Mosaiko

Snapshot: Post-Hurricane New Orleans

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These days, seeing New Orleans clearly is harder than it used to be. And it was never easy to get a reliable read on the place. That was always its allure — to the world that came from afar, and to its own citizens, too. New Orleans, if only for a moment, could become whatever good place you wanted it to be, keeping its other parts tucked (not always tidily) out of sight. …

Still. I can make a claim to clear-sightedness simply by saying what I like most about New Orleans. I like its faux-European, one-off impertinence to the stale, urban-American prototype (K.C., Omaha, St. Louis, Dallas, Atlanta). I like its dramatic and improbable placement on the Earth’s surface — a hopeless, lowering land between a river and a lake — which makes life there feel happily dodgy. I like its location on our American map — a sink into which a great deal of everything American eventually trickles and reveals itself. I like the fruit salad of cultures which renders me pleasantly invisible. I like the latitudinal feeling of torpor and stasis, which inexplicably encourages enterprise — in me, anyway. I like the city’s convoluted sense of its own history, which upon me confers a freedom from history. I even like New Orleans’ smothering self-regard, which finally dictates little about how I should see it, and causes me (not too seriously or for very long) to feel myself a renegade. And I like the fact that thinking about New Orleans — seeking it, prying it, gazing at it as I do — eventually makes my mind wander outward toward all of America, to how it’s different from New Orleans and how it’s alike, and why. It’s similar to the way tourists see America more vividly when they’re abroad. New Orleans is our own private foreign country, where we speak the language.

What’s happened, of course, and made everything harder to see now, is Katrina — five plus years behind us, but numinously, relentlessly the present tense for everything. … Katrina — for the moment, anyway — has become a subversive brand. It taints everything about the city — words, thoughts, possibility, the past, the future. …

This fall, on the hot breeze down Royal Street and up Prytania, out St. Claude to the Parish line, and along Elysian Fields to the Lake, one hears hopeful-baleful words: “We’re coming back.” “We’re almost back.” “Will we ever be back?” “Can New Orleans be the same?”…

But my best bet is that the civic vocabulary in New Orleans will soon change — if it hasn’t already. “Going on” will presently take the place of “coming back,” since there’s no coming back anyway. No one could agree about what back was, or how it looked, or who benefitted. “Back” becomes just another illusion tailored to our separate needs. “Going on” will one day soon be seen as a version of what would’ve, could’ve, might’ve happened anyway, even if there hadn’t been a terrible storm.