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