New Orleans, 10.2017: Pelicans and Pralines — A Photographic Essay

Angel on French Qaarter balcony

London 31.1.10: Quiet Places, Magic Places

Just boarding the plane in London, and as I write the date, I realize I’ll now have to accustom myself to writing 2111—if God gives me breath up to the new year.  This is another flight (this happened when we flew back from our trip to Edinburgh and the Black Forest) where we find, to our surprise, we’ve been upgraded to first-class.  That previous trip back was the first time I’ve ever flown first-class.

New Orleans 27.10.1990: Electric Blue Sky, Peaceful Bayou

A glorious fall day—sky electric blue and calm, cloudless. I’m sitting by the bayou, which I realize as I write has become a haven for me. I have a perfect view of the restored bridge across from Cabrini high school.

Took the morning to go to a Great Hall sale at NOMA, where I bought Christmas presents. Then I went to the main library and did a rare bit of family history research.

New Orleans 25.10.1990: Images of Eden and Ropes of Color

I’ve seen work of two artists recently that impressed me very much. The first was an exhibit entitled “Images of Eden” at New Orleans Museum of Art—oil paintings by a Nicaraguan-Salvadoran artist, Julio Sequeira. Great splashes of tropical brilliance tamed to tiny, obsessive recreations of cities, jungles, mountainsides. Always a parrot or other bright feathered bird atop a tree or building—one of my favorite images of transcendence. A wonderful Carnival picture with little jokes hidden away Brueghelesque in the hullabaloo—some of them I thought gay references.

The other an “Arkansas Traveller” spot on a Pine Bluff black artist, Terrance Corbin. He does large mural-like canvases of intertwining ropes of color. Fascinating . . . .

New Orleans 14.10.1990: French Quarter Ganymedes and Newcomb Pottery

Yesterday Steve and I got up at 5:55 A.M. to go to a garage sale in the French Quarter. The ad in the paper spoke of an old cypress hutch, and we wanted to see if it was anything like the one we have. We arrived at 6:35, the first to do so. The address—741 Dumaine—turned out to be an apartment attached to Clover Grill, an all-night diner across the street from (and sharing clientele with) the world-famous gay bar Café Lafitte in Exile.

In this day and age one is of course hesitant to stand on any street corner in the French Quarter at 6:30 A.M., when dark still reigns. So when we drove up we sat awhile in the car, mumbling back and forth in our sleepy, wimbly state about what to do.

Finally I pointed out that Clover Grill was full and if need be, we could always duck in there in case of trouble. Steve went to park. I got out and leaned on the wall of the house. As I did so, I immediately noticed that a stocky, cigarette-smoking man in shorts across the street was staring at me casually but intently. I realized he was tricking and thought Steve and I had driven up, chatted, and decided I would get out to pick him up! I tried to show not disapproving disinterest, to preserve his feelings.

Gradually it became apparent to me that no corner in the Quarter was so alive as this one at 6:30 A.M. Saturday. Merry singing from Lafitte’s, alternating with loud female rock vocals. For some reason, I could also see a flickering flame through the smoked glass doorway, like a gas lamp but in a spot where one ought not to be.

Tricks came and went. Groups of three and four young men in all types of clothes emerged and sauntered down the street. A thin gray-bearded middle-aged man came out of Clover Grill and parked himself on the other side of the doorway of 741—another garage sale client. A man in tight, dirty jeans and one of those yoked and strap-bearing muscle shirts gay men love came up and said to him, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” The thin man: “From around,” in a high rural-South voice (north Louisiana? Mississippi?). The man then went into Lafitte’s from which he was ejected shortly by a bouncer shouting something about motherf---r, don’t show ass, drugs, etc.

All the time the sky grew lighter and lighter, and cars of tourists cruised slowly and dreamily past. Two policemen on motorcycles came up to the Grill, and the first hustler—by now on the corner, having given me up—shouted to us, “Did you call the police?”

Steve struck up a conversation with Thin Man, who turned out to be a regular, a quasi-antiquer/junker who goes the round of garage sales on weekends. He asked what we liked—Victorian? Anything? He allowed as how he had recently purchased a piece of Newcomb pottery for peanuts.

As we talked, a Ganymede with perhaps not entirely naturally glowing and flowing locks came UP—bemuscled and bemuscle-shirted—opened the door of 741, turned around, and asked the three of us, “Was you wanting a room?” We reminded him there was a garage sale at his apartment at 7 (it was now 6:48 or so). “Oh,” he said, “yes.”

As he spoke, the waiter from Clover Grill came up and said, “You’re having a sale? Whatcha selling?” Blondie: “I’ve cleaned out my attic. My husband keeps bringing home all this shit and I’m selling it.” Waiter Apparently did not quite catch it all, because Thin Man repeated it to Water. He and Blondie and Waiter all appeared to know one another.

Waiter seemed not quite all together, though amusingly distrait. He sported a Café Lafitte t-shirt and lots of name tags, and a baseball cap. Blondie returned to Café Lafitte, whence he had come. Five minutes later, a light and a sound in 741, then the door opens and sale begins. Thin Man knows the seller—“Joe, what ya got on this?” Waiter returns.

Joe to Waiter: “What you want?” Waiter, arm flailing, hand displaying a cigarette coyly perched between fingers: “Dick.” Steve to Joe: “If you rent a room, that comes with it.”

And indeed as we shopped someone did rent a room. At first I believed she was a damsel in distress, over-fatiguée from a night of bar revelry. But as she ascended the stairs in her green satin blouse, I realized she was a he, a he-she. Saturday A.M. in the French Quarter . . . .

New Orleans 24.9.1990: Elephant Ears and Rotting Sheds

I’m sitting outside in the afternoon sun, a clump of elephant ears beside me, a congeries of exceedingly tall canna lilies at a little distance, next to a white althea we transplanted a year ago, and which now thrives and blossoms. All are in soil we worked up and added manure and compost to. I have a rocker from the house and am beneath the remnants of a shed we’ve begun to tear down. There are only rotting rafters above my head, and the afternoon sun is at its most intense. Steve has perched an umbrella on one rafter, but this parasol only barely keeps the sun off.

I’m reading Richard Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism, and thinking many thoughts. These thoughts aren’t necessarily sparked by the book. I’m thinking of some of the prevailing metaphors of my life now—of depths, subterranean currents, the choir of my dream last night, sunbursts of color. This feels like a time in which something creative and new is on the horizon, about to break through.

Yet I write this over and over, and nothing comes. Am I deluding myself, whistling (as we all do, all the time) in the face of death?

(Enroute to) San Francisco 6.6.1990: Great Meteor Craters and Theological Gabfests

Writing enroute to San Francisco, having just crossed over what the pilot tells us is the “great meteor crater” on the New Mexico-Arizona border. I’m going to the Catholic Theology Society of America meeting to be on a panel discussing the bicentennial history of American Catholicism series.

The College Theology Society meeting just occurred in New Orleans. Bulletin—we’re approaching a rim of the Grand Canyon. CTS: I gave my paper on public theology as civil discourse. It was well-received—almost too much so. Audience packed with friends, including Stephen and Hilary S., her sister Rebecca C., and John M.

Speaking of whom: we all spent Sunday evening together, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, it was a very up experience. Sitting at Café du Monde and drinking coffee and talking, talking. About Bush, politics, church, theology, Stephen’s father. I felt a real sense of shared struggle, of community, that I often don’t feel with my American colleagues. Canadians are just more well-read (on the whole) and more tolerant in a genial, worldly-wise way—particularly re: homosexuality.

New Orleans 24.6.1990: Old China and Peeling Paint

It was one of those derelict houses found only in the once-good districts of New Orleans, still inhabited by stoop-sitters. These houses are neither neglected nor deliberately unpainted. They age and weather because something about moist, hot New Orleans air demands a soft patina of aging in the architecture. And the exterior of houses is ignored in New Orleans because the citizens of the city that care forgot are intensely private, inward-looking individuals.

They would be surprised to hear themselves described this way. New Orleanians pride themselves on their ability to throw a party, to dance at dawn in the streets, to cram patios and galleries with drunken, jovial people talking in those high-pitched nasal voices considered cultivated in the city.

But this self-image belies an intense inwardness. More than in any other American city, in New Orleans “society” is a series of concentric circles. One is born into a circle—that of Garden District old families or black Creole bourgeoisie; one does not enter a circle by marriage or purchase.

Consequently, life in New Orleans is lived inside. Take this house. Imagine a zoom-lens camera. It scans the peeling exterior, the slate-gray roof and falling lines of the windows and arches. It moves to the bedraggled ferns and worn wicker of the porch. It breeches the door.

Inside: sumptuously furnished hallway, muted glitter of chandelier, old silver and crystal, jewel-lie tones of Turkey carpets. And the inner sanctum: a dark, well-appointed dining room. Around the 1840s mahogany table, a family eating. At the head of the table, Beau Armistead. Opposite him his wife Ninette Caldesoux Armistead. Flanking these, Trevigne Armistead, heir apparent, and his wife, Betsy Flood. Across the table, Catherine, daughter of the family.

New Orleans 28.3.93: Mockingbirds at Sundown, Fragrant Cedars.

A cool evening, after an afternoon of heating showers. I’m sitting on the patio listening to the mockingbirds. Towards sundown they love to sit atop trees and sing. I have been watching one as its throat catches the now horizontal rays of light. I can smell the cedars around the patio . . . .

Yesterday I went to town and shopped. The French Quarter is even tawdrier on a Saturday . . . . I went to town to shop because the thrift stores have only polyester clothes. In this climate, wearing spun plastic seems absurd. Yet in the heart of one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the world, we wear petroleum-based clothes, and cotton is priced out of sight. In the height of Louisiana strawberry season, I could buy only jumbo, tasteless, California berries. Why? Profit, market.

New Orleans 12.7.92: New Saints and Mottled Buddhas

In some journal entry some time back, I recall writing that “things happen” to me. I don’t solicit them; they’re as gnomic as scribbles of cloud across a high blue sky. But happen they do.

To wit: several days ago, we were at River Road flea market, and I saw a china Buddha that I wanted. I wanted it with an urge of the bowels that made it painful not to buy it when I saw it cost $60. And it’s one of the few things I’ve wanted for a long time.

Why, I don’t know. I haven’t been thinking about Buddha much at all. In fact, as I think about it, I know next to nothing about Buddha. But it was as if the laughing china figurine simply called out to me.

I mentioned this to Steve, and he was occupied thinking re: something else and didn’t hear. Then I thought I’d simply not say anything again and wait. If I were meant to have a Buddha, then a Buddha would come to me.

Yesterday, after Steve finished his teaching, we went out to shop. As we drove towards the French Quarter, I said, “I really want something, but won’t say what.” Steve begged me to tell, and I finally said a Buddha. I said, “I think this is to be the Buddha phase of my life.” Steve said, “Well, we’ll ask Bruce to find one for you.” (In Bruce’s funeral Mass, Fr. Henry had encouraged his family and friends to pray to him as a new saint.) I said, joking—because I have shelved Bruce as a saint for my aches and pains—“What would Bruce have to do with a Buddha?” Steve replied, “You might be surprised.”

We then drove to the French Market flea market, and Steve stopped the car for me to run to a stall I thought would be there, to see if it had pralines to bring back to Tom G. in North Carolina. I did so, and en route saw a table of gewgaws that looked interesting. Well, I felt flatly nudged to go by it. There on the table was a small gold Buddha which I bought for $3. It’s blotched and seems to have been coated with several coats of different-colored paints, which have worn through here and there so that the figurine has a mottled appearance. It’s lovely. Last night, we had supper at Al A.’s, and his wife (who’s Filipina and collects Buddhas) told me it’s a good-luck Buddha. One rubs his stomach for luck.

A Bruce Buddha: the Bruce Buddha.

New Orleans 7.7.92: Friends' Deaths and Life Callings

Bruce Bascle died last night at 11 P.M. Steve and I had gone to see him yesterday afternoon and I felt he would die that day: he could barely look at us, keep his eyes open. He weighed about 60 pounds and was jaundiced.

At 9 P.M., I asked Steve to call Lazarus House and see how Bruce was. He got Barry, who said he felt Bruce would die that night, and that he would call us. At 11:15, Barry called to say Bruce had died.

I find it hard to write now. I’m so tired and slept so little last night. But I had an experience on hearing of Bruce’s death similar to that I felt (funny how that word recurs: I’m feeling again!) when Simpson died. It was an experience of the floor dropping away, and I still stood, as on those centrifugal-force carnival rides. I stood—I saw that there is no floor, yet we stand.

It’s the paschal mystery. That’s all I ever know much about. To meet Bruce 20 years ago; to have our lives intertwined; to be here when he died, as I think he wanted. It’s the paschal mystery, and I haven’t a clue what it means. It’s just in my life: it is my life; it is in and it is every life.

At a level deeper than I can name, Bruce’s death is all about my own calling and ministry and struggle. Steve and I talked about this last night. These weeks in New Orleans have been incredibly rich, grace-filled ones. I can say that even in the face of a friend’s death. C.J. McNaspy has been unutterably kind, renewing my faith in the Jesuit charism. Bernard L. has, as well. We’ve been wined and dined and fêted, all very quietly, but with great support.

And I don’t know what it means, except that somehow my life belongs . . . not to me, but to a mystery greater than myself, in which I walk, and in which I am connected to, belong to, others. I don’t know how, or how much, but I know that in my theologizing, I do belong to Bruce, Simpson, many pain-filled Others.

New Orleans 4.7.92: Purple Martins and Balmy Sunsets

Last night, C.J. McNaspy wanted to go and see the purple martins roost at sunset under the causeway. I knew nothing of this, but apparently from Jan.-June and July, hundreds of thousands of purple martins settle at the west end of the causeway, in their journey from Canada to Latin America.

We got there before 7, because C.J. was under the mistaken impression that sunset was at 7, whereas 8 was more like it. Just as sun began to set, out of nowhere, seemingly, birds began to congregate. At first they were high, assiduous in their search for mosquitoes and other flying insects, something like the chorus beginning the play. They tended to gather, fly in swoops around each other, and move to this side or that of the causeway.

But gradually they gathered in such numbers that the sky was full of them, and began to circle, spin, lower, lower, till they were right above us. Then they entered their nests, and true night began to fall, as a sliver of moon rose higher and higher in the sky.

Aububon apparently remarked on this show as early as 1801, but it seems New Orleanians have not paid attention to it till recently. Maybe the birds haven’t appeared in such numbers for a time. A man named Carlyle Rogillo has “discovered” the birds and has made their preservation his grand cause, so that now a sign tells all about their lives—and migration cycles—and the city has put benches out for people to watch. There were some 30 out last night.

I wish I had felt more as I watched, other than fatigue and the damp heat. As with everything lately, nothing holds or satisfies.

But one interesting breakthrough in family research: I went to the city library yesterday and leafed through obituaries published in the Homer, Louisiana, daily paper, only to discover one for my great-great grandmother Mary Ann Harrison Lindsey. A Benjamin D. Harrison who is, I have always felt certain, her brother, founded the paper and it was he who published the obituary in it—though Mary Ann and her husband Mark J. Lindsey lived several parishes south in Natchitoches Psh. I know so little about this mysterious ancestor who died rather young (a fever, the obituary says), that it’s delightful to find some trace of her life now.

New Orleans 2.7.92: Outré Characters and Church Chat

A hot New Orleans afternoon. Have been here since Sunday the 28th June to teach two weeks.

A sense of the place: heat so palpable that it reaches for one’s limbs, to lap them with a soft wet tongue, one that doesn’t stimulate, but enfolds. Senescence, decadence, sheer lunacy: flaking paint on white-columned mansions surrounded by detritus, needles, other drug paraphernalia, used condoms. People as characters: a café au lait black man in a suburban supermarket, in a lime-green polyester body suit, with a flowered apron over it, from shoulders to knees. Thin, very odorous with stale perspiration, but lithe and proud and self-aware. His hair is pulled into a top-knot tied with a black ribbon. One wouldn’t know he was a man, maybe, except for his neatly trimmed little Hitler mustachio.

Fat people everywhere, on bicycles that allow rolls and sheets of fat to flow down over the bicycle seat, stuffed into bright synthetic pantsuits, eating furiously, devotedly, waving their crab claws, talking at the tops of their voices, dragging on cigarettes between bites.

Only in New Orleans. Today we stopped a while at Catholic Bookstore and talked to Mignon W. She grabs one by the arm and pulls one close, talking a mile a minute as her eyes dance. “Can you believe that? Can you believe it? A book to give retreats?”—this in response to a priest, Carl D., who wanted a guide for a retreat he’s to give. He’s the seminary formation director. All this she’s saying as he stands a foot away, then on to another nearby priest who’s buying rosaries. “He celebrates weddings, and look what he gives!”—sick-call crucifixes, rosaries, bibles.

But the worst is reserved for Harold C., who comes in to buy one or two pre-selected books, and practices custody of the eyes meanwhile, won’t look at any other sections of the store. “Dear, he calls me dear, can you believe it?” And Sister Veronica M., who is escorted in a limousine to the door, hops out to grab one or two pre-selected items, and runs to the counter ahead of all others in line: “Can you ring these up? I have to run to give a talk. God bless you.” Mignon says she thinks to herself, “And are all the people in line dead?”

We go outside, and talk under the red awning, and Reso’s funeral procession passes by, as Mignon makes emphatic, precise ejaculations, “Oh, my God, can you believe it? My dear Jesus, oh, it’s so sad.” Then a large young gay priest in a blue and green horizontally striped boatneck shirt, something H., comes in and talks to Steve in a saccharine Cajun accent.

New Orleans. New Orleans. Last night dinner at Bernard L.’s on Carrollton, with a brother in the house who’s acting director of religious ed for the diocese. Schulte appoints anyone only to acting positions until they’ve proven their absolute fidelity. Lots and lots of that ecclesiastical gossip New Orleans generates, rife with corruption, the phosphorescent stench of decay. I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially as we were a warm circle of outsiders, shuddering with frissons of horror at the deliciously outré culture we inhabit—from San Antonio, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Little Rock, northern Minnesota.

Tonight we drive across the lake for dinner with Dean R. at a Chinese restaurant there. Tomorrow lunch with C.J. McNaspy, dessert in the evening with Karen C., Saturday lunch with Chan N., supper with Diane. Mother comes Sunday, and another week of class, with a visit by Aunt Helen and Uncle Lee on Monday and Tuesday, and dinner with Stanley K., Al A., Peggy and Errol L., and who knows who else.

This is all pretty silly, isn’t it? My usual travelogue. But why do I feel introspection is real life?

New Orleans 13.3.1994: Wild Synchronicities, A Room of One's Own

At New Orleans airport, waiting for our flight and bathing in glorious sunshine over my shoulders, from the high clear windows and sparsely clouded blue sky.

Wondering how one becomes a cloister to oneself, a reserve of green peace and recollection in which a fountain flows quietly, unobtrusively, regenerating all around it even when the world beyond the walls is mere chaos. A not inappropriate question in the madness that is New Orleans, the insanity that is New Orleans Catholicism. . . .

What does it all mean? Over and over in our days in New Orleans, it has been that experience about which I’ve been writing—circles of my life overlapping with and opening onto other circles.

E.g., Sean D. asked Steve if he can share our story with Luis C. Ralph went to high school with Luis in Concord . . . . Would anyone reading this journal even realize how wildly coincidental all this is?

Also, Bill A. and Stan K. both mentioned Jean M. and her trip to Russia—less coincidental, but nonetheless striking. (Bill does hilarious imitations of Jean M. talking about needing new dripes for her parlor. Doesn't totally remove the pain from her ugly behavior towards me on that trip, but it does allow me to put it into perspective.)

And on Thursday, we had coffee with Clarita R., who recommended I write Bard College for a job—a place I’d never heard of. That night at supper, Stan K. referred to Bard; then before bedtime, I read James Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, and came on a passage about—yep, Bard College.

What does it all mean? Or does it have to mean? Why did R., the Trinitarian with whom Bill A. lives, and whom Landrum picked up in Audubon Park, mention Kyle S. last night?

I feel I could develop mad, crazed theories to account for all this synchronicity. Or I can simply live in the current producing these eddies. My fear about the latter is that all insight and enthusiasm seems immediately to be swallowed up by the everyday, once I return to it.

I have to think I’m in a moment of extraordinary grace, whose contours I simply cannot discern. In such a moment, we must pray to be like those paper things that catch wind and sing.

Writing, my heart tells me, is key to all this. We went to Beckham’s Books yesterday, and Cary B. and his partner Alton C. almost begged us to return to New Orleans, though we hardly know them. They’ve bought a house two blocks from our Dorgenois house.

Somehow, this stirred in me again that deep, deep sense that I’m to write. I want so much to have time, space, freedom, to write. If I have that, I feel nothing can stop me: it’ll pour out.

Time/space/freedom from the church and the persona I’ve been forced to adopt as a gay theologian who sees and can’t say what he sees, in this structure. I just don’t want to babble it anymore, or be inside it. If anything, I want to look on it all with wry, amused irony.

(If the church comes to me, after I’ve written, and lets me be me, and teach from that vantage point, well, then . . . .)

Time/space/freedom: money. I need it with an almost physical hunger. Never thought I’d feel this way; it’s so crassly materialistic. But I need it to buy the freedom from the material that I need in order to write, to be free of crippling anxiety, to have a secure place, to be surrounded by some peace and beauty and tranquility, to be free to travel. And yet what fantasies! As if what we need drops down from heaven as we need it.

New Orleans 11.3.1994: Dream Claims and Soul Windows

What claim do my dreams have on me? What claim do any dreams—or does anything—have on me? I feel such dearth of soul.

At face value, they seem so simple, so banal—as I myself am. Guilt associated with sex since puberty, sibling rivalry, a sense of being out of control re: being gay and Christian. I don’t know how to relate what these windows show about my inner soul with anything in my external life.

Except. I was intensely nervous most of yesterday, especially when the Jesuits at Loyola suggested Steve and I go to Africa and work in their missions. A building nervousness, lunching in Thomas Hall and then meeting with LIM faculty. The old symptoms, for the old reasons: who am I in this setting, as a gay theologian?

Then I awoke today angry at Steve and have remained so all day—at his unresponsiveness, inaccessibility, slowness. Or is it anger at myself? Am I inaccessible to myself, obtuse and confused?

The soul window provided by dreams seems to show me some things that are underneath all that I feel and think and experience now. I’m not sure they’re “related” at all—it’s as if the blockage of so much in my life, of fruitful introspection, vision, forward movement, opens up vistas on energies always present inside. . . .

Could I take this story and turn it into a story re: energy, and not re: blockage and confusion?

New Orleans 10.3.1994: Scheming Bishops and People's Liturgies

I need to pay more attention to what is comprised by the act of listening. Somehow, reason—Enlightenment reason as a tool of domination—is connected to this interest, for me. Listening and domination are antithetical to one another. In order to become a culture (or church) able to listen, we have to reject the dominative impulse in Enlightenment reason.

+ + + + +

Yesterday, Sean D. told Steve he has been disciplined because he invited an AIDS patient to speak to the seminarians’ spiritual formation group, as well as a Pax Christi person who spoke about the people’s liturgy. When seminarians complained to conservative bishops, Sean’s office was split in half, and W. Maestri took over the spiritual formation work.

Then, oddly, in the evening as we had dinner with Al A., Al told us that John B. had spoken to the seminarians at St. Ben’s re: Al’s people’s liturgy, and T. Rodi responded with a letter informing them that the liturgy is unorthodox. Two more names from our past flowing together with the present: Sean, a friend of C.J. McNaspy from our present, and T. Rodi, our bête noire at Notre Dame who even then was headed to a suave, good-looking bishopric, and John B., husband of Karen C.

What can it all mean? It’s as if I’m inside something whose contours I can only barely see. But as M. Wolf said yesterday, if we could see, we’d be dead.

Yesterday, Kathleen also showed us the newsletter H. Cohen sends out for his “Closer Walk” ministries. It has a column written by him screaming about birth control, militant homosexuals, the threat to the family, which is the cornerstone of American society, and on and on. It screams about being “truly” Catholic with the pope, Splendor Veritatis, etc., etc. Clearly, lots of money backs all this tripe, like the money (Paul N.’s) that bought Hannan a personal radio station.

What does it all mean? The only way I think I can hope to “figure it out” (how little the phrase fits) is to tell the story from inside, as I see it, tracing the contours with my hands in darkness. M. Wolf says we must speak now. She says Schulte is eager, eager to hear the CUF people. Al A. says he and other theologians have gotten warnings from Schulte, saying that he is bishop and they answer to his definition of orthodoxy. Al’s was in a hand-addressed envelope, unlike others’, a sign of the special attention his radicalism merits. Schulte has spies in Al’s classes.

New Orleans 8.3.1994: Sweet Mockingbirds and Paschal Mysteries

Sitting out back at Kathleen and Abner’s, in their patio with its carved Porta Coeli sign and odorous dog turds on the bricks. Ivy and Moses-in-the-basket spill over the walls. On the drunken trollop’s side of the house, a baby screams frantically. On the other side, the bearded Yankee neighbor is assiduously cleaning house. I see the cabinet open, with its array of cleaning stuffs. I’m embarrassed to see him, since Steve and I have just been arguing, I raising my voice shrewishly.

Pleasant March sky. A mockingbird singing very sweetly behind me, and some more raucous bird (a jay?) cawing nearby.

I think of all the sad days I sat reading and writing in just this spot in 1984 when Steve left me here, as I struggled to write the dissertation. I decade later, I feel no wiser. It was Holy Week when I arrived in 1984: a long paschal mystery since then. I just don’t see its meaning.

To wit: yesterday, Pat R. called Kathleen and Abner to ask for our phone number. It was the first time we’d heard from him since 1978, when we lost contact . . . .

This makes me ponder even more a question I ponder and ponder after my talk the other night, when people from every layer of my life came to hear the lecture—Bill D. from my undergrad days (saying, Why is Bill Lindsey not a symbol of Loyola’s achievement?), Rick B. from the prayer group days, LIM students, Dorothy M. from my time teaching at St. Dominic’s.

What does it all mean? What’s the claim of all this life-lived on me? I’d like to see each layer as separate, each episode as a closed book. Now they’re all flowing together.

I can only conclude that flow is the word. As I wrote in my journal soon after New Year’s in 1993, when I was about to get the terminal contract, something flows strongly under my life, through it. A river, grace, life itself, in its sweet, strange, maddening incomprehensibility.

And in, through, every life. It’s so chastening, and yet so endearing, to see that, somehow, I’ve touched some of those I’ve taught in a way that influences their lives. Deep calling to deep; the depths running underneath my existence eddying and pooling with their depths.

Where to go with this; what to do with it? I don’t see. Thomas Moore says that, in being baptized, Jesus gave himself to the stream. I would (I hope) do so, if I knew how, where. I don’t see.

But maybe this is what this awful time is about, in part. It’s about letting oneself be carried by that river even when one doesn’t see. It’s about learning how life is a force running through one’s limited temporal-spatial boundaries.

I keep thinking of Rilke, and the call to be conscious, the struggle to live so stretched awake that we see, hear, taste, feel. We bought the Robert Bly translation of Rilke the other day, and I was bowled over by his title poem for the songs collection—if we don’t sing, what’s left to us?

And a tiny slug just fell on this journal as I closed it, reminding me that corruption trials through every word I wrote, because my heart is corrupted—with self-infatuation. And my pen suddenly drips black ink. My words, my thought, my heart are hardly sine macula.

New Orleans 6.3.1994: Race Matters and Postmodern Play

Sunday morning, 9 A.M. on Kathleen and Abner’s stoop. Next door, three feet away, as New Orleans houses are built, a baby voices its presence to the soft sunshine. Its mama mocks it, repeating its up-reaching sounds with bass, down-going ones.

Two nights ago, the mama and her boyfriend fought so fiercely the police were called. We had seen them earlier in the day—she a tubby-gutted slattern with round face, dirty askew brown hair, tired, mean brown eyes, a twisted toothless mouth, cigarette hanging out; he a blond cherub spoiled, years her junior, fresh-faced with blue eyes, already going paunchy, sucking on his own cigarette. Real New Orleans. Jesus would have loved them. I have trouble doing so.

The fight was drunken and cacophonous. She screamed vituperations in gutter language, while he demanded she let in the pregnant cat. When the police came, he was outside (2 A.M.) on the stoop, told them he was the husband. Abner and Kathleen says this happens often.

It’s New Orleans, 1994, year of our Lord, Morial Jr., just elected mayor last night. Not much can be done about the decline of traditional neighborhoods here, though I hope Morial will give it a shot. This neighborhood, solidly lower middle-class when we lived here 20 years ago (but even then grudgingly accepting a first wave of displaced Cubans) is now virtually all black. The whites who remain are utterly déclassé, like Kathleen and Abner’s neighbors, remnants of the 1950s neighborhood trapped on this reef as history washes their children to Kenner, Chalmette, and the idyllic North Shore, as t.v. newscasters now urge us to call across the lake.

Rather than remain in these neighborhoods and rub shoulders with Cubans and people of color, white families have fled. And in doing so, have left the city deprived of an important tax base, full of social problems that they blame on race rather than on their own abandonment of the city.

Through it all, New Orleans is always so vital—the squirrel scratching its way up and down the twist of tree limbs across the street, pigeons hurling like suddenly alarmed dignitaries onto the spiky green leaves of the loquat, a mockingbird displaying its white stripes in delighted flight onto the grass of the vacant lot.

I love the mild air, the slowness with which light comes and goes each day, even the raucousness of it all. I don’t like the litter, the burnt-out faces of the trapped poor folks, the bitter hard ones of the Metairie grandparents we saw last night as we had supper on Veterans. Talk about postmodernism.

Steve’s definition of postmodernism: seeing Schindler’s List in a bookstore yesterday, he said, “Oh, they’ve made a book out of that movie.”

Lots of impressions, too many to do justice. LIM nice to me. M. Dumestre introduced me as a New Orleanian, serious scholar, gentle person. Oodles of my students there, all sweet, solicitous, eager to touch and hug in that New Orleans way: M. Wolf, P. Hennican (sporting a Peggy Wilson sticker: her sister-in-law), D. Thompson, B. Dwyer, D. Kouris, D. McCloskey.

The latter amusing with her chunky little body in black tights surmounted by a bright red t-shirt with a beaded Indian thing around her neck, punk-red hair, huge asymmetrical earrings. A statement, and an A for effort, if not fashion savvy. She was back from a trip to El Salvador, where she picked coffee with Salvadoran workers. Then home to New Orleans to a dinner where she dined with people from the Salvadoran embassy, who cooed soft Hispanic horror at her poor scratched white arms, and recoiled in astonishment when she told them how she had incurred the scars. The ambassador made a joke of it: “I knew our economy was bad; I didn’t know we were importing American labor, though.”

. . .

Abner just drove up. Neighbor on the other side lamenting the election—a bearded 40ish man with a Yankee accent, who said, “For the first time in New Orleans history, there’s not a white male government—only one white male elected.” To which Abner replied, “Well, they can’t do a worse job than the previous government. We’ll see what they’ll do.”

New Orleans, En Route 4.3.1994: Golden Expectations Become Hamburg Drizzle

En route to New Orleans, in the plane somewhere over western Carolina or eastern Georgia. I’m to give a lecture tonight, a workshop tomorrow, then a much-needed vacation with Steve, who’s on break next week.

Taking off, I think of the Bahamas, the clear light there last summer, the dishabille of the baseball diamond we walked each evening, with its spiky tufts of tenacious tropical grass. I think of the wind atop Fox Hill, the mysterious scent of the frangipani, the owl that stared us down from the monastery’s unfinished bell tower.

Then I think of rainy, gloomy Hamburg, the two awful Chinese meals Steve and I had there in restaurants that smelled of urine, where the waiters preferred to speak English. I think of the musty inn we stayed at in Dreis in the Eifel, with its frightful furnishings like something from a Fred Flintstone set, skins nailed to interior walls, clashing violently with those nubby polyester bedclothes the 1960s called modern.

Displacement. That curious excitement of displacement I feel whenever I travel. The golden expectations that soon become Hamburg drizzle or Dreis furnishings. I’m not sure what to make of it. As I read James Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, how he sought displacement in Europe as a young gay man, I wonder if it’s inherent in being gay. Totus mundus exilium est: yes, it’s the displacement of oppression and the doors it closes to “normalcy” and privilege; and it’s the displacement of being denied family—in traditional senses of the word.

But is it also that displacement of being . . . genderless, betwixt and between, not one nor the other, at least, in societal myths about a gay orientation? Is that why W.E.B. DuBois’s idea of double consciousness appeals so? Like blacks, gay people live that strange phenomenon.

I know there’s lots of power there, in not quite belonging: Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jesus and the reign of God, St. Francis and his father, any woman you can name, practically. But I don’t know how to access that power. I want to belong and not belong, to have security and be free to critique.

I wait for . . . what? To have some vague sense of who I am, I reckon. Speaking, as I will tonight, in this vague floating space that is my life and identity now—it’s very anxiety-provoking, to put it mildly. I don’t float well; I’m not a very spiritually mature person.

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Leave taking is always hard for me. Sugar’s reproachful eyes through the gate, the tick of the clock in the still house and rust stains in the sink. But today, the purple buds of the Japanese magnolia, big and fat against a not too well matched blue sky. They’ll open while we’re away, as they did last year. This is a poem, if I could write it . . . .

New Orleans 4.7.94: Still Bayous and Dark Coffee

Steve and I up early to walk along the bayou (St. John) and in City Park. I feel some spiritual depth calling to me here, these days. The bayou focuses that call, as it often did for me when we lived in New Orleans, and I wrote poems in my head as we walked on its banks. Followed by coffee at Café du Monde, in that still, cool time around dawn before it’s tourist-crowded.

But times away from home, like this teaching stint in New Orleans, draw out the worst between Steve and me—naked cor ad cor loquitur, and one cannot predict what will happen. The sameness of it all is so boring, so maddening—he says, I say, we say, like some rote chant. That book title, The Dance of Anger, is appropriate—it is a dance, a relentless two-step in which one can never improvise, or fling oneself into the cosmic polka with abandon.

Glad abandon: those old sucker words still get me, with all their self-deception. With Steve, what palls is precisely what drew me to him in the first place—the masculine control. But such sly control, that never really takes control . . . .

Of course, when people argue so hopelessly and for so long about such small things, the argument is really about something else. Control, I guess. If what we hate in others is our own shadow, then it’s I who am conflicted over control. I want to give myself (with glad abandon), but I’m afraid to do so. Afraid I’ll be summarily shaken and my slumber dissipated—as by my mother when I was an infant.

Do the deep traumas inside us ever heal?

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27.6.94

A thought re: my trip to Russia, why it was so painful:

Travelers in foreign lands experience a curious duality: their skin becomes simultaneously transparent and impermeable. To those in whose midst they walk, all their inner mechanisms are exposed, like clocks whose faces are removed. But for the tourist, there is the experience of extreme frustration, as one seeks to connect to foreigners, and finds one’s thoughts cannot pass thick membranes of language and custom, of one’s own skin.