I am in seat 20A, looking out over the trailing edge of the left wing, on United Airlines flight 726, from Denver to Boston. Arguably I am being faintly heroic just by sitting here. My original Saturday-morning flight home was canceled, and I called up and had myself booked on the first available replacement, so now, a few minutes after takeoff, Monday evening, I am part of our national display of defiance. Fuck you, we will not be afraid of our own air. I don't feel very heroic. "Thank you for flying the friendly skies", says the guy on the little video screens, after a "safety" video whose calm confidence in its procedures for turbulence, exiting and "water landings" now seem conspicuously naive against the total absence of a recommended course of action if the plane is taken over by box-cutter-wielding suicide bombers. "All cell phones must be in the complete power-off position", the purser reads from an awkwardly-written script, just in case there was any tiny lingering doubt about how far the airline industry is from understanding how much the world has changed in a week. Andrew and I dropped off Mike at a Hertz office in Durango, and he drove back to Dallas; I seriously considered renting a car myself and driving from Andrew's house in Denver to mine in Cambridge. My presence on this flight is less a vote of confidence in our airline system's post-11-September ability to carry me three hours across the country without incident than a vote of low-confidence in our pre-autopilot highway system's ability to support thirty hours of frazzled solo driving without some sleep-deprived Iowan smashing into me, or vice versa. I wish the decision felt more momentous. There were some obvious signs of increased security at DIA, and random people were getting their bags searched, but despite instructions to arrive three hours before flight time, my own personal course through the airport was the same on this return leg as it was coming out. "Have your bags been out of your control at any time since you packed them?", inquired the United ticket agent, solicitously. I resisted the urge to scream back "Have you people been hiding in the mountains for a week? Never mind what other people might have put in my bags, worry about what I might have put in my bags."

It is, in fact, me who has been hiding in the mountains. On the morning of Tuesday, 11 September, I was standing on the platform of the Durango-Silverton narrow-gauge railway in Durango, Colorado, waiting to take a train in to a flag-stop in the Weminuche Wilderness for a three-day hiking/camping trip with two childhood friends up Chicago Basin, with a slated ascent of Mount Eolus, a 14,083-foot peak in the southern San Juans. We had been planning this trip for months, and for months I had been planning to begin the subsequent column "I did a new thing last week." For some of you, camping may be routine and unthreatening. For me, it was almost entirely novel. To the best of my recollection, the only previous times I have ever in my life spent an entire night away from electricity were during city-wide power-outages. It is in no way deceptive to point out that I ventured into the wilderness carrying, from the long list of requisite equipment, only two objects I owned before beginning to plan the trip; I already had a bandana (thanks to a high-school New Wave phase in which I wore dozens of them tied around one leg), and I happened to already own the exact recommended flashlight (which in the end I never used). But Mike's wife got him a subscription to some smug outdoors magazine for Christmas last year, and he'd become convinced that all these twenty-something skydiving/sea-kayaking/ice-fishing lunatics in the magazine were having more fun than we were, or perhaps just fun of a more profound type. So he proposed we go camping. My initial inclination was to point out, reasonably, that camping is not my sort of thing. But these are exactly the scattered friends I've written before about wanting to spend more time with, and besides, why shouldn't camping be my sort of thing? So, many hundreds of dollars of gear later, including a whole new wardrobe designed to do something called "wicking" that I hoped wouldn't hurt too much, there I was standing on a train platform, wearing a backpack we never got around to weighing but Andrew estimated at forty pounds and I at fifty, apprehensively waiting for the "adventure" to begin. Andrew and Mike went into the little station cafe to get coffee, and came back out to report that on the fuzzy television above the counter they'd seen both the World Trade Center towers burning after being hit by hijacked passenger jets. In what now strikes me as an almost unfathomable leap of faith, we got on the train anyway. Some old tourist, climbing into the seat next to us just before the train pulled out, reported that the Pentagon had been hit, too.

And that's what we knew. The towers hadn't collapsed, the fourth plane hadn't crashed. We left civilization, in retrospect, not at all sure how much of it would be there when we got back. If there had been enough time to be anything but dumbfounded by the news, I'm sure we would have quit the train, at least until the boundaries of the horror were better defined. What if there were five strikes? What if there were fifty? But the first three were so incomprehensible that it didn't occur to us there could be still more, and the whistles were blowing, and nobody could immediately think of anything the three of us could do to respond other than go back to our hotel and sit and watch television, so we let the train take us. It carried us into the wilderness and left us there, wispy Austrian tourists waving goodbye as it continued on its sight-seeing loop to Silverton. And since we weren't to be picked up again until Thursday afternoon, there was little left to do but pretend that this trip was still urbanites' recreation, rather than survivalists' retreat.

Camping, it turns out, is not so scary. Or to be more precise, the camping part of camping, by which I mean sleeping in a tent and not bathing and drinking funny-colored water because we all agreed that the neutralizer tablets made it taste stranger than the iodine, was uneventful and fairly pleasant, and I suspect I'll enjoy it even more once I perfect a mummy-sack sleeping method that doesn't require my usual amount of thrashing. We didn't see any bears, there were no bugs to speak of, we didn't break or run out of anything important, and it only rained on us coming out. My hundreds of dollars of camping gear will be used again. Next time around, though, I will know to scrutinize the "hiking" parts of the itinerary a little more closely. The Needleton flag-stop is at 8,200 feet, and the head of Chicago Basin is at about 11,200, just over six miles away. We camped a little short of that, in both distance and height, but I can now authoritatively report that the low standard of physical fitness required to participate in recreational soccer and volleyball leagues at sea level is insufficient for making a five-hour, six-mile/3,000-foot pack-encumbered climb comfortably. I basically reached my tolerance point about two-thirds of the way up, and continued under physical protest. The second day, Mike and Andrew made the summit-assault on, after observing a feature called The Sidewalk in the Sky necessary to reach the top of Eulos itself, the somewhat less intimidating North Eolus (14,039). I stayed in camp, basking lizard-like on a rock by the creek, reading a book, and developing an intense personal friendship with Lester, an equally slothful (and, as best I could tell, stone-deaf) marmot who lived near our campsite. The descent, on the third day, despite being done in a mild drizzle, and eventually engendering quite a bit more muscle soreness than the ascent, was far less trying cardiovascularly, and even at my slow pace we made it in three complaint-free hours, leaving us ample time to lounge around at the flag-stop being ridiculed by other hikers for having overestimated, by at least a factor of two, how much gorp and jerky three people could eat in three days.

Andrew had actually got cell-phone reception from the summit of North Eolus on day two, and called home for a capsule news update, so for the second half of the trip we had a little better idea of what was going on. On the train ride back to Durango, smelly and grizzled, we bullied aged vacationers out of their newspapers, and caught up a little further. We watched some news at our hotel Thursday night, Andrew and I listened to the radio fitfully on our way back to Denver on Friday, and once at Andrew's we had the full array of communications technology once again at our disposal. I checked in with my family and the most likely friends to have been involved. I have close friends who lost close friends, and know far too many traumatized eye-witnesses, but so far I don't know of any victims I knew personally. It is also entirely possible that I am the only person you know who didn't see any video footage of the crashes until Thursday.

For all practical purposes, I might as well have stayed ignorant. Andrew is an airline pilot and a former military officer, and probably ought to be on television explaining what's wrong with everybody's stupid new security proposals. Mike is an intently politically-aware EPA lawyer who could probably take over once we began contemplating the moral fabric of our possible responses, and his wife, an in-house counsel for one of the airlines in question who was actually in DC at the time, will almost certainly be the most involved of anybody I know. Me, I try to design business software that makes your work life marginally less exasperating, and I write about records. I am a very smart, thoughtful person, but events on this scale do not fit into my comprehension. In the world I thought I lived in, there is no problem to which flying a hijacked commercial passenger plane into an occupied office building is a conceivable response. In the world I thought I lived in, I can go away for a week, having written ahead of time a gentle remonstration about giving Melissa Etheridge another chance, and it can be automatically posted in the middle of the week without events having rendered it surreally irrelevant and unresponsive. I don't understand these attacks, I don't know how they can be answered or atoned for, I don't even speak the language of the discussion. Here is a very simple rule: music is what humans are best at, so anything that seems to supersede it, we should not do. Or phrased as semi-solipsism, in a sort of inversion of Wittgenstein's point about what language can't express, anything I cannot comprehend, should not exist. We, as a species, must be past this, or we will not survive. Every day the planet shrinks a little further, and with it decreases the amount of ideological diversity we can tolerate. If I really think about it, of course, as desperately as I don't want to, I realize that the root subhuman insanity, the willingness to kill other human beings because they have different beliefs, was already on display all around us, in clinic bombers, judgmental evangelists, homophobes, ex-boyfriends and persecuted high-school students. The aftermath of these attacks, I have no doubt, will at times amount to a parade of our own grotesque forms of malignant ignorance and evil. I have to believe I am not like those people. I believe evolution is in the process of producing a human creature that knows, instinctively and incontrovertibly, that violence is not a conflict-resolution mechanism. While that transformation is going on, we are living among animals.

It is more complicated than just not resorting to violence, though. To be part of a post-violent species we must also be able to avoid situations in which there are no non-violent solutions. Actions to which you can only respond by flying a hijacked commercial passenger plane into an occupied office building, if there were such things, would be just as subhuman. I can't think of any, myself, but this is not my field. The coverage of these events, though, has also spent strikingly little energy trying to discern their purpose. Even the search for the organizers, which if this were a smaller crime would inevitably entail an inquiry into motives, has been single-mindedly incurious and unreflective. The perpetrators are unanimously referred to as "terrorists", as if this were a consensual and uncontroversial designation, like "baker" or "sophomore", but presumably that's not how they think of themselves. Nineteen men, at least, cared so passionately about something that they were willing to move to a country they evidently hated, learn to pilot airplanes, and die in the very acts that would constitute their triumph. And so perhaps the most incomprehensible detail of all, so far, is that we have no idea what they thought they were accomplishing. There should be a manifesto. Some unknown faction has meticulously planned what in some senses is the loudest single statement on a world stage in the last fifty years, and yet it says nothing. There were no threats beforehand, no demands afterwards. Except for some telegenic Palestinian children, and god knows what they'd been told, everybody who ought to be celebrating, if this were a vengeful blow in a determined struggle, is busy sternly denying their involvement. I have little trouble imagining, frankly, that there was business transacted in the World Trade Center that qualifies, under any sane criteria, as evil. It wouldn't particularly surprise me to find that some of it, if carefully analyzed, would prove to be as barbarous in its own way as these attacks. I despise the stock market, personally, and am nauseated by the idea that the "engine" of the "greatest economy on Earth" is the manipulation of symbols for human effort, rather than the human effort itself. I hated those towers, even, icons of exactly the inhuman scale and relentless hubris that makes New York City, for me, uninhabitable. But whatever evil was poised to be done in lower Manhattan, Tuesday morning, was delayed mere hours, and is now whirring away again in temporary offices in New Jersey. The passengers on those airplanes, though, and the firefighters who went into those burning buildings, and the people who worked in the offices of companies that never hurt anybody, they are all irrevocable and unavoidable victims of the nature of the attacks, regardless of how many of the attackers' underlying beliefs they shared. I believe the most terrifying aspect of these attacks is that they appear to have been carried out not so much by enemies, or fanatics, or militants, as by movie villains, who make insane and inexplicable decisions that serve no other end than furthering inane plot contrivances and increasing visceral shock value. If these people just wanted to take lives, they could have dropped an LA-NY red-eye into the new Mile High on Monday night. If they wanted to cripple the US stock market they could have walked a bomb into the NYSE, or spent all that flight-school time learning to write a rogue program-trading virus. If they wanted to make a pure military statement they could have stolen an empty jet at National and flown that into the Pentagon. If this is about Israel they should have hit something in Israel first, while a suicide hijacking would still have had the advantage of surprise. The damage to the Pentagon, in fact, was comparatively minor, and unless you think they knew the precise thermo-structural implications of the fires in the WTC towers (which they might have, but note that our own fire-fighters and officials didn't), the damage they thought they were giving their lives to cause might have been far less. Their souls would be forfeit, in any religion on the planet, for the people on those planes, but if they thought they were dying just to punch holes in the most prominent available buildings, it's hard to see how that amounts to much more than architecture criticism. We will make them pay, of course, no doubt we will make a lot of people pay for a lot of things, and with a lot of assistance. And if we are very, very lucky, luckier than we have ever been before and luckier than we've probably earned the right to be yet, the substance of our revenge will not be our retaliation (even if that's what it takes), it will be the end of anonymous violence. Let this be the cause noble enough for thousands to have died for, let these acts have been so arbitrary and so unambiguously unconscionable that no living person can endorse them. Let us stand on the timeline of the human race, and push behind us the last nineteen creatures that looked like us who could still kill strangers. Let the last thousands to die this way manifest in our hearts and our consciences and our shattered cities, and take up our souls in talons, and finally tear us free from the horrors we used to have the capacity to become.

Which is a stirring idea, and a great place to stop, but real things don't stop. This is vanishingly unlikely to be the end of violence. It was my long-standing opinion, before this, that the practically infinite variety of potential human beliefs is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with practically finite living space. I would have claimed, at one cynical nadir, that there were exactly two ways in which humanity could avoid self-destruction: a program of rigorous population control starting millennia before anybody could have conceived of its necessity, and escaping this planet. If you've fallen into the easy trap of thinking that space exploration is an academic's abstract indulgence, walk outside tonight, take hold of Mars in the sky, and hand it over. If we can't live with each other, we have to have somewhere for one of us to go. That red dot in the sky? That's Palestine. Venus? Israel. Anybody who thinks the rest of us can't be trusted, pick a dot. Hell, I'll go. Find me a terraformable rock spinning around Proxima Centauri, and a ship large enough to hold everybody else who believes that there is no afterlife to release them from accountability for what they do while they're alive, and we will start over in the sky. Those of you who want to pour blood on the meaningless ridges we leave behind, feel free to start as soon as we clear control.

Before I can get away into space, though, I've got to get out of Denver. My scheduled return flight was canceled, unsurprisingly, and I spent a couple unexpected but intensely therapeutic extra days in Andrew and Trina's arid, Monopoly-house-lined suburb playing with their cheerfully oblivious nine-month-old daughter and their uncritically affectionate golden retriever. Now I'm on this plane, and we are back in the air. Haven't our bodies always told us, as emphatically as they know how, that airplanes and skyscrapers are bad ideas? But we claim to know better. Nobody puts the tension on this plane into palpable form, but it's easy enough to perceive. For the first time in my life, the prettiest girl I picked out in the waiting area is in fact seated next to me, but in quick succession I notice 1) her wedding ring, 2) her in-flight reading material, which appears to suggest that she is employed as a rodeo clown, and 3) my own temporary disinterest in any form of social interaction. I get my CD player out. I have brought eighteen discs with me on the trip. The comfort disc was Emm Gryner's Girl Versions, but I've listened to that a few times, now, and I'm ready for something else. What makes me think Radiohead's Amnesiac, which I've played at least ten times and still cannot remember a moment of, will suit this particular moment and mood, I have no idea. The only reason I haven't given up on it is that I keep not not liking it, and usually I have no trouble not liking things I don't like, so maybe the fact that Amnesiac vanishes from my mind the moment it's over implies something obliquely positive. Or maybe it's just insular and antisocial, which is how I feel like feeling. Or maybe I've been out of touch with music, too, long enough to want to hear something that seems like a public frame of reference.

And as this airplane carries me towards my home, Amnesiac begins a parallel emotional journey that maybe I'd momentarily stopped believing music could sustain. I am finally, in this haunted interlude between the beginning of horror and the beginning of my own ability to really start processing it, torn between new furies and old, in the right mood for Radiohead. A week ago I would have told you that Amnesiac is Kid A without "Idioteque", and since I said that Kid A amounted to a very long CD-single for "Idioteque", it's hard to take that as a compliment, but in fact, removing the focal point is a stroke of genius. Maybe I should have guessed, from the title of "How to Disappear Completely", what they were after, but I didn't, and here on a frightened jet, in a pool of light from the reading lamp, casting furtive glances at the beautiful rodeo clown sleeping in the seat next to me, I finally get it. Or I make it up, I don't know. I'm too caught up in this discovery to disentangle Radiohead's agenda from my own, and too frayed by tensions to care. I still couldn't hum anything from this album other than Thom Yorke muttering "Get off my case, get off my case", and that's exactly why I've decided it's a masterpiece. I hated OK Computer because I thought it was nihilistic, but that's because I kept stubbornly trying to treat it as a story, with Yorke as a narrator and a character, and his vocal presence as the signature element. But Amnesiac isn't a story, and Yorke's singing is just a sound. This album is a portrait, albeit a stylized and symbolic portrait in musical form rather than an attempt at a faked field recording, of background hum, and of the entire context and environment of industrialized and systematized life. It would be dystopian if it were prescriptive and exhaustive, but it's exactly the opposite, descriptive and methodically incomplete. We complained about Radiohead, the guitar band, ditching their guitars, but that only made sense if they meant to keep being a band, and they didn't. Taking away the guitars wasn't a stylistic decision, it was the first necessary step in finding out what was under them. We complained about them assembling Amnesiac out of the same pieces as Kid A, especially since they never bothered to contradict whoever said this was going to be a rock record, but it's the nature of the statement that individual moments are not precious. The mysterious thing isn't that they made two albums out of one recording session, it's that they fucked up the first one by giving it a single. This isn't a record, it's the inherent sound of streets and data and buildings, of all the wreckage we surround ourselves with even if it hasn't fallen yet. This is an emotional baseline against which you have to calibrate yourself, or else our values and aspirations will seem alien to you because you don't understand that this is what we'd have without them. You imagine we've planned everything, but we are as lost in these streets and rooms as you could ever be in deserts and caves. If you think you only have time for one track, listen to the third one, "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors". A bleary percussion loop cycles and stutters, a brittle computer voice mumbles raspily to itself, tiny flutters of bells periodically drift through like sunlight piercing smoke. It's four minutes long, and very nearly nothing happens. Or, more to the point, it's four minutes long and if you get to the end and nothing has happened, that's your fault. How long do you need, anyway? This is what Alan Ball and Sam Mendes were trying (too hard) to get at with the plastic-bag ballet in American Beauty, not the mundane revelation that trash can be beautiful, but the truths-we-hold-to-be-self-evident insight that beauty is a transformation, not an absolute, and so no amount of trash can preclude it. I'm crying and shaking, for the first time since Tuesday, not because I've started to comprehend the extent of the atrocities, but because I realize, listening to this record, that I can't give up. It may take them a year to clear all the debris out of the hole in New York where the World Trade Center stood. When it's empty, we will gather around it and say goodbye to whatever pieces of ourselves and our friends and our friends' friends lived and died there. And then, when we decide what to put where there's nothing, we will find out what kind of people we've really become.

The War Against Silence
20.09.01