| Wednesday, March 13, 2002 |
18:16 - Bring On the God Rays
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You know, there's an awful lot of really cool stuff that happens during the day. Stuff that I never get to see because I'm at work. I get up, shower, drive in to work in the bland self-absorbed 10:00 hour, when the day is so busy revving itself up that it doesn't have any time to attention to spare toward making the weather or the light or the colors interesting. Then, by the time I'm ready to go home, it's either after dark (in the winter)-- a featureless mass of headlights and vague shapes; or it's winding down into a summer evening, the stillness setting in. Summer evenings are awesome in their own right, but that's only a quarter of the "day" periods that I ever get to experience during the week.
I seldom see something like today, for instance. On the way back from picking up my car from the dealer's, where Kris kindly dropped me off, the clouds were bunching into those fire-edged, cottony formations-- the ones that look simultaneously menacing and exuberant. We don't get thunderheads around here, not like in the Midwest; instead, when we do get interesting clouds, what we get are these miniature versions of them: unruly mobs of clouds, clustering together, breaking off to join new unions, waving their white-hot edges and shouting anti-Sun slogans. My route back to work took me west, and the sun was right in front of me as I proceeded-- but it was masked by these crowds of clouds and kept out of my eyes. Instead of having to squint, I drove home through a valley where the air had suddenly seemed to turn to gold. The glints off the cars around me seemed to wash together; the freeway was bright, polished, carefully crafted. No smog stood in the way. And in the distance, the mountains-- normally friendly masses hemming my line of sight, today they were ponderous hulks, about twice as tall as usual; the clouds were perching on the crest of the Santa Cruz Hills, their tops stretching into the blue, and their bottoms melting into a vapory haze which obscured the real line of the hilltops. Good photographers know that the judicious use of cropping can make a mountain look twice as tall or a valley twice as deep; in this case, the clouds did the cropping for me, and I felt like I was in Switzerland or Mordor or something.
And, naturally, where the sun was obscured by a riotous cloud, the cloud couldn't hold back the beams of light that shot down through any convenient gaps through that misty vapor. They're what Hiker calls God Rays, those things that shoot out of clouds (along with angelic choirs) to wreathe Moses or Simba with Hero-of-the-Movie-ness. In this case, they weren't shining on anything in particular, but they certainly did put me in mind of those light towers in Manhattan.
Crop out the tops of the WTC towers, a photographer might say, and you can make a photo of them look like they extend on up forever. And they would, if only they weren't earthly physical structures. Well, now they're not, and they do.
Marcus Aanerud, way back when (on February 7th, to be exact), noted that the paranormal activity sightings around Ground Zero are going to be the stuff of many a network-TV special in years and decades to come. Hiker's observations would seem to bear that out. After all, these lights that we've just created are the ghosts of the buildings. It's like a cropped photo or a blurry matte painting-- all vertical lines, no sense of finality. There's nothing substantial to them, but they make visible what we all know is there.
Eventually they'll be turned off, and something else will be built on the site. I still have a silly guilty sort of desire to see the towers rebuilt exactly as they were-- they were ugly and gauche, yes, but they were so perfect for what they tried to represent. All vertical lines, no features to break them up. They were as close to "infinitely tall" as anything can be that isn't made of light-- your eyes would follow them upward until you simply choose to stop looking, and it looked no different at whatever floor you stopped on from wherever you started. It just kept going and going. At some point you chose to crop the photo your mind took, and what registered in the deep, dark recesses of the mind was an image not unlike the Tribute in Light: all vertical lines, going up forever.
We have a corporate marketing graphic that shows a city skyline with one impossibly tall building in the middle-- it's (I believe) one of the WTC towers, Photoshopped to extend about six times as high as any of the other buildings in the picture. The top is ringed with our circular logo. It's a silly sort of picture, meaninful only in marketing-ese, only when part of a PowerPoint slideshow full of bleary bullet points. But it's an eerily haunting image now, because it evokes that same weird feeling: It's an ugly, featureless building, yes. But it achieves the reach of Babel. A world of cultural exchange, spiraling upward until the ground is lost to view, and continuing on until the clouds catch on it and erase its upper limit. Whether it's a cloud or a corporate logo, it puts the upper reaches of the edifice into the realm of the impossible-- and yet it was there. It was a monument to so much that the modern world meant. It was the embodiment of success. I can only hope that whatever goes in there in its stead can capture so much meaning and symbolism.
It even stretched higher than airplanes flew.
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