September 11: The Burden of the Ephemeral
2009; Western States Folklore Society; Volume: 68; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2325-811X
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies
ResumoABSTRACT This article concentrates on the performativity of the ephemeral in a range of vernacular responses to the events of September 11 in New York City by widening the frame for folkloristic interpretations of tradition and temporality. When random and sudden death interrupts the course of logic and prediction, memorial making acts to combine ephemerality with tradition in a gesture towards recovery through remembrance. KEYWORDS: 9/11, ephemeral, spontaneous memorials, temporal, tradition Vigil As the companion is dead, so we must all together die somewhat. Shed for him who lost his life, our tears are worth nothing. Love for him, within this grief, is a faint sigh lost in a vast forest. Faith in him, the lost companion - what but that is left? To die ourselves somewhat through him we see today quite dead. Cecilia Meireles translated from the Portuguese by James Merrill (2001:784) Around 8:30 a.m. EST on September 11, 2001, I threw open my kitchen window to catch the morning air in Brooklyn, looked southwest towards Lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center, as I usually did, and remarked on the sparkling clear blue beauty of the day. Forty minutes later I returned to the window, gazed out again, and saw the Towers in smoke-billowing flame. Hit by hijacked commercial airliners, the Towers collapsed within the next two hours and left nearly 3000 people dead. So much gone, so quickly, in the blink of my eyes. It was the beginning of a day that is not yet over.1 Certainly the temporally traumatizing events of September 1 1 and their aftermath of dust, fragments, traces, and ghosts engaged all of us in a heightened sense of the ephemeral. For me, as a folklorist and as a New Yorker, such engagement has continued to preoccupy me both intellectually and emotionally for the past eight years.2 Perhaps this is the condition of my firsthand experience of September 11. I can't say. Outside the provocations of September 11, I would admit, as a point of rhetoric, the oddity of a folklorist's interest in the ephemeral. Folklore's concern is with what stays, not with what goes; with what remains, not disappears; with what repeats, not with the singular instance. We lean to the traditional, not the ephemeral. Years ago I would have thought the ephemeral a mere taunt. This binary is no doubt overstated. Perhaps without naming them as such, many of our colleagues have investigated ephemeralities, and others, especially those working in material culture, museum studies, and print lore address the ephemeral nature of certain things. We are most familiar with the term ephemera as it describes expendable paper works such as broadsides, holy cards, pamphlets, and photocopies. Folklorists including Don Yoder, Alan Dundes, and Cathy Preston offer insights into ephemera. Others such as Suzanne Seriff and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett approach the ephemeral in their work on folk art and recycling and tourist art and collections, respectively.3 Seriff 's unpublished work on theoretical understandings of the Mexican Days of the Dead and the traditions of festival-related toy makers around the world is specifically about the power of the ephemeral to effect temporal transgressions creating access between the living and the dead; the ancestors and the children; the sacred and the profane. Deborah Kapchan's study of women's henna practices in Morocco also exemplifies previous folklore scholarship that limns ephemerality. Whereas Moroccan women are permanently tattooed for purposes of adornment or prophylaxis, impermanent henna paintings on the skin's surface are used to mark status change and transition, most importantly from unmarried to married. But Kapchan does more here than just note the permanence/ephemeral binary between tattoo and henna. She works to unlock the meaning of ephemeral processes, referring to henna as a plastic art, notable for its malleability, its ability to perform change: . …
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