Green leaves on pebbled ground are romantic, I’ve realized. Scattered leaves fallen from decrepit trees. Romantic in the sense that it brings you closer to earth. My fulfillment lies on these leaves. I pity the unobservant and the naive.
““He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.””
I hate you, William Faulkner!
The best beignets in New Orleans are not found in Café du Monde. It is a perverse lie. Please believe me when I say this. My time in Café du Monde is spent sheltering from the rain, listening to the rumbling of ferocious jazz bands on the street. Cracks of thunder as loud as a streetcar; the watercolor sky washed in smokey blue. There is the clack clack clack from the rusty, unsuspecting mules. Rain is romantic. The beignets are not. I feel sleepy; wilted like a flower.
I’m starting to regret this trip. It’s not the city, no. Oh, it’s not. It’s the writing. I must confess that I hate writing. Writing is a selfish lover; one with many faces. Taking and taking, not giving, exhausting all emotion. And it is a lover that I continue to return to. But, I admit: seeking out the city for literary pleasures and indulgences is exhilarating! It's a license for licentiousness. Living life in New Orleans as a striving (and starving) writer is a rather fantastic idea. Fitzgerald, Williams, Capote, Twain, Whitman—these freaks of nature; my compatriots. There is neurosis in the air. It makes me want to take up smoking.
Notice the books with the interesting titles?
James Baldwin—the man that you are.
After the rain clears, I walk over to Pirate’s Alley. Sweat and smoke and soap. I come to Faulkner House Books, the nook where Faulker once resided, now a small bookstore. I’m just itching to read some Baldwin. Rows and rows of books. It makes me delirious. I ignore the fact that I’ve hated William Faulkner since I was seventeen years old; feelings which still persist. Around the corner, there is a blue wall with framed photographs and texts and letters. Southern greats like Williams and Lee with their moody stares. I chat with the owners for a bit before leaving for the Hotel Monteleone, the next stop on my literary pilgrimage.
Inside the foyer, there is a shrine dedicated to the writers who have visited and mentioned the Hotel Monteleone. Capote, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Williams, and the like. Does this particularly inspire me? Perhaps slightly. I am still unsure of what to do with my life. I’ve thought about taking an amicable break in my relationship with writing. Yet everybody keeps telling me to write. Write, write, write. Oh, but you must write. Yes, it is one of the few ways of expressing myself. And yes, it is a vessel for exploration. But I’m tired. I want to desperately sleep and dream and listen to Herb Alpert.
Returning to my hotel, Kevin, the elderly and zestful hotel manager, gifts me a set of bead necklaces by draping them around my neck. Christened by the beads—and thus accepted by the city—without the need to jump into the Mississippi.
I came to New Orleans to escape existential dread; the ravenous kind; the one that’s been gnawing away at my insides. To forgo the philosophical and reacquaint myself with everydayness. The very opposite of what Binx Bolling sets out to do in The Moviegoer. I've since been lost in the mystery of finding myself in Los Angeles at such a strange, liminal time. New Orleans would be the cure for my blues. I would learn how to coexist with the world. Every whistle of the wind, every beam of light, every sprig of grass—I would come to learn how to love these things. But the closer I approach my departure, the more I want to pick up Nietzsche again. I do not want to ‘search’ for anything per se, I just want to be able to live contemporaneously. Living in the moment is what they call it. Take each day and cradle it in my arms.
I like talking to Kevin. He calls me ‘honey,’ ‘sweetheart,’ ‘baby.’ We share moments of life and death with one another. I listen to him ramble on about piling mountains of crawfish, Lake Pontchartrain, and forgotten marital prospects. I ask if he’s ever visited Mexico. “Yes,” he says with amazement, eyes wide as stars. He tells me about his clubbing days in Tijuana. And then we talk about the losses in his life. I nod; there are layers to my sadness. You lose a part of yourself and there seems to be nothing else. Nothing but grief and shame.
“You’ve got to live your life,” says Kevin.
““The everydayness is everywhere now, having begun in the cities and seeking out the remotest nooks and corners of the countryside, even the swamps.””
I love you, Narrative Studies.
It is June; so bright and so sweet and so full of life. On my way to Audubon Park, I stop to admire the trees. The ones whose limbs look like hair. I notice the various ducks and geese resting peacefully under the shade. The fields of pale pink touch-me-not. Turtles sunbathing on logs, heads held high. Our group heads to the gazebo. Class is in session.
We open our discussion. Has Binx come to find the meaning of life? Of course not. He resorts to the allure of the mundane. But what is the meaning of life? There is certainly some of that in Audubon Park. Wasps zoom in and out of our seminar space. I ignore them because I am fixed on the crows that hop and laugh about. But I cannot stop thinking about how tired I am. Could we, under the human condition, ever come to find the meaning of life? I don’t think there is such a thing possible. And yet, why do we try?
Andrew proposes this: if there were such a thing to be found, is it not within the very idea of love? Love that we not only give, but the kind that we receive. The love we receive from other people. The kind we receive from the people that love us, and that, presumably, we love right back. Is that not it? And is it not enough?
I want to throw up; this is our Sermon on the Mount and nobody knows it.
I make a swift effort to put on my sunglasses.