Nothing can be created from nothing.
– Lucretius, DeRerum Natura

 In Canada, we call it Remembrance Day. So when I traveled to New York City last week, and watched the celebrations of Veteran’s Day, I spent my time remembering.

On the morning of the November 11th – Veteran’s Day, Remembrance Day – I revisited Ground Zero, a place where I had stood more two and a half years before, pondering its meaning and thinking about the number zero.

Look:

Zero is the point on the Cartesian system of coordinates (0,0) by which all other coordinates are defined; that is, you can always find and define your place by knowing the location of Zero. Before Rene Descartes developed this famed contribution to the canon of Mathematics, many cultures actively eschewed Zero; it was, in their estimation, an angry harbinger of the Void, a merry trickster that turned logical mathematical systems uncomfortably on their heads, the proverbial “wrench-in-the-works” that defied otherwise logical calculation. The Egyptians and Greeks were so terrified of Zero that they simply ignored it. The western mathematical tradition had to wait for the brilliant minds of India and the Middle East – minds more cosmically attuned, more anxious, perhaps, to find God in numbers – to come to terms with Zero and kneel before its central place in our existence. Thus, when Rene Descartes placed Zero at the center of western mathematics, he forever changed the way we think: Zero, then, was the measure of all things and of no things.

Like most young people, I had learned about zero in school. And like many young people, I toyed with its unique mathematical properties, its brainteasers, its party tricks. But also, like many young people, over time, I did not give Zero much more thought than that which I gave my right ring finger. But then, suddenly, on the 12th of March, 2002, sometime after 9:30 p.m., the power of Zero – its immense philosophical and social potency – was made perfectly clear to me. On that night, a night that was cloudless and star filled, I stood at the edge of the former World Trade Center site, now a brightly lit void called Ground Zero.

I arrived that night, at the edge of Ground Zero, quite unexpectedly. I had been walking with my wife and a friend I had known for more than thirty years along the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown. My old friend was a sculptor, a later-day bohemian living among the artists of Brooklyn. From the late sixties to the early eighties we lived just across the street from each other, in a town just south of Boston. We were, generally speaking, products of late Cold War America, of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The times and place we inhabited made my friend an artist and me an expatriate teacher. For my generation, the Cold War was Ground Zero; that is, we had, in mathematical terms, found our respective points in the Cold War coordinate system. Everything – every idea, every political position, every subject taught in school, every international and national news item – was a coordinate on the Cold War Cartesian scale. The Cold War Ground Zero gave all other coordinates meaning and purpose. But the meaning of the Cold War Ground Zero was ultimately a fictional construct because, like Zero, Ground Zero itself meant nothing. Its meaning emerged in the words and actions of its storytellers: its politicians, its thinkers, and its writers.

On that night in March, somewhere in Chinatown, as we walked among the shops and people, we noticed two towers of blue light shooting out above the buildings to our right. The lights were the new memorial to September 11th, ghostly memory traces of the Twin Towers. Truly, I had no desire to see Ground Zero. Privately, I had been saturated by the event. I loathed the chest pounding patriotism, the aggressive retaliation, the reflexive action, the frightening reminder that chaos lurked at every corner. And yet, with no real thought, and without saying much, we began to walk towards the silence and serenity of the blue lights. And then, somehow, there we were, standing on the edge of Ground Zero. The intense halogen lighting made day out of night, and the site itself seemed perplexingly neutral, not speaking patriotic chants or wailing tearful laments or proclaiming a brave new world of absolute good and evil. It was, simply enough, a gaping wound: horrible, frightening, grotesque. But it did not have meaning; in fact, it was the absolute absence of meaning. It was Zero.

For some time, I watched the clean up effort and considered the blue phantom memory traces to the right, shooting up infinitely into the night sky. I began to wonder if the ramifications of the event were already larger than the event itself – that is, the new Cartesian scale was emerging. All politicians, all school curriculum, all social programs, all future planning, would now be measured by their coordinate position from Ground Zero; potential terrorists and their suspected fellow travelers would now supplant closet communists as the bogey man. Strangely, I thought of Beowulf and of Heorot, the gleaming bright Mead Hall in the story of Beowulf, a metaphor for civility and humanity, under ferocious attack by Grendel, the messenger of darkness and chaos and death. Here, in downtown Manhattan, like in Beowulf, the pure goodness of light was pushing back the murky evil of darkness. Was that the story? Was that the meaning? But all the halogen lights revealed was the void; that is, they revealed Zero.

I looked at the acres of rubble and makeshift roads and the adjacent buildings with scorched and scarred faces, but still I saw no meaning. As a teacher, I had spent much time discussing and debating with my students the myriad issues that have welled up as a consequence of the events of September 11th. The students all believed they understood the meaning of the event. We had been, ironically enough, reading Beowulf. They heard the call of good and evil, every night on CNN. We were just so certain when we watched the images on television that we understood its meaning. But there, at Ground Zero, it was different. The further from the center one moved, the more it seemed God-like, emphatic judgments were made.

Above all, the teacher teaches knowledge and wisdom; that is, the teacher teaches what lies at the center: truth. It is paradoxical to teach students knowledge and wisdom when the center of our collective Cartesian scale is Zero, when Zero means nothing and everything at the same moment, or as a great poet once put it when “the center does not hold.”

And so I stood again at Ground Zero remembering.

In Iraq, so far from Ground Zero, on that same Veteran’s Day, that same Remembrance Day Lance Cpl. Justin D. Reppuhn, 20; 2nd Lt. James P. Blecksmith, 24; Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Burns, 20; Staff Sgt. Theodore S. Holder II, 27; Staff Sgt. Sean P. Huey, 28; Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger, 20; Cpl. Peter J. Giannopoulos, 22; and Cpl. Theodore A. Bowling, 25 were killed in war.

Steven Laffoley is a freelance writer and school principal living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He can be contacted at laffoley@hgs.ns.ca

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