Special Report - The Eyes

New York Diary: The Eyes
September 23, 2001
by John Bloom

NEW YORK (UPI) -- On a brilliant weekend, when New Yorkers would normally be at the Bronx Zoo or Central Park, they come instead to Lower Manhattan, surging on foot through the streets where no traffic is allowed, toting their cameras and picnic lunches, trying to get close to Ground Zero.

What are they looking for?

On lower Broadway the merchants have moved in, with makeshift souvenir tables set up across the street from National Guard barricades and "bicycle taxis" working the area for those too tuckered out to walk the 20 or so blocks below Canal Street. They buy the "United We Stand" T-shirts and the American flags and the snapshots of the Twin Towers, and many of them wear "Rebuild!" placards somewhere on their clothing.

But mainly they come to see something. They want to get close. They want to lay claim to it with their own eyes.

They stand for hours at intersections where you can see virtually nothing. They watch Jeeps and trucks going to and fro. They mill around in front of the fire station on Duane Street, where flower arrangements and memorials spill out halfway over the sidewalk. They congregate at St. Paul's Chapel, where you can't see much except some heavy machinery and a little rubble two blocks beyond the church's dust-shrouded graveyard.

And for those who push on farther, through the maze of old narrow streets in the financial district, they reach nirvana. There's a barricade at Broadway and Liberty Streets where, as soon as you turn the corner, you see the full horror of the site. Just beyond One Liberty Plaza, the jagged walls of two sides of Two World Trade still stand, but they're so twisted that they resemble a defaced ziggurat, some mangled artifact from a decimated Babylon. People stand here for a long long time. The walls still stand 13 or 14 stories high, and they lean in against themselves, but for some reason they don't fall. You've probably seen this angle of the rubble on television, but there's something about it that's both majestic and horrible. The crowds don't leave disappointed.

I've noted before this overwhelming desire for people to see the crash site for themselves, this mistrust of what they can see on their televisions, and the obviously profound effect it has once they do see it. Half the people in the crowd have to wipe away tears, even after they've been there for several minutes. I've also noticed the disparity in emotional response between the hundreds of eyewitnesses to the attack, and those who saw it replayed later. We're a nation accustomed to watching war and disaster on videotape, and people don't like that. They want to know what the difference is.

So to find out exactly what the difference is, I spoke to one of the smartest optical scholars I know, Dr. O. Reynolds Young, who was responsible for many years for making sure commercial airline pilots retained 20/20 vision and was a leader in children's behavioral disorders that were related to faulty eyesight.

"The lens of the eye is only part of the experience," he says. "You're always going to get variations among what people see at an event like this. No two people saw the same thing that day. The places where the variations are going to take place are in the cognitive areas of the brain designated as 17, 18 and 19. An individual named Broca mapped the brain, and that's where the majority of the visual inputs take place. But that's also the point where all the other senses come into play. Hearing, taste, smell, touch, the general tone of the body called kinesthesia-- and all of that comes in and colors the individual's impression of what he thought he saw. And something as dramatic as the World Trade disaster can even produce something called artificial myopia. You can be frightened to the point where you may be a normal perceiving individual, 20/20 vision on the chart, and you drop to 20/40 vision by the sheer terror that the total system is experiencing."

In other words, we may not have seen it, and we may not ever be able to see it. Perhaps that's what everyone struggles with. But there's more, says Young.

"Then the pre-frontal lobe is where you monitor yourself-- you analyze all those ongoing inputs and what you've stored in the gray matter. So by the time the individual is voicing it from recall, he has all the data but he has different capacities than the next person--he may have impaired hearing or impaired kinesthesia--and he's overwhelmed with information. The eye takes in a lot more than the camera, and then it enhances it with the other data that's taken in at the same time. For example, the camera didn't see the hazing effect, the crystalline refractions that the eyewitnesses saw in a kaleidoscopic sort of way. The retina is continuous, but the film camera sees only between glimpses. It can't register the whole experience. And then, in this case, you have the additional overwhelming sensory inputs of hearing and smell and taste. People could actually taste the event--whether that was jet fuel or pieces of the building or smoke--and that constant stream of data would create a very complicated experience."

A very complicated experience indeed. An experience so complicated that people are already arguing over how it should be perceived in the future. During the last four days the city has begun to debate: "To rebuild or not to rebuild." How to rebuild. What it should look like. What it should not look like. One architect has already completed a plan that would have two smaller buildings and a continuous laser-light memorial outlining the original location of the now iconic towers. Pete Hamill, the respected New York columnist, says the site should be a memorial park, and that furthermore the World Trade Center should never have been built in the first place and was always out of scale with the city--even a city of skyscrapers. "Who would rent there if they rebuilt it?" he says.

New Yorkers always had a love-hate relationship with the twin towers, though few would admit that now. They were built during the last big surge of "urban renewal"-type redevelopment, before the modern preference for neighborhood preservation, historic restoration, and smaller-scale living. Among other things, they blocked the view of the Statue of Liberty from all more conventional buildings north of Vesey Street. If a developer today wanted to take 16 square blocks, level all the historic buildings, and put up anything resembling the World Trade Center, he would never get past the neighborhood Community Board.

That's why whatever ends up on that plot of land, which is now sacred to so many people, must acknowledge the past and the future at the same time. It actually wouldn't be a bad idea just to leave the twisted-metal ziggurat exactly as it stands. It already looks like a sculpture, and I assure you: it says it all. The people have a hunger to know that what they see is real.

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