November 26, 2006

This morning New York Times columnist David Brooks has a moving piece about Robert Kennedy (the subject of Emilio Estevez's new film, Bobby) and how RFK dealt with his grief over the 1963 assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Often, RFK would refer to a passage from Aeschylus's Agamemnon that appeared in Edith Hamilton's book The Greek Way. Kennedy, Brooks observes, "carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, [and] reading sections aloud to audiences in what [RFK biographer Evan] Thomas calls 'a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.'"

The point of Brooks's essay is to underscore the fact that too few of us, and too few of our leaders, pay attention to history in times of peril so as to gain the strength that comes from perspective and experience. (My apologies for not providing a link since the Times Select Web feature seems to block a direct link to columnists' pieces unless readers are pre-registered.) "The story of Kennedy's grief," writes Brooks, "is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic.... And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble upon them by happenstance."

It so happens that this very passage from Aeschylus (see below) was the same one that RFK would read at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968, just two months before Kennedy himself would be assassinated. And it is that key passage--from Edith Hamilton's translation of Agamemnon--that on September 12, 2001, would inspire the most important curatorial effort, photographically speaking, to have been mounted in response to the 9/11 attacks: the exhibition and archive called "Here Is New York."

How do Brooks, Aeschylus, Robert Kennedy, 9/11, and photography connect? Please read this passage from Watching the World Change, pages 80-81):

"On Wednesday, [September 12], Michael Shulan, a journalist and writer, germinated the idea for a 9/11 photo show and fund-raising effort--right in the window of his writer's studio at 116 Prince Street in SoHo, a few blocks north of where the two towers had stood.

"[That morning] he happened to see a fragment of verse that someone had stuck to the wall of the building next door. The lines, by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, had been copied out in Magic Marker across a page torn from the September 10 New York Times classifieds. The passage, based on Edith Hamilton's translation of the tragic play Agamemnon, read: '[Even] in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'

"The lines embodied the essence of tragedy: through our despair we find our transcendent salvation. It was a message astutely resurrected during turmoil: the Lord would see to it that, given time, our sorrow would enlighten us. It was the same passage, in fact, that Senator Robert F. Kennedy would cite in April 1968 after civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. (Two months later, Kennedy himself would be gunned down, his assailant intent on bringing global attention to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East...)

"Shulan was inspired by the text, and by the directness and anonymity of the medium--one stranger, through graffiti from the ancient Greeks, had touched another. In response, he ferreted through some old files in search of a shard of his own that might serve [to inspire other strangers]. Shulan found an old picture of the twin towers that he'd once bought at a flea market. He placed it in the front window of the vacant storefront.

"That single photograph, in a street-level window, began to draw a crowd. People congregated, stared, then moved on. Spurred on by the encouragement of a friend, the photographer Gilles Peress, Shulan added more pictures. Other friends then brought him their own images of the towers and the day. Within two weeks the impromptu display was a living, evolving photo exhibition, shot by neighbors and out-of-towners, amateurs and professionals....

"[Shulan and his fellow curators, Peress, Alice Rose George, and Charles Traub] called their exhibition, "here is new york," in deferential lower-case type. The title was taken from an essay by E. B. White about the city's vulnerability after World War II..."

In time, thousands would flock to Shulan's storefront to offer up their own photographs, to pore over the pictures, to seek comfort and meaning in their grief. The exhibition, which would raise substantial donations for the Children's Defense Fund, would become an 800-page book and a database of some 8,000 photos that, to this day, remains the single most comprehensive and significant collection of still imagery related to the attacks and their aftermath.

And it was all inspired by a few lines of text from the ancient Greeks affixed to a wall by someone hoping to offer solace and wisdom.