For almost 10 years in the 80’s I lived on the borders where SoHo, Tribeca and Chinatown met, or more likely arm wrestled with each other, just a few minutes walk from the World Trade Towers. When the NY Times published unclassified documents from the defunct Soviet archives it showed that the intersection of Broadway and Canal Street was Ground Zero for a Russian nuclear strike on New York City as the blast would take out both downtown Wall Street and Midtown Manhattan financial districts. Canal and Broadway sat at the bottom of the bowl between the two economic giants and so was the Goldilocks neighborhood for atomic Armageddon. In addition to the financial districts a nuclear bomb would have taken out - a different kind of Chinese take out- the Chinatown sidewalk merchants selling cheap knock-offs of luxury brands that they were already making in their sewing shops anyway, eradicating yet another existentialist threat to the Soviet way of life.

After 5PM and on the weekends the neighborhood around the World Trade Center emptied out and became a playground for artists and barflies who were often one and the same. As buildings nobody loved the Twin Towers but you couldn’t miss them either. Architects know that a building in some ways is a living breathing entity with a life and personality of its own. Like Behemoth and Leviathan they dominated the skyline and by their sheer mass created enough gravity to pull thousands of people to them every day for work. The World Trade Towers like the Towers of Babel - where the the merchants of the world congregated in one place to speak the common language of money - the coin of the realm.

I was in mid-town Manhattan when the planes struck the World Trade Towers. I didn’t see it happen - I didn’t want to - but there was a plume of smoke like a dark rainbow arching over the perfect blue sky that cerulean morning that you couldn’t not see. It was the collision of two opposing and irreconcilable forces - hyper capitalism and religious fanaticism - each trying to impose the will of their ways onto the world.

I chose to work in metaphor and mythology as they seemed the most appropriate renderings of the clash of equally ossified and necrotic decaying stories whose half-lives were on the brink of expiration, both drawing water from the drying aquifers of their distorted belief systems. In that moment *their* names were *fused forever in some miasma of paranoid nostalgia. September 11 was a shotgun wedding fueled by jet fuel and ideology of two similarly literal notions - the insatiable desires of prophets and profits - soldered together by the combustion of fire on an altar of steel made only possible through high heat, heat with enough energy to melt steel and break hearts and turn iron into amber. It was both wedding altar and funeral pyre - martyrs and money fused together in an impossible alloy like some sad centaur nature never intended to exist or a tortured teratoma of mangled hair and teeth. September 11 saw the children of Abraham tithing with blood for favors from an invisible Father whose Divine messages can only be read in the augury of bones.

The base of the Yamasaki designed Twin Towers reminded me of Gothic cathedrals, holy tenements covered in vines, so I conjured up the image of a rose window, which were an effort to make whole a fragmented world. And how do you render grief - what color is it? How old is it? How does it smell? How long does it linger and how long can we live without it? Where does it go or does it go anywhere? Can we keep on living without it? Does it give us purpose? Does grief give our lives meaning?

In Yoga the path to harmony lays in the word “yoga” which means to “yoke’ - that is to yoke one's desires and tame the wild horses of the ego with the tendrils of the heart so that that energy may be used for harmony and not harm. I thought of the horses in the drawing series as unyoked forces, the manifestations of unbridled and untamed energies causing chaos and destruction. I turned flames into flowers like Baudelaire’s “Fleur du Mal.” And falling…falling, falling, falling…the better Angels of our Nature falling like broken birds and broken promises…gravity will always have the final say.