Being-in-PLACE

Can history hope to hold on to the qualities that are loved?

First to call on a history of place, it is important to remember that every place has layers of history: remnants in memory, in stone, in glory. In a famous passage in “Civilization and its Discontents” Freud described the layers of the history of Rome, as they might be discovered by a very well-informed visitor looking for signs of the past: “Except for a few gaps, he will see the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places he will be able to find sections of the Servian Wall where they have been excavated and brought to light. If he knows enough . . .he may be able to trace out in the plan of the city the whole course of that wall and the outline of the Roma Quadrata. Of the buildings which once occupied this ancient area he will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they exist no longer….It is hardly necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis…”

The built environment is a palimpsest, where the marks of human activity have been repeatedly inscribed and partly rubbed out and inscribed again in another layer, building up, layer by layer, distinctive character and complexity.

And actually, places are much more complex than that. A bit of the earth supports life and evolves a local ecosystem, which is part of the global ecosystem. People make a living from the land and create an economy, a material culture, and a broader culture of shared experience. They build roads and houses and places to work and meet. They add to the complexity of a place all their associations with the land and with each other—creating a kind of collective memory, embodied in rituals and traditions, folkways, stories, and eventually in every medium of communication and remembrance.

Second, often places do not have deep awareness of what is missing from a narrative of place, often fashioned by the group in power. Excluded groups of people are present and not seen. Without deep participation these often affinity groups that share a bond of some kind, will become obstacles in the path to move forward. Some of these unseen or unrecognized groups have been hurt badly by racism or injustices, and contemporary group behavior is characterized by anger, wanting to air grievances, show their rage. A lot of human energy is wasted for lack of true participation. Third, when the real stories of the whole place are known, when the contributions of the unrecognized groups are acknowledged, it releases new energy and makes it possible to engage the future. This step is worthless if represents a check in the box. It is liberating if it is carried out with an intention to heal.

Do people really love places that much, or do they love them enough to help make them better?

Here is a unique opportunity to answer that question. New Orleans was nearly wiped off the map by a hurricane. What follows are liner notes from the first compilation CD made by New Orleans musicians donating songs and performances donating proceeds to rebuilding. The writer is the novelist Richard Ford, a citizen of the city, it is written one month after Katrina. The CD was called Our New Orleans, and it was put out by Nonesuch Records, Inc. a Warner Music Group Company.

“In New Orleans…you can’t separate nothing from nothing. Everything mingles each into the other…until nothing is purely itself but becomes part of one fonky gumbo.” Mac Rebennack (Dr. John)

All New Orleanians gaze at the future with trepidation and longing now. What that we loved is lost forever? What that we loved is inextinguishable? So much of any culture–its music, literature, its precious art–is the topic of chance, of situation and accident. Of who was there for just that moment when it mattered most. Culture is frangible–irreplaceable even–though that quality by which it might never have happened is part of its magic and dream, part of why we, its lovers, feel ourselves illuminated, renewed by its radiance. In this way culture’s dilemma is our human, ageless one: poised on the precipitous between nothing and everything.

All the more this great fonky old gumbo of New Orleans music documented here. In so many ways it has been, over its centuries, the invention of want, of cultural invisibility, of displacement, of those who were marginalized–human states we regret and pray to see ended, but that seek an audience still, a hearing a witness to their old longings and answering sounds: Joy. Loss. Pain. Hope. Discord. Harmony. From what we lament, sometimes comes the indispensable thing we love.

But then comes a great wind and a great flooding, and everything—the situation and who was in it, the culture, its fabled flowering—is all but swept away, leaving behind the longing. It’s hard, so soon after August 29, when all was in its place, to think of a day in our future, or someone’s—say, twenty years from this one—when a kid could hear this music and wonder, “Was it really like that? In New Orleans? All that great majestic noise, coming out of one place. It must’ve been some kinda place.” That’s what happens, though. All of it, and us, swept away on a wind. The great twin engines of rationality and greed are fired already, beginning to carve up the ground, raze what the flood left standing, dispel those witnessing spirits, do away with their old magic and dream. Those engines hurry along to put up what’s earnest and reasonable in the old unreasoning places where the music (and all of art) takes root. They plow under our memory, distract us with the new, detach us from our old longings and harmonies and chanciness in behalf of a plan. This collection, in your hand today—the witness of these piano players, these blues singers, these seers, these gris-gris doctors and Zydeco magicians—must do what it can to hold back our forward-fleeing notice and even bright hopes for just a little time, preserve what was in the air and ephemeral, what we might’ve thought was ours and never-ending, deepen our intimacy with losses new and old, and with what can’t be lost, hold us in a present we long to stay in. You can rebuild a city, but you can’t re-make it. So, we need a surety, a reminder in the fresh face of disaster, where we’re all strangers and afraid, that when new life percolates out of the dried streets and flooded weed patches, off the porches and out of the bedrooms—out of whatever’s left in New Orleans—something vital will be intact, some marker in our hearts, if nowhere else, by which we can say, “Yes, that’s where we were, that’s what we heard, that’s what we knew was good and worth preserving, that’s who we were and are. That’s where we’ll start again.” There are some things you just mustn’t lose, or life’s not life for any of us