SHADOW CENTURY

There's been an unreality about everything this century since that fateful morning on the 11th September, 2001. Of course, the machine domination of the internet as the world's most relied-upon information system has added to the splitting of reality into online/offline realms, but reflecting on the impact of the destruction of those two towers that infamous September morning seems to have been the defining moment where a type of global cognitive dissonance was birthed, as if all the assumptions about the previous century were brought down with the steel girders, and in the smoke and debris, it's been a near impossibility to recover what felt normal ever since.

Perhaps being a Xennial has something to do with the pronounced duality of spending the first half of my life in the 20th century and the second in the 21st century. 9/11 was the broken bridge that merged the two and so, somewhat traumatised, my own consciousness has been shaped by that day. Further to that is the memory of standing on top of the South Tower two years before on a September morning whose sky was equally blue. Everything I thought I knew in that moment as a young adult and everything I realised I didn't know two years later was defined by the World Trade Towers being destroyed. Two contrasting trips to New York (pre) and post 9/11 also illuminated for me how quickly things can change inalterably for the worse and how, once propelled into the rapid torrent of the future, there is no way to return to the past, the inverse of what Fitzgerald once wrote: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

One memory that seems more like a dream now that I think of it was watching footage of the events of that day on the BBC late at night here in the UK. The montage, if I remember correctly, was accompanied by the sound of Keith Jarrett and, momentarily, amidst the confusion, I found some safety in my disturbed equilibrium.

The power of art to heal should never be underestimated in these times.