The PAUSE Before The PLUNGE

I

 "In 1912, the Titanic created one of the first global media storms, with the New York Times devoting its first twelve pages to the disaster ... 

The sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, was as shocking to the world as the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001."

[Tim Maltin, 2012, Titanic, First Accounts, Penguin Classics, New York, p xvii]

 'We begin with "The Sinking of the Titanic Seen from a Lifeboat", the fourth chapter from second-class passenger Lawrence Beesley's The Loss of the Titanic, written in 1912 ... his account immediately places his reader right on the spot, watching Titanic sinking.'

     "First of all, the climatic conditions were extraordinary. The night was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen: the sky without a single cloud to mar the perfect brilliance of the stars, clustered so thickly together that in places there seemed almost more dazzling points of light set in the black sky than background of the sky itself ... They seemed so near, and their light so much more intense than ever before, that fancy suggested they saw this beautiful ship in dire distress below and all their energies had awakened to flash messages across the black dome of the sky to each other; telling and warning of the calamity happening in the world beneath. Later, when the Titanic had gone down and we lay still on the sea waiting for the day to dawn or a ship to come, I remember looking up at the perfect sky ...

      And next the cold air! Here again was something quite new to us: there was not a breath of wind to blow keenly round us as we stood in the boat ... it was just a keen, bitter, icy, motionless cold that came from nowhere and yet was there all the time; the stillness of it―if one can imagine 'cold' being motionless and still―was what seemed new and strange.

      And these―the sky and the air―were overhead; and below was the sea. Here again something uncommon: the surface was like a lake of oil, heaving gently up and down with a quiet motion that rocked our boat dreamily to and fro. We did not need to keep her head to the swell ... The sea slipped away smoothly under the boat, and I think we never heard it lapping on the sides, so oily in appearance was the water ..."

     "And so in these conditions of sky and air and sea, we gazed broadside on the Titanic from a short distance. She was absolutely still―indeed from the first it seemed as if the blow from the iceberg had taken all the courage out of her and she had just come quietly to rest and was settling down without an effort to save herself, without a murmur of protest against such a foul blow. For the sea could not rock her: the wind was not there to howl noisily round the decks, and make the ropes hum; from the first what must have impressed all as they watched was the sense of stillness about her and the slow, insensible way she sank lower and lower into the sea, like a stricken animal.

      The mere bulk alone of the ship viewed from the sea below was an awe-inspiring sight. Imagine a ship nearly a sixth of a mile long, 75 feet high to the top decks, with four enormous funnels above the decks, and masts again high above the funnels; with her hundreds of portholes, all her saloons and other rooms brilliant with light, and all round her, little boats filled with those who until a few hours before had trod her decks and read in her libraries and listened to the music of her band in happy content; and who were now looking up in amazement at the enormous mass above them and rowing away from her because she was sinking.

      ... the black outline of her profile against the sky was bordered all round by stars studded in the sky, and all her funnels and masts were picked out in the same way: her bulk was seen where the stars where blotted out. And one other thing was different from expectation: the thing that ripped away from us instantly, as we saw it, all sense of the beauty of the night, the beauty of the ship's lines, and the beauty of her lights―and all these taken in themselves were intensely beautiful―that thing was the awful angle made by the level of the sea with the rows of porthole lights along her sides in dotted lines, row above row. The sea level and the rows of lights should have been parallel―should never have met―and now they met at an angle inside the black hull of the ship. There was nothing else to indicate she was injured; nothing but this apparent violation of a simple geometrical law ... but it meant the Titanic had sunk by the head until the lowest portholes in the bows were under the sea, and the portholes in the stern were lifted above the normal height. We rowed away from here in the quietness of the night, hoping and praying with all our hearts that she would sink no more ..."

      "And all the time, as we watched, the Titanic sank lower and lower by the head and the angle became wider and wider as the stern porthole lights lifted and the bow lights sank, and it was evident she was not to stay afloat much longer ... At about 2:15 a.m. I think we were any distance from a mile to two miles away ... About this time, the water had crept up almost to her sidelight and the captain's bridge, and it seemed a question only of minutes before she sank ... all in the lifeboat were motionless as we watched her in absolute silence―save some who would not look and buried their heads on each other's shoulders.

      The lights still shone with the same brilliance, but not so many of them: many were now below the surface. I have often wondered since whether they continued to light up the cabins when the portholes were under water; they may have done so.

      And then, as we gazed awestruck, she tilted slowly up, revolving apparently about a centre of gravity just astern of amidships; and there she remained―motionless! As she swung up, her lights, which had shone without a flicker all night, went out suddenly, came on again for a single flash, then went out altogether. And as they did so, there came a noise which many people, wrongly I think, have described as an explosion; it has always seemed to me that it was nothing but the engines and machinery coming loose from their bolts and bearings, and falling through the compartments, smashing everything in their way. It was partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a smash, and it was not a sudden roar as an explosion would be: it went on successively for some seconds, possibly fifteen to twenty, as the heavy machinery dropped down to the bottom (now the bows) of the ship. But it was a noise no one had heard before, and no one wishes to hear again: it was stupefying, stupendous, as it came to us along the water. It was as if all the heavy things one could think of had been thrown downstairs from the top of a house, smashing each other and the stairs and everything in the way."

      "When the noise was over the Titanic was still upright like a column: we could see her now only as the stern and some 150 feet of her stood outlined against the star-specked sky, looming black in the darkness, and in this position she continued for some minutes―I think as much as five minutes, but it may have been less. Then, first sinking back a little at the stern, I thought, she slid slowly forwards through the water and dived slantingly down; the sea closed over her and we had seen the last of the beautiful ship on which we had embarked four days before at Southampton."

     " ...in place of the Titanic, we had the level sea now stretching in an unbroken expanse to the horizon: heaving gently just as before, with no indication on the surface that the waves had just closed over the most wonderful vessel built by man's hand; the stars looked down just the same and the air was just as bitterly cold.

      There seemed a great sense of loneliness when we were left on the sea in a small boat without the Titanic: not that we were uncomfortable (except for the cold) nor in danger: we did not think we were in either, but the Titanic was no longer there.

      We waited head on for the wave which we thought might come ... it never came. But although the Titanic left us no such legacy of a wave as she went to the bottom, she left us something we would willingly forget forever, something which it is well not to let the imagination dwell on―the cries of many hundreds of our fellow-passengers struggling in the icy water ... a cry that called to the heavens for the very injustice of its own existence: a cry that clamored for its own destruction.

      We were utterly surprised to hear this cry go up as the waves closed over the Titanic: we had heard no sound of any kind from her since we left her side ... The cries, which were loud and numerous at first, died away gradually one by one, but the night was clear, frosty, and still, the water smooth, and the sounds must have carried on its level surface free of any obstruction for miles ... I think the last of them must have been heard nearly forty minutes after the Titanic sank. Lifebelts would keep the survivors afloat for hours; but the cold water was what stopped the cries."

II

     "Something's up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn't risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements...we wonder if what we really have is...a first class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything's wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it."

(Noonan P,  1998, 'There Is No Time, There Will Be Time', Forbes ASAP 30 Nov '98)

     "If it has to be compared, yesterday to most of us in New York, it was Titanic. It was the end of the assumptions that ease and plenty will continue forever, that we rich folk will be kept safe by our wealth and luck; it was the end of a culture of indifference to our nation's safety. Those Twin Towers, those hard and steely symbols of the towering city, were the ship that God himself couldn't sink."

(Noonan P, 2001, 'September 11, 2001 and the Titanic Disaster', The Titanic Commutator, 25:154)

An article by Bree Hoskin called "The Morning After A Night To Remember: The Lesson of the Titanic' (2006-2007, Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies, p13), describes how various texts produced during the 1950s reinforced the position of the sinking of the Titanic as Western society's defining example and reference point for disaster ― "the perpetuation of the 'unsinkable myth' in such Titanic themed texts as American author Walter Lord's 1955 bestseller A Night to Remember" and Roy Baker's 1958 British film adaption of Lord's book (A Night to Remember, Dir. Roy Baker, Prod. William MacQuitty and Rank Film Organisation)".

     "Lord's 1955 account of the last few hours of the Titanic ... took advantage of the willingness of survivors to recount their personal experience ... 

      All had faith in the ship on which they sailed. After all, as Lord's narrative stressed, 'the ship was unsinkable, everybody said so'. Lord even titled an entire chapter, 'God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship'. However, after the collision these people ... would soon find their confidence in the safety of the unsinkable ship was shattered.

     ...Lord found in the process of information [gathering] a wider historical significance, that 'the Titanic more than any single event marks the end of the old days, and the beginning of a new, uneasy era' in which 'nobody believed in the unsinkable ship'."

     "In 1956, British film producer William MacQuitty took an option for the film rights to Lord's book. Directed by Roy Baker, A Night to Remember premiered at the Odeon, Leicester Square, on 3 July 1958. Baker's film seems to suggest that a blissful ignorance of, or complacency towards, impending danger and a false confidence in the safety of the unsinkable ship were largely responsible for causing the disaster, and the film uses the backdrop of the peaceful Atlantic night in order to illustrate this point ...

     The 1958 British theatrical trailer for A Night to Remember described the film as the depiction of an event in which '2,208 happy, confident people sped across a flat, calm sea on a ship everyone knew was unsinkable. Absolutely unsinkable. The ship was called the Titanic'.

      ...[In the film] When the ship's architect Thomas Andrews demonstrates to Captain Smith the certainty that the ship will sink in an hour and a half, a shocked Smith declares, 'she can't sink. She's unsinkable!' ... It is [Second Officer] Lightoller who recognizes the symbolic brevity of the disaster as the end of an era of modern confidence and complacency when he converses with Colonel Archibald Gracie as they wait to be rescued on the morning of 15 April

Lightoller:  I've been at sea since I was a boy ... I've even been shipwrecked before. I know what the sea can do. But this is different.

Gracie:  Because we hit an iceberg?

Lightoller:  No. Because we were so sure. Because even though it's happened, it's still unbelievable. I don't think I'll ever feel sure again. About anything.

      "Dilys Pwell's review of Baker's film in the Sunday Times on 6 July 1958 indicates that the film's end-of-an-era perspective was deeply wedded to contemporary insecurities and uncertainties about the modern world:

'... of all the horrors conferred on us by the age of speed and comfort the most appalling to me is still the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic ... No doubt this is irrational. I ought to be shrinking much more from the thought of Belsen or Hiroshima ... No use: the story of the Titanic still has an effect which none of the tortures or massacres of the past twenty years can equal ... The odious distinction belongs to the end of an age. Other aspects, too, of the story, are part of an end: the dissolution of a kind of confidence, a kind of optimism, the end of absolute faith in absolute safety. Perhaps my father and mother ... were vaguely conscious that the ground beneath their feet was no longer as solid as they had fancied. Perhaps this first intimation of insecurity it was which made, and still makes, the sinking of the Titanic so terrible to me and my contemporaries. At any rate after two world wars one is inclined, looking back at the night of April 14, 1912, to take it as a savage warning bell'."

      "...the modern awareness that the Titanic helped realise ― time is precious ... the film is particularly sensitive to time ― lost time ... in the two hours and forty minutes it took for the ship to sink, the film portrays how various passengers and crew members behaved as they 'woke up' to the fact that they were suddenly living on borrowed time ... 

      [Ship designer] Andrews inspects the damage and informs the captain of the ship's fate"

'She's going to sink, captain'. When Smith asks how long the Titanic will last, Andrews calculates, 'as far as I can see, she made fourteen feet of water in the first ten minutes after the collision ... she should live another hour and a half.' Andrews checks the time on his pocket watch as Smith exits.

     This scene establishes Andrews as a man who is uniquely attuned to the nuances of time. He later tells Mr Robert Lucas that 'the ship has about an hour to live. A little more if some of the upper bulkheads hold, but not much more'. After the collision, an awareness of time and a sense of urgency become increasingly apparent ...

     [Marconi telegraphist] Bride informs [Titanic's Captain] Smith that the Carpathia is fifty-eight miles away, making all possible speed and should be reaching them in four hours. Smith slowly repeats 'four hours' with a look of grim resignation, He orders for the distress rockets to be fired every five minutes from the port side ... 

     The captain receives an update from [Marconi telegraphist] Phillips about the Carpathia's whereabouts: 'She's making seventeen knots and should be with us about 3:30 [a.m.]'. Smith replies, 'that'll be too late.' He asks Phillips to tell the Carpathia to hurry ...

     ... in the Titanic, Andrews awaits his fate alone in the first class smoking room, standing in front of a painting called The Approach to the New World. The clock below the painting reads 2:20 [a.m.]. He again checks the time on his pocket watch as an ashtray smashes to the floor.

      On the Californian [whose wireless operator had gone to bed hours earlier], the officers noted that the big steamer they had seen from a distance firing rockets has now gone. They tell [the Californian's] Captain Stanley Lord and inform him that the time is now 2:45 [a.m.].

      The time reads 3:50 [a.m.] as the Carpathia nears the vicinity of the wreck site."

III

A comparison of two poems, both with the title The Convergence of the Twain but written nearly one hundred years apart, reinforces the thematic link between the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. Thomas Hardy, who wrote his subtitled "Lines on the Loss of the Titanic" at the time of the tragedy, and Simon Armitage, known as the Millennial Poet and whose poem was read out at the Westminster memorial service for September 11, are writers from very different eras. Nevertheless the same style of 11 formal stanzas and unique verse structure are used to express ideas that transcend those distant decades. Each poet is addressing the sense of cultural shock, of shattered certainties, and a sort of mass grief.

THE  CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)

Thomas Hardy, 1912

 

I     In a solitude of the sea

      Deep from human vanity

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II    Steel chambers, late the pyres

      Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III   Over the mirrors meant

      To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls ― grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV   Jewels in joy designed

      To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V    Dim moon-eyed fishes near

      Gaze at the gilded gear

And query : "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

VI   Well : while was fashioning

      This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII   Prepared a sinister mate  

       For her―so gaily great―

A shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII  And as the smart ship grew

       In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX    Alien they seemed to be;

       No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history.

X    Or sign that they were bent

      By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI   Till the Spinner of the Years

      Said "Now!" And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

""""""""""

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Read at Westminster memorial service for September 11)

Simon Armitage, 2005

 I     Here is an architecture of air.

       Where dust has cleared

nothing stands but free sky, unlimited and sheer.

II     Smoke's dark bruise

       has paled, soothed

by wind, dabbed at and eased by rain, exposing the wound.

III    Over the spoil of junk,

       rescuers prod and pick,

shout into tangled holes. What answers back is aftershock.

IV    All land lines are down.

       Reports of mobile phones

are false. One half-excoriated Apple Mac still quotes the Dow Jones.

V     Shop windows are papered

       with faces of the disappeared.

As if they might walk from the ruins ― chosen, spared.

VI    With hindsight now we track

       the vapour-trail of each flight-path

arcing through blue morning, like a curved thought.

VII   And in retrospect plot

       the weird prospect

of a passenger plane beading an office-block.

VIII  But long before that dawn,

       with those towers drawing

in worth and name to their full height, an opposite was forming,

IX    a force

       still years and miles off,

yet moving headlong forwards, locked on a collision course.

X     Then time and space

       contracted, so whatever distance

held those worlds apart thinned to an instant.

XI   During which, cameras framed

      moments of grace

before the furious contact wherein earth and heaven fused.

"""""""""

IV

REMEMBERING 9/11 ― Survivor Greg Trevor ― Floor 68, North Tower

<atlantahistorycenter.com/blog/remembering-9/11>

'Greg Trevor is a survivor of the attacks on 9/11. Trevor, a public information officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was in his office on the 68th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center that morning.

He came to the office earlier than usual that day, and it seemed like it was going to be a good day if the weather was any indication.

"It was one of the brightest, sunniest days", he said. "And I remember standing behind my desk, stretching my lower back. And I looked out the window and I saw the Statue of Liberty and it was glistening because it was such a bright sunny day".

When American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower, the shockwaves from the impact made the building sway and nearly knocked Trevor to the floor. He looked out of his window and saw a stunning sight.

"I saw this parabola [of] flame come past my window, and then this blizzard of paper and glass, and then silence".

Immediately after that moment of silence, Trevor said he heard a cacophony of sirens and alarms. It was then that Trevor knew without a shadow of a doubt that something horrible had happened.

Remembering the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in which al Qaeda operatives detonated a truck bomb below the North Tower, Trevor said he immediately thought that the tremor he felt might have been from a bomb. It wasn't until he got a call from a local reporter that he knew that an aeroplane was the source of the blast.

"It made no sense", he said. "It was a clear bright day. How could a plane have hit the building? I didn't think at the time that it was a deliberate attack, [I] thought it was some kind of accident".

Once they knew that a plane had flown into the building, Trevor and his co-workers decided to evacuate, heading to the stairwell closest to them.

Because Port Authority officials mandated routine emergency evacuation drills for the World Trade Center, Trevor described the evacuation process as orderly.

There were thousands of people in the stairwells, and they proceeded down the stairs two-by-two. Unless an emergency worker needed to ascend the stairs, the line of evacuees descended at a speed of about a minute per floor.

It was while he was in the stairwell that Trevor learned from a co-worker via interactive pager that planes had also crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Just before 10 a.m., when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, Trevor said he felt rumbling and was thrust to the opposite side of the stairwell, where he hit his back. He looked up and an avalanche of dust fell into his face just before the lights in the stairwell went out. Then a cascade of water from the building's water tanks started rushing down the stairs.

"It felt like wading through a dark, dirty river, at night, in the middle of a forest fire", Trevor said.

As he and others reached the fourth floor, the door was blocked, and couldn't be opened from inside the stairwell. When word got out that the door was blocked, tensions began to rise and the relative calm of an orderly evacuation began to turn fearful.

"People were panicking", Trevor said. "I know because you can tell from the sense of anxiety had. It was at that point that I thought I might not make it".

To calm down, Trevor used breathing techniques he and his wife were taught during childbirth classes. He said a prayer, closed his eyes, and pictured his family.

"I thought to myself, their faces will keep me calm", he said. "And if I died, they will be the last thing on my mind".

Shortly after people began to ran back up the stairs to exit the building through another stairwell, the fourth-floor door was forced open, and a port authority officer, David Lim, began shouting up the stairs, "Down is good".

"I could hear him saying that because I wasn't far away. I turned around over my shoulder and yelled 'Down is good'," said Trevor. "And then you could hear like an echo up the stairwell as people were hearing it and saying it to everybody else. And at that point, we all turned around and we all got out."

As North Tower survivors exited the stairwell and entered the mezzanine of the World Trade Center, their evacuation took them to an overhang. There, they were stopped by an emergency responder before being allowed to proceed. 

"We had no idea why he was doing that", said Trevor. "We did not know at that point that there were people who were jumping out of buildings".

Trevor and his co-workers walked around the perimeter of the World Trade Center before descending a stairwell that is now known as the "survivor staircase". Then they began to walk uptown. About 11 minutes later, a police officer instructed Trevor and his group to run.

"When a police officer tells you to run for your life, you listen and we started running" he said. "This was when tower one was collapsing. And we just ran".

Trevor and his co-workers ran for several blocks until they were about a block away from the Holland Tunnel. When they stopped running, one of Trevor's co-workers told him that the World Trade Center was gone.

"He [said], they're gone", Trevor remembers. "I thought he was talking about a person or people. I said 'who?' He [said], 'No, not who. The Towers'. And I turned around and looked.

And the only way I can describe it was it felt like a hole in the sky".'