Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: Imagination is the Instrument of Compassion

?Imagination is the Instrument of Compassion?

Of the many books which have appeared this year in the new genre which has been called ?post-9/11 fiction? one of the most striking is Jonathan Safran Foer?s ?Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.?

Interview: Jonathan Safran Foer (Marijke van der Meer June 2005)
Music: ?On the Transmigration of Souls? by John Adams (Sept 2002)
Readings: ?Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close? by Jonathan S. Foer

SCRIPT

VOX ID

MUSIC: On the Transmigration of Souls ? John Adams & NY Philharmonic
From Start

DAVID: To commemorate the first anniversary of the events on September 11, 2001, composer John Adams created what he calls a ?memory space? ? a place where one can be alone with ones thoughts and emotions. He was inspired by European cathedrals where one senses the presence of generations upon generations of souls, as if they were all congregated in that one spot. He began with everyday sounds of the city streets?until (MUSIC CLEAR ? ?missing?) ?the voice of a nine year old boy? (PAUSE) ?repeating one word over and over? (PAUSE) ?like the heartbeat of the city?

MUSIC UP

DAVID: Adams completed ?On the Transmigration of Souls? for the New York Philharmonic in just over six months. Usually he would spend over a year panning an orchestral work. But he leapt at the opportunity to make a work of art that would speak directly to people?s emotions and allow him not only to come to grips with the events of 9/11 personally, but to give something to others, as well.

MUSIC UP A BIT

DAVID: Three years later, authors have begun to do the same. In 2005, several novels have been published which critics have dubbed ?post 9/11 fiction.? Booker prize winner Ian McEwan?s book ?Saturday? begins with a man watching a plane on fire descend toward London?s Heathrow Airport. Pulitzer prize winner Michael Cunningham?s latest work involves child suicide bombers in New York City. But the novel most directly related to September 11th is arguably Jonathan Safran Foer?s ?Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close? which centers around nine year old Oscar Schell, a boy with a vivid imagination prone to wild inventions, whose father was killed in the fall of the World Trade Towers. Ironically, it?s not exactly the book Foer set out to write.

FW: ?I actually would?ve never chosen?
LW: ?would be comfortable with that.? DUR: 2?00?

MUSIC

DAVID: Less than a month after 9/11, I made a radio program mixing Walt Whitman?s 19th century Civil War poetry, a Shostakovich symphony written during the siege of Leningrad, and e-mails from artist friends in New York City close to Ground Zero. When it was presented at a festival in Croatia, a producer stated categorically, ?It?s impossible to create a work of art about such an event so quickly after it happened.? I could only reply, ?I wasn?t thinking about the art ? just responding to the outpouring of emotion I felt and received.? But later I began to wonder, how much time must pass before we can ?transmigrate? a catastrophe like 9/11 into an artistic form? If not weeks, months? Adams? work was criticized for ?not having enough distance? ? but it also received a Pulitzer Prize for music. And some literary critics are now saying four years is too soon for novels reflecting 9/11? So when is the right time?

FW: ?It?s always a good time?
LW: ?instrument of compassion.? DUR: 2?45?

MUSIC

DAVID: ?In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened ? like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack ? an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.?
(Foer pg. 38)

MUSIC UP a bit

FW: ?I think one of the things 9/11?
LW: ?that first reaction.? DUR: 1?50?

MUSIC

DAVID: ?What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone?s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone?s hearts would start beating at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don?t really want to know about.
That would be so weird, except that the place in a hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn?t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York Marathon it would sound like war.? (Foer pg. 1)

DAVID: ?Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close? isn?t only about 9/11. In his quest to unlock a secret, Oskar befriends an ancient journalist who has reported on almost every war in the 20th century. Oskar?s grandparents experience the Allied bombing of Dresden. And Oskar makes a school presentation using an interview with a survivor of Hiroshima.

FW: ?The way September 11 is talked about?
LW: ?the ugliness of it.? DUR: 2?00?

MUSIC

DAVID: Composer John Adams has said wanted to capture in his music something he had seen on an amateur video taken minutes after the first plane hit the first tower: an image of millions and millions of pieces of paper floating out of the windows of the burning skyscraper, creating a virtual blizzard of white paper slowly drifting down to earth. It?s an image which also struck Jonathan Safran Foer, who himself has a sizable collection of blank papers amassed from writers and artists. Does this perhaps help explain why some of the pages in his novel are blank? Or why some are so tightly crammed with words the pages turn black? Or does it at least shed light on another of Oskar?s inventions?

?I invented a book that listed every word in every language,? he explains. ?It wouldn?t be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.?

FW: ?This book is about failed?
LW: ?what does come across.? DUR: 2?15?

MUSIC

DAVID: Late in the novel, Oskar overcomes his fear of elevators and skyscrapers to visit the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building?

?Even though I knew the view was incredibly beautiful, my brain started misbehaving, and the whole time I was imagining a plane coming at the building, just below us. I didn?t want to, but I couldn?t stop. I imagined the last second, when I could see the pilot?s face, who would be a terrorist. I imagined us looking each other in the eyes when the nose of the plane was one millimeter from the building. I hate you, my eyes would tell him. I hate you, his eyes would tell me?
I thought about all the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it?s in a millisecond, or days or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that?s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they?re all on fire, and we?re all trapped.? (Foer pg. 244/45)

DAVID: The last pages of the novel are a short flip-book Oskar has created. By reversing the order of a series of still photos, a body which Oskar imagines could be his father?s is seen to float gently upwards toward the top of one of the Towers ? reversing one of the most haunting images of September 11th. After such profound sadness, is this the closest we can come to a happy ending?

TAPE - On ending & imagination
FW: ?It?s not a happy ending?
LW: ?that connection, that empathy.? DUR: 3?10?

MUSIC

DAVID: John Adams? composition ?On the Transmigration of Souls? ends as it began with soft sounds of the streets of Manhattan. It was performed by the New York Philharmonic for Nonesuch Records. ?Imagination is the Instrument of Compassion? also featured Jonathan Safran Foer, author of ?Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close? published by Houghton Mifflin and Hamish Hamilton. Special thanks to the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam and Marijke van der Meer. The program was produced by David Swatling with sound engineer Arjan de Reus . Vox Humana is a Radio Netherlands presentation.

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