It was a balmy September morning as I waited for the subway to take me into Midtown Manhattan. I was living in the working class, semi-gentrified neighborhood of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn at the time. Like most mornings, I had bought The New York Times and stood waiting on the platform when I overhead someone say that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers. They had no other details, I heard them say, but went on to compare it to a similar incident in 1945 when a military aircraft crashed into 78th and 80th floors of the Empire State Building due to heavy fog and pilot error, miscalculating the plane’s altitude and position.

I was headed to work early that day. The F train pulled into the station; I got on, sat down, and arrived at the 57th Street stop about twenty minutes later. I quickly exited the station where I saw an embankment of televisions in a window next to the Steinway Piano showroom. A second plane had, just moments earlier, careened into Tower Two. The upper floors of the North and South Trade Towers were engulfed in flames and smoke. Within an hour both towers would completely collapse.

When I got to the office my colleagues were huddled around a laptop, listening to the news. The first and second plane were reported as hijackings, but unconfirmed as deliberate terrorist attacks. A third plane, some twenty minutes later, crashed into the Pentagon causing partial damage and killing all sixty-four passengers onboard as well as another one hundred and twenty-five working inside the building. A fourth plane intended for the Capitol or White House was reportedly commandeered by a passenger-led revolt, having somehow learned of what had already happened in New York. The jetliner crashed in a field outside the rural town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was the only plane which didn’t reach its intended target. All thirty-three passengers and seven crew members were killed.

We were told to leave and go home, to be with our families. All five boroughs of New York were under a citywide lockdown. Subway and bus service was halted. Sirens blared from every direction. Low flying military jets were dispatched, patrolling the skies. Within minutes of the first plane strike the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey shut down all the bridges and tunnels leading to or from the city. Evacuation routes were immediately established. The only way to leave Manhattan, to get off the island, was on foot. Thousands of people working in Midtown were marshaled east and routed south down Second Avenue, corralled like war zone refugees, walking in the middle of the street and along barriers flanking the sidewalks. The entire police force was on high alert. Police cars, fire trucks, and first responders were the only vehicles permitted to go anywhere, and most of them headed to Ground Zero.

Evacuating on foot, you had to cross on the Manhattan Bridge, which I did, after walking for nearly two hours. I began walking up Flatbush Avenue toward Second Place and to my third floor apartment. When I finally got home, I went straight to my bedroom. I was exhausted, still in a state of disbelief about what had occurred, what I had witnessed.

I had left my bedroom windows fully open that day when I left for work, on what began as another mundane Tuesday morning. The wood floors of my entire apartment were now covered in a fine powder that had drifted across the East River. From my bedroom windows, looking west, I could see where the twin towers once stood. There were only massive plumes of smoke. Every surface inside my apartment was covered with a thin dusting of ash.

I don’t much remember what I did after I returned home. I remember trying to call people, concerned about their whereabouts. Phone service was sketchy. All I recall of that day was a disquieting uncertainty, a feeling of pervasive unease, of how something so catastrophic had occurred for which I had no comparison – absolutely none whatsoever – or for the sheer magnitude of this tragic event. It felt like the prelude to the end of the world, or the epilogue for what the world would be going forward. What possibly could come next?

Until now I have never written about the events of this day.

In the aftermath of 9/11, The New Yorker ran a poem, ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’, by the poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021). The magazine printed it as full page and in a larger font size than usual for the poetry that normally appeared in the magazine. It seems appropriate to present it here in its entirety:

Zagajewski’s poem has stayed with me for many years with its contemplative urgency and call for resilience. I recently came across an interview in Boston University Today where the poet was asked about the origin of the poem:

Something about the prescience of Zagajewski’s poem – that I return to it so often, or that it triggers my memories of 9/11 – reminds me of the revelatory and prescient nature of the works by Julia Wachtel.

As an American artist of my generation – that is, those of us born in the mid or late 1950s – there is something about the astute associative powers of Wachtel’s work that is more relevant than ever in our current sociopolitical climate. In fact, for nearly the past forty years Wachtel’s central concerns or imperatives have addressed many of our most pressing issues that continue to this present day: class, inequity, injustice, degradation, and power. That old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words has never been truer; but it’s in how Wachtel puzzles out her images, her savvy juxtapositions, as if positing questions for the viewers to reach their own conclusions, to fill in the blanks.

Are the cartoon figures that so often appear in Wachtel’s paintings stand-in narrators or commentators? Sometimes they are hapless sad sacks, sometimes like carnival sideshow barkers. Cartoon commentary runs deep throughout the history of both print and televised media. Benjamin Franklin’s Join or Die is long considered the first political cartoon published in The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754, urging colonial freedom and unity as a reaction against the threat of French expansionism and Native Americans. As a kid, I loved watching cartoons – Roadrunner, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, The Flintstones, and The Jetsons were favorites. I was a fan of newspaper comic strips, too, like Peanuts whose forlorn and woebegone character Charlie Brown was perhaps my first example of what childhood depression might look like. Even then these cartoons portrayed their greeting card versions of acceptable American values, family dynamics, or heart-wrenching emotional responses. Poor, stuttering Porky!

Was this, perhaps, the beginnings of my own mutilated world? Certainly nothing as horrific as living or growing up in Zagajewski’s war torn Poland under a brutal totalitarian regime. Nowhere as tragic as the barrage of televised images of starving children in Gaza or the ongoing death and destruction in Ukraine.

Poet Edna St. Vincent once wrote, ‘Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.’ Or there’s Albert Einstein’s remark, ‘The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.’ Still, we scroll ahead, to the next image, then the next, and any or all sense of innocence seems to have vanished.

Wachtel forages our image-saturated world. The internet, of course, has long ago replaced our antiquated sources for images – in books and literature or through conventional photographic media. The world has long ago gone digital, everything is pixelated. Some years ago, on the island of Mykonos, I recall standing before the island’s famous hillside of windmills, and the first thought that came to mind was Miguel de Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote. I thought of Quixote’s madness, his attack on his imaginary adversaries, and how I would never again be able to look at windmills the same way – ever.

Such indelible literary symbolism or imagery has been subsumed by the relentless and insatiable need for information. Along with the now fully opened doorways to disinformation. Scholarship feels quaint, reserved for the kingdoms of academics and intellectuals, or contestants on Jeopardy. Wachtel has tapped into these seismic cultural shifts. The lenses through which we engage our imaginations feels terribly devalued. What we remember is mostly on the surface.

In her recent paintings, which still adeptly combine hand painting with silk screen, she has developed a larger worldview in which to chronicle current contemporary culture. They are poignant works with a compelling sense of trepidation or unease about humanity’s decay and its inability to get beyond some epic tragicomedy, our daily dose of the absurd.

I’m reminded of something from Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame: ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh anymore.’

Another poem that has remained with me over the years is W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and, in particular, its first and closing stanzas:

Auden, as in Zagajewski’s poem, seems to be suggesting that everyday events in our otherwise ordinary, mundane daily lives can feel at once fleeting and yet magical, even in the face of crisis or misfortune. It can happen anywhere, at any time, in the blink of an eye. As naive or as foolish as this might sound, I still believe in the enduring, transformative powers of art, of great paintings, poems, and music – and that artists have the power to change the way we see or experience the world. Wachtel is among them. Prescience and paradox are always part of the palette.

When I return to those seemingly distant memories of that balmy September morning in 2001, I also can’t help but think of another event, of what some journalists have called ‘the greatest artistic crime of the 20th century’. Last year, 2024, marked the 50th anniversary of Philippe Petit’s extraordinary high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. His clandestine, death-defying spectacle was like no other in the city’s history. The performance, more than 400 meters above the ground, lasted a mere 45 minutes before police arrived and Petit was arrested. All formal charges of trespassing and other criminal violations were dropped by the New York District Attorney, with the caveat that the artist perform a free aerial show for children in Central Park. To this day, while I sadly remember the victims of 9/11, all those who tragically died, and those who leapt to their deaths from the burning towers during the attack, I sometimes think about a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman who danced in the sky.