by Eric Darton
Is it now possible to speak of a Wild Trade Center?
Can we now call the towers, once popularly known as David and Nelson (Rockefeller), by their truer names: Gargantua and Pantagruel?
Inescapably “world trade” conjures the image of the medieval marketplace – for trade tends toward freedom and sliding values, whereas finance connotes restriction, formulae and fixed forms, however brief their functionality.
Paradoxically, trade lives on the sea and land, and deals in their material fruits, while finance flies high, imagines itself empyreal and considers gravity the greatest heresy.
And though towers’ forms seemed rigid, they were not. Structures of such a scale must be able to yield before the power of the wind – like and not like bamboo. Indeed, it took an architect of Asian descent to furnish the West with the ultimate symbol of its dualism.
Another paradox: while standing apart from one another, deep down, these giants shared a common foundation, half dug out of land, half dyked against the tides.
Such was the “gargantuan” late flowering of the Modern, conceived even as it gave place to the depleted grotesque of the “lipstick” and “Chippendale” buildings soon to come.
Who built, then climbed these giants? Tiny men. Who walked a filament between them? A fearless mortal. And others, equally courageous, parachuted or otherwise challenged an awesomeness usually ascribed to mountains: Eiger, Jungfrau, Mönch.
King Kong, a more primitive ancestor, spanned their tops; then, dying, crashed down upon the plaza, where, after dark, some Rabelasian wags invaded his massive hand, and curled the fingers inward – save for the middle one – which gesture greeted the morning’s first comers.
And the marketplace which had reared the giants also shrank them to fit within a hundred thousand snowglobes; forged them into keychains, and injection-molded chatchkas to suit every fancy.
That is until the day their claim to infinitely extending and immortal order, their parallelism, their binary split rendered ideal, encountered fuel and fire, and crumbled, pancaked, into an undifferentiated mass, a vast and chaotic field: a material, earthly hell upon which tiny men poured a great lakesworth of unavailing water.
Is it possible, if not forensically, that one tower fell in sympathy with the other?
Today, when we look upon them in our minds, what images arise?
* * *