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Posted on by Dave Bonta

My life as a landlubber

This entry is part 15 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m still reading Paul Zweig, and trying to get back into the spirit of writing poems in response. The following prose piece was sparked by the fourth poem in the second section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, entitled “The Archaeology.” I’ve been in a bit of a confessional mood lately…

1.
My first God was a lake in Maine with a soft mud bottom & plenty of leeches. I am too young to swim, but I love watching my mother, so slow on land, slice efficiently through the small waves while seeming merely to recline on her right side. The lake is large & not to be trifled with. In the winter, it turns to stone, my first desert: a white lid for the dreamless eyes of fish.

2.
I am four and a half. My mother is hugely pregnant, & my older brother & I decide to play a practical joke: I hide myself in the deep grass on the back slope above the pond, while Steve bangs in through the kitchen door: “David’s drowning!” Mom rushes past me, frantic, calling my name. I leap to my feet: “Here I am!” She’s furious.

Later, I sit inside staring numbly out at the grass, wanting to be missed again like that, wishing I could still be hidden there, curled up like a comma in that green sea as the wind moves through.

3.
Oceans with stone beaches, thundering surf. In an old black-and-white photo, we wander at low tide past the iconic cliffs at the Bay of Fundy. Fifteen years later, in Taiwan, Steve & I find ourselves on another beach dotted with stout, wave-gouged menhirs. He swims out to a small island, then hollers back: “Come see the geysers! Hurry, it’s spectacular!”

A typhoon is swirling somewhere off to the east, raising mountainous waves. Somehow I fight my way out, & it’s worth the effort: smoothly sculpted sandstone as if from the desert southwest, undermined by the sea & pocked with hollows just the right size to lie down in, imagining I’m St. Brendan innocently beached on a whale’s barnacled back. Its blowhole shoots spray high into the air with every wave, each time giving rise to the same rainbow.

After a while I hear faint voices from the shore: “Come back! Come back!” I try to obey, but the current is too strong & pulls me sideways, out to sea. My strength quickly dissipates; I go under once, twice, my brother reaches me just before I go down the dreaded third time. “Stop swimming,” he says, “& stand up in the water – there’s a shelf of rock we can rest on.” I quell my panic & feel for the rock with my feet, my chin just barely above the troughs. For the first time, I learn to space my breaths. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he shouts in my ear. “Put an arm around my neck, but don’t strangle me. If I paddle & we both kick, we can get to shore.” It works.

Back in the car, we marinate quietly in our separate swamps of self-disgust: “I would’ve died without his help.” “I almost killed him.”

4.
Then, I was too skinny to be buoyant; now, I’m unsinkable. Adrift in my skin boat – hide stretched taut across the ribs, the sea on the wrong side – I float through my days.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eating a tomato

I wake at 2:00 a.m. with a bad taste in my mouth, and I think I know what it is: it’s me. That slightly metallic taste of ego. It mingles with last night’s eggplant curry, which was a culinary disaster. I have been cooking too quickly, eating too quickly, I have been much too quick to speak my mind. Why such haste? It’s as if we’re shrews or blind moles, daydreaming about slowness and enlightenment in between our frantic gropes and gulps. Fortunately, I have a very forgiving digestive system – but perhaps it would be better if I didn’t. It might force me to slow the hell down.

I remember as a child how I pictured my insides: a great, dark cavern below the heart and the gracefully flapping lungs. The throat ends in a sort of chute, out of which food and drink drizzle or plop into the swamp below. I don’t know when or how this image originally took shape in my imagination, but I remember clinging to it in a half-unconscious sort of way well into my teenage years. The fact that it was incompatible with what I had learned about human anatomy in school was not in itself enough to banish it; I had to bring it to the surface of my consciousness and reason it away, just as I had driven out ghosts and under-the-bed monsters years before.

Now I wonder if we don’t dishonor and diminish the imagination to enslave it to our daytime egos in such a manner. In a conversation last night before bed, my linguist brother reminded me that the root meaning of “tantra” is “trick.” The idea that there might be educational value in training our minds in conscious self-deception, though fundamental to vernacular religious traditions the world over, seems almost incomprehensible to those of us accustomed to thinking of the mind as an innocent mirror. The religions of the powerful – the traditions whose central focus has become the perpetuation of power – school us in reduction, in the wonder-sucking necromancy of algebra. Something either is or it isn’t, Parmenides intones. Do good and eschew evil, the sacred texts say, making stern necessity out of virtue.

In my freshman year of college, I plowed through a lengthy tome on Daoist cosmology that simultaneously attracted and repelled me. It devoted many chapters to detailing the Daoist microcosm of the body circa the first millenium A.D., and I remember being fascinated by the notion of such an elaborate system of visualizations based on nothing but idealistic desire. I mean, it’s not as if the ancient Chinese didn’t have good models for the way the body worked. The relative effectiveness of technologies such as Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, taiqi and martial arts – all ultimately derived from the same stream of popular religion that spawned Daoist microcosmology – surely testify to the power of the trained imagination, I thought. But I found the focus on physical immortality very off-putting, perhaps because it clashed with my own, Western tendency to devalue the concrete in favor of the abstract.

In any case, it was hard not to be charmed by the culinary route to immortality advocated by popular Daoism: one first eliminates meat, then grains, then vegetables, then finally even liquids until one learns to subsist on nothing but air. Though this might sound like a recipe for anorexia, it’s hard to see how it could lead to that in practice, given the Daoist emphasis on corporeality. Isn’t anorexia nervosa pretty much a Western disease, deriving from our endemic devaluation of the body and the earth? Daoism simply promotes the endearingly goofy idea that the air itself has nutritive value, if only we were sensitive enough to appreciate it. I suspect that the real effect of a Daoist diet would be to train one in greater attention to the sensual qualities of everything one ingests, and in learning to distinguish what the body really wants from what the grasping ego thinks it wants. And lately I’ve been hearing about new research by Western nutritionists suggesting that regular fasts might indeed form a vital part of a healthy diet.

It seemed to me then and still seems to me now a kind of blasphemy against life to try and prolong it indefinitely, but isn’t that what all the world religions are about – abolishing death? Or am I being unfairly reductionist to issue such a sweeping indictment? I do like the teachings about purifying or spiritualizing consumption that are near the center of so many traditions: the Christian communion, the Jewish Pesach, the North American rituals of inhalation – smoke of tobacco, cedar, sage.

I sleep late, break my nightly fast with coffee as usual. Sitting in the sun on my front porch, I think of Vicente Aleixandre’s poem about the old man slowly nibbled away by sunlight. My maternal grandfather attained that level of sweetness in his old age, I believe, though through some cruel trick of fate his death was preceded by several days of agony. I remember last night’s news about the death of my friend Tom’s indomitable mother-in-law: she died peacefully at home, he said, ending her life with a sigh.

I shut my notebook and walk around the house, figuring on putting off eating for a couple more hours at least, but then I spot a ripe cherry tomato on one of the volunteer vines twining through the butterfly bush. To me, a cherry or grape tomato has the perfect proportion of firm flesh to juice. This one’s skin is encased in a thin film of dew, and for the fraction of a second before my teeth close around it, my mouth fills with the pungent, feral redolence common to all the Solanaceae, from jimsonweed to belladonna. Then its blood-colored mucilage mingles with my saliva: such acid sweetness! Grace isn’t something you say, I think, it’s just what happens. And here’s another one. Oh taste and see.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Migration

Quarter till six. I’m sitting outside with my coffee and a brand new pocket notebook, in which I am writing the following words: A jet crosses the chest of Orion, dragging its roar half a sky behind it. Fog forms around me as I write, guessing at the lines, unsure of whether I have started this notebook with black or blue ink. Trucks are loud in the valley — I try to determine from the quality of the sound whether or not they are driving through thick fog.

Last night, I dreamed about finding my missing set of keys — they had been right where I usually keep them, and had simply been hiding from me each time I looked there before. Now, they were ready to be found. But other things remain lost. It seems that I am part of a group of pilgrims about to set off for New Orleans on foot, but I want to bow out and go by car instead because my glasses are in such bad shape. One of the lenses keeps popping out, and I’m afraid that if the frame breaks I won’t be able to get it repaired on the road. Even in the dream, I realize the foolishness of this anxiety. But I am quite nearsighted, and always feel terribly vulnerable without glasses.

We’re following one of New Orleans’ cemetery angels come to life, who is searching for her missing thumb and thinks that it might have been ‘borrowed’ by a hitchhiker desperate to get out of the city. Our plan: to comb the shoulders of every major road and highway between here and there. When we find the thumb, the angel will turn back to stone and will return to her station, directing traffic at the center of a vast necropolis. For now, she seems human enough — in fact, she has a bit of a pout. I want to find out if her wings smell of mildew, but she keeps her distance.

As the light strengthens, my handwritten words get smaller and straighter, falling into line. The stars fade. I hear the “wick wick wick” of migrating wood thrushes dropping down into the trees to rest and forage. They have thousands of miles yet to go. It makes me sad to think I won’t hear them sing again until next May.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Katrina links: the big picture

Here’s a brief selection of links to some blog posts that have helped me grapple with the aftermath of Katrina in the last few days.

Two Cabbies in New Orleans, from the marvelous garden, is my favorite appreciation of the city so far. Never mind all the rampant corruption, endemic poverty, police brutality – it’s through stories like this that you learn the true flavor of a place. And in an update yesterday, Patry reported that she and her husband have made contact with one of the cabbies they befriended.

“The state of the city, and the number of the dead is far worse than anything you see on TV,” he said, his voice briefly cracking. “But I feel grateful to be alive, grateful that my children are safe. People have shown us so much love.”

“What do you need?” my husband asked.

Briefly, Chris faltered, his needs so clearly overwhelming. “I try not to think about that,” he said, attempting a laugh. “Because we need just about everything.”

Then he told us how his son had broken down in a particularly vulnerable moment.

“Where will we go? What will we do now?” the son asked.

And Chris responded, “We’ll be like Job. We’ll praise God more than ever and he’ll triple our bounty.”

Artist and former New Orleanian James W. Bailey wonders, Is America Really Prepared to Allow the Hoodoo Culture of New Orleans to be Destroyed by Hurricane Katrina? (thanks to Marja-Leena for the link). Black Cat Bone is an enjoyable new blog whose mission is

to burn the flesh off modern art to get down to the raw bone of what’s really happening with art in American society. Black Cat Bone is a free road trip through the wild, chaotic and blissful world of the contemporary visual arts and originates with a down-home Blues-based root philosophy born in the Delta of Mississippi. Broadcast live on the Internets on a daily basis from just outside our nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., Black Cat Bone utilizes advanced digital technology designed, engineered and manufactured by the Devil to tap into the cosmic positive powers of Hoodoo to better serve its world-wide audience…

The most linked-to essay in the blogosphere right now is all about Being Poor. I hope that its popularity, and the passion evinced in its lengthy message string, are signs of the start of a national conversation on poverty and class, and are not just a flash in the pan.

Maria of alembic has written a great screed on Blinders.

For the social narcissist there can be no such thing as the working poor. It is inconceivable that people should be working and not have anything to show for it. For the social narcissist, it is better to think of the poor as dependent on the government or charity rather than not having a living wage. This way, the social narcissist doesn’t have to be accountable for his or her part in this distribution of the garden’s yield … or, to bring it home to the backyard, the possibility that our little paradise in Marin is not exactly a realization of our pure will in shaping the landscape. Better to feel sorry for the poor than to see how we are implicated in their plight…

Should we succumb to anger, though? Does anger ever really solve anything? After a couple briefer attempts to explain himself, Dale of mole lets loose with what he calls My official Buddhist sermon on the subject. I found little to disagree with, surprisingly enough.

Finally, Pica at Feathers of Hope asks, What Can I Do? I like her answers.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The work of enlightenment

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White shooting star or flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris). Note the bumblebee stealing nectar from the base of one of the flowers

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The bread dough after it has been punched down – the primordial origin of the fabled knuckle sandwich

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Landscape with dried tomatoes (a live shot, not a collage). The blood of the tomato is evaporated as an offering to the sun

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Four nights of dream

I dream of beaten fields, whole landscapes cleansed of desire & pressed flat by an enormous iron. I start awake, not as if from a nightmare but from the ingestion of something too heavy, too incompatible with dreaming. I stumble downstairs & scan the latest headlines: people cutting holes in their attics, standing in water up to their necks. Whole towns smashed to rubble. There are rumors of bodies floating through the streets.

The next night, I dream of meeting my fetch, who resembles me in every way except that he seems to be a bit of a pedant & is not at all good-looking. We join forces to beat up my older brother, who is greatly offended. I wake to stories of gunfire & looting & the president surveying the damage from 20,000 feet.

In the following night’s dream, my nine-year-old niece gets a visit from herself as a five-year-old. They exchange spiteful words & withdraw to a safe distance, glaring. I wake & read about rapes and near-riots in the Superdome, mothers carrying dead children, children standing watch over dead grandparents, helpless to stop the bloating & the grim ministrations of rats.

Early the next morning, I find myself kneeling in my parent’s dining room beside the ghost of a young girl who grows steadily more visible as we talk. I casually touch the black skin of her arm. She feels solid, alive, she giggles & chatters like any five-year-old. “What is your name?” I ask softly. She pretends to mishear. “Her name is Lucy,” she says, holding up her blond doll. “I’m going to go stay in her house now. She lives in a big ol’ mansion on a hill with columns out front.”

My mother watches anxiously from the sofa. “Were those your parents we saw disappearing in the middle of the field?” she wonders. A look of panic crosses the girl’s face. She grips my hand tightly, & I wake. I get a shower & sit outside in a folding canvas chair under the stars, taking small sips of black coffee, then tilting my head all the way back. The Pleiades stand high overhead; Mars glimmers to their right, a bloodshot eye. Meteors flare one after the other & quickly gutter in the dark waters, whichever route they take toward the horizon. I sit breathing in the honeysuckle fragrance of wild tobacco – also called white shooting-star, after the shape of the blossoms – & listen to the crickets stuttering toward dawn.
__________

My Paul Zweig reading project is, I hope, only temporarily stalled. I have been following the news closely, for once, and busying myself with many distractions. The title here plagiarizes Natsume Soseki’s 1908 collection of linked stories translated as Ten Nights of Dream. I’d love to hear from readers who may have had similarly disturbing dreams over the past week.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Arms and the poet (cont’d)

For the first part of this chain of quotes, see here.

The Eskimo song duel is famous for its disputative function in a cultural context where normally the airing of grievances was forbidden….

The song duel owes much of its effectiveness to the ambiguity created by the fact that the single event can at all times be interpreted in two ways: it is at once an artistic festive event and an airing of grievances. An opponent can at any time be said to be doing two things: composing humorous songs and hurling accusations and insults. It should be emphasized that the singer is in fact doing both things at once; it is not a case of pretending to have artistic fun while making veiled attacks. Both aspects of the performance are important, real and inter-connected. The ambiguity of the event itself is compounded by the humorous key: participants are constrained at all times to behave as if all statements in the duel are ironic. At the most essential level, the duality of the event allows the community to continue to function after the duel, since the loser of the duel (if there is one) has not been publicly declared guilty of any serious transgressions. The loser is guilty simply of having performed less well than his opponent in a song contest, and any accusations leveled against him were only ironic.

Songs were of great importance to the Eskimo, and the duelling song was just one of a wide genre. Orpingalik, a Netsilik shaman, expressed the significance of song as an integral part of his culture in a reply to [Knud] Rasmussen’s question regarding the number of songs he had composed:

How many songs I have I cannot tell you. I keep no count of such things. There are so many occasions in one’s life when a sorrow is felt in such a way that the desire comes to sing; and so I know that I have many songs. All my being is song, and I sing as I draw breath.

Good dueling songs – and in fact entire duels – were immortalized. While Rasmussen gathered some of his songs first hand, many of them were sung to him by people who had learned them from their elders. These immortalized songs were occasionally sung in other contexts, providing entertainment and amused reminiscence on informal occasion. A performance in a song duel, therefore, was a contribution to an important and extensive art form.

– Penelope Eckert and Russell Newmark, “Central Eskimo Song Duels: A Contextual Analysis of Ritual Ambiguity,” Ethnology vol. xix, no. 2

By far the most important social context in which zamil poetry is composed [by Yemenis] is in the dispute mediation. When a serious conflict breaks out between two or more villages or tribes or two different tribal sections – a conflict that might involve a dispute over land (private property or tribal boundaries), women (abductions, runaways, adulteries), or water rights – warfare among the contending parties often results…. The fighting at first is often a kind of symbolic violence in which the offended party tries to restore its honor by a show of force, and almost immediately after the first shots have rung out, intermediaries arrive to try and persuade the parties to agree to a truce…

The intermediaries may arrive chanting a zamil poem…announcing their intention of mediating the dispute and offering up cows or sheep for sacrifice in token of their sincerity and good faith. If…the plaintiff…agrees to a truce, it sets the conditions in numbers of cows, sheep, guns, and, in the most serious conflicts, even hostages… These demands are put forward by the intermediaries in the form of zamil poetry….

It is practically impossible to delimit a class of occasions on which someone might use zamil poetry for his own personal ends…. Once I was riding a bus on which more boarding tickets had been sold than there were seats available for passengers, with the result that a luckless passenger who happened to be an old tribesman had to sit on the floor of the vehicle. Resenting the injustice of not having been given a seat like everyone else when he had paid for one, he composed a zamil on the spot voicing his complaint. It had its intended effect: everyone on the bus started to laugh when they heard the poem and taunted the ticket seller, who in turn relinquished his seat to the now greatly mollified old man.

– Stephen C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe

Egil Skallagrimson received word that there was a new king in Norway and that Arinbjorn had returned to his lands there and was held in high esteem. The Egil composed a poem in Arinbjorn’s praise and sent it to him in Norway, and this is the beginning of it:

I am quick to sing
a noble man’s praises,
but stumble for words
about misers;
freely I speak
of a king’s deeds,
but stay silent
about the people’s lies.

Replete with taunts
for the bearer of lies,
I sing the favours
of my friends;
I have visited many
seats of mild kings,
with the ingenuous
intent of a poet.

Once I had
incurred the wrath
of a mighty king
of Yngling’s line;
I drew a bold hat
over my black hair,
paid a visit
to the war-lord

where that mighty
maker of men
ruled the land from beneath
his helmet of terror.
In York
the king reigned,
rigid of mind,
over rainy shores.

The shining glare
from Eirik’s brow
was not safe to behold
nor free from terror;
when the moons
of that tyrant’s face
shone, serpent-like,
with their awesome glow.

Yet I ventured
my poem to the king,
the bed-prize that Odin
had slithered to claim,
his frothing horn
passed around
to quench
all men’s ears.

No one praised
the beauty of the prize
my poetry earned
in that lavish house
when I accepted from the king
in reward for my verse
my own sable head
to stand my hat on.

My head I won
and with it the two
dark jewels
of my beetling brows,
and the mouth
that had delivered
my head’s ransom
at the king’s knee.

A field of teeth
and my tongue I took back,
and my flapping ears
endowed with sound;
such a gift
was prized higher
than earning gold
from a famous king.

By my side, better
than every other
spreader of treasure,
stood my loyal friend
whom I truly trusted,
growing in stature
with his every deed.

Arinbjorn,
paragon of men . . .

– Bernard Scudder, trans., Egil’s Saga, attributed to Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)
__________

For more on Inuit poetics, see Qarrtsiluni and Building Dwelling Eating. For more on Egil Skallagrimson and Norse poetics – including a description of the origin myth of poetry, alluded to in Egil’s sixth stanza above – see Poetry or vomit?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fish puke, bread grunts and other signs of culture

O.K., “Free Willy” fans! Time for another heart-warming story of a captive killer whale who is really just like us. We could call this one “Free Lunch”:

First, the young whale spit regurgitated fish onto the surface of the water, then sank below the water and waited.

If a hungry gull landed on the water, the whale would surge up to the surface, sometimes catching a free meal of his own.

Noonan watched as the same whale set the same trap again and again.

Within a few months, the whale’s younger half brother adopted the practice. Eventually the behavior spread and now five Marineland whales supplement their diet with fresh fowl, the scientist said.

“It looked liked one was watching while the other tried,” Noonan said of the whale’s initial behavior.

The capacity to come up with the gull-baiting strategy and then share the technique with others — known as cultural learning in the scientific world — was once believed to be one of those abilities that separated humans from other animals.

But biologists have since proven certain animals, including dolphins and chimps, do this.

“This is an example in which a new behavior spread through a population,” Noonan said. “We had the opportunity to see a tradition form and spread in exactly the way that cultures do in humans.”

A more sober article in New Scientist summarizes this and several other recent examples of cultural learning, including a new study on chimps:

Chimpanzees appear to be capable of communicating using sounds that refer to specific objects, according to a study of sounds made in response to different foods. It is the first time this ability has been demonstrated in chimps.

Primatologist Katie Slocombe of the University of St Andrews, UK, recorded the grunts made by chimps at nearby Edinburgh Zoo as they collected food at two feeders. One dispensed bread, considered a high-quality treat, and the other doled out apples, a much less sought-after snack.

Slocombe then played back the recordings and watched the reactions of a 6-year-old male named Liberius. The results were striking. After hearing a bread grunt, Liberius spent far more time searching around the bread feeder, while an apple grunt would send him hunting under the apple feeder. Slocombe presented the work at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah, this month.

This is the first convincing evidence of “referential communication” in chimps, says primatologist Amy Pollick of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Earlier research with a close cousin of the chimpanzee – a male pygmy chimpanzee, or bonobo, named Kanzi – showed that he made specific sounds for four different things: bananas, grapes, juice and yes. But the researchers did not test if the sounds conveyed any meaning to other bonobos, and the same experiments have never been done in chimpanzees.

Liberius, on the other hand, was able to take cues from apple and bread grunts made by at least three different chimpanzees.

This follows closely on the heels of another report of cultural learning among captive chimpanzees. I imagine that in a few years there will be dozens of other examples from many different species of mammals and birds, now that the taboo against studying animal cultures seems finally to have been lifted.

But here’s what I wonder. Suppose the “Free Willy” crowd organizes for the release of the Marineland orcas back into the wild, and they then transmit their new-found bait-and-snatch lore to other killer whales. What will this do to wild populations of seabirds? Will they all prove equally, um, gullible? Take fulmars, for instance. Their diet is described as “oily offal and refuse, fish and cuttles.” Seems as if they might be at high risk here – except that nature (or culture?) may have left them well equipped to retaliate. “Fulmar” means “foul gull” in Icelandic. When disturbed, fulmars hurl a stream of bright-orange, foul-smelling projectile vomit with great accuracy into the eye or other orifice of their attackers. Things could get interesting out on the high seas.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Remembering New Orleans

What is there to say about the destruction of New Orleans that hasn’t already been said elsewhere? As with the 9/11 attacks, I feel somewhat disconnected from what the rest of the country is experiencing, due to my inability to view video images of the tragedy (no T.V., only a dial-up connection to the Internet). I thought that Cornelia Dean and Andrew C. Revkin, writing for The New York Times, did an excellent job of encapsulating the environmental context. Among the blogs I read regularly, Whiskey Bar did the best job of summing things up (see also the comprehensive links list of organizations involved in hurricane relief), and Creature of the Shade offered the invaluable perspective of an urban geographer on the question of whether the city will survive. Creek Running North has had a couple of good posts on the looting – or is it salvage? – to which I can only add that, with 28 percent of its population below poverty level and one of the most brutal police forces in the country, the storm of looting was almost as inevitable as the hurricane itself.

On a more wistful note, a New Orleans reminiscence in 3rd House Journal takes the prize for most lyrical image. “After 10 days in New Orleans, I flew directly to Colorado Springs for a work conference,” Leslee writes, “and when I opened my suitcase steam came out. New Orleans travels with you.”

I have only been to New Orleans once, and most of that time was spent sleeping, so I have no real reminiscences to share. But I think it’s worth reflecting for a few moments on how much we collectively owe this city. Jazz has been called, rightly, America’s greatest gift to the world, and I think it embodies our ideals of freedom, adaptability and individual self-expression better than any other native art-form. That the birthplace of jazz has been dealt this kind of blow at the very same time that America’s other great contribution to world civilization – our national parks system, the first in the world – is under attack, makes me sad beyond words.

One often sees New Orleans described as “America’s most unique city.” This is a polite way of saying that it was one of the few cities in America where, I gather, it was possible to have fun. Street culture was actively encouraged, and the annual party known as Mardi Gras drew hedonists and misfits from all over the country. Why? Because outside of Louisiana, the idea of a high old time in virtually every town and city in this law-and-order-obsessed country is to reproduce the entire civic order in a slow procession through the streets: a parade. Woo-hoo. New Orleans offered a valuable counter-example, as well as a link to pre-Christian religious traditions of both African and European provenance. In vernacular religions the world over, annual, week-long festivals offer a ritualized vision of the world turned upside-down – an age-old image for the spirit world and a valuable reminder of the distance between that world and our own. But the United States was founded upon a different sort of idealism, one that sought to actualize heaven in the here-and-now – that whole, utopian, shining-city-on-a-hill bullshit. The inevitable result has been severe hubris and hypocrisy, social repression and a relentless war against wild nature.

It’s tempting to try and imagine how things might have been different if, instead of putting all its efforts into keeping the Mississippi in a straightjacket, the Army Corps had instead tried to apply a kind of Mardi Gras philosophy. Annual, controlled flooding of the Mississippi – on a much bigger scale than the freshwater diversions currently permitted – might still be able to restore coastal wetlands and reduce the storm surge from future hurricanes. In place of our traditional view in which order – meaning top-down control – is all-good, and chaos – bottom-up insurrection – is all-bad, we need to learn how to value an interplay between the two. If we continue to resist achieving some kind of equilibrium, in the form of social, economic and environmental sustainability, nature will do it for us, and the results will not be pretty.

O.K., I do remember this: a slow, night-time drive through a wide-awake city, and the immense civic pride shown by the African American taxi driver. He swung past one of the cemeteries, explaining why all the coffins were stored in above-ground crypts. When he found out I was a writer, he enthused about local author Anne Rice and her publicity stunt to promote her latest vampire novel: she had herself borne through the streets in an open coffin. They say that jazz originally sprang from the famous New Orleans funeral, in which the slow march to the cemetery switches to an up-tempo dance tune to accompany the mourners back home. Here’s hoping New Orleans can dance back from the crypt once again.

UPDATE: Before you pooh-pooh my conclusion, read this (found here). It very much fits what Jarrett wrote in the comments: “New Orleans — with its ability to produce wonderful stories like this one without having anything like a coherent local economy — may be more performance than place, which is cause for hope. Performances are easier to put back together than places are.”