What left is there to say?

Day 28: 

What we call “our lives” is a glamour thrown up to keep us from reaching them. We put so much stock in feelings that hold no meaning at all. Sadness, loneliness, anger, despair, happiness, hope: These are the great fictions you torque upon, which is as useful as building a city on a swamp. None it can hold because you can only distort the truth for so long. It is in your nature to fight for them as it was in our nature to build in a place that cannot survive. Do you see how we replicate loss, how all of it is a temporary disbelief in the reality that none of this will hold. 

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

TIME

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Just after midnight, at 12:40 AM CDT (0540 UTC), Hurricane Katrina reached Category 4 intensity with 145 mph (233 km/h) winds. By 7:00 AM CDT (1200 UTC), it was a Category 5 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph (282 km/h), gusts up to 190 mph (310 km/h) and a central pressure of 902 mbar.

In a press conference at roughly 10:00 AM CDT (1500 UTC), Nagin declared that "a mandatory evacuation order is hereby called for all of the parish of Orleans." "We're facing the storm most of us have feared," he told the early-morning news conference, with the governor at his side. Following Nagin's speech, Governor Blanco stated that President Bush called her "just before" the press conference and said that he was "concerned about the [storm’s] impact" and asked her "to please ensure that there would be a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans."[8] Katrina was expected to make landfall overnight.[9] Shortly after the meeting, at 10:00 AM CDT (1500 UTC), the National Weather Service issued a bulletin predicting "devastating" damage.

At 12:00 PM CDT (1700 UTC), the Louisiana Superdome was opened as a, "refuge of last resort," for those residents that were unable to obtain safe transport out of the city. 20,000 people entered the Dome. 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. 4444 Army National Guard and 932 Air National Guard are deployed (5,376 total).

President Bush declared a state of emergency in Alabama and Mississippi, and a major disaster in Florida, under the authority of the Stafford Act.

Photograph: 

Katrina Memorial

There is a blank space where a name should be, an erasure of what is does not make it not true. You know this. A lack of memory, an unknowing, a forgetting, a not believing... none of these change reality. 

You think there is something to fight for, and that is the problem. Time is a problem. 

This is always happening. This is the story of your life. There is no other story. Each detail is exact. 

It is always Saturday, August 28th, 2005. And the storm is coming. And there is no deviating from this path. 

It is exactly the moment you are in now, and there is no deviating from this path. 

Tell me when you began to believe that this illusion was "live." 

Time appears linear because you are on a small arc on an endless circle. It's so small it appears flat with a beginning, a middle and an end, like a story. A past, a present, and a future. 

But none of these things exist. 

I need you to believe in everything. 

If not, we will be here until you do. 

In order to change the past, we need to change the future by unhooking from all we thought we knew before. 

It only takes one line of code to change the whole program. 

You only have to locate one line of code. 

Plague Journal: 

8.26.2020

We are a species conscious enough to know our planet is dying. 

What that has done to us on an emotional level is create a massive amount of fear and aggression, an animalistic response to threat. 

We are not going to survive and we understand this at a fundamental level. We were given all we needed here, and we failed. 

And no amount of blood in the street is going to change that fact. 

We can kill each other first or we can wait till the planet dies. But either way, this cycle ends. 

The universe cares not one bit how we are recycled into further energies. It is only us who thinks being human is so precious that somehow we were invincible. 

In all future timelines, the story of humanity is a cautionary tale. When we hear it... 

Resource: 

What did we learn from Katrina: 

https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/what-did-we-learn-from-katrina/

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 arises in the minds of all living beings?

Day 21:

1. a never ending cosmos of triggering sound
2. gates to the threshold
3. cloisters of stars
4. stay long enough to part
5. stay long? loose this grasping

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

Process Notes: 

Are we still at war?

What do you believe is going on?

Why poetry?

At the base of it is perfection.

Outside of trauma, one will try to affix to something that can be consistent.

The line: a perfect pitch. A metered feet of sound. A collapse of error.

The box corners, the frame of the photograph, the cutting edge of syllabic. What we adore is symmetry, what we adore is light, what we adore is the way a feeling can be contained in this form, I have the ability to capture anything and make it beautiful.

Don't believe me then try me. I know what I am and cannot be moved.

The problem with surfaced lifetimes and nothing here is enough.

I want everything like I would retrograde back before each of us exploded, i tried to use magic to slip into a life i wanted/ realized too late doubt showing, never thinking here i could offer enough to not make you love me/ but to tear down the walls of keep it all out/ what suffers the heart is potential and the inability to reach/ like i would play against the childing beast of all/ [redacted] calls all survival a type of play/ we wanted the dawn to be our guarding/ the stars themselves to narrate our destiny


inside the poem i build an island of refuge
for i want you to see me
far more than i want you to reach me

Photograph: 

Cemetery behind a chain link fence


How can one find one's mind when one looks elsewhere.

Here is what we found written in the stream:

no matter what you see here
no matter what you feel here
do not doubt
that there is nothing but love
one sound, unending
you have to want to listen


"in the Kabbalah there are names for angels that live in the intervals created by each harmonic"

"safety in the broadest sense is any sound the listener can listen to without amygdala activation"

-Sound Healing 


I spend more time with the dead than with the living. They are ever present. They are the sound in between sound, interstices where the poem lives as well. We carry the current across veils. Or to say, if you hold to this reality, I was distracted from living.

But still, I was trying to meet reality. But the truth was I was often unmoored after the storm. Habits of disappearing. Who ever knows where you are in a city. I spent too much time in unsafe places but having come from unsafe places didn't notice danger. I didn't need to flee what never scared me. I was part of a design already coded and can tell you too much of endings.

I built a space for this community before we exploded so we would recall our intimacy.

I made a space for sound so we could sing our resilience.

I broke consistent because I knew already the world was spinning.

Let me tell you, between the choice of wonder and knowns, you want to lead a life of never seeing too far forward in time.

I imagine anyway. It must be a kind of peace to not know always what is coming next.

Plague Journal: 

6.23.20

if i would have known on the that last night before the city shut down that i would never kiss you again. i would have really kissed you. i would have stayed long enough to say good bye.

but like most of my life, i thought i had all the time in the world.

and i thought you loved me too.

and what has been most consistent in my life is how wrong i am about other people.


Resource:
Survivor Stories: Family reflects on how Hurricane Katrina brought them closer together
https://www.today.com/news/survivor-stories-family-reflects-how-hurricane-katrina-brought-them-closer-t137527

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 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

What happens once you are free?

Day 17:

disasters takes years to recover from/ that is the nature of their imprint/ you can’t cling to life/ it’s already lost/ all of this, already lost/ look there in the pooling/ once this time moves/ we move forever/ all of this passes/ there is no guarantee of life/ our practices reflect us more than god

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

Process Notes: 

there is a chaos if i so choose
-A. Notley

"Incidents of abuse are never stand alone events."
-The Body Keeps the Score

What deaths are we ready to allow into our lives now?

Post-Katrina New Orleans in 2006 was a dangerous landscape. There were very few mental health resources, people were using to cope, domestic abuse went up, suicides went up. We sat stranded from each other. A city made of blocks of debris, abandoned homes, darkness for miles, and the emptiness where once we danced.

In Mardi Gras of 2019, we followed St. Anne over the tracks to the river where traditionally New Orleanians deposit their dead. Have you walked these paths? Have you danced to music in the morning as the sun rises over the costumed medley and as you passed the tracks made a wish:

May we be well.
May we be safe.
May we be at peace.

Oh New Orleans.

I have walked at night on the eve of the New Year in a snake like pattern over bridges to clear this waking.

I have walked at dawn from the levee to the place where we pushed through the energy that bounds us to the past.

We have made such a metamorphosis of this living.

And now we ask again, can you sing us through this time of capsizing. Can you listen to this drowning and still tell me we will make it right. Right there, the shore in sight.

I will tell you to reach a place: You must never take your eyes from where you're destined.


"if you have walked outside the machine
  Who are you?"

-Notley

Photograph: 

Reflection in City Park Lagoons

City Park, a 1,300-acre (5.3 km2) public park in New Orleans, Louisiana, is the 87th largest and 20th-most-visited urban public park in the United States. City Park is approximately 50% larger than Central Park in New York City, the municipal park recognized by Americans nationwide as the archetypal urban greenspace. Although it is an urban park whose land is owned by the City of New Orleans, it is administered by the City Park Improvement Association, an arm of state government, not by the New Orleans Parks and Parkways Department. City Park is unusual in that it is a largely self-supporting public park, with most of its annual budget derived from self-generated revenue through user fees and donations. In the wake of the enormous damage inflicted upon the park due to Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism began to partially subsidize the park's operations.

City Park holds the world's largest collection of mature live oak trees, some older than 600 years in age. The park was founded in 1854, making it the 48th oldest park in the country,[ and established as the "City Park" in 1891.
Source: Wikipedia


Photo by: Coleen Perilloux Landry, Sept, 2005: City Park


Plague Journal:
5.27.20

i thought it was "less life" or "missing life" but it was just a choice & there was stuff to learn here too- it's a matter of how you want to receive lessons

i feel like if i could just be still or quiet enough, i could hear something. is there something beyond expectation. that nails us to suffering. endeavoring to get it "right" when everything is already right- right before us.

he says, i make things harder than they need to be. and it's true. i needed you to speak to me in a language exact. a code i could read that i only wanted to read as safe. inside the complexity of chaos, the simple pattern of return to where we begin and to begin again. over and over. we pass through the chambers and all of the chambers are the same. it seems some days. we aren't getting anywhere. and then we arrive. and you'll know because if you are lost in your life.

it means you never made it this far before.



Resource:
Shipwrecked America:
by Alexandra Kandy Longuet | Eklektik Productions & Crescendo Media Films | France - Belgium | 52' | 2016

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the most violent storm in the history of the United States, ravages New Orleans. The city’s entire population is displaced.
In the land of opportunity, the disaster seems to provide an opportunity for a city’s rebirth on a fairer basis. But against all expectations and despite the Obama presidency, the Crescent City turns into a ground zero for imposing economic shock therapy, intensifying drastically the economic, social and racial inequalities that existed before.
Portrait of the city that became the US laboratory and reveals the divisions of a whole country.
https://vimeo.com/188628485

What is the weight of a vow?

Day 16:

I am telling you a story backwards.  I have already scored it, but to you it uploads linear. Time is a problem. This illusion I created just for you. If you ever doubt how loved you are, know I stopped time. I pulled it through language and image. I corded it over a decade/ and all of the time it took me/ all the hours of my life/ they are for you/ to show you/ this is the length of my love/ be not afraid/ is all art is ever saying/ i’ll be here until we are all free.




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


Process Notes: 

"Let's not fracture our music in this existence of urgency."

-A. Waldman, 2020

Every vibration awakens all others of its particular pitch.


the symbol of a code
(metaphor) replaces energy disruption
& personal attachments that halt progress
to seeing clearly

how do you know the passage of time
is exact.


tell me how long is a night
now.

our greatest dangers are our habits.


from here, the story turns on invocation, for what we make
what we create first in thought
is what assembles the world.


we made the imitation of life
more valuable than life itself.

"acute sensitiveness is always associated with genius"
-A. Crowley



Photograph:

New Orleans skyline at dusk taken from the River


You can go towards what scares you, they are your feelings after all. New Orleans. I have layered in image, symbol, metaphor and a draping. What I sacrifice is the up to this moment how I carved from self the art I thought would save me.

I let it float.

I will never go back to being who I was before this.

And this, the story of your breaking inside your breaking. I would hold it for all of us.


But I must ask for a return. Take this whole life from me, take every minute left and let the vessel be place holder for what is invulnerable.

I retire breaking this land. I retire breaking this song. I retire breaking this path to surrender. I retire the sound of fear and doubt. I retire any gods that don't dance on the charnel ground. I retire attachment to outcome. I retire any story that makes small what we carried to our shores. Between the basin and the river, canaled of outlets and water ways, I retire fear of what takes, of what erases, of what submerges, of what swallows. I retire the anger of lost hours. I retire the regret of potential.

I forgive it all, for this lifetime and seven generations. I mark into the edge between land and empty, the outskirts where energy thins under bridges, along the train tracks, the walls bounding our city: I mark the overgrowth and neglect, the art of temporary, the forgotten codes of abandon. I have run from end to end of miles between where no one listens. I have seen how what is real wavers in invisibility. I have catalogued what you would put away. I have seen the inequity of time and place. I retire belief in systems, in programs, in thought patterns of uneven priority. I retire any notion that all life is not sacred.

I forgive the cycles of birth and death. I forgive the cycles of dream and awareness. I forgive the cycles of rebirth and endless suffering.


Plague Diary: 

6.23.20

Vow:

With one eye on this world and one on the next
And a third focused on the timeless dimension
Throughout this life and all possible lifetimes
Until Enlightenment be achieved
May I inexhaustibly endeavor in the Bodhisattva way
And follow the path of unconditional compassion
And selfish altruism
So that all beings everywhere be delivered
And freed from the ravages of suffering and confusion
And reach the other shore, great peace, deathless nirvana.



Resource:
Ten Years Since Katrina: A Meditation on New Orleans by Kristina Kay Robinson
https://ibw21.org/editors-choice/ten-years-since-katrina-a-meditation-on-new-orleans/

What is the word for something emerging from nothing?

Day 15:

Practice dying till it comes as natural as inhaling. Practice that or be lost in this cycle of endless suffering for all lifetimes. Amusement is the degree to which you have tricked yourself into believing anything here holds meaning. You can no more be in New Orleans than America than in some fixed notion of your own name. You can destroy a city or kill yourself, and all of consciousness will continue to self replicate. It’s not that you don’t matter, but it is exactly that there is no “you” that exists to matter. Doubt of that truth is the dream; it’s the fabric of this bardo to deceive us. 



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

Process Notes: 

1) the art of visibility
2) the art of attention
3) the art of reciprocity
4) the art of response
5) the art of truth
6) the art of protection
7) the art of travel
8) the art of disclosure
9) the art of grief
10) the art of safety
11) the art of touch
12) the art of entry
13) the art of response
14) the art of intensity
15) the art of confusion
16) the art of moments
17) the art of impulse
18) the art of time
19) the art of shared space
20) the art of devotion
21) the art of admiration
22) the art of communication
23) the art of laughter
24) the art of creating
25) the art of critique
26) the art of design
27) the art of denial
28) the art of sacrifice
29) the art of acceptance
30) the art of gratitude
31) the art of joy
32) the art of relaxation
33) the art of nature
34) the art of beauty
35) the art of the unexpected
36) the art of release
37) the art of gratification
38) the art of memory
39) the art of trust
40) the art of recall
41) the art of codes
42) the art of magnification
43) the art of energy
44) the art of doubling
45) the art of closure
46) the art of beginnings
47) the art of numbness
48) the art of awakening
49) the art of sound
50) the art of vibration
51) the art of collective
52) the art of repetition
53) the art of bodies
54) the the art of no words
55) the art of restraint
56) the art of surrender
57) the art of excess
58) the art of unconditional love
59) the art of fear
60) the art of ecstasy
61) the art of union
62) the art of across time
63) the art of underneath
64) the art of nonduality

Photograph:

Tomb in Odd Fellow's Rest cemetery in Mid-City

Lat:   29.9817°   (29° 58' 54")

Lon:   -90.1106°   (-90° 6' 38")


The Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana was founded in 1849. It includes Renaissance architecture and Exotic Revival architecture. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and the listing included one contributing building and one contributing site.
Source: Wikipedia



the first part of every ceremony is the banishing

the second part is the invoking

rest here, i hear joy is coming....

i know how to see far enough forward into time
to build a path to resistance
when i arrived at the crossroads
it was not what i carried but who i brought with me

that i had not counted on, but all of life will torque
on unexpected, so i need you to hold grief in an open palm facing the sky
not with your hand closed turned towards the ground
clutching the fear, if you relax, you will lose it
there is nothing to lose

i promise.



Resource:
Carville Morgue:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/world/americas/15iht-orleans.html