“As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.”
Canal Street at dusk
New Orleans is a city unlike any other. That became clear from the moment we arrived. On Tuesday evening we walked down Canal Street to Bourbon Street seeking out dinner, and I was struck by how lively the city was. We ran into a band playing on the street, its passionate music filling the night. Although it was dark out, the neon signs of every color lit up the street like an arcade. It was overwhelming how much there was to see. There was the beauty of the lights and music and joyous crowds, but, especially on Bourbon Street, there was an atmosphere of sleaziness that was inescapable. The next few days, we explored the French Quarter further. Getting away from Bourbon Street, the age and culture of the city became more apparent. Boutiques and galleries and tourist shops sat below old French apartments, with wrought-iron railings overflowing with hanging plants and Mardi Gras beads. We went to the Pharmacy Museum and the Voodoo Museum, two very little places crammed full of old artifacts and interesting history. It was the little spots of authenticity scattered around in the touristy area that made the city feel so vibrant. The contrast between the modern and the historic gives the city an out-of-time feel to it.
French style old houses and overgrown ivy
I identified with the city as soon as we arrived. There’s something about the mixture of artistic beauty and pain that resonates a lot with me. It is filled with ghosts. In Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice explores the gothic side of the city through the goings about of Louis, a man who is able to get a new outlook on life when he is turned into a vampire. This novel does a brilliant job of showing the darkness of New Orleans, and how that’s not always a bad thing. I have always found a certain comfort in the gothic and macabre, and Rice’s exploration of the city through this light really resonated with me. As a vampire, Louis is able to fully realize how beauty and pain are inseparable in his life. Before he was turned, he was horribly depressed following the death of his brother and facing the resentment of the rest of his family. As a vampire, he becomes re-immersed in life, simultaneously being given the freedom to go out into the city with new eyes and a new perspective on time as someone who lived through centuries, and also having to wrestle with the moral consequences of needing to kill to survive. As a nocturnal city, New Orleans allows for Louis to go out and re-engage with the world. And even in all of the pain of having to live a secret and subtle life and having a very toxic relationship with Lestat and having to figure out how to cope with his new reality, he is able to find moments of beauty, with experiencing the city and raising Claudia. He sees that pain doesn’t negate the possibility of pleasure, and good things can be built in spite of hardship. This is something I find to be true as well. The upside of this revelation is that even in moments of pain and sadness you know that there is a way to always find and build beautiful things.
Vampire Boutique shop
Art print I bought from a street vendor artist, Custom Gambler
As someone who deals with chronic mental health issues (and has for a while), I find the idea that there can be beauty despite underlying pain to be incredibly uplifting. It means I don’t have to wait for my struggles to be resolved in order to experience any form of happiness. On the scale of my single unimportant life, it is the difference between simply surviving and properly living in the day to day world. Because of this, it is vitally important to find reasons to keep going and to enjoy life as a way to resist the negativity in the world. New Orleans is a city that seems to embrace sadness and the macabre, and instead of being bogged down by it, it expresses it through art, music, and community.
New Orleans is undoubtedly a city built on a lot of pain. It was built from the beginning with a system of slavery like the rest of the South, meaning the city was literally founded on the suffering and dehumanization of the majority of its population. As time went on, although slavery got abolished, the systematic oppression of Black people was never dealt with and therefore only evolved to be more subtle in the modern world. Although an amazing culture was formed out of it, the undercurrent of pain can still be felt in every aspect of it.
The simple geography of New Orleans is another source of pain. The weather of the swamp doesn’t lend itself to civilization, and the onslaught of heat and storms makes it seem like a very hostile place to make home. In 2005, the entire city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, leaving everyone who lived there with only scraps of their former life. The entire city had to completely rebuild.
So many of the beautiful things in this city—the music, the buildings, the museums, the rich and unique culture—were created not by ignoring the pain that ran throughout the city but as a resistance to the pain. It’s a mindset that says not to give up but to resist and fight against the sources of strife, no matter how futile it may seem. It says that beauty can come out of pain, that hurt doesn’t make good things impossible.