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現在地 HOME > 掲示板
★阿修羅♪
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(回答先: ｢グラウンド・ゼロ」の真の意味 投稿者 さすれば 日時 2002 年 9 月 13 日 12:11:55)
http://www.groundzeromemorial.net/
What I'm proposing is not the idea of a memorial, which seems a given of any plan to rebuild on the site of the former World Trade Centers. Rather, I mean to articulate a particular logic or intention that might inform the memorial that will be built.
This logic arises from what I take as the double meaning of the term 'ground zero'. While currently the term relates to the lexicon of devastation, prior to the development of explosive warfare a more likely interpretation would have been 'sacred center'. Ground zero describes a place of symbolic origin.
Though throughout much of the ancient world people regarded certain places as centers of the world [read more on sacred centers], the most easily recognizable example of this is likely Jerusalem. From the Midrash Tanhuma:
“Israel is at the center of the world, and Jerusalem is the center of Israel. The Temple is the center of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies is the center of the Temple. The Ark is the center of the Holy of Holies, and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, which spot is the foundation of the world.”
The Foundation Stone mentioned is that which the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third holiest site, is built to honor. In Muslim tradition, the Foundation Stone is regarded as the place from which Mohammed ascended to heaven.
Of course sacred centers are not actually geographic centers. They are those places where the divine and mundane are thought to most closely touch, or most deeply interpenetrate. We might call them points of historic origin; places where something profound began.
Regardless of what really happened on them, world centers acquire a sort of gravity which portends importance. Relative to this symbolic gravity, it doesn’t matter if the world actually began at the Foundation Stone, or whether Mohammed actually ascended from it. Regardless of the truth, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have been charged with continuing historical importance. The place is a magnet, one of history's strange attractors. So long as the place is regarded as sacred, a center of the world, significant events will occur to validate this feeling.
I mean to point out the tendency of sacred centers (or should we call them symbolic centers?) to encourage self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s in light of this quality that I believe what is built on ‘ground zero’ should be deeply considered. The events of September 11th seem so significant as to have led me to interpret ‘ground zero’ as a figure of symbolic emergence. Something so deep happened there that people instinctively, unconsciously and transpersonally recognized the place as a symbolic center.
That ‘ground zero’ also perfectly describes the physical circumstances of the place completes what i mean by the phrase ‘symbolic emergence’. It is the fact of the double meaning, one identifying a location and the other the unconscious significance of it, that identifies the spot as a sacred center. This is a more modern way of saying that on this spot the divine world and the human world were seen to meet.
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A Dream of Eden
Weeks have passed since this site first went up. In a recent dream I found myself in some sort of church meeting. An official asked me, 'Is ground zero a blast site?' It occurred to me then how to resolve the connotations of origin and explosion, in the story of Eden. Eden is the Ground Zero shared by the three monotheisms. In Eden, Eve and Adam ate the fruit, and their explosion of knowing set off history. The knowledge that had been outside of them became part of them, as the events of September 11th have become part of us. Like the biblical couple we are married to what we learned that day; changed so that we can no longer distinguish ourselves from it. We have known the difference, with shattering clarity, between Good and Evil.
This is the experience of History, and if we would awaken from the nightmare it seems to me that we must not allow ourselves to rest in some shallow pool of revenge, or hypocritical 'war on terror'.
It is no longer enough to be concerned primarily with the health of our own economic and military superiority. Not merely in an abstract moral sense, but tangibly, economically, ecologically, socially, human rights and dignity have become essential. Elsewise there can be no world worth inhabiting.
Because of this, we would do best to memorialize not our loss, nor our pride, but the immovable mountain of our humility before the Greater Reality by which we exist. In God We Trust: this is Islam. And if we should triumph over the fanaticism of that religion we must yield to its truth, even if that truth is overlooked and misunderstood within it. There is no God but God and All the World is his prophet.
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