“The excesses cloud up the page . . . the rest of your life a desert of facts. Cut them open and spread them out like garbage.”
Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter,” often feels like an archaeological project. Unearthing histories whose traces are scattered throughout the urban ‘desert of facts’ that is New Orleans. The image of spread out ‘garbage’ is incredibly off-putting, but that is the harsh reality of most material histories that are not preserved in conventional archives or museums. Yet, there is something potent about this ‘excess,’ the capacity to overflow that transgresses a more curated and manicured history.
Of course, Ondaatje is transparent that these “facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction,” yet, the polishing of these facts does not make Buddy Bolden’s story, as told by Ondaatje, any less excessive. As I read the novel, it felt like I was collecting detailed fragments of a larger picture; each character: Nora, Robin, Webb, Bellocq possessed their own fragments of Buddy. Yet, as I reached the end of the story, the larger picture never fully formed – I was just left with a collection of fragments. This lack of completion, to me, enables the excesses of Buddy to ‘cloud up the page.’ After two weeks of traveling, I have come to embrace this sense of incompletion.
When speaking about my travels to places, I, like a lot of tourists, have the tendency to remark: “I have done this,” almost as if an entire place has been rendered complete by my mere act of visiting it. This is simply untrue.
I had about an hour to meander around the French Quarter before the Preservation Hall Jazz performance. I decided to visit a second-hand book store I had heard about: Arcadian Books and Prints. Shelves of dusty books covered the walls of the tiny room; piles of books seemed to sprout out of the ground. The place was overflowing. Weaving through walls of precariously stacked books, I was overwhelmed. Usually at a bookstore, I like to scan every shelf from top-to-bottom, but rummaging through everything here would be impossible. I just had to give in to the excesses of the forty-one years of history and literature.
“The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of.”
Before the Jazz show, we were made to stand at the back of the antiquated Preservation Hall. My vision of the stage was obscured by a wooden pillar that cut through the center of the room and the backs of others in the audience in front of me. Restlessly, I continually adjusted my angle of viewing to see as much as I could. It was exhausting.
Preservation Hall
Eventually, I leaned against the wall behind me and just listened. I remembered how Buddy Bolden described the parades he played in. People walking past him would hear “just the fragment” he was playing – they could “come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased” – they could hear “all the possible endings.” During the jazz performance, I often missed what the drummer was saying as he introduced each new piece; sometimes, the music faded into the background as I zoned out into my thoughts; other times, I could clearly grasp the rhythm of the song and tapped my feet in sync with the music.
After one of our seminars in Jackson Square, where we discussed the literary history of New Orleans, Andrew sent us a map of the French Quarter marked with key locations visited by authors who were associated with the French Quarter’s Bohemian zeitgeist: Truman Capote, Sherwood Anderson, Tennesse Williams, William Faulkner. It felt like a scavenger hunt. Although these authors’ legacies are preserved a lot more concretely in the canon of New Orleans’ culture, I felt an affinity with Ondaatje – visiting spaces and digging out the individual histories contained within them.
Some of the locations, like the inside of the Hotel Monteleone or Faulkner House Books, seemed to be preserved through time. The ornate carousel bar was still operational inside the Monteleone. Faulkner’s house was now a sophisticated bookstore with first-editions of his books, and framed letters written by famed authors like T.S Eliot.
On the other hand, I felt a little underwhelmed by some of the other locations. Hotel Maison De Ville, where Tennessee Williams supposedly wrote parts of Streetcar, was closed. All I could see were its old doors and a commemorative plaque. 538 Royal Street, where Williams used to live across from a gay bar, the St. James looked no different, now, than the other shops on the street. It housed a cosmetic store. The Old Absinthe House, the meeting place for celebrated literary figures, was now more of a sports bar with football helmets hanging from the ceiling.
“. . . the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray? How can I deal with five million personal rays?
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Although my interest was directed towards these specific authors, there were millions of strangers who may have left traces of their ‘personal ray’ in those spaces. Even though there are attempts made to preserve and sometimes commodify the presence of these authors, most of their material presence is smothered by the multitudes of other unnamed presences. While it is exciting to individualize these spaces, I increasingly felt like the authors I was tracing were dissipating into the excesses of history.
“He was scared of everybody. He didn’t want to meet anybody he knew again, ever in his life.
”
Buddy is frightened when he realizes that he does not have complete possession of himself. He dissociates. When history becomes so fragmented and dispersed, it is easy to feel lost. Is it even possible to hold onto something that is so scattered
When I visited the Hurricane Katrina exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum in the Presbytère building, I saw one way this might be possible. The main room of the exhibit had clusters of television screens with speakers attached to them. A spotlight directed us sequentially to each of these screens, where we listened to multiple accounts of the harrowing experience. The people speaking ranged from policemen, firemen, and nurses to regular New Orleanians who lost their livelihoods. Everyone’s experience was essential.
There were recurring themes: the dehumanization of the victims of this disaster by the media, the ineptitude of institutions, and the profound cooperation between people that allowed them to endure. Still, I do not think it is possible to paint a complete picture of what happened. I left the exhibit knowing that there was so much more to the experiences that I could never begin to comprehend. These shared, yet personal experiences could never be contained within a desert of facts.
Search and Rescue on Humanity Street - David Rae Morris