9/11, the New York Times, and fetish

A friend of mine posted an interesting article from The New York Times on her social networking page earlier today:

read it here

The article, written by Dan Berry with accompanying photos by Tony Cenicola, talks about some of the debris from 9/11 and how they have been stashed away in various drawers and closets for the past ten years.  He describes the way the objects have taken on additional meanings, meanings that have transmuted them into relics, as if they have been sanctified by History itself to stand guard over our memory of that day.

It's an interesting piece, and amidst all the brouhaha of this weekend (it still amazes me how superstitious our society is when it comes to the number 10), it was refreshing to read something that chronicled the small acts people have taken in an attempt to process and deal with their trauma.

As I read, my mind drifted to the idea of the fetish, that of Sigmund more so than Karl,  ever lurking in the shadow of Thanatos: the tiny artifacts that came to embody death and entomb numbers.  When was the last time you looked at a clock that read 9:11 without remembering?  We do not say "seven-four" not " twelve-twenty-five" nor "one-one" any more than anyone calls nine-eleven "Patriot's Day."

Freud posited that the fetishist forms his or her attachment to an object as a response to the trauma of the moment that came before.  Since he or she cannot process the trauma, the fetish becomes a stand-in, a constant distraction and reminder of the pain.  In the case of 9/11, it seems that the rift between the moment of trauma and the moment that came before is absolute; it is as if time itself is torn, one of those periodic schisms that divides history into "pre-" and "post-".

Unable to reconstruct what happened in the minutes leading up to the impact, those who lived through it are literally left to pick up the pieces of what came after, and then substitute them for those lost memories. 

What are we to make of these totems?  Do these mementos protect from the trauma, or simply reinscribe the pain in our collective memory, pushing us further and further from ever understanding what really happened?