Pretty lively for a dying city

My friend Charles' observations in the Times Picayune today, reminding me that 2008 is another opportunity to celebrate this city, and embrace the many lessons she offers us.
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Friday, December 28, 2007

C.W. Cannon
Goodbye, 2007. And good riddance. But will you really be gone? After we've had our réveillon suppers and passed out, will we wake up to a new day?

Katrina, many supposed, would be far-ranging enough in destruction to wipe history clean so that New Orleans could finally reinvent itself along lines regarded as more healthy by Yankee values of thrift, hard work and suspicion of sentimentality (evidenced as much in Mississippi and Texas as up north).

Yet Katrina simply deposited another rich and stubborn layer of past atop an already deep trove of, to use the dismissive American term for history, "baggage." In other words, the storm only anchored New Orleans more firmly, not only in history, but in a history haunted by death.

The New Orleanian approach to the past, and to death, is, to put it mildly, unorthodox in America. Outgoing state poet laureate Brenda Marie Osbey has written eloquently on the subject: "Wear the memory of the dead plainly / speak of the dead as though you thought they might hear / live among your dead, whom you have every right to love."

Many dry-eyed American optimists regard such an attitude toward death as unhealthy. Yet one could see it in opposite terms as well.

For example, New Orleanians are routinely disparaged as "delusional" or, "in denial," especially when it comes to the region's physical future. The tone of the July 2007 issue of National Geographic is an apt example, as was Ben C. Toledano's nasty bit of petty vitriol last summer in Commentary, which he cutely termed an "autopsy."

A transplant friend of mine, who still struggles with her choice to stay here, tried to put her finger on that nagging sense that New Orleans isn't a place to build a future. She said she just wasn't sure the city would even be here in a hundred years or so.

Instead of citing coastal restoration hopes, or pointing to the miracles of Dutch flood control, I just flat-out agreed with her. Yes. Of course. The city, in time, will be under the ocean, Atlantis. So will you, darling. In time the sun will supernova and the earth will be destroyed. In time the universe will expand into a dark cold place and the phenomenon of life will be no more. Do you really want to go there?

Maybe a little strategic delusion and denial is the height of rationality. Do you really think that glitzy new condo complex in some exurban boomtown is going to be there forever? Ask a homeowner with negative equity in South Florida or Phoenix. At least when we dress up like kings and queens on Mardi Gras, we don't think we really are kings and queens. Far from being irrational, New Orleanian frivolity in the face of death and decay is actually built on a sober apprehension of reality.

In comparison with other major American cities, New Orleans has been in economic decline for 150 years. Isn't it interesting that all the cherished cultural gifts the city has placed at the feet of the world have arisen during this period of supposed decline? We've been pretty lively for a dying city. Maybe "going down slow" isn't so bad.

After all that dying, we're still here, and, physically, we resemble our youthful self more than any other American city. We've stayed beautiful without plastic surgery, a feat that requires grace, wisdom and, probably, economic underdevelopment. Though they might not admit it, other Americans love us for that.

So I'll stay until I'm neck deep -- at least then I can still sing. Then I'll think about moving to a pseudo-New Orleans in some brand new development somewhere, where death doesn't exist.
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C.W. Cannon teaches English at the University of New Orleans. His e-mail address is cwcannon@uno.edu.