What are the limits of a city?

Day 25


shush. hushabye. sigh. shhhhhhhh. ssssssss(blinks)leepy. fais do do. (do) you dream. do. do. hi(ssssss) s(lither)s. you do(dream) don’t you. so long/ so (long) / the poem is a ritual of public and private performance / to see these words & images is to take part in the reciprocity of what i offer/ i am offering to hold it with you/ i am offering never abandon/ my love

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Process Notes: 

TIME

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Katrina strengthened to a Category 1 hurricane. Two hours later, Katrina made landfall on Keating Beach, just two miles south of the Fort Lauderdale international airport. Winds were 85 mph (137 km/h) and pressure was 989 mbar. During its passage, the eye of the hurricane moved directly over the office of the National Hurricane Center, which reported a wind gust of 87 mph (140 km/h). The strongest sustained winds in Florida was a report of 72 mph (116 km/h) on the roof of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Virginia Key. The same station recorded a gust of 94 mph (151 km/h). Unofficially, wind gusts reached 97 mph (156 km/h) at Homestead General Aviation Airport.

Katrina lasted six hours on land over the water-laden Everglades, weakening to a tropical storm before reaching the Gulf of Mexico just north of Cape Sable. 

"the level of consciousness of one person holding the concentration for the group can change the entire room" 

-Dancing in the Flames

"if you are sad or depressed, you cannot influence reality"

-Dalai Lama

Photograph: 

Mississippi River from Arabi Levee, New Orleans Skyline in Background


-for we are the angel who treads on despair

"There is only a little grid. There is no exit."
-Plath

the strange reasons of ordinary objects

and the spring board of words

skin sprung to simple still life 

I bought a camera four months into the pandemic and taught myself how to shoot pictures. Mostly, I took pictures of graffiti because there was an abundance and it took me all over the city. And mostly, I could be alone and left alone. And maybe I thought too, I feel safer now in places where I could die and no one would even know for days.

I spent a lot of time by tracks watching the trains go by.

After Katrina, I thought I never want to have to leave my city again. I would have a panic attack any time I had to fly out of the city. The last place I flew to before lockdown, I had to ask a friend to drive me to the airport because I couldn't leave the house.

Now there are so many days I can't leave the house.

and New Orleans: I think, I can't leave even if I wanted to. If I wanted anything. I forget what it feels like now to want anything.

I am watching it all go by like those cars on the tracks.

I think less about traveling and more about the way the world crushes you under its wheels.

"there is nothing social about traumatic memory"
-The Body Keeps the Score 


Plague Journal:
8.17.20

i wanted to swerve the project. halfway thru to let it speak of joy and hope and resilience. i wanted to steer the poem even knowing i cannot.

i thought if i changed the inside of me, language would change. the shape of words, the thoughts, the ideas. the whole channel wiped clean enough. and to pass, a fluid calling.

i've spent so much time in neglected places. forgotten parts of this city. the parts no one sees. an invisible.

do you know what happens to a place not seen? to a thing made invisible by neglect.

it ceases to be solid. it accrues what is damaged. it is not well. these pockets of the city are not barren, but collect like a corner with its dust and debris. collected of loss and sadness and despair.

i would tread there. in the space of familiar. we can forget anything. if we try hard enough. the solidity of the self and the solidity of a city comes down to perception and belief. and if no one is looking. if no one sees it anymore.

a city becomes thin at the edges. and what enters in the thinness. if not protected at the borders.

what enters in our thinness. what passes where the crossroad has been abandoned.

TRIGGER WARNING
THIS VIDEO SHOWS  FLOODING AND PEOPLE TRAPPED IN THEIR HOMES
IT SHOWS LIVE FOOTAGE OF THE NEGLECT 

Resource: 

HOPELESS
https://youtu.be/GzVvGut-qrc

What do you see?

Day 24
Prayer: our city who art/ our city who art/ our city who art/ tell me everything you know about forgiveness

i (carry) your (name) in (my) mouth/ do (you) trouble/ a (city) is (its) people/ you’d do (well) to (remember) that/ a (city) rises and falls (on) the desire/ we (bring) to (survive) it

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Process Notes: 

TIME

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

 - strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina



in the deepest cracks of your heart
what you seek is older than love


some beings map dreams, map a city
a card catalogue of spray painted sanity
we talked about how you we make it
where no one else makes beauty
find us there

mapper of dark places, locked by sound
i was made not afraid
designed close enough to call back
time is short&idon'twantorepeathesecycles
once upon a time, you get lost, megan
i downloaded too fast and burnt edge
made space and plummeted
falling so fast, you burn up before you land

anyone who tells you they want to be loved unconditionally
is a liar, we crave the border of love, the special costs
the choosing, if all you offer is without condition
to anyone, i promise, you will travel alone



"complex entanglement simply becomes no entanglement"



Photograph: 

OPEN YOUR EYES graffiti by READ on the Naval Base behind the End of the World Labyrinth


It's hard not to compare disasters, to mine for lack and less and where we stand now.

Like we had poetry readings, we had dinners, we had dancing and second lines; we had touch and comfort and community. We fought to rebuild. Others came to support us. We were both hated and cherished. And there was hope, an arc of ending and moving toward recovery.

And now, it's just endless days of slowly losing more of ourselves, more of all we worked for and built, more of less and less. No touch. No memories. No sounds shared. No support. No one is coming.

No reflection catches this: The silent ways we break apart alone.

What time does to us here. And where was love in all of this.

Self-transcendence means the universe is capable of going beyond what it has been before.

I felt us changed. Time folded and we rode out on fear. But would you give it to me.

The future maps the past. Time is never moving forward. It's turning.

Back to the beginning. What if there was no suffer but only opportunities to slip this net of desire constructed to hold us down to this story's old ways of unfolding.

What have you got to lose at this point by believing in everything?

That's where we are headed. Grief so deep; you let go the hold on thinking there is a limit to what you can think. A limit to what you can feel. A limit to what we can imagine. As if the only war hasn't always been that war...


Plague Journal:

6.17.20

i don't think you can be good at anything in a cruel world. i wish i still believed that poetry or art or anything really made a difference.



Resource:

Destroy This Memory
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/08/17/129251257/misrach

What is empty space in a photograph?

Day 23

We’ve been here for 5 months. No, 15 years. (time is a problem) Love is the absence of any of us in the frame. Every day I wanted to reach for you, I had to ask if your rejection would touch me. And it is not until I understand that there is nothing to reject that I can ever reach for anything again. Fear will not serve you. 

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Process Notes: 

from here on out, none of this is easy. from here on out, we are wading in the water...

TIME 

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

What would eventually become Katrina started as Tropical Depression Twelve which formed over the Bahamas at 5:00 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC) on August 23, 2005, partially from the remains of Tropical Depression Ten, which had dissipated due to the effects of a nearby upper trough. While the normal standards for numbering tropical depressions in the Atlantic indicate that the old name/number is retained when a depression dissipates and regenerates, satellite data indicated that the surface circulation from tropical depression ten had separated from the mid level low and dissipated as it moved ashore in Cuba. A second tropical wave combined with mid-level remnants of Tropical Depression Ten north of Puerto Rico to form a new, more dynamic system, which was then designated as Tropical Depression Twelve. Simultaneously, the trough in the upper troposphere weakened, causing wind shear in the area to relax, thereby allowing the new tropical depression to develop.

In a later re-analysis, it was determined that the low-level circulation Ten had completely detached and dissipated, with only the remnant mid-level circulation moving on and merging with the aforementioned second tropical wave. As a result, the criteria for keeping the same name and identity were not met.

Photograph: 

Train tunnel near the End of the World


before katrina, we would write exquisite corpses at 17 poets! and put them in an empty wine bottle. after the reading, we would head over to the river and toss them in.

we were so young, and new orleans seemed like it would last forever then.

we had no idea how numbered our days were. no idea a city could disappear. no idea we could lose almost 1900 beings in a matter of days. no idea some of us would never return. no idea some of us would and still not survive.

all deaths were not by drowning. some deaths were slow to surface; it would take months or years for the dying to complete.

we are circling back to that time again. there is disaster and there is the fall out from disaster.

and we must cross all the chambers in order. and we must cross all channels to reach the shore.
and we must move through time in the fashion with which we perceive it.


Plague Journal: 
8.7.20

when memory is danger/ kali keep us safe

Resource: 

Long Night Moon 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5Ms3dWCB8

Do you feel love or do you think love?

Day 22

All photographers are liars. They want to convince you the young beauty is not a corpse, the sunset not a dying star, the bloom not already wilted, and yet the poem could be called a lie except sound undoes us, its vibration cannot be held to untruth the way a framing can be said to manipulate time, to capture, to hold still. A photograph is what we wish memory could be. No shutter fast enough to catch the nothing of light: A city can disappear, a country, a whole universe in a whisper. All we catch here is for release. Do you understand what we fish for with the hook of compassion.


*******************************************


Process Notes:

minute variations in any system when amplified lead to chaos-


I'm sorry but I can't let you go now.

If you've come this far, I am coding a new program. It's already happening.

I'm sorry but there is a way that seeing is belief, a way that the word transforms grief, the way I have put my body between you and the world, the way I have used this as reflection, as reciprocity.

There was never a poem.

There was only the spell of design to code a ritual to survive.

Just stick with me anyhow...

I don't know why it is true, but it is true.

I can shift the lines. Proximity is not in space and time, proximity to me is chaos and chaos is a choosing, so if you have chosen to arrive here. Well, there is not the choosing of you as much as the choosing I have done to get us here. And here we arrive, a wonder and a tasking.

I don't know the ending yet, but I know we have shaped time and distance across a city.

I have already seen it die and I have seen it come alive again. This is happening as we speak. This death is inside us, happening even now.

The question was never what will you do with your one wild and precious life, the question is always:

What will you do with your one wild and precious dying.


Photograph:

The Mississippi River and the other shore

"technostrategic language"

is language that attempts to reduce horror to digestible bits, often used in war

instead of "millions of dead" the words "collateral damage"

instead of humans, "targets"

instead of the lives now suffering, we have been reduced to "economic incentive"
to" stimulus relief," to "suffering economy"

even as we know: there is no economy that is suffering

[We're alone in the cave. 

Hold on to that. It's just us and the shadows on the wall.]

i see you invincible
i see you invulnerable
i am the poet and you can never turn my gaze
i will spell disaster
and worded, watch me unclock inside
the dark energy that holds us all
threaded and over lifetimes, if you come
i am calling      i abandon any connection to one
as we travel in plurality
unhook me                        un - hook - me

unhook your tongue


Plague Journal: 
8.3.20

if we cannot tolerate another's suffering, we suffer

do you recall how you ever begin loving anything?

the way water hugs the land, a touching

"For Kali is said to be mad..."
-D. Kingsly

no one is coming. sanity is what i am containing. no one is coming. 15 years of containment and no more.


Resource: 
Hurricane Katrina poem - Walidah Imarisha
https://youtu.be/DJgpkalWSKE

What is a mistake of light?

Day 19:

[pour out of me]  whisper into night/ pour all of this [out] of me/ this gesture is called: Begging

*Please use the guide for exact measurements.

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Process Notes: 

"Because dissociation is a breakdown in the continuity of a person's felt sense, it almost always includes distortions of time and perception."

-Waking the Tiger

Lens Flare:

"When light rays coming from a bright source(s) of light (such as the sun or artificial light) directly reach the front element of a camera lens, they can reflect and bounce off different lens elements, diaphragm and even off the sensor, potentially degrading image quality and creating unwanted objects in images."

What is an unwanted object in regards to light? 

Do you look for safety and security but in your heart, you pray for danger to be saved from the little dream we made here. 

Is this time worse than Katrina. I don't know how you would measure a disaster against a disaster. Each is as unique as a fingerprint, a snowflake, a stain, the way we love...

I am learning now there are so many layers to love. 

Have you seen this too. (in the still silence of these days when you can hold your breath against your beating heart, if you can hold it. can you hold it. can you let it go. i slipped inside each moment, stealth. we rotate. i leaned into not clinging, not grasping, and let it wash. let it wash me away, if that's what you want, new orleans. i could never resist you.) 

[and love, love was so slippery. like happiness. love was so abundant. we warred here and it was unnecessary.]

I don't know that light ever makes a mistake. I think we just have to adjust our expectation of seeing. 

Photograph: 

Clouds over the Lakefront 

Time changed during the pandemic, everyone noted. We steep in the familiar, the dissociative experience. 

The night we roller skated by the tracks in the warehouse while the trains rolled by... 

I want you to know at the end of the night, I rolled the whole perimeter of the space and swept it clear of all the energy we left there. All of my life has been a sweeping of sorrows, a gathering of grief, the felt sense of how energy shifts from the body into open space, and we move it. We transform it out into the replicating space of all of this. I wouldn't change a thing. 

I want you to know in all of my life: I have had friends who handed me ways to survive all of this. In the end, there was more love than I could have ever reciprocated. 

And you too, even as the world broke around us, even as you struggled and fought to stay afloat, you gave me the dream I held inside me. I wanted to fly and you said, here: I made this safe for you. 

And it made all of the difference. 

Love doesn't always shape by carving, I discovered in this life. 

Love shapes too by the softest of whispers over time; we pull so close, we forget to listen. 

Plague Journal:

6.7.20

Sometimes love pierces us so deep we want to flee it. Run from swift moving waters before we are carried away. We want to be told, this won't be painful or scary, but life is a meeting of reality where reality lays. We never go back. We are never the same. What about the radical inclusion of I will care for you anyway. Beyond what you give me, how you benefit me, what you do for me. Beyond knowing or else we begin to accept there is no stranger in a species of one. We can define boundaries but keep love unbounded. How many words for it is not the problem. 

The problem is everything you hold as a condition and call love is not love. 

The problem is what you are reaching for is not love at all. 

They say in a dream, everyone is you. I say, here it is exactly the same. 

We move through bardos and nothing changes about what we always are. 

We want so desperately for the little dreams of our lives to matter, but we are dust. And if we understood the way dust interacts with all dust over time. maybe we could put it away long enough to call up that incredible resilience of joy that harbors in each of us. 

Resource: 

Photographer Mario Tama arrived in New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, after he was dispatched by the agency Getty Images to document what was shaping up to be one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2012341_2179993,00.html

What is a container for fire?

Day 14:

You can’t abandon emptiness and emptiness cannot be abandoned.
tell me how the past is “real.”  tell me when we made the performance of our lives more important than our lives.
how has the word safe shaped your days. how has the feel of it hidden in your hide feraled the notion of happiness here.


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Process Notes: 

when i tell you i am new orleans

i mean i am the deepest secrets she keeps

darkness and shadow, shame & neglect

we do, don't we- want to know the terrible

stories we keep. all that it means to be human

we want to have some say in the bargaining 

for safe passage & i said the city sings of gratitude

for this life & that's the portal 

what do you sacrifice to walk there

they are watching to see

if you pick up the code

"survival always leaves its mark"

-M. Embree

and the angels have every right to refuse us

at some point you have to reconcile

that someone should have taken care of you

that you deserved love and attention and protection

that you needed and didn't get it

but you survived anyway--you made it anyway

and you are never going to get what you need 

in this life, that's the part that will trap you 

if you don't accept it: the poem takes all 

Photograph: 

alley between two buildings on Downman Rd. in New Orleans east

New Orleans East:
About two miles (3.2 km) later, LA 47 crosses a level bridge over Bayou Bienvenue into Orleans Parish and the city of New Orleans, which are co-extensive. The highway then crosses a high-level bridge over the much wider Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, an industrial shipping channel. Returning to grade, LA 47 becomes a controlled-access highway that also serves as the entire route of I-510. This concurrency lasts for 3.5 miles (5.6 km) and contains four closely spaced interchanges. The first is exit 2C, a stingray-shaped diamond interchange that connects with Old Gentilly Road via Almonaster Boulevard and serves the nearby NASA Michoud Assembly Facility. This is followed by exit 2A–B to US 90 (Chef Menteur Highway), a major route through New Orleans East. Continuing north, a more traditional diamond interchange at exit 1B serves Lake Forest Boulevard, and soon afterward, the abandoned Six Flags New Orleans theme park appears on the east side of the highway.

The fourth and final interchange is exit 1A, a partial cloverleaf with flyover ramps that connects to I-10. New Orleans' major east–west route, I-10 connects with the Central Business District to the southwest and the city of Slidell to the northeast. Having intersected its parent route, I-510 ends, and LA 47 continues ahead as a divided four-lane highway without control of access. The highway reaches the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain in an area known as Little Woods, located at the easternmost extent of urban development along the lake shore. Here, LA 47 turns southwest onto Hayne Boulevard, an undivided four-lane thoroughfare. For the next 4.5 miles (7.2 km), LA 47 travels through residential New Orleans East while closely following the lake levee, which is topped by a concrete floodwall. Several divided neighborhood thoroughfares, such as Bullard Avenue, Read Boulevard, and Crowder Boulevard, lead back to interchanges with I-10. Just west of Crowder Boulevard, a ramp provides access to the New Orleans Lakefront Airport and the Senator Ted Hickey Bridge across the Industrial Canal. LA 47 continues along Hayne Boulevard for another 1.3 miles (2.1 km) to an intersection with Downman Road, which parallels the industrial corridor located along the east side of the canal.

Source: Wikipedia 

Plague Journal: 

5.27.20

All of the pictures from my childhood growing up in New Orleans east were destroyed in the flood. 

"Code your language and escape."

-A. Waldman 

"Every poem should be written in all languages simultaneously."

-P. Joris 

Notes from the Channel: 

Resource:
New Orleans east recovery after Katrina:
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_9906ab1b-a1e7-5eb7-8e52-824adb52d6a3.html

How many people are still missing from Hurricane Katrina?

Day 7:

40% of deaths were drowning:

Here is a short list of things that will cause panic: rain, wind, floods, news reports, bills, federal agencies, leaving the city, returning to the city, hurricane season, attics, evacuations, insurance, your mother, your father, your brother, your children, your friends, childhood, sleeping, dreaming, being in the city, not being in the city, hope.

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Process Notes: 

"Without a functioning Broca's area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca's area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered.... All trauma is preverbal." 

"The scans also revealed that during flashbacks our subjects' brains lit up only on the right side... the left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order."

-The Body Keeps the Score 

"truth means nothing"  - C. Wuehle

"for the secret of death is hard to know" -The Upanishads

The official effort to recover bodies had stalled as local and federal agencies decided who would do so — and how. Eventually, procedures were set, with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals taking the lead and Jensen’s company receiving a contract to coordinate the work in the heaviest-hit parishes.

Collecting, identifying and counting the dead was an emotionally wrenching, often gruesome, sometimes thankless job. Kenyon workers had to walk through hospitals where the power had been knocked out. Extreme heat decomposed bodies. The sheer size of the affected areas meant each body might have to go through several checkpoints on its way to the morgue. And each stop could mean the loss of valuable information.

Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-still-dont-know-how-many-people-died-because-of-katrina/

On the fifth anniversary of the storm, 80 bodies were laid to rest at a memorial  on Canal Street designed, as the engraving on it said, to "evoke" the shape of a hurricane.

"I just thought we should honor our dead in a better way than putting them in Potter's Field," said Frank Minyard, the former Orleans Parish coroner.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/27/bodies-remain-unidentified-decade-after-katrina/32474355/

MEMORIAL

I want to hand you this: At night in the city covered in darkness, you could hear in the French Quarter (because it was so silent)… the howling of humans. The screaming, The crying. We in our cells designed to keep. And keep us safe. What is a container. For time and memory. What happens to grammar in disaster. What is the language of never before or again. What is the stimulus of moving toward or away from terror. 

When they did not come for us, we tried to tell you they would not come for you too. 

And here we are. Blanketed to a suffocating of truth. 

You are free to die. That is the only freedom granted here. 

“There are four components of trauma that will always be present to some degree in any traumatized person: 

1.hyperarousal

2. constriction/ (a form of hypervigilance) 

3. dissociation

4. freezing, associated with the feeling of helplessness” 

-Walking the Tiger

Photograph: 

Haynes Blvd in New Orleans east by the levee

30.0385° N, 90.0264° W

I can no more recall what it felt like to be in the moments of post Katrina New Orleans than I can what it felt like to be a child in New Orleans east. I have the knowledge of it. I have some memories, some facts, photographs, and stories. I have a mapping in my mind of neighborhoods, and the way places looked before and after the storm. Dissociation means you never have to hold the feeling inside you. You become a stranger to yourself. Life a strange patina, a movie playing beyond the scope of your skin. It was a surprise to me to learn I had been dissociated most of my life just as it was a surprise to learn not all people felt actively suicidal. I imagine now there must be so many things I regard as “normal” that are in fact not the way the world is experienced by anyone around me. And also, all of us in this space --because the illusion is that we are basing any of us against a baseline of “normal.” A baseline of what is human: And then to be an artist who has given up trying to be sane, trying to contain madness. To say I can clearly see the art and the hysteria, and I will not relinquish either. It is not that I am hard to love, but you have to understand this about me: I probably can’t feel it. My cerebral cortex has no ability to integrate you into its confines. What I can do is hack into consciousness enough to program this story where we constellate an escape route, what is a sacrifice in any lifetime except to say there were so many hours I spent not in this world but disconnect was where I traveled to make safe: 

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us –Always 

Plague Journal:

5.24.20

SIGHT LINES

what i am saying is i have reached the end of my wanting. whatever you barely handed me, i hand back. we kept trying to not be wilderness of untamed things. try to be a common thing made small enough to love. let me pass you by. shipwrecked from the shore. inside the poem. it's such a hollow thread to say, i'll leave this life behind. music to replace the sound of heart's beat, the drum of meter run beneath tongue and to say, this is how you build a life over and over again feeding it to dissolution. i learned from every lover the act of never was. i was abandon. don't pretend you couldn't see me clearly when all you do is look through the glass darkly at what won't hold your gaze.


Notes from the Channel:

Resources:
Encrypting Katrina:
Traumatic Inscription and the
Architecture of Amnesia
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_16/articles/tuggle/tuggle.html