Grief Done Badly - The Fifth Anniversary of 9/11

Yesterday being the fifth anniversary of the dreadful attack on the Twin Towers, I turned on my television and caught a little of the memorial service from the site of ‘Ground Zero.’ One is forced to say that this secular requiem was handled rather badly.

Against what sounded like an extended version of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony a pair of bereaved women recited the names of victims – I gather all 2,749 names were read out. In theory this should have been deeply moving; in fact, dreadful as this might sound, it touched on bathos.

This is mainly down to the somewhat crass choice of music. Substitute, say, John Williams’s theme from Schindler’s List for Górecki’s symphony and you will see what I mean. In simple terms of scale, the terrible events of 9/11 pale in comparison with the Holocaust. Both admittedly were examples of what Hannah Arendt's famously described as “the banality of evil”, but the Nazi wickedness reached much deeper, killed millions rather than thousands and lasted far longer than this instant of Islamic-Fascist onanistic puerility.

Not only is the issue one of scale; it is also one of dissonance. Heart rending music like Górecki’s Third Symphony or, say, Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth cannot form a ‘backdrop’ to something less harmonious than itself. A list of names – especially a list of culturally and ethnically diverse ones – is of and itself inharmonious and cannot possibly work as a foreground.

We are, of course, not talking simply about the aesthetics of the presentation, but rather of the way in which humans can relate their personal loss to a major tragedy. For the individual, it matters not whether their loved one was the sole victim of a lunatic or part of a huge event. Perhaps it is a matter of focus – making the personal stand out from the whole. Briefly hearing the name of one’s loved one in a torrent of other names does not, I suggest, provide this focal point. Being aware of the number of other families involved does little to assuage the individual pain of losing a child, mother or father.

For an example of ‘grief done well’, if such an expression is permissible, one could visit the Hollandse Schouwburg in Amsterdam. Here you have the devastating background music; here you have the list of names (those of some of the 60,000 Nazi victims are inscribed in dark marble on the wall); but the focus is on one thing: a single flickering candle.