And Not A Drop To Drink

"How deep is time?", asks a character in Don DeLillo's 1997 tome-of-the-age UNDERWORLD. The cover of the novel frames an eerie photograph of the World Trade Center towers from a dark and prophetic distance, across an expanse of garbage. And now one year has passed since the soul of another of the world's great and mysterious cities was asking the question in alternate terms, with suddenly deadly and serious stakes. How deep?, indeed. The water rose and rose, the world watched as the Yacht Club was swallowed in flames, an irony deficiency once again - much as in the wake of 9/11 - gripped every pair of eyes and ears as America's poor were suddenly, miraculously visible; and a woman who shares my genes was imminently pregnant in Touro Hospital as my mother and I helplessly waited for news of her very fate. It seemed that the public conversation would evolve to what the conditions of creation native to American poverty truly are. It seemed that James Agee and Walker Evans were actually onto something when they set out to document Southern tenant farmers years before Hitler would poison the century. The conversation, it turned out, was not to be; rather, a nation more concerned with the emotional stability of Jennifer Anniston and the auto-tuned vocal prospects of Paris Hilton reigned supreme. The poor remained. The poor remain.

And what of New New Orleans? Does walking down Pirate's Alley still resonate with the ghosts of a devil-may-care Bill Faulkner? Has Walker Percy's Kierkegaardian notion of what realitizes human beings - what makes us all present to each other - been proven true, the question of whether total catastrophe is the only possibility that we as a species retain for compassionate and outward-seeking perception? Do we waste time with politicizing our gestural futility? I believe during this week our duty is simple and necessary. We privatize New Orleans, its mythos and wonder and ancient sadnesses. We change the meanings and senses of words like "privatize" and "industry."

My private New Orleans - the city where my sister and brother-in-law and nephew live, the nightscape that has captivated me from my first chocolate milk shake at Camelia Grill to the arthritic dread in the pit of my stomach that invariably overwhelmed me whenever I flew out of a city that seems to welcome doom with an open heart, a city that can and must digest that doom and continue to inspire the secret poets of the shadows and the silent impressionists who sleep alone on wooden floors in the Quarter - can never drown. We must all privatize this special place, make room in the inner spaces within us: make room to rebuild with an industriousness of spirit we may not have known possible. Let us not point fingers at FEMA for a moment and, like Coleridge in his Mariner's Rhyme, fill ourselves with the poetry of thirstiness, no matter the costs.