May God Bless and Keep You Always: Ideology and 9/11 Through The Praise of Infants and Children
Excerpt from "How to Market Your Grief Blog"
Unentitled to comment as I am, that these thoughts on 9/11 came about as the conclusion to my epistolary novel How to Market Your Grief Blog seems as strange to me as it would anyone. I subsequently visited Reflecting Absence with my friend and fellow Bob Dylan fan James to fill in some of the details in Tip 10. The other tips may not be as resonant without reading what precedes it, but watching the jingoistic 9/11 flagellation that has come to kick off every NFL season, I decided to post it in the same spontaneous spirit in which it was written.
Ten Tips for Getting Back in the New York Groove
If as time passes children grow with their pituitary glands and their ATP, and the change in Mikael is swift and stable, such that one day he looks very old and the next he remains very young, then let this be an adequate sign, let this be enough for you. If your glasses cloud the knowing before you, clean them sensibly with an alcoholic lens cleaning wipe rather than crush them underfoot, or they’ll have to be replaced, and you won’t be able to buy him treats at the Bronx Zoo.
One: If here come their ghosts again in the peacoats of the passing young ladies, practise humility as the passing ladies smile not at you but at your striking child. Press your palm against his skull, which skull’s fontanelle was once very vulnerable but now seems firm enough to absorb a wayward soccer ball or maybe even God-forbid a softball descending from a modest trajectory of f to x.
Two: Should you refuse Mikael’s request to feed his powdered donuts to the M’Wasis of the Bronx Zoo, whom he pleads “Are hungry guys!” because you’re not sure what M’Wasis usually eat but assume it’s like leaves or something, and this insult causes Mikael a screaming fit, leven the mood with the setup to an old joke: “When you look for something, why is it always in the last place you look?” distracting Mikael from all the world’s M’Wasian injustice enough to ask, “Why?” then respond with the dry comic sensibility you reserve only for those you love, “Because when you find it, you stop looking.”
Three: Though you find the substance neurotoxic, get unethically-traded coffee in a multinational franchise to keep up with Mikael’s boundless energies. While no more cosmopolitan than all the multinational cafes from Savannah to Stratford, it is in Manhattan and contains the boy in whom all your best qualities reside, and in whom, mercifully, the lesser qualities, e.g. ‘Varsol abuse,’ e.g. ‘flakily reading a few pages of Wittgenstein before talking to your fellow residents in the Airbnb about meaning as use,” remain absent up to this point.
Three: If in a high comradeship of filial spirit, allow Mikael to marvel at the ceilings of the Stephen Schwartz branch of the New York Public Library. Edify Mikael regarding man, blessed man, 18th century Giuseppe or whomever, up on some literal latter to the stars sculpting those ceilings to resemble the Sistine Chapel’s so that one day, this day, you and Mikael could drop in to look up at them. If you get distracted with photographing the ceilings, hope that Mikael is strapped to you not by the Object Oriented Programming of a Parent/Child relationship, but only by the object oriented ontology of his Mommy Helper Kid Keeper leash.
Three: Show Mikael the “crummy little hotel over Washington Square” in which Bob Dylan wrote the songs he wrote in 1963. Inform Mikael that no, whatever his aspirations, he can not grow up to be Bob Dylan, because you believe Bob Dylan to be a genuine prophet, and to just bestow this potentiality on a son out of fatherly zeal is a sacrilege you won’t quite yet commit.
Four: If Mikael can’t grasp the hallowedness of these grounds, then on the subsequent walk around Washington Square merrily sing some words from Forever Young. If Mikael is embarrassed and needs to be bought off at a larcenous pretzel cart, grudgingly buy the $12 pretzel before expressing how grateful you are that Mikael has been mysteriously saved.
Five: If Mikael’s memory of occulted past sustains remains pliable, ask him what he recalls of his counterfactual authorship of an artificially intelligent ostensive doom. Respond to his look of comic four-year-old obliviousness with, “Wouldn’t it be bad if the memories from that old life tied our hands?”
Six: Breathe relieved sigh when Dublin Mike is nowhere to be found at the Dublin House i.e. ‘If that was a dream then maybe this isn’t. If that was a dream maybe this is what’s real.’
Seven: If St. Patrick’s Cathedral remains a free and ornate place to untie your hands, a sanctified place where even the tourists feel holy walking right up to the altar to take mid-mass selfies, and only five or six people know the head-tapping maneuvers of the responsorial psalms, which is enough—and if you are holding a child’s hand, and also a child’s leash, the cloud of forgetting a welcome friend, and the neo-gothic setting is like Batman’s house, bloody palm wounds on the stained glass, Jesus pretty adamant about having died for our sins, then get down on your knees and pray to Saint Hilarious, for if the psalmist speaks,
Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.
then that means you have chosen wisely. And if a father and son band scream a popular Stalaghh hit by the central park pond from which Holden Caulfield’s wise ducks once safely migrated, lie your hoodie on the dry hot grass for Mikael and stream him the Rodney Dangerfield bits he enjoys even though it’s not easy on your international data.
Eight: Atop the Empire State Building, make a sweeping gesture to convey to Mikael_Bulgakoff all that God hath wrought.
Nine: If Mikael sees a brochure for the 9/11 memorial site and asks to go, suggest more light-hearted leisure activities, e.g. ‘Ball pit at McDonalds,’ but if you find Mikael’s adamance upon addressing those who fell twenty years prior to his birth oddly affecting, take him to the deep-set granite voids surrounded by four-hundred Swamp White Oak trees at 180 Greenwich Street.
Ten: If Mikael throws his souvenir-sized New York Mets baseball bat in the air, one bat toss dinging a stricken Texan and nearby careening thirty feet into a Tower’s footprint, remind Mikael with an age-appropriate jerk of his shoulders that he stands in a sacred place. Tell Mikael, “Son, we’ve been joking of our absences since first we came in from the cold and found ourselves without. All of us had to joke at first, to keep from crying. Then a cavalier register co-opted our good intentions. That register competes with the genuine grief of this cowboy-hatted Dallas Stars fan whose hands are folded in prayer here. What we need to do Mikael is guard against the cavalier with all our empathy. If, Mikael, if…Mikael…pay attention now…if you’ll pause from loudly chewing your watermelon Hubba Bubba for a moment son, you’ll notice how these man-made waterfalls fall eternal as sure as we’re living, reminding us how the process of having been is the same as the world in its becoming.” If Mikael_Bulgakoff responds, “Who was Chaplain Michael F. Judge,” and you’d no sooner reduce the life of Chaplain Michael F. Judge to “a victim” than you would Catherine’s, then suggest Mikael Google the Chaplain later. If Mikael asks why there are so many firefighters’ names on the memorial, slowly speak four words you’d heard a man with more stake in this awful game say in a documentary, words you’re not entitled to speak other than to explain the depths of man’s servitude to a child, “They ran towards it.” And if Mikael asks, “Why?” then indicate the solemn Texan and the other congregants at Reflecting Absence and respond, “They foresaw all these people’s pain and were compelled to lessen it, by giving up their own lives, causing their own brothers and step-sons and Chihuahua dogs the same pain, in order to lessen the net amount of pain.” And if Mikael asks, “Who wanted them to be in pain?” do not illustrate the ideological idiocies of Mohamed Atta and Fred Phelps and the Reverend Jerry Falwell; simply admit to Mikael that yes man can be a rotten old ragamuffin sometimes; and then distract him by buying both a Tough-Tex 3 x 5 foot U.S. flag from Anin Flagmakers and also a Remember 9/11 toy race car for ages 4 and up, the only age-appropriate (if not entirely situationally-appropriate) gifts at the otherwise tactful gift stand. If you eat poorly at the nearby 9/11-themed Irish Pub, e.g. ‘fried,’ and weariness results, resist the urge to return to the Airbnb for a nap; instead continue consciousness so that you can never lose the loved object, never sacrifice him to the inferior gods on the Mount Moriah of digital physics, to all the unanticipated Attas and epidemics of post-civilization, to the hard-luck wolves of the night. Stay awake and sober and lucid so that you can assure him that this is not all some kind of dream.