Psalms and Lamentations: Fallen Towers and the Art of Tea

Makoto Fujimura

IF I'd come out of school five seconds earlier," said my ten-year-old son C.J. when I finally found him, "I would have been in trouble." He was covered in white dust, later called "dust of death," his hair speckled, his black backpack now gray. When the second Trade Tower collapsed, firemen pushed the children inside and shut the school doors. The fireball of jet fuel incinerated thousands in a second and exploded a chain reaction of vehicles. C.J. and his friends ran from one designated store to another, guided by teachers who told them to close their eyes. He almost ran into a tree, he said. It was a red maple that he had helped to plant in front of the school five years before. The next morning, when we returned to get essential items from our loft (now at Ground Zero), we walked by the tree, now covered in soot, each leaf sagging, coated in dust.

I had sat with C.J. on a summer night only a month before in front of his elementary school, P.S. 234, sharing a verse from Jeremiah 29. We looked at that red maple tree, the lights of the World Trade Center windows glowing above us in the evening haze. "Jeremiah told us to build houses and settle down, and plant trees in Babylon ," I said. "Do you think New York City is like Babylon or Jerusalem ?"

It was a lead-in question. The answer is yes, like both. The Israelites were exiled from their identity as God's people, having forsaken God, and so neither the desolate Jerusalem nor the exilic land of Babylon would hold any promise for them. The false prophets spoke words of encouragement, saying it would be a short exile, and God instructed Jeremiah to buy a field in Jerusalem , as a step of faith and as a seed of restoration. But God spoke through Jeremiah of a long battle in the foreign land of Babylon . The battle would be long, even generational, in New York City as well. "You helping to plant a tree, and being here with Daddy, living in New York City ," I said, " is being faithful in a foreign land. I suspect we have it better than those Israelites though."

My question to my son has become a lead-in question for me as well. New York City is like Babylon and Jerusalem at the same time, especially now. I survey the damage done to our "backyard." Three blocks away, the stadium lights set up to aid the recovery of bodies cast hallowing white light upon the rubble. Smoke rises like incense from the remains of the towers. Witnessing the devastation day by day, I have crossed the chasm of history, back to the fallen Jerusalem that Jeremiah witnessed. But New York is also the exilic land, and how do I remain faithful here, even among the rubble? Reading the New York Times, reading the Bible in the subway, I kept noticing a similar despair in the voices of the prophets of Babylon , then and now.

"Until Tuesday, I was part of a ridiculously lucky generation," wrote a fellow parent at P.S. 234, artist Laurie Fendrich:

For me, war was what I knew about from movies, reading, and my mother's loss, before my birth, of her brother in World War II. Now, like all Americans, I know something directly about war. I know it as a civilian, having been attacked here, in my own country, my own city, my own neighborhood. After Tuesday, I can no longer speak as a woman, or an artist, or a New Yorker. Speaking in those ways-"speaking personally"-will no longer do. I have to learn how to speak as a citizen.

It has been said that we worship what our tallest buildings represent. Church spires defined city skylines in previous centuries, but have been replaced by those punch-card towers, the pride of our progress. The Twin Towers were the twin visions of technology and commerce flowing right out of modernism. On September 11, out of a cloudless, azure sky, right over the schoolyard, the airplanes cast sinister shadows upon our modern presumption, our trust. The Trade Center used to shade us at hot summer Little League games in Murray Street field nearby. They gave us respite, security. They stood for-and embodied-an economic system that we have come to depend on.

Postmodern art, too, was sustained by capitalism's nurture of modern technology and economy. Postmodernism depended on modern ideals that until September 11 were rarely challenged: build a higher, more impressive building; build a city that will surpass others in economic status and technological vision. The arts require the same presumptuousness, the same innocent belief in our power. Jeff Koons sculptures, Andy Warhol silkscreens-postmodern art prospers by mocking, like a child, the very hands that feeds it, the hands of modern idols.

How crafty the terrorists who masterminded this catastrophe. Their "art," we must admit, was too powerful, too explosive, and thus all the more sensational. The terrorists accomplished in a single second what no art movement in a century could: their vengeance transcended and shattered the language of ironic distance. Takashi Murakami, darling of 2001 Chelsea and the contemporary art world with his animé-based installations (and his Nihonga-we attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts Japanese Style Painting Department together), says, "The 'rules' and 'conventions' I learned over the years...have experienced a seismic shift. I must choose now whether to create in the chaos of 'new rules' or not." For many artists I have spoken with, the fires of September 11 exposed the 'rules' of postmodernism as irrelevant and narcissistic. Fendrich even calls for a type of restraint on art making. "Art and images need to be postponed. (I certainly can't think of painting right now.) We need, I think, to achieve intellectual control of our feelings, and direct our actions according to what is right and just, instead of to what pleases us as 'personal expression' or intrigues us as theory."

But the real death-knell for the twin symbols of modernism was not the insipid relativism of the postmodern agendas of our age. It began long ago. The terrorists cleverly turned technology against its makers, injecting poison into the heart of the modern idols, a poison of an ancient flavor, familiar to Adam and Eve. In the garden, the Devil twisted what was given by God to be used for good by injecting our hearts with terror: doubt of God's love and goodness. Terror takes away innocence. Now, having swallowed this poison, we must remember that the flip side of fear is the desire to enslave and control-to be in charge of our destiny.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his lamentation "My Lost City" from the top of the Empire State Building in another dark autumn, 1931:

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood-everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits-from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

The crowning error of the city is in all of us. For the artist, as for Fitzgerald, cities represent both the height of our success and the depth of our failures. Both success and failure expose the error within, showing us that even the greatest city has limits. But the city of man is not limited because of her boundaries. No, the city of man is limited because her foundation is selfish ambition, the desire to control. We are all terrorists in that sense, attempting to twist God-given gifts to serve our greed and leaving Eden poisoned. Fitzgerald imagined falling towers long before the World Trade Centers were built.

Yet it would be a mistake to judge the city, to call it Babylon , to call what happened the judgment of God. Jesus told his disciples to repent when they saw the tower of Siloam collapse, rather than explain it away as God's judgment upon those who died. In our own lives, no matter where we live, we have ground zeros. Babylon and Jerusalem , the exilic and the destroyed, overlap in our cities. Through these ruined cities, the City of God will be built.

Repentance, or the Greek metanoia, means turning 180 degrees back to God. Developing a habit, a culture of repentance, will require us to walk straight toward the darkness, including our own imaginative power of vengeance. Our own acts of terrorism toward God drove Jesus to the cross. Jesus's slain body absorbed our anger and defiance, but more importantly, God's just anger toward us. God stands ready to turn our dark imaginations into a vision of the new Jerusalem. Post-September 11 New York is full of fallen idols. But it is not enough to turn from our idols. We must run toward the tower of Jesus .

After the disaster, we drove north. Miraculously, we had been able to get our car out of our garage before it was shut down because of a gas leak. Even at the north end of Manhattan near the George Washington Bridge , we could still smell the acrid smoke. We drove to Oneonta , New York , after dropping off a kind neighbor and her dog on our way, a complete stranger before September 11. She and her husband had welcomed our family of five into their home that night so that we wouldn't have to sleep in my TriBeCa studio. As I watched the smoke rise from another fallen building, Number Seven, the series of lithographs I had been working on at Corridor Press became a welcome goal. At three a.m. on Interstate 81, thousands of stars lit up the sky, echoed below by the flags.

TriBeCa had been a ghost town that morning. In my head, I still heard sirens shrieking in the bitter night, and my own inept, feeble prayers during my subway ride home as literal hell was breaking forth above us. When I came out on Seventh Avenue at Fourteenth Street , all I could see was the smoke of the fallen towers. I brushed against hundreds of evacuating businessmen and women as I ran toward home. I saw the blood-drained face of my wife who met me at the studio. All three children had been evacuated safely, she told me. Relief.

At Corridor Press, master printer Tim Sheesley and I had been working on a series of lithographs of a medieval pear tree, Quince, that I had sketched at The Cloisters. I had exhibited one as part of a triptych at Saint John the Divine's millennium Christmas celebration. On the morning of September 13, as I walked to the printing studio, noting the quiet of the turning leaves, for the first time I saw in my mind the pear tree images printed on thin Japanese paper. I had painted this as a test plate to get used to working on limestone again, and Tim thought the trial piece was successful enough to print [see back cover]. As I pondered this simple image, printed with silver ink, the work began to speak back to me. It was like a small seed bursting into a joyous mess in my mind. I could almost hear it growing.

I told my friends later that I heard the voice of Christ through the image. A voice of Shalom. I had not intended the piece to exist-I meant it for practice only. But sometimes the Lord speaks through our peripheral expressions, like Mary's nard, where expression is allowed to spill out. That voice, like water, spoke out against the voice of fear within, the one that said, What about the children, now? What about our loft? Do you think it would be left standing? Do we dare move back into New York City ? But as I pondered the print, the whisper of Shalom became more real even than the tree itself.

I wrote in an email to my friends:

Create we must, and respond to this dark hour. The world needs artists who dedicate themselves to communicate the images of Shalom. Jesus is the Shalom. Shalom is not just the absence of war, but wholeness, healing and joy of fullness of Humanity. We need to collaborate within our communities, to respond individually to give to the world our Shalom vision.

Hiroshi Senju, my studio-mate, called from Japan and left a message. He had been traveling, finalizing the plans for a historic commission at Daitoku-ji Temple , the birthplace of the Japanese art of tea. (His was among more than ten messages from Japan. The towers collapsed at ten p.m. Tokyo time, while many in Japan were watching the news. Many stayed up through the night, concerned about us.) "I realize that everything now has changed," said Hiroshi. "You now have a responsibility to minister and to heal. You have my support in this." In over fifteen years of friendship, it was the first time he had used the word minister to describe what I do.

Back in August, the two of us had decided to secure a smaller studio next door, partly to help Hiroshi complete the enormous commission of over eighty screens for the Daitoku-ji Temple , but when he returned, he told me that he wanted to take a break from that project. "I cannot paint in the same way for a while...after looking at Ground Zero," he said. We decided to make the studio a place where local artists could exhibit, dialogue, hopefully find healing. We called it TriBeCa Temporary, and dedicated it as an "oasis of collaboration by Ground Zero artists." I was able to secure, almost right away, the help of artists and writers such as James Elaine, curator and artist at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles , composer William Basinski, critic Tiffany Bell, and Australian-born TriBeCa painter Denise Green, the last student of Mark Rothko. The history of Daitoku-ji, and therefore the history of the Japanese art of tea, will still be woven into our efforts.

Sen-no-Rikyu, the sixteenth-century tea master who is most responsible for the development of the art of tea, lived and died at Daitoku-ji Temple in Kyoto . His teahouse still stands there. In China , tea was a form of celebration during banquets, but in Japan , Sen-no-Rikyu and others refined tea as a form of communication and the teahouse as a minimal conceptual space. In a war-torn period of cultural flux, Daitoku-ji became the center of activity, and Sen-no-Rikyu became a new culture's main voice.

His teahouse had a distinctive entry called nijiri-guchi, built so small that a guest would have to bow and take his sword off. It is no coincidence (but a historic fact ignored by most in Japan) that one of Rikyu's closest confidants, one of his wives, was one of the first Japanese converts to Christianity, the fruit of an influx of missionaries into Japan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He went with his wife to observe a mass in Kyoto , and there saw the Eucharist celebrated, with a cup-Christ's blood-being passed around. This experience affirmed his vision for tea. His tea would be an art form: a form of communication equalizing any two who took part, shogun or farmer, male or female. As a cup of green tea was passed, the teahouse would become a place of Shalom. Five of his seven closest disciples were Christians, later exiled by Shogun Hideyoshi, who at first gave power and prestige to Sen-no-Rikyu but later hardened his heart against him, realizing, quite correctly, that the egalitarian nature of the art of tea would be dangerous to his power. Shogun Hideyoshi later became one of the greatest enemies of Christianity in history, commanding the execution of thousands of believers, closing Japan for several centuries, and ordering Rikyu to commit Seppuku-the art of suicide-at the very teahouse of Shalom.

For my friend Hiroshi, a practitioner of tea and an artist who stands for today's Japanese aesthetic (he represented Japan at the Venice Biennale), bringing the ancient tradition into the present means finding innovation in today's context. He will exhibit his eighty screens at the Asia Society and the Japan Society before they are installed at Daitoku-ji Temple in an exhibit called The New Way of Tea .

TriBeCa Temporary will be a small conceptual space, a Ground Zero teahouse. In such a space, incomplete gestures are acceptable, and even preferred. Perhaps temporary and indefinable statements are the most honest ones we can make. Such gestures must be made; the present darkness beckons us to respond.

"The layers of azurite pigments," I wrote for an exhibit in Santa Fe called Beauty without Regret, "spread over paper as I let the granular pigments cascade. My eyes see much more than what my mind can organize. As the light becomes trapped within pigments, a 'grace arena' is created, as the light is broken, and trapped in refraction. Yet my gestures are limited, contained, and gravity pulls the pigments like a kind friend." The Gravity and Grace series that we included in our first TriBeCa Temporary exhibit, exemplifies this "incomplete" approach. But further, beauty too is defined as a participant in the suffering of the world.

Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to close our eyes to that beauty around us. Every beauty also suffers. Death spreads all over our lives and therefore faith must be given so that we can see through the darkness, through the beauty of "the valley of the shadow of death."

Our prayers are also made of broken, pulverized pigments. Beauty is in the brokenness, not in so-called perfection, not in "finished" images, but in incomplete gestures. I wait for my paintings to reveal themselves. Perhaps I will find myself rising through the ashes.

The Japanese ideogram for beauty is built with two Chinese characters, sheep and great . Evidently, in China , beauty meant a "fat (great) sheep." In Japan , the word for beauty became more abstract, more refined, and became associated with death and its sorrow. Mono-no-aware, an expression that captures the sentiment of sorrow (literally "sorrow of things") points to the notion of beauty as sacrifice. To enjoy the feast at a banquet, a sheep must be sacrificed. Autumn leaves are most beautiful and bright as they die. The minerals I use must be pulverized to bring out their beauty. The great post-war writer Ryunoske Akutagawa wrote, before committing suicide at the age of thirty-five, "But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."

I did not realize, when I wrote the above, that my family and I would witness firsthand, and survive because of, the sacrifice of hundreds of firefighters. They, along with other heroes of September 11, redefined life's true expression, something we'd forgotten in recent times, with our emphasis on theory: their art was in their sacrifice. Their lives were offered up in response to the terrorist's art of vengeance-their "last extremity." Theirs was the metanoia, turning 180 degrees to face death head-on rather than fleeing. They are examples of great sheep, and from their example of sacrificial love, we can begin to know and experience true beauty.

Our family left Oneonta early on the Sunday morning of September 16, the car full of apples the children had picked from the Sheesleys' yard, and drove back to New York City . We needed to return for a time of mourning at our church, The Village Church. We found out that a few members had escaped from the towers. A few, like us, had been displaced. None was lost.

On that Sunday, C.J. was to be confirmed as a full member and take his first communion, his first public expression of faith. He had been meeting with our pastor throughout the summer in preparation. We wanted to invite family members and friends to join us. We were planning to have a party for him. Now, the best we could hope was to get to the service on time. I asked him, as I negotiated the Catskill Mountains , if he still wanted to go through with it. "Dad, I can't wait. I want to take communion today," he said.

After my fellow elders and our pastor prayed for him, officially recognizing him as a communicating member, he expressed his exuberance with a victory gesture I had seen him give after scoring a goal in soccer. At Communion, he came up to me, his hands cupped as I broke the bread for him, and the voice of Shalom filled my heart again.

"This is Christ's body, bread of heaven," I said to C.J. If God can turn ordinary bread into a sacrament, God can turn anything into a sacrament. There is power of resurrection in this piece of bread going into the hands of a child. These hands, covered in asbestos dust last Tuesday, would be redeemed. God would take the very dust of death and turn it into life, twisted metal into a memorial of hope, and even the broken city of New York into the City of God .

Andras Visky, a Romanian playwright and scholar who was once imprisoned for his faith, told me that "without Communion, there will be no community. Without Communion, there will be no communication at all." Every time we break the Lord's bread and drink the wine, we affirm the foundation of Christ, shaken but not moved, broken but not destroyed. He is the strong tower we run to, and find true refuge in, even as our own towers collapse all around us. This refuge, this communication, this community was what Sen-no-Rikyu desired in his struggle to express humanity in a war-torn time.

With this Eucharistic foundation, we do not need to postpone art, because art flows for us right out of that Table, from the very heart of our universe. If we center ourselves there, then we can go as far as the end of hell and still return home. We can dare to have the innocence of children in a world filled with fear and darkness. Jesus' command not to fear flows from that Table. At the Table, the Great Sheep still resides, inviting us to enter the Beautiful through His suffering.

Makoto Fujimura is a visual artist who exhibits regularly in New York, Santa Fe, and Japan, and founder of International Arts Movement, an organization based in New York and Tokyo committed to "renewal of hearts and culture."

Visit Makoto Fujimura as Image Artist of Month for October '04

Issue #32• Fall 2001