Oh Babylon! Oh Mammon! Oh 9/11!

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by Phil Hall

We lived in the Zona Rosa. The posh university I worked at was also in the west of the city. Some of the students were spoiled. They remind me of rotten characters in the book by DBC Pierre: Vernon God Little.

In the evening, once a week, I trained teachers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and at the weekend I went to the University of Tlaxcala to teach a friendly group of lecturers led by Yola Salgado.

My pleasure on the move was to stop in the Roma district at a good cafe and drink coffee, and to rest before driving home. My other pleasure was also to eat tamales with my youngest daughter outside the school while we waited for them to let her in. But it was a very tense time and I can’t say I was a relaxed or nice person those days. I was trying hard and on edge. We lived well, but had no savings. Perhaps like young people in London nowadays.

Our house in Mexico City was round the corner from the statue of the Angel.

We had a live-in maid. She was called Ceci. She was uncomfortable with me being downstairs working on the computer which was in an office next to the kitchen because, on those occasions when I was at home in the mornings, there was no one else in the house. Ceci hated all men because (by way of an explanation which she felt she owed me) she told me that she had been raped when she was a teenager by her father’s cousin.

The culture of servants is something deeply ingrained and problematic in the Mexican middle class. The film, Roma, aired the dirty laundry of the Mexican middle class. Ceci lived in a small room high up on the roof. You reached her room by climbing up a wrought iron spiral staircase. In front of her room was the corrugated stone sink where she washed clothes. All around the roof to the left were steel and glass skyscrapers.

The family attended church at a beautiful little Victorian looking building at the end of our road in Calle Tokio. My wife’s grandparents had lived nearby in the 1950s and they went to that same church. Now, they tell me, young people from Europe and the USA are emigrating to Mexico City to live in flats in the old part of the city and, in doing so, they are raising the rents and getting Mexicans who can’t afford those rents thrown out.

Ignorance is bliss. Mexico City is not a friendly monster. I would never live there again.

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In the photo, my wife is wearing the shirt of the political party we supported in those days. It was a heady time. We got rid of the ruling party; the perfect dictatorship, as Vargas Llosa called the PRI. We all celebrated. Now the situation is much, much worse and even the PRI feels like a decent alternative.

The priest with my wife is Don Jorge, the youngest uncle. He has a double doctorate from the University of Navarre. He opened my eyes to the whole question of the anthropic principle. He gave me a book on the subject, winning me over to the idea of the universe as creation. He is an amateur astrologer and cosmologist, a charming man who loves tea. We got on well.

The photo shows the inside of the house. It had white columns and a big flight of stairs. The best place in the house was the landing where we put the television. There was a sofa there. The ceiling was very high and there was a skylight. The floors were all wood.

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My father (the magazine editor and ANC activist) wrote a poem about 9/11 he called The Tottering Clowns. He wanted to say that in comparison to the outside estimate all the millions of people killed by the US or US proxies in wars since the Second World War, tragic as it was, the death of under 3,000 US citizens was underwhelming. It was the spectacular sight of the huge buildings falling that magnified the tragedy out of all proportion.

The Twin Towers

The twin towers
Of deathist mentality
Rage like a giddy clown
Claiming reality

Dirt and insects stamped
Onto the anthrax hole
Cleanliness next to
Anybody’s god, a cover
For the volcano of life

Let us awake to the
Light in the fire
On the unveiled muck
Of female beauty
And power

Let us dance
With the raging lusts
Until the growling face
Of our superficiality
Relaxes into a smile

Tony Hall

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The Tower, Rider-Waite

Symbolism

‘The Tower is commonly interpreted as meaning danger, crisis, sudden change, destruction, higher learning and liberation. In the Rider-Waite deck, the top of The Tower is a crown, which symbolizes materialistic thought being brought low.’

The lightning comes down and strikes the Tower. In doing so, the destruction reveals that even the mightiest of human structures (mental and physical) are never fully in alignment with the divine. Everything needs to be rebuilt, brought down, examined, thought through. Over and over again. The noosphere: ideas and thoughts built up powerfully over centuries and millennia seem to hold together in ways you do not understand, but they too are subject to sudden collapse. The vitality of life persists in spite of collapse, and divine reality imposes itself eventually.

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Can’t you feel the ripples?

There is a pool, still and black, on a cloudy morning. Throw a pebble into it. When the pebble hits the pool waves ripple out in circles from the point where the pebble hit the surface and fell through.

The pool is time. Pebbles thrown into water are like events in time. Most pebbles are very small and hardly raise a ripple. Big stones splash. The ripples that move into the future are invisible and unpredictable, but the ripples that move back through time are felt as chains of surfacing cause and effect. They feel like a plethora of coincidences and generate dreams and foreboding in the sensitive. The more coincidences we notice, the quicker we move towards that future event.

Seen in this way, it is not only the present that creates the future, but also the future. Whenever there is a sense of pre-destiny, and the universe seems to be talking to you one of two things could be happening. Either you are suffering from a delusion or schizophrenia, or something important is about to happen, good or bad and you feel it.

At the edge of World War is it possible that people feel as if they are floating silently, quickly, towards a waterfall, the cliff, the point of impact when it happened? Is that what you feel now? Are we on the edge of WWIII?

The twin towers were not beautiful.

I remember seeing them after they were built, in magazines. It seemed such a shame that they usurped the skyline, and so the Empire State. They were big boxy ugly buildings easy to generate in computer games like MS Flight Simulator. One critic described them as filing cabinets.

Did New Yorkers like them before 9/11? Weren’t there complaints when they were built? Horrible, money making slabs. Exercises in innovative, cost cutting cynicism. And, as it turned out, the design was shoddy. There was a fatal flaw. Conspiracy theories aside, they collapsed into heaps almost instantly, pancaking, killing thousands. The good ol’ Empire State would have stood its ground.

The tragedy that happened ascribes more quality and love towards the buildings than people actually felt for them.

Now, in retrospect, they have the appearance of tombstones.

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The Shock of Recognition

That day I wasn’t busy. It was unusual for me. In Mexico City, I spent an average of seven to eight hours in the car going to work, taking the kids to school, and back and taking my wife to her job. The kids’ school was in the south, we lived in the centre, She worked in the west and I worked in the west and in the north of the city.

While Ceci washed the dishes I decided to leave her alone and went to our bedroom. It was spacious and well lit. I lay down on the tight fitting embroidered cover of the king size bed. Because of the light it was difficult to nod off. But I’ve been around. I can sleep in most places. I quietened my breath and slowed down my breathing and came to the borders of sleep, stepping carefully over them. Flat on my back, the sunlight still visible through my eyelids, I began to dream.

I dreamed I was walking down the stairwell of a tall building. It was dark. There were no lights. I could hear a few frightened voices, but mainly I heard a scuffling and knocking in the dark.

A jump, a cut.

Scene 1

Walking down a dark stairwell, people in front of me.

Scene 2

Coming out onto a mezzanine. Looking out through tall arched metal structures.

Scene 3

Everyone is scared and looking up at the sky through the mezzanine glass. Some people are pointing. No one knows what it is. Someone shouts.

‘It hit the other building’

A terrible feeling of dread.

My mother is in the other building. ‘Oh my God. Mom. Mom.’

Scene 4

I am high in the air looking down. It is New York. I can see scaffolding and diggers. I see a neat square punched into the ground. Maybe 450 to 500 metres by 400 metres.

Scene 5

I am closer to the ground now, hovering. I look again. The square is full of water.

I look carefully. There is water there, a square pool.

.

Immediately after this dream I wake up and call my mother. ‘Are you alright Mom?’

She sounds tired. Have I woken her up. No, it’s about 11 am South African time. I rarely call, but this time I did.

I tell her my dream. I’m in a sort of funk. She thinks I am being eccentric. She reassures me she is OK. She thinks I am sublimating my worries about her cancer operation on the nose.

‘It’s not life threatening,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry.’

I detect an note of irritation.

We reassure each other and I hang up.

Two months later and, like everyone else, I watch the Twin Towers get hit by two planes, and collapse.

While the buildings are falling Juan phones me up to ask for my opinion. He’s my brother-in-law. In the government. And I say:

‘I have no idea, Juan, but things would be a lot better if the US stopped supporting Israel.’

It takes me a while to realise that my dream was premonitory. I explain it away, and try to ignore it; until I watch TV: the images of the superstructure appear, the blank square in New York, the pools commemorating the fallen.

Perhaps it’s a false memory. No, I did make that phone call to my mother. She would remember it. She said what she said. I said what I said. The dream happened. It happened when I said it happened. The phone call proves it.

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From Heroic Materialism – Kenneth Clark:

“But New York, after all, was made by men. It took almost the same time to reach its present condition as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals. At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one’s mind: that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of mammon—money, gain, the new god of the nineteenth century. So many of the same human ingredients have gone into its construction that, at a distance, it does look rather like a celestial city. At a distance. Come closer, and it’s not so good.”

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Babylon

Genesis 11

‘And the lord(s) said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

1. CUNEIFORM

You fear the Babylonian
and the builders of the Tower of Babel;
the people for whom nothing is impossible,
even revolution.

What are you so afraid of?
Carrion eaters!
Carnivores!
Predators!
Violators!
Vampires!

You sociopaths of the corporate Anglosphere,
and your flunkeys
in charge of architectures
of wealth extraction;
what are you so afraid of?

You are afraid of
your own demise!

You have no humanity to lose,
only your appetites.

You are afraid of
the magic of Babylon,
and the writing on the wall.
You have been judged
and found wanting.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!
You live in competition
with the ordinary people;
who grow, love,
eat, talk, play and share,
who are able to make do and rub along together.

Oh Babylon,
the first human civilization;
invented cuneiform,
invented history,
thought up some useful gods,
and developed science.

It was a civilization
fathered by incubi and succubi,
by impenetrable angels of inspiration,
called out of the void.

But to you, utilitarians,
users of the so-called Enlightenment,
all history is locked behind Gadamerian gates;

unopenable, amuletted shut,
forbidden,
an impossible acrostic
to the reductive, defiling minds
of the spoiled, selfish and cruel
hedonistic, materialistic
kingpins

Unrepentant hoodlums!
Soldiers!
School shooters!

---

2. TOWERS

And higher and higher and higher we climb.
The universal language
of mathematics and engineering
is complemented more and more by a symbology,
an underlying grammar,
Universally articulated
Holistic and subversive
Systems of meaning.
Rip the veil.
And, consequently, penetrate
into the Freudian psychopathy;
the motives and minds
of the biters,
the haters,
the hoarders,
bandits on the make!

Our language and ideas
(rooted, Marxists say, in shared material conditions)
are the real source of the unexpected power of Babel;
A worldwide upwelling of hope and constructivism,
and the reason why you fear.

The intuition of the exploiter
is frightened by the intuitions of the exploited.

What if they all got together?
What if the servants sharpen up the cutlery,
gang up, throw us out
and lock the doors?

Could it happen? How do we convince them not to do it?

Collectivity is the language of Babylon.
Builders acting all in concert.
Brick placed on brick.
The workers together.
People under the same bombs,
suffering the same wounds all across the world,
inflicted by the same weapons,
dropped by the same comprador scum.

Cast aside the arguments you follow;
written by paid jerks, paid to jerk you off.

Revelations
don’t come from robots
or the fashion statements of Yves Saint Laurent.

That’s not a damned diamond sparkling;
there is no value there,
but an infinite regression of screens
and a calculus of corruption.

Value comes from labour and creativity,
in the real logic of human needs and wants
not from “demand” and “supply.”

What we see,
we can undo!

No matter how much cement or steel,
no matter how many statues,
no matter how much language glue
WE can get rid of you!

When the ruling class battled Babel,
for a hundred generations they tried
to replace language
with euphemisms,
justifications,
mystifications,
ratiocinations,
and false attributions.

This is why
American-built tanks rolled over
and crushed the cuneiform tablets of Babylon,
and why they killed a million Iraqis
in cold blood.

It is because the worst of the worst were frightened
by the new Babylon emerging;
emerging across the world.

Frightened to death
of strong words,
written so clearly now
in the blood of Arab children.

---

Was it real, that premonition?

The unconscious is definitely linked to some kind of greater reality.

For a while I looked for pictures of the mezzanine of the Twin Towers. It was as I had seen it in my dream. The same shape of windows. Was the view from the mezzanine the same?

Then, some time later. The bare patch in Manhattan. That was the site they cleared before they built the new skyscraper.

I had to wait before I could understand the last part. The water. It didn’t make sense. I ignored it and left it out of the re-telling. Then I saw it. The last part of the dream; a square pool of water. It was the memorial pool.

But how was it that I foresaw this? I think someone was broadcasting in an agony of worry and fear and I picked up on their transmission. In twin experiments when identical twins are separated one feels what the other feels. My double. Another Hall resonating. The emotion rippling out in circular waves in all directions in time.

But if it was simply a broadcast, then why was the dream sliced into separate episodes like a film? Like an artifact? Edited. Clearly it was not a warning. The dream included the event itself, the period of reconstruction and the memorial.

I don’t think the tragedy of 3,000 outweighs the tragedy of the many million deaths the USA and global corporate capitalism is responsible for directly or indirectly since the war, but clearly the 11^th of September marked a tipping point in history, a shift.

They woke up the dragon.

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Phil Hall was born in South Africa into an ANC family with British, French, Austrian, and German roots. After his parents were exiled, they lived in East Africa and India before returning overland to the UK. In the UK he studied Russian and Spanish literature, politics, and economics. After graduating he specialised in descriptive and applied linguistics. Phil has lived and worked in Spain, the USSR, Mexico and the Gulf. Returning to London during the pandemic, he co-founded the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria (the Art of the Noteworthy) and the micropublisher, AN Editions.