![Hallowed Ground .jpg](/sites/default/files/content/artist-registry/images/Hallowed%20Ground%20.jpg)
Hallowed Ground / Howard Berelson, Published 2015, Jane's Boy Press.
Hallowed Ground
The New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2014, in a section labeled “look.”
“…The Size of the National September Memorial & Museum is 110,000 square feet .Two and a half million visitors are expected in its first year. Two billion people worldwide have seen video or photographs of the attack.”
I turned the page to the image of twisted ladders and scaffolding that once carried living beings to safety or men into the inferno to search for living beings to be brought to safety, that was compressed onto the carriage of the truck - the fire apparatus scarred and twisted downward , and if one could if one could ever separate this mass of compression from those towers that fell that day
if one could ever, this twisted metal beautiful in its own right, in its expression of violent power.
I think of Vesuvius exploding its might to preserve those caught in everyday life in positions of copulation, or eating or sleeping or reclining, frozen in time for us to uncover what little will be left to uncover.
Someone had said the fire truck in front of the towers was scarred and burnt on one side, the other side remained untouched, and I think of the people that turned from the falling towers running to the left of that fire truck perished, while those running in the opposite direction lived.
I am reminded that when the cattle cars emptied their living cargo, there was at the head of these long lines of living beings huddled and slowly moving, one, with dogs at his side, who had instructed the living mass to either left or right.
It is all the same - this apocalypse.
The air became its own shroud with particles of vaporized flesh or bone inhaled it covered everything with no remorse and became fixed to memory it became the silence of collective grief too personal for some , not personal enough for others.
A child had said on that day: “I knew people were falling from the sky because they were folding in the air.” Another had said: “The sky is falling.”