love is more thicker than forget

New York City occupies a curious spot in the hearts of those of us who live elsewhere, those whom residents of the city parochially insist on calling “mid-westerners.” I say “curious” because even as we tsk-tsk the excesses of her superlatives, we remain envious of her energy and creative resource — her willingness to work to be the best. She is what we would like to be if only our maiden aunt would just look the other way.
 
This ambivalence is shared by much of the world, I think. When in 2001 extreme men chose to execute extreme measures, they targeted New York City — tacit acknowledgment that she served then as now as an icon for us all, a sacrament of the American spirit and venerable totem of us at our best.
 
Our response to 9/11 has always chafed me. In those first weeks of the nation’s shock, we came together in a spirit of natural and voluntary self-examination. But just as we had begun to mourn our collective loss, politicians, smelling an opportunity for ideological advancement, elbowed their way to the podium. Arrogance supplanting inspection, we acquiesced to their assurance that polarizing revenge was merely another phrase for the harmony of justice. I did not think — do not think — we honored the victims very well.
 
When I was asked through Project Encore — a program encouraging the composing of choral music enthusiastically sponsored by the Schola Cantorum on Hudson — to submit a piece for possible inclusion in the Sing New York! Festival, I took the opportunity to act upon my misgivings. For some time I had been studying E. E. Cumming’s [love is more thicker than forget] and thought it might be an appropriate vehicle for honoring the victims and the city. Yes, I know. In the hands of the marriage mongers the poem has become, like poor Paul’s effort in I Corinthians, a banal metaphor for a marital bliss. Perhaps with more energy than sense, I hoped to rescue it.
 
In any case, it seemed to me that the poem's pairings of thick-thin, forget-recall, and the striking deep-high underscored the appropriate distinctions between wrong-headed retaliation and my hoped-for response of people more in need of grieving than grievance. If there is an eternal aspect to love, surely it lies in its ability to negate violence and hatred. Surely a love less always than to win is indeed most sane and sunly. By returning love for hate, love both thicker than forget and thinner than recall, we may yet honor our dead and can, in time, create meaningful closure to the city’s and our nation’s tragedy.