This Offbeat Life
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Paris, 9/11/01

As If in Response

by Ethan Gilsdorf

I am painting a picture of sunflowers in my mind's eye. (Originally, I typed "paining a picture" which I suppose I am doing as well.) Actually, it is Vincent Van Gogh and Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, they are painting, a rare three-way collaboration. They are good-naturedly fighting over the paintbrush, drinking little French coffees, and smoking cigarettes. It takes them a week to render these sunflowers: a small oil on canvas, unframed. When they are done, they are satisfied and exhausted and drunk, and the sunflowers have shrunken to a third of their original sizes, perhaps more, and turned down their heads (except for one, propped up against the bright white wall, still aiming for the sun, despite its roots being severed, its green blood not pumping ). They call the painting "Shame," and they do not sign their names.

The day of the hijackings and crashes, I heard the news on the streets of Paris. A man, stuck in a traffic jam behind a delivery truck, downtown, on Rue de Seine, somehow sensing I was American (I was walking with a friend and perhaps he overheard our English) tried to describe what was simultaneously being channeled through his car radio. Attacks, airplanes, explosions, towers. I had not grasped the severity of the events, not even after seeing a brief TV replay-upon-replay in an Irish pub shortly thereafter. About two dozen people stood silently, eyes glazed as they connected with this distant event through our shared crystal ball: this TV lashed to the back of the bar.

I watched for a few moments, exited the bar, had lunch. We ate, talking quietly, wondering who yet "knew" and who did not. Then I left my friend off at another Irish pub (there are, at last count, 62 such drinking establishments in Paris, proving Irish good-times can happily marry globalization) and headed to my next destination, Planet Hollywood.

My first mistake was to go there at all. "Didn't someone bomb a Planet Hollywood in South Africa a few years ago?" Isabelle, my wife, later admonished. My second mistake was to think I'd receive any sane sense of news there. Entering its memorabilia bubble, I descended into the basement. About this place: if you enjoy dining to the racket of car chases and explosions, under the watchful gaze of a prosthetic severed dog head (from the film Pet Sematary II) and Charlie Sheen's Platoon pants, perhaps Planet Hollywood's loud, multi-media minded ambiance crammed with props, costumes and celebrity shots is for you. Passing the life-sized Schwarzenegger and Stallone mock-ups, I took in the big-screen TVs showering clips of our favorite action films from the States, while pop music thundered above the heads of British tourists twirling their pasta. Where was CNN?

I headed for the screening room (part two of my "program," to review the film The Fast and the Furious for Time Out's Paris magazine: I would not be deterred). I was about 15 minutes early, so I waited in the foyer. Suddenly, some clever Planet Hollywood employee pipes in the audio from an American newscast (either TV or radio, hard to tell). But the screens throughout the restaurant remain, recycling their action vignettes: Mark Hamill blasting at Jabba the Hutt; Stallone rappelling down a cliff side; Bruce Willis battling corporate terrorists; Schwarzenegger chasing or being chased by an android. (While spell-checking Arnold's name from the safety of home, I stumble upon a website listing his "body count," the total number of people he's "killed" in his films, which stands at 446, and that's just through Kindergarten Cop; the site needs to updated.) While the commentators speculate on the causes of the blast, saying, "How much remains of the World Trade Center, at this time we just don't know," the smoke-stained figure of Kurt Russell rushes through a fiery Backdraft, rescued child clinging to his torso, then (in another film) a car overturns and explodes, followed by the steady rain of machine gun fire, other destructions and excesses, various scenes of incendiaries and redemption.

I pace back and forth frantically, head raised toward the speakers in the ceiling, as if by isolating the source of the audio with my eyes I could wash myself clean of these these multi-million dollar fantasies that pass as entertainment on any other day, but reveal themselves for what they are today: indulgent, sickening images that challenge no one's world view, that bring none of us closer to understanding or preventing such cowardly acts of change. But of course my eyes can't "see" the sound waves any better than I can hear the silent images, and soon a manager probably decides this is too disturbing to the Planet Hollywood experience and the audio snips off as bizarrely as it began.

I settle into my plush seat in the screening room, my feet on leopard-print carpet, to see another explosion of testosterone, this The Fast and the Furious, an over sincere (therefore campy) look at the Los Angeles "street racing" scene, here depicted as rival gangs ("teams") doing battle on make-shift racetracks in the city streets, ogling the latest engine part while their sneering, slutily-dressed girlfriends look on (though some do drive and one does wield a mean socket wrench).

Nothing has prepared me for the cauldron of emotion I - perhaps we all - have been facing these past days. Part of me is amazed by my own reaction - why do I care more this time, for this disaster, and in the wake of that caring, what waves of guilt lap along my shores? Of course, these events hit closer to home, which is why my schizophrenic, expatriate patriotism has been shattered and chaotically reassembled. I am suddenly a representative of my country, and the object of people's sympathies.

I return to the Internet (as I seem to be doing about twice an hour now, a compulsion, after hearing the French radio news updates, trying to translate, trapped as I am in a non-English speaking country, without cable TV). Ah, the world responds. Bouquets of flowers. Fresh images; more fuel for what I need to say. The fading terror and helplessness returns. Yippee. (What cannot be wiped clean: that indelible image of the plane silently striking the glass of the World Trade Center - small and gentle, as if carried by a child's hand during playtime - then the result, the unleashing of its ruinous wake.)

What chills the most deeply, as Isabelle tells me later and others have remarked, in horror, are the scenes of young children in the streets of certain cities cheering the deaths. Their parents know, they have the capability to distinguish right from wrong, so my fury against them feels entirely justified. But the children, whose lives are being shaped (as are children's lives everywhere) by the events of these past days, are at that crucial divide where they begin to understand the world, its joys and biases and regrets. With the children, I cannot describe my emotional response. Men are firing guns into the air, women are whooping as if on the warpath, and these dumb, sweet children are waving flags, cheering and smiling for the audience back home, not quite knowing what they are doing.

Maybe it is out of fashion, clichéd or obsolete to express this, but it must be said: our response to these events must be love. Now is the time to reach out, spread tolerance and respect. Would this be the time to send a donation to an orphanage in some distant, desperate land? Change someone's heart? Those faded bumper stickers on your Volvo station wagon rotting in the lawn, why not dust them off?

Here is a beginning of words. I have just crawled out of bed. The FedEx man has rung, delivering my PR package from the publishing giants of NYC. A writer is coming to Paris to read and celebrate the French publication of her novel in French, and I will be interviewing her for a magazine's website. So the world continues, the planes fly, a little shaken up, the deliveries scurry, the information seeps across these imaginary frontiers. I can imagine the electronic messages crisscrossing our heavens like tracer bullets, this message now traveling from here, a land of light (it is morning), backward to a land of night (your "there," where you still sleep) or further ahead, as if into the future, where it has been day for a very long time now.

Thank you for listening. Hope for everything, expect nothing. Peace.

Ethan