Do we send the kids to school?

Day 8:

A Naming:

Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irene, Jose, Katrina, Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Phillippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta

After the season had ended, the World Meteorological Organization's hurricane committee retired five names: Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma and replaced them with Don, Katia, Rina, Sean and Whitney for the 2011 season.



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Process Notes:


but love, do not ask me the secrets
the dead keep
do not ask me of strangers' tongues
slipping in a no mouth

you self assemble into a shape
called consciousness
in response to a universe
vibrating to a specific spiral
helixing in you

place your fate against another
and what can you ever know of distance
when my love leaves my heart
till when it reaches you

do not speak grief to me
if your belief is still in separation
in ending, in death

An untold number of kids—probably numbering in the tens of thousands—missed weeks, months, even years of school after Katrina. Only now, a decade later, are advocates and researchers beginning to grasp the lasting effects of this post-storm duress. Increasingly, they believe the same lower-income teens who waded through the city’s floodwaters and spent several rootless years afterward may now be helping drive a surging need for GED programs and entry-level job-training programs in the city. It’s no coincidence, they say, that Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of young adults not in school or working.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/04/the-lost-children-of-katrina/389345/


Photograph:

Train tracks by Holt Cemetery
Latitude: 29° 59' 4.1496'' N
Longitude: 90° 6' 20.7972'' W

Holt Cemetery is a potter's field cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is located next to Delgado Community College, behind the right field fence of the college's baseball facility, Kirsch-Rooney Stadium. The cemetery is named after Dr. Joseph Holt, an official of the New Orleans Board of Health (famously involved with city health issues concerning Storyville, the Red-light district of New Orleans) who officially established the cemetery in the 19th century. Holt Cemetery is one of the Historic Cemeteries of New Orleans.

The cemetery was established in 1879 to inter the bodies of poor or indigent residents of the city. Funeral processions to Holt Cemetery were generally around, rather than through, the city. The original cemetery was 5.5 acres, and it was expanded in 1909 to 7 acres. Nearly all of the tombs are in-ground burials. As established, ownership of the graves at Holt Cemetery were given to the families of the deceased for the cost of digging the grave and subsequent maintenance of the plot.

Most of the graves and tombs at Holt Cemetery were not commercially or professionally produced but were instead fabricated by families of the deceased, giving the cemetery a strong personal touch.
Source: Wikipedia

holt (həʊlt) n
(Physical Geography) archaic or poetic a wood or wooded hill
[Old English holt; related to Old Norse holt, Old High German holz, Old Slavonic kladũ log, Greek klados twig]
Source: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/holt



When we were kids, we would jump the broken fences to cross Holt Cemetery. It was so neglected then it was common to see bones surfaced.

After Katrina, coffins washed ashore on the train tracks near our house. You could tell by the coffins that they had come from the wealthier cemeteries nearby.













We never learned anything in school about death. Everything about death you learned on the streets, in whispers, from your friends, and in the city. After Katrina, there was so much we knew about dying and how they would let us die. And now here we torque on the knowing: America.

How long will you suffer as we have? How did you think you could ever escape our fate?


Imagine a world where instead of being caged by the fear of death, we actually embraced stepping through the portal. Imagine how we would value life if we could learn to hold that truth.


You will know the intelligence of any species by how they handle their dead. And if they put it far away to not be seen, if they hide and ignore death, if they fear and run from it: Woe to the species that would speak of life thinking they can halve reality and not pay the cost of that sacrifice.

This dance is chaos. Come along...


Plague Journal:

5.25.20

you're gonna be changed whether you want to or not. the way a disaster swims inside the time line of all that touches you. you have now inherited before and after. the way we are dissimilar and similar, paradox the wheel that belief sits on. how to be a suicide to the living dead handbook. how do you survive in your suicide mind. i've been here forever. let me draw you a map. you have all of these days and hours now. make something to break against. make something beautiful. don't let any part of your life go uncharted just because the vessel suffers. just because we are made of shattering bodies is no reason to slip the light too. take all of your love and suffering and pain and fear and hold it against your genius heart. pull up the radical imagination that keeps you here when the only real solution to being human is to leave the stage. tie a red string round your wrist for every time you fail to keep the echthroi out. it's not anyone else's job to keep you safe. you will pass each chamber as you are ready. and what we call a night: well, now tell me how long that lasts now in the bardo we call pandemic.

tell me of this bardo's language. the way time shifts. and also, how do you taste under such a lack of touch.

life was a temporary, and what we call death is not something one can do to another. death was the only thing we carried in. it's the only thing you have ever held here. don't you recall this song?


Maps from the Channel: 



Resource:

We're Only Sleeping by Herbert Kearney

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