"Overdrawn at the Empathy Bank: A Journalist Looks Back at Sept 11"

By Eric Marks

LAST YEAR, I spent the first week of September standing in the open air at a workbench with a 270 degree view of a saltwater bay, shaping scrap steel and hardwood into a paring knife for a friend. I spent the second week of September filling newspaper pages with some of the most heartrending stories and horrific images our youthful millennium has produced. Like a number of my colleagues in the media, I also spent a few hours in hospital that week, my nervous system stressed to the breaking point by the photos and copy I'd been handling.

I mention this because, for the past month or so, people have been asking me what I'm going to do for Sept. 11. They're really asking, what am I as a newspaper editor going to do for Sept. 11? What I tell them, though, is what I'll be doing in my free time: grinding pocketknives out of sawblade steel. Hammering silver into a bracelet. Hanging with my girlfriend and her children. Helping my best friend move.

It's not that I'm indifferent to the outrageous acts committed on Sept. 11. Quite the opposite: the memory of it stirs such a slough of anger and sadness in me, I don't want to call it up again. I'm still overdrawn at the empathy bank from last year.

Relaying a bit of wisdom gleaned from his father, William Least Heat Moon once wrote, "a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosities, they make and remake him." To my ear, it rings true: Like it or not, we become what we do, and what we choose to dwell on leaves its unmistakable mark on us. What newspaper editors do, by and large, is trade in misery they have no hope of alleviating. Since Sept. 11, it's a commerce I'm less and less comfortable pursuing.

ALDEN NOWLAN wasn't all that comfortable with it, either. Nowlan, a writer of great compassion and ability who spent nearly a decade in the newsroom where I work, wrote about it in "the night editor's poem." It's a stream-of-reportage account of an editor trying to make space in the morning edition for three tragedies - a suicide, the abduction and murder of a child, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

there's a call from the hotel
our reporter sounding disappointed
because, sure enough, it was suicide
and that means only three inches
of type on the back page, and
by the time Mac got to the Pythian Castle
they'd gone home but maybe we have a file cut
of the grand chancellor
we can use on provincial; there's a hell of a good
shot of the mother
of the lost child taken when they told her
they'd found the body, one that will stand up
in three columns with everything but her face
cropped out, something good enough
to send out on the wire and,

Bulletin,
Martin Luther King
is dead

With the dexterity of a skilled technician, Nowlan's night editor shoehorns the stories in, giving more and more space to the breaking news of King's assassination because it's the story that will sell the most papers. The dénouement is his realization of how much humanity he has had to sacrifice to do his job well:

and it's not until later,
hours later,
eating ham and eggs
at an all-night diner,
shrugging my shoulders
to work some of the ache
out of them,
that I pick up the paper
again and understand
that Martin Luther King
is dead, and that I care.

Sept. 11 had that sobering effect on me. Like thousands of others in the news industry, I responded to the terrorist attacks as a professional, determined to get to the news. But somewhere along the line, the news got to us: the overwhelming detail, the fear, the anguish and the anger, the unforgettable images of unimaginable suffering.

-Bulletin, a jet has collided with the World Trade Center in New York City.

-Bulletin, a second jet has struck the World Trade Center, vapourizing hundreds in a firestorm.

-Bulletin, a third hijacked jet has crashed into the Pentagon.

-Bulletin, a fourth hijacked jet has crashed or been shot down in Pennsylvania.

-Bulletin, Trade Center tenants trapped by fire are leaping to their deaths from the crippled towers, some singly, some hand-in-hand. Photographs to follow.

-Bulletin, both towers of the World Trade Center have collapsed, killing thousands.

Dan Rather went off the air Sept. 11 telling viewers to shut off their televisions and buy newspapers. Newspaper editors cut pages of local copy and expanded their editions to run as many photographs of the rescue efforts as possible. Reporters called anyone they'd ever known in New York for the inside story. When some nut started mailing letters dusted with anthrax to news organizations, it just accelerated the erosion of the crumbling line between journalists and the news: The story of Sept. 11 had become our lives, and vice versa.

A MAN becomes his attentions. Maybe that's why, in the months since Sept. 11, I've divided my attentions, focusing more on what I can build with my own two hands and in my own life than on world events.

I've gotten off the international news pages, with their daily reports of suicide bombings, murder, torture and retribution, and I've stopped working overtime. I still don't get to see the people who matter most to me as often as I'd like, but I'm making more time to spend with them. And I'm making time for creative pursuits: bladesmithing, silversmithing and poetry.

What I produce at my workbench this September won't have much impact on the world around me; it certainly won't reach a fraction of the people my newspaper pages do. But I get more satisfaction from turning junk into tools and beach stones into jewellery than I do turning out newspapers destined to become garbage within the day. And I'd rather try to strengthen my own humanity than publish another day's worth of stories lamenting our collective inhumanity. It's a much more demanding task, but the payoff is richer.

--Eric Marks is a full-time editor and part-time writer whose poems have been published in the U.S., Canada and the UK. He lives a stone's throw from the Gulf of Maine.

A complete version of "the night editor's poem" by Alden Nowlan can be found on the Web at www.well.com/~brekke/nighteditor.html, The Well. If you want to know more about Nowlan, look for the collections Playing the Jesus Game, edited by Robert Bly, and What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread, edited by Thomas Smith, or the biography If I Could Turn and Meet Myself, by Patrick Toner.