our own tidy thesis

I've been working again with Don DeLillo's "In the Ruins of the Future" for my 102 class*.  I must have read this essay more than 10 times the last two years.  The essay is challenging for students because it lacks a tidy thesis, because DeLillo is DeLillo.

In eight sections, he switches from abstract ideas about the causes of the attack on the World Trade Center (technology and time are central to his understanding) to first person accounts of what's happening at the make-shift memorials and what happened in his nephew's family's apartment building immediately after the towers fell to an account of a young Muslim woman praying on Canal street, using the Manhattan skyline as a compass to Mecca.

DeLillo wrote the essay shortly after the attacks, and the disjointed nature of the piece echoes the confusion and confliction that must have gripped the city in the last months of 2001.  The young woman praying on Canal street comes in the final paragraphs of the essay, and DeLillo finishes with the words "Allahu akbar. God is great."

It's the perfect end to the essay.  I'm convinced that nothing else could have expressed the love and the sorrow and the determination to make sense of the tragedy and the refusal to see others through the eyes of hatred.

The essay got me thinking about Steve Earle and how in his music he refuses to "other."  My love and I walked around D.C. the day of this concert/protest.  People ridicule protesters.  Even those sympathetic are often cynical as to the effects of protest.

I am too, but there's something powerful about becoming one voice for something you care about.  There's something overwhelming in even fleeting unity, even a corny chant, that each and every time makes me tear up a little.  Days like this are part of what's amazing about D.C. -- people stream in from all over the world to come together or face off or just gawk at the monuments to this country's short but powerful history.  D.C.'s a city that, like New York, welcomes all kinds.  That's part of the narrative, anyway.

I love Steve Earle because I think he refuses the narratives that narrow the world and seeks to understand, as DeLillo does in "Ruins."  It's so much easier to narrow the world, to create our own tidy thesis for the Universe.  But the world is wide, and the more we can expand our narrative of the world, the harder it is to accept another as an enemy.  As Fr. Wren used to say, "The present moment is pregnant with God.  Most of us are guilty of abortion."


*As a note to myself, next time I teach this essay, I also want to include "Falling Man" by Tom Junod and Geoff Nunberg's "No Language Legacy: Where's The Sept. 11 Vocab?" It's too late this time around, though I'm tempted to offer one up as extra credit.