Do you know what I mean?

 

Day 9

dear new orleans,

i wanted you to never leave. i wanted you to be with me forever. i wanted us to be safe. go to the river and deposit your dead. go to the river and scream. go to the river and ask yourself: is today the day i leave you. i have tried to love you so, and what you have given me is everything and nothing.

deaths: 1,836 beings
damage: 125 Billion nothings
depression: a sunken place or hollow on a surface

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Process Notes: 


"Traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words."
-The Body Keeps the Score

let us start in failure. let us abandon words. i would you code me.

i would you read this lettering. i have a handful of symbols.

some dreamed sigils. spray paint. and i will show you a catchall

of how we trespass. into what is forgot.


Photograph:

Beach shore of the Mississippi River by the French Quarter when the river is low

29.9584° N, 90.0644° W

In June of 2020 when protests erupted in response to police violence and systemic racism across the country (and even into other countries,) New Orleans began to hold its own protests nightly: First peaceful then met with police violence. Two nights after NOPD dangerously tear gassed peaceful protestors on the bridge in this photo above the Mississippi, New Orleans' protestors assembled in the French Quarter. After listening to speeches and poems, the crowd walked in silence to the river. Once there, you could hear screams and songs and laughter and tears as the city gathered in the place where we deposit our dead annually on Mardi Gras morning. See, a city is as complex as any one human being, as any one cell in a body, as any nebula in the universe. We are violence and silence. We are the flood, and we are the water when it is so low, you can walk on the sand by the muddy banks and dip your toes in. And sometimes you are on this shore with your best friend while she fights breast cancer and you are taking this photo. And sometimes you are on the bank at night screaming into that water after she has survived a year of treatments and surgery only to be in a world shut down on all sides by virus and greed and racism and murder. And you are all of it. You are the screaming and you are the screamer. And now you are witnessing the scream. That is the dream.



Plague Journal:
4.21.19 [sic] (20)

thus the body becomes a house of illness and of production----

in utter darkness, the smallest slice of light will undo what we think we know of nothing

the boundaries of every god are doubt and anger

with a a lack of distraction, we begin to project more and more of our personalities on to the walls

you get so dissociated, you find yourself waking into a life you do not recognize, a life you have no real feeling for, but you can construct a measure of feelings and thoughts about any situation you find yourself waking in ... much like a dream, where you have no memory of arriving, as in i have no memory of arriving in this life. i have no memories of the spaces between demarcations of disaster in my memory. i have no memory of feelings inside me. i have no way to tell you this is not the dreaming.

i cannot tell you how i arrived here, so this must be the dream.



Resource:
Crushed Dreams and Moldy Memories: The Messages on Homes After Hurricane Katrina
https://petapixel.com/2015/03/07/crushed-dreams-and-moldy-memories-the-messages-on-homes-after-hurricane-katrina/