New Orleans

I just came back from my trip to Louisiana, where I took the above photograph. Its just a flower, nothing more, nothing less. At one point it was likely cared for under the shade of a welcoming home, by the someone who knew the earth by the hands. The flower is well rooted, as it has found it's way around this pipe, precariously positioned just above it.

I could have placed any number of photographs of New Orleans here, photo's that state 'look at the authentic experience I witnessed, oh the war zone that is the city,' I'm sure many people have done that. I think it is a bit tired now. Yet I am sure many people are engaged in the same process I was, 'people have to see to believe.' Yes, this sentiment is true, but it is also very dangerous. Taking in the scene leads to belief, but it is an entirely fabricated exercise, because too often the tour buses, rented limoscenes and cars are not authentic enough to be included in the frame.

There is a delicate balancing act going on between the blood red lily and the slanted pipe beside, a contrast that maintains itself as if it were the only authenticity needed to convey a particular story, say of a city under a deluge that has been over a century in the fabrication. I wonder, what draws people to the parts of New Orleans that have been most affected by Katrina? Is it because, as Robert Pogue Harrison suggests, the testaments of time and earth that are outside of humanity's grasp are revealed through ruins? Possibly, or is it because we want to fix a part of ourselves that feels alienated from the rest of the world? I like to think it is the former, rather than the latter, but I can easily see how the latter is the case. I found myself taking a few photo's of the tour bus and of the tour group, a reminder that I am not involved in some act of discovery, but I am taking part in something as old as civilization as itself, the continued negotiation between the desires of human development and the lasting memory of nature.

All of this while people still go about living on the other side of the limoscene, a place where the living remind the tourist that they are indeed human beings, just as the tourists are, and that despite how they are portrayed in popular media discourse, that they indeed need basic ammenities such as construction materials, food and water. I find it interesting how the memory of the living is conveniently displaced, relegated to an easy stereotype that seeks to justify neglect. Any metaphor that compares Katrina to an invading army casts the residents as helpless victims of war, removing any agency and autonomy to dictate their own stories, if they so chose to speak them. Popular discourse makes memory easier to convey survivors as hapless victims with no autonomy, they cannot be people who know the earth by the hands, and therefore cannot know or belong to a community. Is this justufying diaspora, the forced displacement of thousands of people with generations of presence in one place?

I think an ounce of empathy can go a mile in erasing this notion. Even further, an ounce of empathy can quickly turn the camera lense on the bus, on the structures and systems that pushed working class black and white New Orleanians to places like the Lower 9th Ward and Chalmette many years ago. These systems feed the discourse, merely out of self preservation. There is a definite structure to this discourse that needs some serious reconsideration. This discourse uses as its foundation the dichotomies of Biblical scripture, conveying stark images of light and dark, there can only be a sublime and an abject. Beauty and squalor are the operative terms, and where there is squalor there can be no little red flower in the foreground, it is a foregone conclusion that there is only despair. This is fabrication, however, and cannot be authenticated when there is a bus behind the lense. We feed like sharks when the latter symbols reveal themselves, it gets the blood going, and reaffirms these dichotomies as we clinically remove ourselves from the scene without a second glance back.

Ruination renews itself through ourselves, and through the authenticity we engineer. This is the same authenticity that pushes back the wetlands and defines the Mississippi River in linear terms to allow the quick and easy flow of goods from the Gulf to the heartland. The linear terms also allow the quick and easy flow of water back to the wetlands when the conditions are right for the wind to turn counterclockwise and contrary to capitalist notions of linearity.

The movement of people onto the wetlands is also a product of this linearity, creating the conditions for people to continue this way of living in the world by draining the wetlands and building communities below sea level. While this may have the appearance of linearity, it is also cyclical in its repetition. Dominant paradigms demand certain conditions to allow civilization to follow its linear projection upward. However, is this an exercise of inclusion or exclusion? Who is included and who is excluded? It was quite apparent in New Orleans who is excluded, in the Lower 9th Ward specifically the issues of race and class are determining factors in this exercise. Yet communities like the Lower 9th Ward defy this projection through their very existence and persistance. Some of the people we spoke to belong to the group "Common Ground Relief", a community based organization that is defying both the dominant paradigms and discourse. Meeting community members here reaffirmed what it was I was doing there. My greatest fear would be that I was contributing to the discourse that conveys New Orleans in the sublime and abject, and that I may have been crafting the story of someone else who had been through a far worse experience than I could ever imagine.

So, instead of revealing more pictures of devastation, I think the image above is adequate for crafting another story from the experience. However, the experience did have my mind replaying a video by Thom Yorke over and over. It is the video for Harrowdown Hill, and portrays quite effectively this broader exercise of crafting narratives of civilization, who is included and excluded, and the shape the world is taking because of this exercise. I see the eagle, obviously fabricated endlessly in the video, as portraying the physical, metaphysical and very tenuous qualities of championing the kind of possessive individualism that demands straight lines in the Mississippi River.