Happy Mardi Gras, Y’all!
Part II (continued from yesterday)
After natural action and human inaction devastated New Orleans, many have eulogized the city, calling it one of the greatest in the world. But most have not told us why New Orleans is such a unique and important place.
Returning in April 2006, just seven months after Katrina, we found a city resilient. Visible evidence of destruction abounded but the city’s spirit remained undisturbed. How do you describe what makes up a city’s spirit or sense of place or character or whatever you may call it? Structures? Other trappings of culture such as art or food or music? People? The older a city is the more challenging a question this becomes. Striving to refrain from oversimplification, I can only say what characteristics define New Orleans for me.
The Crescent City is a place you can misbehave or allow eccentricities to blossom and have it viewed as commonplace as the city takes comfort in the fact that life cannot make sense. New Orleans is okay with life unadorned, at its lowest ebb, at its most absurd. No, it is not just okay with it but enfolds in fraternal grasp all peculiarities of human existence. Contradiction and paradox both find a home here. It is staying at the Old-World-style Hotel Monteleone to find the hotel hosting a Goth convention. It is understanding that most of the time you should forget the muggers and run from the police. It is jogging through the French Quarter only to have a man with purple hair, a stove-pipe hat, a monkey and a snake look at you like YOU are crazy. It is – as we saw so tragically in 2005 – living below sea level in a hurricane alley.
New Orleans exudes a form of pessimism both shocking and recognizably human. The city has always lived close to death and frailty and poverty and has been subject to disease and other ravages of nature, invasion – both hostile and friendly – by many nations and cultures, economic collapse, racial strife, each catastrophe adding yet another layer of complexity to a culture that is forever beguiling, sexy, nebulous. One New Orleans writer talked about how the city is so comfortable with death and decay and how that perspective shaped its character. As he put it, New Orleanians believe in the occupied cross. Maybe that is why so many people chose to stay in the city following Katrina despite the destruction. The rest of the world could only see death but many New Orleans residents just saw it as the reality of life. As one local writer perfectly summed it up, “If your porch falls off, close the door.”
For those who have only experienced the city through the haze of a weekend drinking binge on Bourbon Street, you have never been to New Orleans. You will have future opportunities to find the real Big Easy, I believe. If the city continues to resist the hopeful optimism that is being heaped upon it the world over, the cities spirit may persist to entice countless future generations into its languid embrace.
Wherever I am, strains of Dixieland jazz act as a Siren’s call eliciting a deep yearning to return to New Orleans. The city makes no secret of the important role voodoo and other dark arts have played throughout the city’s history. Am I under a spell? To this vagabond, those seductive, enigmatic shores along the Mississippi remain, in a word, bewitching.