Notes from 115 Days Out

Now, 115 days after Hurricane Katrina, what pierces through to my heart almost daily is “the look.”  It’s that look of a perfect stranger into whose eyes I glance momentarily while passing on the street or standing in one of the many lines one stands in here in New Orleans.  It’s a steady, sad, unblinking gaze that says: “I know.  I know your distress, your fears, your confusion and despair and your bone tiredness.  I know.”  And with my own gaze I reciprocate.  We are strangers in the usual sense, yet deeply connected in an intimate knowing of this unique pain we share.  Our world of sadness is one world.  The rest of the world, our country and our government seem already to be forgetting us…and that in itself is a great sadness.

            Only 100,000 persons of our former 460,000 population remain or have returned and few of them are children because only a very few schools have reopened.  Everyone experiences unexplainable difficulties accomplishing simple tasks, getting a repair job done, and there are millions, finding a hospital bed or friends that still can’t be located or making a phone call (if one has a phone at all) with bizarre noises, long silences or constant busy signals.  Thousands of people are still without electricity or telephones.  Getting nails removed from one’s tires can be a daily occupation.

            Garbage and debris are piled as high as 50 feet in some places and almost no street is without curbside piles of waterlogged furniture, refrigerators, bikes, ruined photographs, stuffed toys revealing the life of a family, stacked as trash.  Parts of the city are off limits even to the former residents and there are curfews, dark places one cannot enter after 8 p.m.

            All  this, yet we can never gaze into the eyes of the dispossessed—those who have lost everything.  They are gone, far away beyond our gaze.  Yet to all of us remaining these persons pervade our inward vision.  We are sad…and have few means of processing our ever-present feelings.  One of the things we need the most is for our artists to come home.

            Of the dispossessed, hundreds are musicians, visual artists, composers, writers, performers who have lost homes and studios and were forced to find homes and work far away.  In this grieving city we need the artists, those special people whose work sings to us, makes us dream, wonder, cry, laugh, dance, hug, feel our oneness and the essence of our rich and precious culture—the heartbeat of our city.  We need the art, music, writings and theatre that helps us to process this human disaster, restore our spirits and provide the vision necessary for all of us to build an enlightened, resurgent and safe, healthy city…and you can help us do it by supporting Restoration Residencies for artists to return to the city and help to restore its heartbeat.

— Lucianne Carmichael, Founder

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