New Orleans
Philadelphia, PA 8 September 2005
New Orleans:
When Bad Things Happen to Good Places
A thought on the way to another thought ...
A Buddhist monk will tell you, if you ask, that, on a journey of a hundred miles, the ninety mile marker is just about half way. By that reckoning the halfway point in the hurricane season is probably sometime in October. So, the urgency to make sure that there is never another bureaucratic debacle could not be greater.
And now some thoughts on the Crescent City...
I have had an unspoken yearning to visit New Orleans for a long time now. The city has been one of those places that has tugged at me for much of my life. What year was it? 1969? What year was it that I sat in a dark, rather seedy theater in downtown Baltimore and watched Easy Rider for the first time? The way Peter Fonda’s character so methodically rolled those hundred dollar bills. Were they hundreds, or twenties? I forget now. Anyway, proceeds from a drug deal gone well. And how carefully he secreted them in the plastic tube in his gas tank. Then he and Dennis Hopper headed off, not north by northwest, but east by southeast, on their Harleys. East and south to New Orleans. Even before it was “The Big Easy”, there was an easiness to it. A longing, no a beckoning, to the sensuous. An easiness that said, enjoy what you have now because the trip to cemetery will be a lonely one for you, the rest of us, though, will enjoy the music and the good company and the fact that we are alive.
Every city it seemed then had its little piece of New Orleans. I guess in New York it was Times Square. In San Francisco it was Broadway in North Beach. Baltimore had its famed "Block". Each one fueled by booze and half whispered promises never fulfilled. But in my imagination anyway, New Orleans was different. From my reading and the occasional glimpses I would see in magazines or on television, New Orleans was different – it was/is real. The music, and the dancing, and the food and all the excesses of the French Quarter – they were real. Not the Potemkin Villages I saw in those other cities. Not a sliver of Eros that calcifies and makes one uneasy, uncomfortable in a fantasy world tinged with the brutal, and hardened by its falseness and pretension. No, it was and is a real city, with an awareness of its own mortality etched in the faces of every native son and daughter who walked its streets, umbrella in hand, in time to the music that pervaded the place.
That New Orleans is not here any more. Another bit of unfinished business in my life that will remain unfinished for now at any rate.
What occurs to me now is what the ghosts of New Orleans would be saying. It seems to me that this is a city with the thinnest membrane between the two worlds. A city with a history that whispers loud enough for many of its folk to hear clearly without much effort. I wonder what they would be whispering, if there were anyone there to hear.
My guess is that they would be whispering:
Don’t fret now. The city has been washed away many times before. Each time they said would be the last time. We built it again, though. The levees will break again because they always do. The river and the lake will only give so much to us, and then they take back what is theirs.
They might be whispering:
Don’t fret now, child. You live on borrowed time just like we did. We built the city up on the bones of our ancestors. You’ll build the city on our bones. It’s how it is.
They might be whispering:
Don’t fret now. And don’t lose your nerve either. You have chosen to live on a patch of earth beneath the sea. Poseidon is your landlord. He is not a stern one, as landlords go, but he will insist on his payment in due time. Until then, bring into this new city as much joy and sadness, despair and hope, body and soul as you can. Poseidon is not a stern landlord, as landlords go, but he insists that all who live beneath his sea live their lives true to their natures, and true to themselves.
And finally these ghosts might whisper:
Don’t fret now, child. We have left our bones for you. Use them well. Someday you will leave yours for those who come later. They will need them to build the city all over again. It’s just how it is.
That’s what they might be whispering.
Don’t fret now…