My dear dear dear friends,

I've just returned from another day roaming the streets of this wounded city, and I am writing to tell any of you who might be able to make it here before the fires go out, to get on your horse and ride.  I've never seen anything like this.  All the hatred that was demonstrated on Tuesday seems to be balanced by waves of spontaneous and creative expressions of love and compassion (and aggression and sorrow and revenge and religious expression and ...)  The city is an open council process, everyone just speaking up, everyone..., displaying their feelings to strangers with whom they've had a common traumatic experience.   It's really amazing.  If any of you are able to get here, go to the memorial sites constantly being created in Washington and Union Squares, go downtown and talk with a policeman or a National Guardsman, at dinner break class lines and ask the busboy about his feelings, everyone is so incredibly open.  There are no horns being honked, there is virtually no rudeness.  I go to sleep everynight with the nightmare image of the first plane heading toward the first tower, and yet I feel so
fortunate to be in this city this week... the email and the phonecalls from all over the world ...the constantly emerging individual stories, everybody has a story; most end in life, but today I learned that "Mike I" died in the fires.  I played basketball with Mike for many years, he was a much better player than me, but was always generous with his passes and his humor.  Like
many of the other guys I've played with, I knew him intimately but never needed to know his last name, the buildings have a face for me now.

As for myself, I've been intending to try to get back my "regular life" but there really isn't any time for it.  Being here with friends, making photographs, keeping our door open, walking, talking....... they tell me things are different uptown; it seems that the closer you go to the combustion, the more intimate life has become in its aftermath, my friends in tribeca had much much more fearful experiences and they seem even more bonded to eachother and to their neighborhood...there are big canvases and
marker pens for everyone and they are filled with messages of all points of view, but nobody seems to write over anybody else, everyone has their own space and it seems to be respected, people just write what they feel, there seems to be a separation between deists and non-deists, between those who want to recognize the dead and those who need a wrathful response,
between...  but it's so democratic, I'm proud of this culture, I really didn't know we were so advanced.

I must sleep now, I am making a project of recording the multiplicity of voices as well as a poject recording the state of advertising at the time of the event (with the smoke in the background) and I want to start early in the morning,  delicate  things change quickly and this one surely will.

love to you all,

peter

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