DROWN IN MY OWN TEARS

If St. Charles Could Swim

Marcus Reichert RAW STORY CONTRIBUTOR

The idea that New Orléans might be the south’s archaic equivalent to the twin towers of the World Trade Center is, at first glance, an absurd one. But absurdity often masks the most mysterious of truths. For reasons of circumstance I sadly never photographed this unbowed city of indulgence, blacks and whites lingering eternally on its outskirts in once-forbidden communion.

I photographed London’s Battersea Power Station just one year after New York’s shining colossi of capitalism were felled. If I’d had an appetite for apocalypse I might very well have trained my lens on Norman Foster’s “gherkin”, then in construction, or the stolid mass of Canary Wharf, both likely targets for suicidal devastation. But instead I was drawn to the clichéd hulk of the Power Station, lying with its legs held rigidly in the air like an elephant about to suddenly shift his enormous weight out of a mud hole and rise. At the time, my friend the producer Gregor Wilson was making a film in New Orléans, but my work in London kept me away. How I now regret it.

I knew the World Trade Center intimately, watched it grow out of the bowels of the subway, nearly was sucked out of its elevator’s doors to my death when I was carried without warning to its skeletal 77th floor. I don’t care what anyone says, it was an inhuman structure, characterless and inelegant. The huge red steel horse’s head that stood decapitated on the plaza between those identical masses always struck me as Picasso’s most futile work, not at all inadequate to its task, simply futile. Buildings anywhere near such a scale fill me with horror. Perhaps at one time the great balconied terraces of New Orléans filled another frail wandering soul with such horror, or perhaps they made him swoon with their Proustian plenitude.

It is of course the proposition of scale that awakens one through the lens to the relationship one is obliged to have with edifices of such epic proportions. The cityscape that surrounds a building that by its sheer size attains mythological status takes on a new insignificance. In the case of New Orléans, its situation, in some ways not unlike that of New York, is masked in the atmosphere of the lowlands, or so I imagine—strangely compliant, and without the need for cold-blooded provocation.

Today that atmosphere is incomprehensible to the eye: New Orléans snarls vainly, weakly at the slightest movement in a state of disemboweled mortality. Once committed, like a cat on heat, to provide the energy to keep thousands and thousands of miscreant intruders alight each year, it now lies inertly sipping its own urine. Gazing with listless eyes up beyond the fetid verge of the Mississippi and the Gulf, railroad lines curling underwater, from dawn until dusk, and then into an endless night of unendurable pain, New Orléans silently cries out for something akin to Biblical retribution. Heaven no longer waits in sultry repose in New Orléans for any man, and especially not for one George W. Bush, whose timbered ranch across the dissolute river stinks only of a few daft squirts of DKNY eau de toilette.

For a so-called world leader with two black people—at one time—in his cabinet, dedicated to his racist imperialist agenda, it would seem unlikely that Bush would consider the very same poor people whose children make up much of his armed forces unworthy of the most basic civic concern. However, bearing in mind his brother’s nefarious (unproven) insistence that rural blacks not have the right to vote in the state of Florida, why should anyone even modestly aligned with the White House have anything to do with protecting blacks, and poor whites, from the ravages of nature— no, not when there are diffident Muslims to be subjugated, and it’s far less trouble than keeping track of one’s own backyard. What will young black Americans think of joining the US. Army now, and what will those poor misguided Americans who encouraged their children to dress up in flamboyant camouflage fatigues, —and deploy freedom-rich digitally-adept weapons—for Uncle Sam think of encouraging their grandchildren to do the same?

One day, a sunny day, the empty fields surrounding New Orléans will be merely hypnotic, like an ancient grave-site. Imagine what this devastated land will be worth. I understand its next reincarnation is already in greedy development. The significance of such places as New Orléans in all their spiritual glory often means nothing to those lacking a taste for the exotic, the unspeakably opulent, the downright poetic. It all depends, it seems, on one’s entrenched system of values but, perhaps more importantly, on where—and how far away—one sits in contemplation of the dark mysterious drift of life. For George W. Bush, in his disassociative reveries, that place must always be a bright and welcoming classroom filled with adoring children.


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