The 15th saw my 34th year rung in though you can be forgiven for missing the peal of the bells sounding as they did rather quiet by comparison with the constant shriek of global politics and rocketry. Rather selfishly I can only note that it was a more pleasant birthday than last year where, amid the early days of the pandemic, l struggled to find some way to mark the day and settled for drinking alone in my apartment, eating the best pizza New Orleans has to offer (which is admittedly not very good pizza), and reflecting on the ways in which western states have historically struggled with actually maintaining the apparatus of statehood once they reached any kind of natural boundary to growth.
On the note of New Orleans, last week I made some notes about living in Houston but it might seem ungracious were I to give my home these last six years such short shrift and I’ll offer no such scandal because if there is any city in the United States haunted by fae, devils, ghosts and gods then it is New Orleans.
It is well-known among the public that New Orleans is a haunted place sunk deep in the delta by the weight of sin and industry. Swampy lowlands are by nature given to haunting. The land isn’t quite committed to being in this world and flits in and out of existence. This is why the swamp can be so treacherous. In the time it takes a foot to fall, the firmament shifts slightly elsewhere and lets the wea ry traveler sink into the muck. An environment like that breeds ghosts.
You can deal with a place like that in two ways. The Dutch, for example, set a unified will to purging the ambiguity, driving out the ocean, and crafting a well-ordered clockwork world where even the people are manufactured in a precision press. Not coincidentally, they are entirely lacking in ghosts.
New Orleans looked at the miasma, the land that was not land, and settled in to simmer. Whatever spirits lived here in the beginning were joined by the haunts and dreams of a dozen tribes scrapping for survival and glory neck-deep in the effluence of the continent and bleeding together in the way they always do on the periphery of empire and even more so in the porous boundaries of the swamp.
Cut to now and the City has created a culture of Life Amid Death found nowhere else in the United States. Even as the City sinks below the sea and engineering megaworks are rolled out to delay the inevitable catastrophe—and make no mistake, what the Dutch have turned into a distant question, the denizens of the Delta have been content to delay to the day after tomorrow—a blanket of living green weaves itself across every yard and building. The necropolises that dot the city draw in tourists—i.e. Money ergo Life—while the aggressively joyful second lines serve as a constant reminder of the gossamer thin boundary between life and death. Mardi Gras is a riot of color, feasting, utter hedonism, and celebration of life committed to with the religious fervor normally seen in militant crusaders marching into battle. And if all of this seems at all wasteful, one night ask what else this teetering edifice of civilization is all for if it doesn’t allow for such grand foolishness.
Of voodoo l know little more than the average misinformed American and will only gesture vaguely at the decapitated chickens and skeletal loa as if to say, "Oh yeah, these guys are here too.”
Every year in New Orleans brings a hail of bullets, a second line of hurricanes, and a litany of failures by the city’s basic social services, but it also brings endless opportunity to embrace immediacy and open yourself to the unexpected, the strange and the sublime. Opportunities like that are rare and even if it’s not forever—and while dreariness is remarkably persistent nothing of worth ever is—who could say no to the chance to dwell for even a yet while in that space where everything seems possible?