Silent Images of the Horror and Triumph

It was night and everyone was somewhere else, which was fine with me. After a weekend filled with guests, even good ones, it’s a relief to be in the house alone, staring at something on television that amounts to nothing.

But this time, there was a difference.

I was alone, all right, and the TV set was on, but it was 9 o’clock on the nose, and the channel had already been set to HBO. I was about to see America in pain all over again.

I’d known for weeks that the documentary, “In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01,” was going to be aired that weekend but then forgot about it until Sunday night. I had even monitored some of the objections to its being shown at all, hearing critics argue that we didn’t need a replay of the scenes that were already seared into our national memory.

I too had pondered whether I wanted to see those beautiful, sky-scraping twin towers again, standing like scepters of power against a powdery blue sky, then collapsing in fire and smoke and human lives.

I have a photograph of them taken by my wife a few weeks before the attack that changed the world. We’d flown to Manhattan with our two 15-year-old granddaughters as a kind of coming-of-age treat, when the World Trade Center was still a dominating feature of the vista that was once New York.

And I returned a week after the attack to gaze in sorrow at those two vacant places on the skyline, that hole in the clouds where the towers had stood such a short time before.

Was it necessary to relive the pain on television? Did I want to once more hear the cries and thunder of that sad September song? Yes. I had to.

I wanted to watch that documentary for the same reasons that compelled me to visit Buchenwald on a trip to Germany, the killing fields on a visit to Korea and the memorial at Pearl Harbor on a trip to Oahu.

They represent instances in history that reveal with shocking clarity how humanity has yet to make it completely out of the jungle. Sensitivities that define compassion and caring are not yet fully developed in an age dominated by technology.

It was time to view calamity without tears.

Faces and memories of laughter remain for the lifetime of those who’ve suffered a loss, like the loss of a child, but there is only so much grieving to be done before it dissolves into self-pity. It becomes not the child we mourn for, but ourselves.

So I sat alone Sunday night, staring at images too awful to watch but too mesmerizing to avoid. A thousand hours of footage had been condensed into 60 minutes of horror, history and acts of courage so elevating that their spiritual triumph almost compensated for the darkness of the evil that required them.

I saw those two Boeing 767s, tubes of jet fuel and humanity, fly like arrows into the sides of the towers. I saw the blossoming fireballs and the billowing darkness. I saw humans fall from the highest reaches of the burning skyscrapers, and we prayed that God would give them wings and bear them to the sun.

I saw the faces of the terrified, the bewildered, the determined, the sad and the brave, reacting, running, moving in, comforting, swearing, not believing. And the face of Rudy Giuliani, an oddly puckish face, with a sweep of expressions that reflected everyone’s emotions, and a voice that said in so many words that they’ve taken our buildings but not our soul.

I watched alone in a house as still as midnight. Sometimes I muted the sound to view in silence images that seemed somehow more real than they had eight months ago.

It was a Dali landscape then, but now it’s documented history, burned like a cattle brand into the body politic.

Silence in the Santa Monica Mountains has an embracing quality, allowing only small, ambient sounds to intrude: a dog bark, a car engine, the refrigerator motor purring, an animal scurrying across the roof. Scratches of sound. Puffs of sound.

It was a familiar moment.

In 1963, I sat in silence and watched the funeral of John F. Kennedy. Five years later, I sat up most of the night and watched muted replays of the events that surrounded the murder of Bobby Kennedy. Figures moved across the screen in a ballet choreographed by the age, swallowing sound into the stillness.

I don’t need words once they’ve been said. Repetition denies them the impact they deserve. I had to see what was emotionally unwatchable, I had to be connected to the people that comprised the images. And the only way I could do that was to silence the sound and absorb the humanity.

When it was over, I turned off the set completely and pondered. Was it worth watching?

Yes. It was. Not to remember what they did to us, but to remind myself of what we do to each other. We’ll be judged by that someday. And the judgment may be harsh.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.mar tinez@latimes.com.