Right Back Where We Started From

“He was as curious about her static world as she was about his wandering one.”

- Tim Gautreaux, Same Place, Same Things

Reading Same Place, Same Things I’m reminded of old country music. Old country music. The kind of country that still has its roots in folk songs and has a little bit of the classic twang we associate with country, but it’s a smoother, 50’s pop sound too (I’m absolutely thinking about Patsy Cline). But these songs have a melancholy about them, either in the melodies or in the lyrics that makes them beautiful, but with an uncontrollable sorrow that seeps through mixed with some acceptance of this being the way of life.

And being in Lafayette and going to Tom’s Fiddle and Bow it’s easy to see just how important music is. There’s that line that’s always passed around in musical theater about ‘when you can’t speak, you sing, and when you can’t sing, you dance.’ So, when you’re stuck whether by chance or by choice in rural places, how do you express yourself? If you love, or you hurt, or if you feel and you have no one to tell, don’t you sing? You can sing to people and for people and with people. You can play instruments with people, and you can dance with them, and really, how much better can it get than to connect musically with the people around you?

Our experience at Tom’s shop was enough to show us this and to let us experience it. It was almost magical the way our class, bags of food in hand and city personas squeezing tight into a house already full of people and bursting at the seams with instruments. And there’s music slowly starting up, and before we know it, it’s like we’re being swept away into a utopia where everyone is talking and playing music, listening and dancing.

This isn’t all to pretend that places like these are fantastical utopias of music and laughter and Southern charm. This whole scenario thrives off the back of hundreds of years of enslavement, segregation, and the abuse of disenfranchised people. It’s impossible to see that moments like these are backed by histories of harm.

But through all of this, even with the music playing and the singing and the dancing, it’s the people that matter the most. The people you surround yourself with, and the people you choose to sing with. I enjoyed meeting Rick and Rod and Tom and everyone else, but we’ll drift out of their lives perhaps just a bit slower than we entered them. So, I look at the people I’ve experienced this once-in-a-lifetime trip with and they’re playing music, talking, learning how to dance, and it’s hard not to wish this could last a lifetime. There’s melancholy in that too.

All the books that we’ve read over this trip, they all share that quality: the importance of the people around you. When we read The Awakening, it was just as much about other people as it was about Edna’s finding herself. It took other people in her life to make her realize her own wants and desires, and to pursue those choices whether other people thought they were the right or wrong decision. And like a lot of other people on this trip, I saw myself in Edna too, and I’m glad I started out this journey like that. To emphasize the self and treasure individuality before incorporating yourself into a group, I feel, makes you a more open to understanding and loving the people around you because you stand on your own first to be able to help the people around you.

Interview with a Vampire – well, Andrew’s probably had enough of what I had to say about that book in my essay, but Louis’ everlasting despair all revolves around the fact that he has lost so many people in his life (death?). Anne Rice gives her vampires human qualities so that we can relate to them and view them as more than ‘children of the night’ (say that in Bela Lugosi’s voice!). And what’s more human than loving other people? Louis, as much as he despises Lestat, is devoted to him. Louis’s devotion to Claudia is heartbreaking and he’s, “hopelessly her lover.” People, or vampires, are just as important for living as any physiological needs.

Although I struggled a bit with Coming Through Slaughter, I was more in love with the people that preserve these histories. The beauty with which Ondaatje characterizes Buddy Bolden, preserves his history and helps a movement to recognize his influence on music blossom. And I loved how my classmates loved this book too, how they interacted with Ondaatje’s writing in so much more perceptive and intelligent ways than I could, and through I had a hard time, it was their views that made me realize it’s importance and find the beauty in it despite not understanding.

I know this one wasn’t well liked, but The Moviegoer! This was my silent favorite. How could you put a book about movies in front of me and tell me not to like it? Even though almost no one in this book was likeable, the message it carried made me love it. It’s a romantic’s book that juxtaposes existentialism with the solution of just finding smaller things in life that make you happy. Life doesn’t have one big answer, and it’s okay if life is just going to school, going to work, taking a trip to New Orleans, or watching a movie. Seeing the people around you eat the food they love, buy the things they like, interact with other people, even with just a look. We’ve all worked through problems with each other on this trip, and we’ve all come out better people even without finding some large meaning to life. I’ll love everyone on this trip until the skin on the backs of their hands turn translucent too.

A Lesson Before Dying; if you want a book about people, this one is it. I actually struggled with liking Grant as the main character more than any of the other novels, perhaps because I had committed to loving other people so much with their flaws included that I was face with difficulty trying to justify the way Grant treated the people around him. Even though I never felt that he completely came around like Binx did in embracing the people around him (for a multitude of justifiable reasons), he found his way through life with the help of other people, in an Edna-ish sort of way.

And Same Place, Same Things. I’ve only read a few of the stories from Gautreaux’s collection, God knows I’m probably avoiding it because I don’t want the trip to end. What do I have to look forward to after today? The same life I’ve lived for 19 years already?

But I don’t think that’s the point. It’s never the same life, never the same things. Even the same bench, or table, or rusty fence looks different from day to day. It might seem all the same, but the people in your life can change that. They can help you find beauty, and self, and joy, if you only let them and if you want that change.

We all owe so much to Andrew for giving us this opportunity, letting us meet and find our ways to each other. And we owe so much to each other, for listening, being there, and bringing joy to each other’s lives.

Change is bittersweet – and endings too. But even the same places and same things every day after today will be better because we found each other.

Between Faith and a Hard Place

“I could never stay angry long over anything. But I could never believe in anything, either, for very long.”

- Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

Christianity has an oppressive grip on the world. The normalization of Christian symbols, praying, converting, shouting from rooftops about God’s grace is so normal we don’t even bat an eye when we see it. We’re comfortable with it. (For some perspective on how ingrained it is into the fabric of our mentality and country whether you’re a believer or not, Penny Lane has an amazing documentary called Hail Satan? about a not-so-long-ago religious movement/political campaign in the U.S.)

At this point in our Bookpacking journey, we’ve finished Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying. Both our characters in their respective novels struggle with faith. Why is faith, if it’s so infallible, something that people struggle with so much?

“I had heard the same carols all my life, seen the same little play, with the same mistakes in grammar. The minister had offered the same prayer as always, Christmas or Sunday. The same people wore the same old clothes and sat in the same places. Next year it would be the same, and the year after that, the same again.”

- Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

Do you even need faith?

When we visited the Katrina exhibit at The Presbytere, I left the Mardi Gras exhibit early to spend more time by myself downstairs in the exhibit to read and absorb. It’s all good and well to reside in academia where we analyze monotheistic religions with ‘God’ at the center, to scrutinize what we might categorize as people’s blind faith in this gracious daddy in the sky that gives the ‘Word of God’ to men alone and rules with his big, yet nonexistent phallus. But when we see natural disasters in the world, when we sit with them and reside in their aftermath, how can you expect to survive without the faith this country has been prescribing to its citizens for centuries? There is so much destruction and pain in disasters like these, there comes a point at which there’s nothing to do but find something, anything, to believe in, which by default becomes the white, Christian god.

I mean, you leave the Presbytere exhibit and immediately you’re faced with wrought iron gates protecting the pure white walls of the St. Louis Cathedral and its imposing and beautiful architecture. I’m not sure there’s a person who wouldn’t find comfort in a sight like that, even if they weren’t Christian. We go to Algiers, a quaint little town, and the largest building is the church with the clock tower, with room enough to fit the whole population of the town in it, tolling every hour with the time of day to remind people where all sources of knowledge and life come from.

But the cathedral, the churches we come across at every streetcorner, they’re old. The roots of the architecture, mentality, logic; they’re all archaic and unchanging.

Why leave things the way they are? Why try to keep up big, extravagant mansions that deteriorate naturally and are built from the money made off the backs of enslaved people? Why be so afraid of changing the image of a god that all of us struggle to identify with?

I don’t think that Binx ‘settled’ down with his faith at the end of The Moviegoer – and for what it’s worth, I don’t think any of the characters at the end of A Lesson Before Dying do either. Both Binx and Grant struggle throughout, their faith in the prototypical, Catholic vision of God is never completely unshakeable. But by the end of each of their character arcs, they find something, or a combination of things that let them feel peace with things, including their faiths.

“A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on this Earth – and that’s a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all.”

- Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

If the god you believe in is so personal, how can they not be a part of you? How can you ask someone to believe in a god that does not reflect them? How can a character like Grant find comfort in an image of a god that white men have identified with for centuries as a Black man? Your god can be anything – it doesn’t really matter. Because at the end of the day, it is and always has been a personal thing and it becomes about finding balance: taking what you want out of what you’ve been given to believe and finding out the rest for yourself. And like we’ve found with so many things on this trip, a balance is key. A reclaiming, but also an acceptance. A celebration, but mourning. Passion and excitement for life, but letting things happen and relaxing too.

At the end of the day, or at the end of your life, it seems it doesn’t really matter who you pray to. Like we saw in Grant and in Binx, they weren’t changed by some miraculous fulfillment of faith, but their awareness to the people around them. As offensive as it might be to say, God is imaginary. Oftentimes, it’s almost like a lie that helps people get through life, and it’s fine because it’s what’s needed. But sharing this trip with people I’ve come to love so dearly in such a short time, I think I’m more changed and affected by the sheer beauty of the souls of the people around me than the supposed unwavering faith we’ve all become accustomed to believe will us last a lifetime.

Preserving a History of Scratched-Out Faces

How do you preserve a history? What spin do you put on it to make it interesting? What tone do you take; story do you tell; character do you stay true to?

We’ve been in New Orleans for over a week: we’ve read a lot, seen a lot, learned a lot, and lived a whole lot more. So, when we’re in the present, enjoying these spaces or learning these things, how do you preserve a history so that people can learn? I knew nothing about Buddy Bolden – I didn’t even know he existed or was the predecessor of Louis Armstrong before reading Coming Through Slaughter. So what I read in the book became my reality of him: the artistry of the writing, the scandal, the musicality, everything I knew about Buddy Bolden stemmed out of this piece of writing. But it turns out some of the factual things we take for granted in the book were actually disproven after its release. Though it’s by no means Ondaatje’s fault, how do you create a history out of a single photograph and no documentation?

Much like the Voodoo Museum we visited, it’s an eclectic collection of rumors, interviews, and imagination. There is so much we’ve lost to time, and there’s no way to get it back than to rewrite by imagining, almost like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments where she reconstructs personal unknown histories through known sources of life at the time.

The only surviving document of Buddy Bolden is the picture that sits in our books, we have nothing of him, not even his music because he refused to be recorded. Did he not want to be preserved? Was his art and his soul not meant to be captured through a recording device, beautiful sounds compressed, scratched into and reproduced through a crackling Victrola?

Perhaps it’s better that way, to imagine the beauty of his music than to hear it in contemporary contexts. It’s more romantic. When we packed ourselves into preservation hall, hot and sweaty and tired from the day, the music brought life back into that room and into our bodies. In such close quarters, the room buzzed with sleepy calmness and the involuntary, primal reaction to dance to the music. It was like stepping into another world again, the back and forth between the high brass and low brass, gravelly singing, and conversational tradeoffs of melodies right next to all of us. What an incomplete thing it would be to experience something like that through a video, through audio; and what a blessing to be there in person.

And what of the Money Wasters’ Parade? I tried to record moments, tried to take pictures to remember, but what a moment; what a way to go! Just swept away by the crowd, by joy and dancing and laughter, with friends all around you, strangers, people that love life. How do you preserve that, how do you live it and understand it without being there? I was so happy; I feel some kind of inexplicable joy even now, just thinking about it. How could I write into words that experience, how could you do justice to it with a recording of the band that’s almost drowned out by the excitement of the crowd?

Who knows, there’s always a possibility that a recording could capture all of that, but perhaps it’s a choice, like Bellocq scratching out the faces of some of the women he took pictures of. At the cost of alienating your audience, what risks do you take in telling a story? Is it better to have mystery, to wonder what those women looked like or why he made them unrecognizable, or to expose all, to give everything to the world and hope people can find something to take away from it?

And what of difficult histories? Histories of cruelty and abuse and enslavement; how do we preserve those histories? Visiting the Whitney Plantation was the first time I had visited a preserved historic site and felt that it was inappropriate to take pictures; there was just something that didn’t feel right to me about taking pictures of anything other than scenery. Was this history so gruesome and unjust that I felt unconscious guilt in taking pictures like I would normally do? But everyone had a visceral reaction to visiting this site, would not taking pictures harm that history more by not preserving it?

And the fact that we were all given a lanyard with a child’s name and statue but not their history, it wasn’t something that we could follow throughout the tour and learn more about. All we received was a card with a body and a quote, something to keep as a souvenir after visiting and learning about a site where people were enslaved and treated like property not so long ago. Things like this begin to show the frayed edges that academia hasn’t completely worked through to present this history to non-academics visiting the site; which leads us to the question of who is allowed to frame histories?

One of the most shocking things I found when visiting the Tennessee Williams exhibit and talking to the exhibit curator, Winston, was that in the film version of Streetcar Named Desire, the filmmakers attempted to include the sexual assault scene, even with the Hayes’ Code still in full swing at that point in time. And it was interesting to read the room as well when watching the film with everyone; there was the understanding that this was obviously a bad thing, but getting the sense that with the gratuitousness of current cinema, the broken mirror scene didn’t seem like enough. But what is enough when sexual assault takes place? Must we see it to believe it? Must we believe something through concrete, visual evidence before we begin to trust a victim?

I wonder why people involved in the film production wanted to include that scene, but then again, it’s Hollywood so I don’t wonder. But then, who do we entrust with our histories?

Perhaps not so much auteur filmmakers, but those with a passion and compassion for these stories. The historian that dedicated her work to finding the names of people enslaved on the plantation and memorializing them throughout the tour with walls of honor as constant reminders. The couple that run Faulkner House books and know the everything in the shelves like the back of their hands. Even Ondaatje, who weaves a complex narrative and sparks an effort to make Buddy Bolden become known.

It takes a special love and conscious effort to keep history alive. It takes academics, curators, historians, authors, students, readers, and so many more to keep forgotten histories relevant and accessible. It takes a fictional biography, a Preservation Hall, a second line parade, a museum tucked away in the French Quarter, a plantation converted to a museum, and a hand-curated map of pins and notes tracking down where authors of the classics spent their waking hours. It takes all these things so that we can continue to live and experience life to our fullest.

A Step in Celebration

“And this sadness gave a subtle satisfaction and held me a long time in that spot; and it held me to the city; and it didn’t really leave me that night when I went away.”

-Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

New Orleans is anything but silent. It’s everything I expected – and didn’t expect it to be. But the one thing I’ve found that I’ve come to love most is that fact that the city is teeming, just filled to the brim with life. Its streets are wonderfully worn down from the constant foot traffic and the buildings loom overhead in their wearied French Colonial style, paralleled by unfixed ruins left behind by the hurricane. It has its bright lights and exciting night life, but a lurking danger and mystery that we’ve come a little too close to, both in real life and in the novels we’ve read. There’s excitement, unpredictability, and celebration, but a profound sorrow for the history of people who were enslaved and suffered in these places that’ve been converted into restaurants and hotels without reparations to those who are due it.

This city could very well be immortal, or seem that way, with its history and its naturally exciting nature – but there’s something unnatural about immortality, even for a city.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice to be immortal? Experiencing generations of history, being able to do everything and be everywhere you could’ve possibly dreamed of. Instead of coming on a four-week long experience, what if you lived in New Orleans for decades at a time, taking your time to watch its culture grow into what it is today?

But if you look at the infrastructure, you see that the even the architecture that the city is so well known for is bursting at the seams with nature. Alleyways hide glimpses of lush greenery, walls are disrupted by branches breaking through and brushing countless shoulders on sidewalks, concrete is upturned and crumbles at the roots of trees that have been around longer than we’ve been alive.

What better way to realize that life will find a way? And what better way to remind us of our own mortality? That we’re not meant to be immortal, that even the things we build to structure our lives are meant to fall away and be rebirthed. New Orleans celebrates life and death and that extensive range of emotions that life in between those two points. Having only been here for a few days, you can practically feel the sorrows that the city’s history has, but the joy, too, that’s been able to come out of it because joy, like life, persists.

“What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? And what is ‘the end of the world’ except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself?”

-Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

In Interview with the Vampire, Louis lives through whole centuries of change and nothing is so important as the companions he surrounds himself with. Births and deaths of inventions, historical events and people (non-vampires) all blended together and sometimes weren’t even important enough to mention in his personal history. But his companions: Lestat, Claudia, Armand; they were his history, because what is a history or a culture without others to make it resonant?

Roses in front of a statue in Congo Square.

We had talked about Thoreau at one point during this trip – perhaps on Grand Isle – about his quote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” that our lives are misguided and unfulfilled by our learned attachment to worldly possessions. Initially, I hadn’t interpreted it this way: this general consensus about its meaning felt negative and even a bit condescending to me, but the first impression those words left on me was a certain kind of sadness. What desperation is so harsh that it cannot be shared? Why, when we’re so full of life, would we choose to live quietly? If we want something, even a worldly possession, shouldn’t we live and desire it and celebrate our feelings loudly?

It seems that in New Orleans, life is lived boldly and loudly. There is celebration, even in death. In Louis and Lestat’s everlasting life, they strive to form eternal bonds by creating new vampires and trying to sustain those relationships over decades, but they can’t: Claudia dies, Armand leaves, Lestat can no longer even step out of the house to support his own needs. Our relationships and our emotions won’t last forever, so it matters now that we treasure each other and these moments we have together as a class even more so because we are mortal, and this is a chance in a lifetime to experience a city like this. We don’t choose mortality, much like the vampires in Anne Rice’s novel don’t choose to be immortal, but in this city, I think it matters only how we choose to live that life.

A Beach of One's Own

“No multitude of words could have been more significant than these moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first felt throbbings of desire.”

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening

It’s a weird feeling to step back and see just how fast you’ve been living life; how easy it is to get used to the pattern of being overwhelmed, and then underwhelmed when that intensity is missing.

Before the trip, I was living off that intensity (it probably didn’t help that I went to a Paul McCartney concert the night before we left) and I don’t think I was ready to let go. The excitement of being busy is addictive, like anything in the right amount, and I simply was not going to sit on the beach and read a book uninterrupted.

But at the suggestion of relaxation, I tried. After our first seminar, I decided I wasn’t going to try and complete a checklist: go to the beach, go to this and that, etc. (at least not for the first day). So, I read, granted with the intent that I’d finish early and go and complete said checklist, but the kind of languidness of midday crept up on me and I just sat and read, just looking up at the beach whenever I felt like it.

While reading, it’s usually my goal to be distracted – for having been an avid reader in the past, my habits now are to expect interruptions, sometimes to hope that something will come up for me to avoid what I’m currently reading because it’s just too slow. But these interruptions almost blended into the book, at the beginning there was a specific moment where Robert and Edna were laughing at something that in retrospect, wasn’t really funny when retold, but they laughed anyway. I think I read that and just looked up at the beach to imagine that feeling that we’re all probably familiar with, and at the risk of sounding cliché, it was nice to kind of slip into that imagination. Something kind of dreamy even, where I was in this world, because I was.

And for the character of Edna, in all of her acute awareness of her own thoughts combined with the lethargy of the setting, I approached the same way I approached studying: I wanted to find a reason, a purpose, a feminist focus and create some grand idea that would be perfect to share. I sat and scribbled and concentrated, at times pretending to enjoy the scenery and contemplate, but really only looking up when a new idea wouldn’t come to me, and I had to work myself out of that. That it was okay, that I could find it all later, because it would happen no matter how much I sped up the process.

So I just kept to the idea of letting things happen to me. I’d read and let myself look up at a lime-green lizard with his strange little orange gill hopping from rung to rung, then opting for an easier path of the flat handrail (I would’ve loved to drop a picture of him, but I think I committed a little to hard to not doing anything and just watched him until he was too far away to take a picture :’)). Or at the blue shutters of the house across the way, one window with the shutters propped straight out and the other pushed gently to its left side. Really inconsequential, but it was there anyway.

But Edna’s journey of self-realization is about acting too– going beyond just thinking and feeling. Acting on impulses, taking the step first without the turmoil of overthinking.

So I finished my reading on the first day around 3 o’clock, and some people were sleeping or continuing to read, and I decided to walk alone. It wasn’t really on my list to things to do, but I just did it anyway. I took a walk to the beach by myself, stopping along the way to take pictures of flowers and taking some pretty unprofessional looking pictures of the sky and the beach, but it made me happy just to be able to capture it. People passed me by and I couldn’t care less, and I didn’t even want anyone to accompany me. I would’ve gladly had anyone join, but then, it was perfect. I walked across the street to Jo-Bob’s just to stay out for a bit longer, and came back. And just like that, it was enough; I’d had my fill. So I came back and lounged around for an hour with nothing in particular to do and nothing particular in mind.

I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. A year ago, a month ago even, I wouldn’t have gone out on my own. I would’ve sat and wanted, and never had the courage to go out and act on an impulse. And I wouldn’t have sat actively tried not to achieve some maximum potential I set for myself for the smallest tasks. So, yeah, it is kind of a wonderful thing to let go, to just rest. I don’t know how long I can sustain it, but Grand Isle was definitely the place to take a stab at it. I can have just as many thoughts and ambitions and strongly worded things to say as I did before, but time will let them play out.

“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.”

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening

If Edna had the time to sit and laugh, to take a nap and have the time to find her own path of agency and self-discovery wherever she was, there might be time for me too.