NEW YORK - One afternoon last February, I came out of painting class with the usual assignment: Show up next week with five new paintings, any subject, any style. It was a beautiful day, unseasonably warm, and suddenly I realized that I wanted to paint the flag.

At first, I rationalized this desire. Jasper Johns, the most prominent of all flag painters, was one of my favorite artists. Since I was working on basic technique, why
not copy a master? I found a 3-by-5-foot flag, with nicely stitched stars. I took it home, hung it up and prepared a small canvas.

As I began to paint, it became clear that my interest in the flag was not academic. In the aftermath of 9/11, many people took comfort in the flag. I did not. Since that first, horrible day, when flags went on sale in the streets of New York, when I saw teen-age girls in Stars-and-Stripes headscarves, I had been besieged by fear.

This wasn't fear of a terrorist attack - God knows we all feared an event that we were individually helpless
to prevent or avoid - but fear, justified by subsequent acts of our government (and specifically John Ashcroft's vengefully repressive Justice Department), that the display of Stars and Stripes was evidence of a rapid, instinctive reactionary shift in American sentiment.

If anything - this despite my grief and outrage over the attacks - I was more afraid on Sept. 12 than on the day later immortalized by those emergency numerals 9/11.
It was time to really look at the flag, to see if I could really see it for what it is meant to represent: freedom, liberty, possibility. In painting Old Glory, I hoped to discover that post-9/11 flag-waving was not proof of a terror-induced political and cultural shift to the right, but a broadening of the definition of what it means to love America.

I wanted to believe what the choreographer Paul Taylor, who has often used patriotic images (however ambiguously), told a New York Times writer about all the flags flying all over New York in the wake of Sept. 11: "When you used to see a flag on a car, it usually meant a redneck. Now everybody's doing it. It's kind of nice!"

Lost in the intense concentration and mind-freeing meditation that painting allows, I was overwhelmed by memories of that terrifying Tuesday in September, and the fear and sadness of the weeks that followed.

Some images stay with me even now, and perhaps they will never leave me. The look on the face of the Irish-born carpenter who stood at the barricades on 14th Street on Sept. 11, his hand on his heart, fighting for words as he told strangers around him of 400 fellow workers he feared dead at the World Trade Center.

How the wind would suddenly shift, and the acrid, metallic smell and taste of death, that horrifying gray-brown snow of pulverized bodies and buildings, would descend upon me. The way that sirens, which had once been Manhattan's white noise, could suddenly stop conversation like a death knell.

The Muslim cab driver, kneeling in the dead of night Sept 13, on a prayer rug pointed toward Mecca. Worried for his safety, I lingered, out of sight, and when he stood and saw me, I wished him peace. He reached out and clasped my hands between his own.

In the months after Sept. 11, I heard a lot of talk of the meaningless of our lives and work after all that death, all that suffering. Specifically, I heard stories of artists who questioned why they should bother making art. "What's the point of my work," was the common refrain, "when so many people have died?"

Not long after the repressive Taliban regime had been defeated, Afghans went about the task of restoring their country's cultural life. Music, which had been banned under the Taliban, rang through the streets. The magnificent third- and fifth-century Buddhist statues of Bamian had been crushed to dust in March 2001, and the mullahs had destroyed thousands of paintings, films, photographs, drawings, books, statues, musical recordings, relics, archaeological sites and other Afghan treasures. But after the Taliban was defeated, hundreds of cultural objects came out of the woodwork.

Amid terrible repression and suffering, under threat of being Toyota-trucked to the stadium and murdered by Taliban thugs, Afghans, many of them artists, had hidden their country's cultural treasures. At considerable personal risk, a leading Afghan painter, Mohammad Yousof Asefi, used watercolors to doctor 80 oil paintings that were threatened by the Taliban, who considered them blasphemous. People had written poems in Nazi concentration camps, too. Had we Americans grown so decadent that even after Sept. 11, we couldn't see art for what it is - the soul's food, which keeps the spirit of a people alive, even (and perhaps especially) in the face of death?

"Write as if you were dying," Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life. "At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"

In the end, I came to terms with the flag. Created, according to lore, more than 250 years ago by a seamstress working in a folk tradition, the flag is the symbol of our tribe. After the devastation of Sept. 11, a tribal instinct was unleashed among us, and the flag became a locus for grief about the missing, the dead, and the devastated; a gesture of solidarity with those who labored to find bodies in the rubble; an attempt to make sense of a desperately senseless act of violence; an expression of defiance in the face of fear and loathing for those who had attacked us, and would attack again.

As Johns himself noted, the flag is a ready symbol; in the post 9/11 context, it was an easy image from which to begin to construct a visual response to a horrific, but undeniably visual, event. For all the trauma of the actual attack, and for all the suffering of family, friends and residents of Lower Manhattan, there was the added terror of images emblazoned in our psyches through repeated viewings in the media: the towers struck with planes, billowing smoke, collapsing into dust and twisted steel.

With such harrowing pictures in our mind's eye, is it any wonder that the flag, to which we are conditioned from childhood to pledge allegiance, became the symbol of our collective sorrow, our shared resolve? The flag became a blanket with which we tucked ourselves to bed at night, a charm against nightmares about incinerated buildings, Osama bin Laden and his unfathomable followers, our unburied dead.

In early December 2001, I got a call from the singer-songwriter Steve Poltz. He was coming to town for a gig at the Mercury Lounge on the Lower East Side; could we get together and catch up? He told me about a song he had just composed.

"It's the most honest thing I've ever written," he said. I told him I couldn't wait to hear it at the Mercury show. "I'm not sure I can play it in New York," and when I asked why, he sang it to me over the phone. The first line, sung sweet and low, was: I wish I had a medical career.

I thought about those early hours after the planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, how useless we all felt. Poltz had felt useless, too, and then he had written a song. He wasn't useless. Art isn't useless. It's what moves us, survives us, defines us, immortalizes us. It's what makes all the pain of existence bearable; it's what we leave to the future to say, We were here. A graveyard in Flanders, Belgium, is where 368 World War I-era Americans are buried, but it's John McCrae's poem that gives them life:

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Less than two months after the terrorist attacks, Steve Poltz played that song at the Mercury Lounge. The audience, which had been rowdy, was suddenly hushed as he sang of his yearning to rid the world of hate. I looked around the room, and there were tears in people's eyes.