“Barbarism may lie only a small distance beneath the skin of civilization”
– Fergus Bordewich
“We cannot forget history.”
-Abraham Lincoln
At the Gettysburg battlefields.
In early November (2023), Janet and I made a first-time visit to Gettysburg. Visiting the battlefields was one of the most compelling and solemn explorations of our lives.
The dead have all gone away. There is no sign of them. The farm fields, where men labored to kill each other, look so innocent, so plain in their green and brown rest. The human nature is gone. I remember having a similar feeling when our daughter, Carrie, and I visited Dealey Plaza in Dallas in 1988. The traffic was just going by, and the Texas Schoolbook Depository was just another building. Mundanity covered the scene.
Standing in the Wheatfield with Janet, it is smaller than I expected. At 4:30PM on July 2nd 1863, at fierce battle began here that left 4,100 men killed or maimed. We stand in a moment of silence. I pick a stalk of ryegrass to take home for placement in a vase in our farmhouse kitchen. We can do little things, one at a time.
Over to the west is Emmitsburg Road, a main town thoroughfare, which runs north/south through the center of the flat, sprawling battlefields including the Peach Orchard, the site of Pickett’s Charge. The cars do not speed, there are no houses, no traffic signs, no pointers, no “keep off grass”. There are no answers, just calm, invisible, bloody history – all American’s history – on either side of this simple road.
We took the opportunity to visit the National Military Cemetery and the area where, some weeks after the battles, Lincoln gave his dedicatory address. By then the corpses of the soldiers and horses had been removed and the feces and blood and urine covered over by lime to dull the odors. I never tire of The Gettysburg Address. Carl Sandburg called it, “the great American poem”.
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9/11/01
It is a bright, clear morning. I leave the house and head west in the direction for Hudson Street to vote in the Democratic Primary. I will then proceed to my acting conservatory, GATE (Gregory Abels Training Ensemble) on West 27th Street. As I near Seventh Avenue at Sheridan Square, I am surprised to see several people standing still in the middle of the avenue, all of them looking south. They must be extras in place for a filming.
When I reach Seventh Avenue, I see what they are all staring at. Some of the high floors of the North Tower of the Wall Trade Center over twenty-five blocks to the south are ablaze. I think, “The people must have had time to evacuate before the fire became as bad as what I’m seeing.” And, “How can it ever be possible to extinguish that fire?” Someone makes mention that a private plane crashed into the tower. That makes sense. I take out my 35mm Nikon and begin to take photos. A guy who also has a 35mm SLR says to me, “Payday!” He thinks I am a professional photographer like himself. A Black woman is clinging to the post of the downtown subway entrance. Her eyes are fixed on the blaze. She is weeping.
My sister works as a legal secretary for a law firm in the World Trade Center. It will be several hours before I am able to discover that she was late for work this morning. She sees the towers on fire as she walks across the Brooklyn Bridge. Her firm is decimated. In 1993 Monica had to descend 56 flights of stairs in the dark, in high heels, when a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the WTC.
After voting, I catch a cab up to my school. The bulletin on the radio states that another plane has crashed into the South Tower of the WTC and a third highjacked passenger plane has crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. It is now clear that the U.S. has been attacked by terrorists. It is reported later that an Arab man had attend a flying school in the South and wanted to learn only how to land a plane but not take off. He paid for his lessons in cash. Nothing was suspected.
When I arrive at the school, my secretary is worried about her kids. She is afraid, as are many others, that the terrorism might not have ended. I, of course, let her go to fetch them. I gather my students in the main studio. They are from various places in the U.S. and Europe, and I advise them to call their parents. That hadn’t occurred to them. None of the parents tell them to get out of New York City. Some of the student actors go to the roof of the 11-story building and witness the collapse of the South Tower. Classes are cancelled for the day. I remember in April 1961, my acting teacher, Stella Adler, sending us home at the height of the Bay of Pigs crisis.
I leave my conservatory in the elevator with some of my students. I say to them, “I’m not surprised this happened”. Walking home down Sixth Avenue, people huddle around van radios. A large, continuing billow of smoke from lower Manhattan is blowing east to Brooklyn. The avenue has been blocked to traffic by troopers. How strange to see state troopers in New York City. I recall what Walt Whitman wrote on the day following the assassination of Lincoln, after Whitman had taken the ferry from Brooklyn and was walking on Broadway, “…. business public & private all suspended, & the shops closed—strange mixture of horror, furry, tenderness, & and a stirring wonder brewing.”
When I arrive home, there are calls from my concerned colleagues in Europe, especially The Czech Republic, who have heard the news. The Czechs have waved long-distance charges on all calls to the U.S. They will long remember our help in World War II. In his reaction, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair says, “This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today.”
In the evening, we members of Still Mind Zendo hold our regular meditation sitting. We wear masks to protect against the residue smoke in the air. For days, ambulance sirens will be heard on Sixth Avenue, the main route uptown from the World Trade Center Site. Pictures of missing loved ones will be posted in our subway stations. A line of blood donors can be seen constantly outside St. Vincent’s Hospital. New subway routes will be created. Very strict air travel and postal safety procedures will be initiated.
For days, I attempt to imagine the reality of the horror of the 3,000 who perished and the searing suffering of their loved ones. I cannot.
Evil is personal. It lives in the human being. Fear, personal insecurity, ignorance, greed, hatred in the extreme can make evil malignant and can cause it to spread as a disease to ignorant populations. This is never new.
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Gregory Abels is a Zen Master who taught at Still Mind Zendo in Manhattan. His books of poetry are: Where to Begin (Lightwood Press), Glimpses & Pointings and Never Something Else (Seven Meadows Press). He enjoyed a 50+ year career as an actor, director and Master Teacher of Acting. Gregory holds a B.S. in Theatre and Religion from SUNY. He lives with his wife in Greenwich Village and on a sheep farm in the Hudson Valley.
Gregory Abels is a frequent contributor to Lightwood. His poems and articles can be read here. Scroll to our Search button and insert his name.
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