What believes in the dream of the body?

Day 27:

There were a number of hours between landfall and news of the levees breaking where most of New Orleans sighed into the belief of having weathered the storm: What do you call false time.  What is the language of suspension we travelled among in conversation as we moved from relief to terror into the dark nights of surreal undone, to say erased of all that we knew is the minute. To say you can never go home again is so much more than a series of words strung together.


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


Process Notes: 

TIME

Saturday, August 27, 2005

By 5:00 AM EDT, Hurricane Katrina reached Category 3 intensity.

At 10:00 AM EDT, officials in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, St. Tammany Parish, and Plaquemines Parish ordered a mandatory evacuation of all of their residents. Jefferson Parish and St. Bernard Parish ordered voluntary evacuations, recommending that all residents evacuate, particularly those living in lower areas. Jefferson Parish officials did declare a mandatory evacuation for the coastal areas of Grand Isle, Crown Point, Lafitte, and Barataria. Tolls were suspended on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway as well as the Crescent City Connection, to speed up the evacuation process.

At 5:00 PM EDT, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced a state of emergency and a called for a voluntary evacuation. He added that he would stick with the state's evacuation plan and not order a mandatory evacuation until 30 hours before the expected landfall. This would allow those residents in low-lying surrounding parishes to leave first and avoid gridlocked escape routes. However, he did recommend that residents of low-lying areas of the city, such as Algiers and the 9th Ward, get a head start. Nagin said the city would open the Superdome as a shelter of last resort for evacuees with special needs. He advised anyone planning to stay there to bring their own food, drinks and other comforts such as folding chairs. "No weapons, no large items, and bring small quantities of food for three or four days, to be safe," he said. The Louisiana National Guard had delivered three truckloads of water and seven truckloads of MRE's to the Superdome, enough to supply 15,000 people for three days.


Map of Louisiana parishes eligible for assistance.
Governor Blanco sends a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to declare a major disaster for the State of Louisiana, in order to release federal financial assistance.

In response to Governor Blanco's request, President Bush declared a federal state of emergency in Louisiana under the authority of the Stafford Act, which provided a, "means of assistance by the Federal Government to State and local governments in carrying out their responsibilities to alleviate the suffering and damage which result from such disasters,..."

The emergency declaration provided for federal assistance and funding, as well as assigned, by law, the responsibility for coordinating relief efforts with those government bodies and relief agencies which agree to operate under his advice or direction, to the FEMA federal coordinating officer (FCO). It also provided for military assets and personnel to be deployed in relief and support operations, although the Posse Comitatus Act imposes strict limitations on the use of Active Duty soldiers in law enforcement. 1701 Army National Guard and 932 Air National Guard are deployed (2633 total).


That night, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield briefed President Bush, Governor Blanco, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, and Mayor Nagin on the status of Hurricane Katrina.




create just enough space to be final

make  a poem or make a picture
a oncing/ a volatile/ a continuum
vacuum/ blackhole/ suspended   variance    a tribe

what's the dream design to a bridging

can you echo in a no chamber vat
of collusion

i wish there was a better way to be lovely
i wish there was such a thing as a star anymore
and not just layered arts of extinction


Photograph:

Canal Outlets in New Orleans East

When we were kids, we played in the canal outlets, under the bridge overpasses along Morrison Rd. We rode our bikes unsupervised around neighborhoods, no cell phones. No social media. You could lay under the bridges to cool off and find odd stuff, discarded. You could peek over the railing and sometimes, we would pretend to be dead laying on the side of the bridge to see if anyone stopped.

They didn't.

Maybe we weren't good at playing dead because we didn't really know much of death.

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space."
-Einstein

Plague Journal:
8.9.20

The only commitment you can really honor in this life is to yourself. Love happens in the freedom to let others be all they are, without judgment, expectation or attachment.

Making a commitment to another is really an illusion.

The dissociative aspects of our culture are revealing an inability to deal with reality. And its deepest root lies in an inability to face death, suffering and mortality: Our aversion as toxic as our attachments.



Resource:
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/hurricane-katrina-then-and-now/

Would I tell you to stay?

Day 26:

A city is barricaded mansions with armed guards where caviar is flown in and champagne pours and still, bodies pool by the dark, hot doorways of the convention center waiting for water to be dropped that does not arrive while arranging the cloth over the corpse. Yes. A city can hold everything.

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

Process Notes: 

TIME

Friday, August 26, 2005

At 1:00 AM EDT, maximum sustained winds had decreased to 70 mph (110 km/h) and Katrina was downgraded to a tropical storm. At 5:00 AM EDT, the eye of Hurricane Katrina was located just offshore of southwestern Florida over the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles (80 km) north-northeast of Key West, Florida. Maximum sustained winds had again increased to 75 mph (121 km/h) and Katrina was upgraded again to a Category 1 hurricane.

At 5:00 PM EDT, the National Hurricane Center officially shifts the possible track of Katrina from the Florida Panhandle to the Mississippi/Alabama coast.[8] Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco declared a state of emergency for the state of Louisiana.[2] The declaration included activation of the state of Louisiana's emergency response and recovery program under the command of the director of the state office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness to supply emergency support services. Following the declaration of a state of emergency, federal troops were deployed to Louisiana to coordinate the planning of operations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).[3] 922 Army National Guard and 8 Air National Guard are deployed. By 4:00 PM EDT, Katrina was upgraded to a Category 2 storm. Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, 66 miles (106 km) southeast of New Orleans. 

Photograph: 

What does it feel like to be in your body in the failure of a city?

What if fear is a type of memory.

What if what we fear is not what we think may happen, but memory of the repetition of our lives, the way we never escape time, but rotate around one lifetime, an infinity.

Tell me how you got here. Tell me if you remember clearly memory or is it like a story planted in your head. A telling. A series of photographs. What makes it real? evidence. Other faulty story tellers. Experience. What is ephemeral and cannot be held.

What if fear is simply the felt sense of what we have already tread.

To say I have already survived all of this, and so I refuse to entertain fear any more than I entertain memory.


Plague Journal
8.17.2020

as if you could ever know what a river is and separate from any part of you, it did not matter where we walked or walked away from, this catalogue of collected thoughts, the way weather has a way of turning

you can't really predict what you can't imagine anyway.

tangle destiny or entangle narrative. we tribed from source, all of us collecting, in the making of song.

"Truth and meaning are context bound"
-Derrida

"If I do not exchange my happiness
For the suffering of others
I shall not attain the state of Buddhahood
And even in samsara, I shall have no real joy.

-Shantideva


Resource:
Buddha, Ananda, & Katrina
https://www.mindfulnessbell.org/archive/2015/04/buddha-ananda-katrina

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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 the sacrifice?

Day 20

the magical act of the poem/ is you thinking we are getting somewhere/ with language/ when there is nowhere to go/ there is nothing but emptiness

strange always was our time among each other/ the strange lights we are /or how we hide from one another

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


Process Notes: 

inside [redacted]
there is a story, all the way down
we know best stories we build here
in one lifetime, mine the story
it has everything you need, and the stories
interlock, so you have to know the story of where
you came from in order to read the code
you have to access generationally a coding
complete inside you and where it lacks, you
are searching for a matching in code
to translate back to you what is forgot
for there is no separation of family to other
we are all traveling the same paths
on different time lines

time is a problem


maybe we fear love

because it makes us invincible.


Photograph: 

Live Oak near Canal Outlet on Robert E. Lee Blvd.

"The first existence of the universe was brought into being by hearing and its last will be brought to an end by God through hearing." -Adonis

In Buddhism according to the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which in the original Tibetan was named: The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States, at death the dying person will be presented with hallucinations of sights and sounds as the body's senses deplete and withdraw. These images of the Buddhas, both wrathful and beneficent, are said to be "projections" of the original Buddha nature of our being. Not truly projections as they are us. They are the reality of what we are that we forget in the samsara of illusion which is our reality. The book is called Liberation by Hearing as the text is to be read to the dying being to remind them not to panic during death but to recall their teachings and to understand what is happening to them.

It's a shame we don't value life in this culture so much that we would prepare not only our own deaths but be prepared to know what to do when those we love die.

What will you do when those you love die? Will you know how to ease their fear. Will you have eased your own to such an extent that you can hold it. And your own death, how much of each day do you devote to sitting with that reality. Do you know how you will hold yourself in death.

What is it you wish to achieve in dying as there is truly nothing in this world to achieve.


Plague Journal:

6.8.20

the macrocosm of standing together will seep into the microcosm of all of your relationships

when you realize there are an abundance of people who will feed you, you don't have to rely on poison anymore

we recreated templates of power and control in our relationships because we were modeled abuse and control as normal, as ideal, and told it was care taking and love. What we need to normalize is standing besides one another, the next/ to model. We need to learn to stand next to anyone and care take. We need to learn to care for who is besides us, not who we pick and choose. These practices are the antidote to the poison.

We sow the seeds now with every choice- for what grows next.

We are asking for more and will ask for more as we value ourselves.

Learn here in this disaster to stay the course, be consistent, to navigate terror, to survive -- keep going all the way to the other side.

Fixed continuums and fixed models are fantasy. All is birth and death, growth and decay. Do not despair your time here, no matter where you fall in the fluid motions of its sweep. What is low, rises and what is on top must always descend below.

The universe is exact even in spite of all our failure.

Try to hold on to the balance of all that spools out before us.

I am keeping you in sight.


Resource: 
New Orleans' Urban Forest Survived Katrina
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9773202/ns/us_news-environment/t/new-orleans-urban-forest-survived-katrina/

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.

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

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 the edge of sound?

Day 18: 

front doors standing open for blocks
the city at night divided between light and darkness
a neutral ground of garbage for miles
appliances wrapped in tape on corners
coffin flies and coffins on the tracks
cats in the square
the sound of screaming at night
quiet, a quiet deep in the bones
child bones found in the house
smell of the death
i kept dreaming till my brother died

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

Process Notes:

how the poem rhythms you like a lullaby
metaphor like a cave we dwell within
the volume of breaking
as you huddle and hide: silence
a type of shame, silence also a lesson
in naming, silence always a webbing
round which we keep

inside lies a great stack of i can, i can
i can

i can get it right

"I read the writing when he seized my throat."
-H. D.

Photograph:

Kenilworth Cinema in New Orleans East:

The Kenilworth Cinema was opened as a single screen by Ogden-Perry Theatres, Inc. on August 13, 1969. It was twinned in the mid-1970’s. Ogden-Perry divested itself of the theatre in 1982. It closed in 1991 due to problems with the roof.
Source: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/43362


We went to see Dick Tracy with Madonna in it, smoked cigarettes hiding behind the seats.  We were 12 or 13. In 1990, if you were a girl, you wanted to be an object. That was what was held out for you. The boys were pretty, pretty hair, pretty made up faces or the boys were hard, baggy clothes and fast cars and drugs. The boys were active voice. The boys were the center of every story. A girl at the center of a story still was eclipsed, still patterned against sexual passivity, still was a thing for the eye and tongue before the ear and mind. And mind you, we wanted to be seen that way. To be made visible is far superior to being invisible. To be possessed equals a claim to a type of safe.

Sometimes what helps you survive is not what keeps you safe. No boys were harmed in this telling. Water waits and this husky dream waits, and we wait to for truth to surface.

And language matters when you are trying to convince yourself of anything, but does it really matter how you survive.

In all these books of trauma, they don't ever tell you how much you can swallow unharmed. But I believe we must be coded early on to have a bandwidth widened by disaster.



"...even under the most perfect circumstances, there would always be something imperfect that would leave you feeling not exactly good. The trick was to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was."
-R. Ford


"be stark in the world in which
all that heart breaking brightness will

crack"

RBD, draft 96 

Plague Journal:
6.7.20

Love is always worth doing.



Resource:

Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
https://www.movingwalls.org/moving-walls/14/katrina-unnatural-disaster.html

Is death a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected?

Day 12:

m_ther is the word for g_d
c_ty be my h_art
_ngel as ad_ict


we never _scape


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

Process Notes:

I pray to God to be free of God.
-M. Eckhart


Photograph:

girl walking in floodwaters in Lakeview, Aug 5, 2017

17th Street Canal
30° 0′ 41″ N, 90° 7′ 19″ W
Stop 4 of 4 in the Levee Breaches During Katrina tour

On August 29, 2005 at about 9:45 a.m, a monolith (30-foot long section of the concrete floodwall) failed sending torrents of water into New Orleans’s Lakeview neighborhood. The water level in the Canal at the time of failure was about 5 feet lower than the top of the wall. The breach quickly expanded into a 450 foot wide gap through which storm surge water poured, killing hundreds (directly and indirectly), destroying hundreds of residences, and causing millions of dollars in property damage. Thirty-one (31) bodies were recovered from areas directly flooded.

Post-disaster studies conclude that the breach was due to steel sheet pilings driven to depths that were too shallow. Sadly, in recommending the I-walls with such short sheet pilings, the Corps had relied upon a poorly executed and misinterpreted study it had conducted near Morgan City in 1988. At a savings of $100,000,000, the Corps wrongly concluded it could short-sheet the steel pilings of the 17th Street Canal driving them to depths of not more than 17 feet instead of between 31 and 46.

In January of 2008, Federal Judge Stanwood Duval, of the US District Court for Eastern Louisiana, held the US Army Corps of Engineers responsible for defects in the design of the concrete floodwalls constructed in the levees of the 17th Street Canal; however, the agency could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity provided in the Flood Control Act of 1928.

Source: https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/275


I cannot locate the GPS coordinates inside me
where it happened.

time is a disruptive metaphor.

can you hear me. can you hear me. [it's not inside me] i am inside of it.

sing me how we make the maze. and sing me how we escape ourselves.

the incredible irony of anyone thinking they don't already live
a life masked.

we go so far out we become ghosts of/  dear heart, what we made
time with one another.

a type of afraid called living: you can tour the remnants
of how we came.

landed, what could make us come alive again. on the map .

mark with an X the prize. the breach. the damage. what is buried.
treasure this take. we orbit until we cannot. until we can break
free.


(New Orleans, City Park, 2005)

"we see the world as it truly is... infinite"
-W. Blake







"There must be someone who crouches at the corner of every constellation."
-K. Hyesoon




Plague Journal: 

5.23.20

the problem with the artist is the natural seduction with the self, an inward turn towards create and away from external amusement, which is to say it is hard to be held to others when the mind is a century of tasks to complete. or i am trying to connect to others but have to lay down the threads to return to the cave of wonder. was the outside world supposed to be as generative as the internal depths of the self. or the mazing of wander to escape these cycles. how to not be centered on the portal of endings. to move from the wound of the past to turn your attention to the actuality of the death that leaves us vulnerable to understanding, to not want to miss the awareness of stepping free of the body. to be of such calm as to breath directly into that light of drift away without fear to cloud the hallucinations of the mind as they arise in conflict to survive. i tried to capture shadow but it depends on light and your closeness to source. the direction of glass. the lens of how to turn to allow in or out. and also how you are limited to self and self's aperture. like Woodman's angel series. you are bound by what you have on hand. you have on hand enough to make the dreaming a caught net.









Francesca Woodman





Resource:
A Decade Later, New Orleans Reflects on Hurricane Katrina in New Shows
https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/hurricane-katrina-in-new-art-shows-326259

Have you ever seen what water can erase?

Day 10:

Activate Survival Instinct:

make believe and beliefs are the same, a desire for things to remain the same

do you believe you have to carry this forever?

once upon a time i was spooling out a story i’ve held threaded inside my cells for fifteen years. come closer…

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

Process Notes: 

Photograph: 

Seabrook Bridge that connects New Orleans East to New Orleans, taken through the damaged window of my brother's car

The Seabrook Bridge (officially the Senator Ted Hickey Bridge) is a medium-rise twin bascule, four-lane roadway bridge in New Orleans, Louisiana, carrying Lakeshore Drive, connecting Leon C. Simon Drive on the upper side of the bridge with Hayne Boulevard on the lower side. The bridge is operated by the Orleans Levee District. It normally stays in the down position for vehicular traffic, but provides sufficient clearance for most marine traffic.
Source: Wikipedia 

My brother was eight years younger than me. He suicided right before his 29th birthday. I doubt he had many memories of New Orleans east. I remember driving over the Seabrook bridge almost every day of my childhood. I used to dream the drawbridge would open up beneath us, and we would tumble in or sometimes the bridge was an extraordinary height and the car would have to nose dive down the other side. I can't remember in the dreams if I was leaving or returning home, or which side of New Orleans is even home anymore. Bridges connect and divide, like language, and that is why I cannot escape them. 

I've been driving my brother's car since he died. Six years now.

It has a problem with volume. It has glass that won't stay in place. The smear on the passenger side window is from when my brother got his tint too dark and then he couldn't get a brake tag. My mom helped him peel it off with a razor blade. How do you get rid of memory. How do you remove these reminders from your every day view and then walk around being what. 

I would have to confess to you that inside the disaster of Katrina was the opportunity I had to live with my mom and my brother again when we evacuated. I would have to confess, who ever gets a second chance at childhood. It must be all miracles because there is no way I can tell you what is and isn't. There is no way I can ever say what should or should not be. I know it takes a long time to see truth. It took 9 years for this to be true, and took another 3 years for it to surface. Gratitude is where grief intersects with time. Live long enough and it will all come down to what we took for granted in the moment. Take nothing for granted and it will all come down to time.

12 years from now, what will you hold from the pandemic and say, thank you   how will you break down on the bathroom floor sobbing, oh my god, oh my god what i wouldn't give to go back....

Mark me here: You do not get to return to disasters. 

"...brain wave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment." 

-The Body Keeps the Score

Notes from the Fold: 

(Written in 2006 in New Orleans)

Suggested Ways of Living In New Orleans:

1. Medicate (i.e. Prozac, Zoloft, Xyprexa, Trazadone, Wellbutrin, Valium, Xanax).
2. Medicate (i.e. alcohol, weed, coke, ecstasy, mushrooms, acid, or various pill combinations crushed with a quarter and snorted with a dollar bill).
3. Sleep, or at least lie in bed with a pillow over your head. It’s okay, new polls show 1 in 3 New Orleanians cannot fall asleep. At least you’re not alone.
4. Distract, by any means necessary (see numbers 1 and 2).
5. Exercise: heavy lifting, carpentry and painting count.
6. Go about as though debris and half gutted homes were the norm.
7. Cut pictures of politicians out and throw darts or do other disgraceful things to them.
8. Take a vacation, preferably to another country.
9. Read letters from loved ones, if all your personal belongings and loved ones were lost in the storm, read your FEMA disaster recovery fact sheet, then apply for a SBA loan and the Road Home Program. This will be long and tedious, certainly keeping you distracted for some time. When finished immediately go back to steps 1 and 2.
10. Go to the hospital (see number 8) in another state where they actually have operating hospitals, just to see how the rest of the world lives.
11. Write your congressmen, your representative, your insurance company, the Corps, etc…..see step 9.
12. Rest, sit and think. Nothing’s happening fast, so there’s nothing you’re gonna miss.
13. Listen to sad music, When the levees break, Zeppelin cover.
14. Listen to happy music, Greenday and U2’s The Saints are Coming.
15. Get angry.
16. Do something nice for someone else like coming to a full stop at the intersection with no working lights or letting your neighbor borrow your utility pole for some juice for their microwave oven.
17. Eat ice cream, candy, cookies, cake, or brown sugar out of the box
18. Go to the shopping mall where you can see a miniature display of New Orleans in ruins. Never mind, scratch that one. Stay home and knit.
19. Watch TV or play video games (see number 4).
20. Cry, if this is difficult for you, just watch the evening news or pick up a copy of the latest USA today.
21. Talk on the phone if you can, about things not New Orleans related, To achieve this, stop talking to anyone from outside New Orleans.
22. Go to therapy if you can get an appointment at one of the two working hospitals or three private practice doctors left.
23. Meditate.
24. Talk to your partner.
25. Don’t talk to your partner, at all. Just be glad your partner hasn’t cut you up and left you on the stove.
26. Have sex, but under no circumstances are you to conceive and bring more people into the misery.
27. Drink tea, preferably in London.
28. Take a bath, that is if your gas has been turned on.
29. Watch a sad movie (see number 20) When the Levees Broke by Spike Lee.
30. Watch a happy movie (see number 15) The Death of a President by Newsmarket Films.
31. Lie on the floor (try the bathroom, that always seems to work) unless the bathroom still doesn’t have a floor, then try balancing across the cross beams while enjoying the underbelly view of your former home.
32. Take a drive with no destination, preferably off a long bridge.


Resource:
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the University of New Orleans organized the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) in 2005 in partnership with many national and Gulf Coast area organizations and individuals.
http://hurricanearchive.org/