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…

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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/

Will lack of touch induce a failure to thrive?

Day 4


committed/ i fold down my fiery wings & listen:
“Parts of the levee system were either topped or failed, leaving up to 80% of the city under water.” What do you do at 6:10 AM. Where were you when you heard the news. Where did you grow up. Where did you go to school. Do you think there will be a Mardi Gras. Can you locate New Orleans on a map a hundred years from now.  Once there was a city now underwater. We call it home.

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Process Notes: 

“the habit of photographers seeing – of looking at the world as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature”
-Susan Sontag

the devotional target goal is to post each piece by 6:10AM, then meditate for 30 minutes, then do a ritual energy clearing directed towards the GPS coordinates of the area of that day coalescing in a 31 day city wide healing reciprocity to the city from my body. if i imagine this makes any difference to the world, am i a form of crazy. is it hysterical in this world to only believe in love. or how have you ever known anyone has ever loved you. or how has no one ever loved me as much as i love this city. or has this city's love created within me a strange capacity to love all things broken and abandoned. and who among us is not.

Photograph:

Picture of New Orleans east sidewalk in the rear view mirror of my brother’s car


30° 1' 56.053" N     90° 1' 0.797" W


My brother was born in New Orleans east at the same hospital where my first daughter was born; it was destroyed by Katrina. After the storm, my brother and I went to the house where we grew up and walked through the abandoned decay. The tiles were visible through the mud, and I remembered them from childhood. Now the house is occupied, and the above ground pool is gone. The tree house my dad built in the oak, gone. The fence we put up for the dogs is still there and the shed where I used to climb on the roof. When I was 13 years old, I used to watch my brother while my mom worked after my dad moved out. After he would fall asleep, I would go in the backyard and smoke one cigarette behind the shed thinking, one day, I’m going to get out of this place. one day…

“Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. They learn that they can play an active role when faced with difficult situations. In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading and crying do not register with their caregiver…they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life”
-The Body Keeps the Score

“relationships extending curiously throughout space and time… spooky action at a distance”
– Einstein

“entanglement between particles exists everywhere, all the time…”
– Michael Brooks

“Even with high intelligence there is the always the risk of becoming overwhelmed by the persistent state of expanded perception. “
- Dean Radin

listening to the radio in the days following the levee breaks, i remember the story of a mother on a roof who waited for anyone to rescue them and during the night, the baby slipped from her arms into the muddy water that surrounded them. she couldn't swim. the child lost. an island of what takes us is this city. how do you not go into the water. how do you not go into the underworld looking for your dead. how long it has taken me to understand how thin these veils are that appear to separate us and how often we are crossing. and why is there afraid. we can never be lost to one another. there is nowhere to go. these are the ways we survive the nightmares we have constructed here, the types of suffering we dreamed up to make life "matter." we imagined all of this terror and inside of this terrific image, we forgot it was only us in the cave watching our own shadow dance on the wall.


can you hear me//who can hear me// can i hear what i am saying yet// [echo]


Plague Journal:

5.21.20

inside Notley’s poem Eurynome’s Sandals- it feels like she is inside my head, writing to me, inside my thoughts & then she writes about telepathy, being in another’s thoughts and can we get so crystal clear, can we tap into the vessel of language so clearly we share one poetry making mind, or sometimes how it feels when you are in love, and you feel like the other person can hear you, can know what you need, as if you are tethered, is that a type of being open to receive do we make the future with our mutual desire. can you be in a space with someone eclipsed of your need. if you drink poison by mistake, the “mistake” won’t save your life.

“When people begin to argue about doing things instead of doing them, they become absolutely impossible”
– A. Crowley

reality exists only in accordance with what you choose to observe

i have to get to the future to finish the poem that saves me from the past



Notes from the Channel: 





Resources: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-is-a-medical-and-financial-disaster-for-blacks-in-new-orleans-11590226200