Haven't responded before, but have been reading along when time permitted.

My sense is that the shape of the bombing and its aftermath was reflected in the response of the human community, mirrored here on Mudcat through these threads ---- A short burst of time when there was physical shock, a momentary pause when it seemed that everything could be made sane or insane, and then a vast wave of the total and complete destruction of all meaning, speechless horror, and then a vast explosion of words trying to capture explanations that kept exploding beyond the capacity of language to hold them in, people rushing in with explanations, ways of dousing the collapse of the way things were, and then everywhere fragments, shards, rubbles of meaning, and then at last, finally, in the heart of the babble, exhausted silence, the pages and pages, littering the streets of the city, blizzards of yesterday's memos and memories. Rumours, whispers, and then the rise of mourning like smoke in the rain. And out of the wreckage of the old, some of the old worlds and old words revive, out of need: some of them reminted -- "hero", for instance, with new beauty -- and some of them brought back, but so useless as to be misleading -- "war", for instance, when what is needed is a new word, beyond what has been meant by war. So it is with all great experiences: they blast the old words away, and we grope back over the dust and debris once more into halting speech. I believe that we should not betray the events by the redeployment of the old words which inevitably redeploy the old forces: but we are a long way from the new words that would tell us what we are to do, now. But that is what artists are for, ultimately: people here and others.

yours, Peter T.