Remarks by President Nannerl O. Keohane
September 11, 2002, 8:00 a.m.
Last September 11, there were many words, as people across the country and around the world tried to find language for what was happening, and why, and how they felt about it. But in New York, words quickly failed those who actually witnessed the events, or who lost family members and friends in those terrible moments.
Instead of words, people turned to images, to prayer, to music, to flowers. In New York, thousands of posters that appeared expressing a wild hope that missing persons would yet be found slowly hardened into memorials, even with no change in their appearance. The rituals with which people surrounded them, and the shrines and sculptures and wordless tributes that sprang up and continued to spring up, were fraught were meaning.
At that point, no one called it art. They needed a way to give voice to grief, despair, anger, reassurance, and community. The outpouring of exhibits and artifacts and poems, the candles and snapshots and letters, carried on a dialogue that threatened to overwhelm itself. This morning we are fortunate to bear witness, however grimly, to some of the fruits of that dialogue, that emotion which for those of us who lived through that day will probably never be recollected in tranquillity. And in this context, thoughtfully collected by Martha Cooper, it is, indeed, art, as well as memorial and tribute
For the entire past year, people have continued to mark September 11 in their own way, and they will continue to do so. But this exhibition captures an indelible moment of time--the sudden sense of the world-turned-upside-down, and the way people tried desperately to make sense of it or to reorient ourselves even before we could stop staggering. Despite some too-clever-by-half post-modernist claims, it seems not only insensitive but absurd to describe the attack on the towers as art; but these specific personal outpourings of grief and sorrow and love and tribute are indeed a manifestation of the human artistic impulse in the deepest sense.
I have said in today's Chronicle that I hope 9/11, this year, will be a day of light, not another day of darkness. If we can find ways to reach deep into our collective consciousness and understand human grief as manifested under extremity, that will be a moment of light. If a glimpse of these documented memorials can relieve the pressure of history for a single instant, the unbearable burden of fate, that will be a moment of light.
The events of September 11 engendered wide discussion on our campus, with a broad range of views expressed from this country and abroad. Scholars of all ages at Duke wanted to probe further into the facts and emotions and ambitions and hatreds behind these events; many questions were asked, many answers given. But the ultimate questions can only be postulated, refined, hurled against a blank screen or canvas or pages of our art.
Today we remember the Duke alumni who died in the attacks, and the tens of thousands of others who were affected by those events. Today we salve wounds, seek closure, vent, attempt to understand-- and today we stand together. Though many events will transpire throughout the day all across the university, there are two principal places for remembrance and reflection, one on each of our main campuses.
On West Campus, the Chapel bells will toll to mark each of the moments on that unfathomable morning; at 11:00 the carillon will toll once for each of the Duke alumni lost in the attacks, and then in a simple ceremony six magnolias will be planted in a memorial grove at the West-Edens Link.
On East Campus, the place of remembrance is this exhibit. It will daze, inspire, haunt, hurt, urge, commemorate. It will evoke both pain and joy. It will shout as surely as any tree to the viewer, the scholar, the passerby: remember this.
