Words for the WTC Memorial Competition:

We are the sum of our memories. Everything we know, everything we perceive, every movement we make is shaped by them. “The truth is,” Friedrich Nietzche wrote, “that, in the process by which the human being, in thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining…inside that surrounding misty cloud a bright gleaming beam of light arises, only then, through the power of using past for living and making history out of what has happened, does a person first become a person.”

The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl made much the same point in Man’s Search for Meaning, his memoir of experiences as a concentration camp inmate. Frankl recalled trying to lift the spirits of his fellow camp inmates on an especially awful day in Dachau: “I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. [I quoted] a poet…who had written, Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben (What you have experience, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”
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“to see and yet not be seen”

The idea of a memory, is to envision something within the mind’s eye, to experience its smell, touch, taste, and yet physically it is not there. A gravesite in much the same way, is a place to see, to be with someone who in reality is no longer there. Even remaining foundations barely peeking through the grass, even mundane things as these cause the eye to allude to a time, or rather to a memory of a building that once stood tall above the ground.

How does one create a space, a place for memory to flourish? How do you contain a memory from escaping?

It is an assumption that for this reason burial sites were created. Although it may sound morbid, the idea of the “coffin” is merely an attempt to contain the smells, touches, tastes, experiences of a person inside a box. A problem with that, however, is that coffins, tombstones, gravesites, all these are so stagnant, so still, so static. The beauty of a memory, is that you are taken away, to another place, another time, another climate even—mentally and physically, one can close their eyes and not even realize that they are standing in the middle of New York City’s 42nd & Broadway about to get hit by a yellow cab.

So how does one create a “coffin” which still breathes? Which still contains life? Not surrounded with dark, but light coming from within. Not filled with only death, but life also living inside. Not part of this world, but buried somehow between…stuck at just that precise moment where memories occur.