Augur and Recoil is about the anxiety and dread I had leading up to September 11th. I had no idea what was going to happen that day, and by all experience these were simply beautiful autumn days on the east coast of the United States. Most things were going very well for me. Yet the anxiety in my chest was like a buzz saw, constantly cutting and leaving me to stare up at perfect cerulean blue sky, as if expecting something to fall from above. When September 11th did arrive, I was destroyed and heartbroken, like so many of my countrymen. The loss was there to view on television over and over again. I think what I felt in the days leading up to 9/11 must have been the psychic recoil of the screams of the dying and so many dying all at once. If time is a straw and a linear feat, such a event would reverberate backwards and forwards through time, such was the magnitude of its impact and emanation. But in addition to this was the cumulative shock and grief, felt all at once and then repeated for days on end and the length of lives remaining. The anxiety that’s felt before you open the door to a room where something terrible has happened. The foreboding before you get in that car to go to that place. Before you get the call to travel there. The greater radius of beforehand at the edge of the future. The future days flowing backwards like a torrent against the natural stream. It creates an eddy that becomes a whirlpool, where the drowning can hear shadows above the water, the shadows on the shoreline are deafened by the ripples in the sea.
