or just otherwise occupied has been my life for the last several months (strike that) years. And if I was sitting during that time, I was (in no particular order) a) eating; b) grading; c) watching shows on the DVR – I have come to despise regular TV; d) driving; e) sleeping; f) avoiding reading.

So, now I am forced to sit. I’ve been doing everything in the previous list except driving. And I have returned to the art of wonder. Lately it’s been questions such as why is Santa’s suit red? Or what kind of director would Roman Polanski have become if Sharon Tate had survived and had their children? Don’t ask. But if you have the correct answer, please, by all means, enlighten me.

But the wonder that came back to me tonight prompting this post is why did the men who plotted the attacks on 9/11/2001 choose that particular date? It is possible that this question has been asked and answered, but I haven’t found the answer anywhere, perhaps because the actual planning committee was never asked the question directly.

Why 9/11 – September 11, 2001? What is significant about that date for the ones who were planning to take commuter planes and turn them into kamikaze bombers? They had to pick the date in advance, probably well in advance in order to get everything in place. I have wondered about this since I watched in awe (that would be terror and dread) as the second plane flew into the tower that Tuesday morning.

Okay, so I have this thing about intertextuality. And sometimes I see connections that were never made by the original author. And this one I am about to point to may be messing with my head simply because of the medication cocktail that I enjoyed about an hour ago:

There is a movie with Robin Williams titled Awakenings. In this film, Williams’ character is a doctor trying to determine why his patients are in atypical catatonic states. Anyway, while he is reviewing their charts with a nurse, she reads that a patient has had “No change dated 9/11/44,” which is twenty-five years prior to the date they are supposedly reviewing the charts. In addition (as my students typically try to get away with, and I do so now because it’s late, and narcotics can fire off all kinds of weird synapses while simultaneously flattening language waves), there is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that De Niro directs Williams to through a (grammar police – “an” sounds stupid here) Ouija board. I’m not sure who did the translation below. It is not exactly as the lines in the film:

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

I’m not saying that this movie and/or poem had anything to do with the assassins’ motivations or the choice of date, I’m just saying that date mentioned in a movie with the title Awakenings that came out in 1990 based on the 1973 memoir of the same name (I haven’t read it) – I wonder if someone thought he was being clever – people have decide to do things for less.

I don’t think I’m being clever. I fully admit that I am heavily medicated here. And now, I’m taking a nap.

Quote for the day: Talk amongst yourselves. Linda Richman