A Meditation on New Orleans
By Ralph Adamo

People in New Orleans do not look like people elsewhere. It is not simply a matter of race or ethnicity, both of which do distinguish the city's population from much of the rest of the country's, but a look in the eye, a cast of spirit, a suggestion of a familiarity with the dark that transcends conventional depths of suffering and despair. Not a few writers and artists -- mostly passing through to one degree or another -- have come to think of New Orleans as a city of the dead. This conceit has far deeper roots than the above-ground burial practices or even the voo-doo/Santeria in the air, that connection with Africa's spirit world imported through the islands to the south of the city. You don't have to be of African descent to have that look in your eyes. And the look does not have to be bound to morbidity or locked in pain; in fact, its antithesis, a sort of manic celebratory joy, equally well marks and defines the character in the faces of this city.

Death, after all, is not a one-sided argument.

People have to live, even if they have pitched their tent in a passageway to and from the spirit world, for that is what New Orleans in its soul most nearly is, a place of transition, an access point, an open door, a wound that will not heal.

The photographer Lowell Handler, attracted to the city by its mystery and beauty, found the truth of this observation with the lens of his camera, even though youth and optimism and a cataclysmic struggle with his own demons may have kept him from knowing what he was seeing in the late 1970s. Like many young artists in search of themselves, Lowell found more than he bargained for in his year-long idyll here, living the Bohemian life of the French Quarter, working at the storied Napoleon House bar, volunteering his time in a hostel for run-away kids, Lowell kept his eye on the city, and the city looked back at him. In New Orleans, he discovered one of the sources of his own difference -- the accumulation of mental and physical effects that had plagued him took clearer shape and was given a name, Tourettes Syndrome. Though he carried inside the heart of a romantic, his eye was much cooler than that, more focused and more visionary. With the camera guiding and protecting his search, what Lowell Handler found in the late 1970s was the truth of the city of New Orleans, a truth that is incalculably harder to articulate in language, with its baggage of rules and deep veins of etymological dispersions.

When you say what sets the city apart, or try to say it in language that clears a space for itself and invites listening, the result is frequently so mediated that the sharp chill of the truth feels comfortably familiar, like something that is odd but can be assimilated. In fact, what lives in New Orleans, in the soul of the city and the fiber of its people is not comfortable, or familiar, or safe. Language may make it seem so, but images push the viewer past the threshold from which he or she could casually observe, and those images bring us close up against the face of something we cannot make alright, and do not necessarily want to see. It is not deformity, or ugliness, or a failure of invitation, but something much more unsettling. To look into the faces of the natives of this city is to look into a reality of time and experience which most of us are trained by our education and acculturation to shrink from, to turn away from both in self-preservation and as an aesthetic complaint. We do not want life to be so fragile, random, so open to those spirits in the universe that are not so happy to see human beings among them.
I do not, by any of this mean to suggest an Anne Rice state of mind as the primary milieu of the city, even though, no doubt, that variation does account for some distracted rogue element of our reality. But for the most part, the undead of this city are all of us, or most of us, quite alive in conventional metrics, possibly even hostile to the tourist-driven preoccupation with vampires and the black arts (as sold through the actual black arts of media manipulation). It is difficult to sort out why exactly this place is different, or how that difference manifests itself over generations, or -- especially --how it overtakes newcomers. Should I say, maybe, 'attracts' newcomers? that small number every year who arrive here and then report to their former neighbors elsewhere that they simply felt they had come home, that they had to remain here. My agent, who has never lived here, calls New Orleans his 'spiritual home.' In that regard, perhaps it is not so different from a handful of other cities that have the same sort of effect on people - Paris, most obviously. Perhaps the difference lies in the degree to which the element of a dark and uncontrollable alternative spirit is concentrated here, where, truly, there is not much reason to live if one is not in the river trades, or simply drawn to trouble, as were the migrants of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The twentieth is harder to sort out, but maybe only because everything about that recent century is, and because people could roam far more easily toward a destination that was drawing them to it.

My own father moved here, alone in the 1930s, the 20- year-old child of immigrants who had settled in Brooklyn and Jamaica, New York, from the shores of Napoli. Why did he come here and why did he stay? I never heard him even try to articulate the answer to that. Was it the fact that this is a gambling city, however impecunious most of its gamblers are most of the time? Not just a city where gambling was always wide-open, but one where it made sense to gamble, was not a crazy departure from a well-ordered life but the very stuff of life.

Like most artists who come here, Lowell found an escape and took it. Would he have survived otherwise? Hard to say. Those of us born here bear a somewhat different relationship to the city's allure and some of its repulsive reality. Many, in fact, do leave, have always left, need to go away from this place no matter how much their souls have been shaped by it. The musicians -- Wynton Marsalis, Harry Connick, Doctor John of this time, Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet of an earlier time -- had to leave, and the conventional explanation involves economic opportunity, or the lack of it, and their desire to ply their trade in the cultural mainstream. On the other hand, we have the emblematic tale of Buddy Bolden, arguably one of the forgers of original jazz, who famously sat down on his bed one day and refused to say or play anything further for the remaining thirty years of his life. One does not wish to criticize the mettle of Faulkner, Anderson, Hearn, Fitzgerald, Ford, but in fact, they all passed through, moved on, looked back for material but did not assume they could sustain life here. Tennessee Williams tried, perhaps, but like many Hollywood stars of today, he was more a frequent visitor than a resident. This place scares people, as well it should. People with conventional American ambition in particular, seem to know not to stay, contributing to what has long been seen here as a brain drain, the loss of the best and brightest to opportunity elsewhere. But one could argue that they left in order not only to succeed in American terms, but not to perish, in the succubus of their own hometown.

The poet Everette Maddox, born in Alabama but a ravenously committed Orleanian by choice, could not find a way to both create and survive here. He chose to create and did not survive; dead at forty-four, his legacy of three exquisite volumes of poems argues powerfully for the generosity of the muse of this place, once she has decided your devotion is absolute and eternal.

That same muse lives in perhaps a lesser, certainly a less self-conscious way in every one who walks these streets and pushes their luck with nearly every breath drawn here. While this observation may seem grandiose, the chances of dying violently here are approximately ten times those of other American cities, and the general life expectancy is notoriously lower in New Orleans for every class and category of person. (The cigarette manufacturers blame the food; the chefs blame the alcohol; the distillers don't say much about it; the gambling interests continue to circle, as they always did. It is also pretty easy to feel like the only unarmed person in town some days, assuming you are.

Finally, post-Katrina, we in New Orleans are living a different sort of reality, a different sort of dream from the one even we are accustomed to. When the waters came, many were literally washed away, forced from their moorings and from planet earth by the swift rising tide; others perished in their attics or on their roofs, dehydrated, starving, unable to attract the help that was in such short (if frequently heroic) supply. Returning to the city in the months following the water's retreat (for a month, more than 480 billion gallons of water covered most of the city), we were all cautious and numbed. Had it been war, we would've been described as shell-shocked. The folly of placing too much faith in the material world was reiterated in home after home, which either were no longer habitable, if there at all, or from which the contents had been torn and trashed by the waters until books were pulp, pianos were driftwood, fine clothes were rags decorating rusting appliances and overturned vehicles.

Each of our houses bore complex inscriptions in chalk - marks left by the first-responders, searching primarily for bodies. The lines and squiggles became a sort of divine encoding, the final tally of the storm versus each home personally.

After that, we tried to return to 'normal.' But our baseline for normal remains, as I have tried to convey, a threshold halfway into another realm of being in the first place, and hardly anyplace to begin a normal American life over again.