For the second year the date of awful remembrance is approaching. The date that, for all of us alive today, will never be just an ordinary date. September 11th is coming around again.

But the anniversary this year is very different than last year’s.

For one thing, we have fought a big war in Iraq – are still fighting that war – a war that we would not have fought had 9/11 never happened.

But on the other hand, this year’s memorializing will also be different because we are much further from that nightmare morning in 2001. For most of us those horrible events are less present than they were a year ago. The intensity has faded. And the memories of 9/11 are becoming…simply…memories.

The form of the memorial to be built on the site of the World Trade Center is going to start taking shape very soon. This fall, a competition jury will announce a handful of finalists and then a winner from among the 5200 entries that were submitted over the summer from all over the world.

But before that winner is named I think it’s useful to have a conversation about what memorials are supposed to be. Why do we humans need to do this, and do it in so many different ways? Why this age-old universal impulse of cultures and their artists to recall the sacrifice of kings and warriors and victims.

So much of art, from the beginning, has been inspired by that impulse.

Whether it's the epic poem about Gilgamesh, the fallen Babylonian hero king; or the great Egyptian pyramids; or the numberless paintings and pieces of music inspired by the life and death of Christ; or the grieving widower's mausoleum that is the Taj Mahal; or a poem by William Butler Yeats that I happen to like a lot, called "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death":

...A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death...

Artists make memorials in all sorts of ways. Including, sometimes powerfully and always ubiquitously, in the form of popular songs. When I was a little kid, I remember being absolutely fascinated by the horror and the grief in old tunes like "Clementine," the apology of a man who let his daughter drown, or "Tom Dooley," the murderer who's about to hang.

As a teenager I was always struck by memorial pop songs, even when they seemed manufactured and treacly, when I didn't really like them -- like Dion's "Abraham Martin & John" in 1968:

“Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill,
With Abraham, Martin and John”

And Don McLean's "American Pie" in 1971.

“I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
So…Bye-bye, Miss American Pie…”

I remember the lyrics to memorial songs more than I do songs from any other genre. And if I remember them, then I guess they're doing their jobs: remembering is what memorials of any kind aim to make you do.

Like Bruce Springsteen's album The Rising, which came out last summer. I still find myself thinking of the heartbroken awe at the firefighters' grace and heroism in the song, "Into the Fire."

In this coming week I expect I’ll find myself thinking of it again.

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