In Canada, we call it Remembrance Day. So when Itravelled to New York City a couple of weeks ago, and watched thecelebrations of Veteran’s Day, I spent the timeremembering.

On the morning of November 11, I revisited Ground Zero, a placewhere I had stood more than two and a half yearsbefore, pondering its meaning and thinking about thenumber zero.

Zero is the point on the Cartesian system ofcoordinates (0,0) by which all other coordinates aredefined: that is, you can always find and define yourplace by knowing the location of Zero. Before RenéDescartes developed this famed contribution to thecanon of Mathematics, many cultures actively eschewedZero; it was, in their estimation, an angry harbingerof the Void, a merry trickster that turned logicalmathematical systems uncomfortably on their heads, theproverbial “wrench-in-the-works” that defied otherwiselogical calculation.

The Egyptians and Greeks were soterrified of Zero that they simply ignored it. Thewestern mathematical tradition had to wait for thebrilliant minds of India and the Middle East — mindsmore cosmically attuned, more anxious, perhaps, tofind God in numbers — to come to terms with Zero andkneel before its central place in our existence. Thus,when René Descartes placed Zero at the centre ofwestern mathematics, he forever changed the way wethink: Zero, then, was the measure of all things andof no things.

Like most young people, I had learned about zero inschool. And like many young people, I toyed with itsunique mathematical properties, its brainteasers, itsparty tricks. But overtime, I did not give Zero much thought. But then, suddenly,on March 12, 2002, sometime after 9:30 p.m.,the power of Zero — its immense philosophical andsocial potency — was made perfectly clear to me. Onthat night, a night that was cloudless and starfilled, I stood at the edge of the former World TradeCentre site, now a brightly lit void called GroundZero.

I arrived that night, at the edge of Ground Zero,quite unexpectedly. I had been walking with my wifeand a friend I had known for more than 30 yearsalong the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown. Myold friend was a sculptor, a latter-day bohemian livingamong the artists of Brooklyn. From the late sixtiesto the early eighties we lived just across the streetfrom each other, in a town just south of Boston.

Wewere, generally speaking, products of late Cold WarAmerica, of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The timesand place we inhabited made my friend an artist and mean expatriate teacher. For my generation, the Cold Warwas Ground Zero: that is, we had, in mathematicalterms, found our respective points in the Cold Warcoordinate system. Everything — every idea, everypolitical position, every subject taught in school,every international and national news item — was acoordinate on the Cold War Cartesian scale. The ColdWar Ground Zero gave all other coordinates meaning andpurpose.

But the meaning of the Cold War Ground Zerowas ultimately a fictional construct because, likeZero, Ground Zero itself meant nothing. Its meaningemerged in the words and actions of its storytellers:its politicians, its thinkers and its writers.

On that night in March, somewhere in Chinatown, as wewalked among the shops and people, we noticed twotowers of blue light shooting out above the buildingsto our right. The lights were the new memorial toSeptember 11, ghostly memory traces of the TwinTowers.

Truly, I had no desire to see Ground Zero. Iloathed the chest pounding patriotism, the aggressiveretaliation, the reflexive action, the frighteningreminder that chaos lurked at every corner.

And yet,with no real thought, and without saying much, webegan to walk towards the silence and serenity of theblue lights. And then, somehow, there we were,standing on the edge of Ground Zero. The intensehalogen lighting made day out of night, and the siteitself seemed perplexingly neutral, not speakingpatriotic chants or wailing tearful laments orproclaiming a brave new world of absolute good andevil. It was, simply enough, a gaping wound: horrible,frightening, grotesque. But it did not have meaning;in fact, it was the absolute absence of meaning. Itwas Zero.

For some time, I watched the clean up effort andconsidered the blue phantom memory traces to theright, shooting up infinitely into the night sky. Ibegan to wonder if the ramifications of the event werealready larger than the event itself — that is, thenew Cartesian scale was emerging. All politicians, allschool curriculum, all social programs, all futureplanning, would now be measured by their coordinateposition from Ground Zero; potential terrorists andtheir suspected fellow travellers would now supplantcloset communists as the bogey man.

I looked at the acres of rubble and makeshift roadsand the adjacent buildings with scorched and scarredfaces, but still I saw no meaning. As a teacher, I hadspent much time discussing and debating with mystudents the myriad issues that have welled up as aconsequence of the events of September 11. Thestudents all believed they understood the meaning ofthe event. They heard the call of good and evil, everynight on CNN. We were just so certain when we watchedthe images on television that we understood itsmeaning.

This month, more than two years later, I stood at Ground Zero, remembering again. And what was the story now?

In Iraq, on that same Veteran’s Day, that sameRemembrance Day, Lance Cpl. Justin D. Reppuhn, 20; 2ndLt. James P. Blecksmith, 24; Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Burns,20; Staff Sgt. Theodore S. Holder II, 28; Staff Sgt.Sean P. Huey, 28; Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger, 20; Cpl.Peter J. Giannopoulos, 22; and Cpl. Theodore A.Bowling, 25 were killed.