After dinner while K watched a taped Patriots game, I made a slideshow. It’s in the middle of the post. A few stills follow.

But first the original collages of the running girl. In them, her urgent need to escape emerged from the iterations. The double/triple exposures that form the basis of the slideshow, seemingly of their own accord, continue that feeling. The way she comes in and out of view heightens the sense of imminent harm and also, perhaps, points to the way trauma damages one’s ability to stay in the body.

I couldn’t sleep last night. Eventually got up and read. I came across an article about Emmett Till which you can read here.

Short version: a journalist hired to write about Till’s murder for Life Magazine (this was after the two men were acquitted), couldn’t get releases from two OTHER murderers, so he just WROTE THEM OUT OF THE STORY.

The journalist could be tried (could have been? Sorry, it was 3:00 in the morning) for accessory to murder after the fact.

The current article makes plain that not only was it journalistic malpractice and very possibly illegal, the omission generated more terror in the Black community than had they known there’d been four perpetrators.

If two men were capable of THAT, what’s next?

Maybe the sense of haunting had something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. K and I watched a Frontline episode — America After 9/11. Oh my god the lying politicians. The lazy press. It underscored a pithy tweet I read which said that we would have been better off as a country if we had literally done nothing.

The personal impact of the tragedy is rendered beautifully in this memoir piece: Hero by Liz Ackert.

Four of the hijackers spent their last night on earth in a discount hotel less than a mile down the road.

The place has long since been torn down.

P. S. Just went back and found a post about dreams the week before 9/11. And a Tarot card pulled (The Tower). Interesting to look back. A little haunting.