Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 23)

A City Beyond the Reach of Empathy by RICHARD FORD WHO CAN WRITE ABOUT NEW ORLEANS NOW? Tell us what it’s like there. Bring us near to what people are experiencing, to their loss, to what will survive. People who are close should write that. Only they’re in the city, or they’re on a bus, or they’re seeking shelter. We don’t know where they are. It’s just a keyhole, and a small one, onto this great civic tragedy. The people who should be writing of it can’t be found. An attempt to set out a vocabulary for empathy and for reckoning is frustrated in a moment of sorest need by the plain terms of the tragedy that wants telling. There are many such keyholes. In America, even with our incommensurable memories of 9/11, we still do not have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city — our great iconic city, so graceful, livable, insular, self-delighted, eccentric, the one New Orleanians always said, with a wink, that care forgot and that sometimes, it might seem, forgot to care. Other peoples have experienced their cities’ losses. Some bombed away (sometimes by us). Others gone in the flood. Here now is one more tragedy that we thought, by some divinity’s grace that didn’t arrive, we’d miss. But not. And our inept attempts at words run only to lists, costs, to assessing blame. It’s like Hiroshima, a public official said. But no. It’s not like anything. It’s what it is. That’s the hard part. He, with all of us, lacked the words. For those away from New Orleans — most all of us — in this week of tears and wrenching, words fail. Somehow our hearts’ reach comes short and we’ve been left with an aching, pointless inwardness. “All memory resolves itself in gaze,” the poet Richard Hugo wrote once about another town that died. Empathy is what we long for — not sadness for a house we own, or owned once — now swept away. Not even for the felt miracle of two wideeyed children whirled upward into a helicopter as if into clouds. And we want more than that, even at this painful long distance: we want to project our sympathies straight into the life of a woman standing waist-deep in a glistening toxic current with a whole city’s possessions all floating about, her own belongings in a white plastic bag, and who has no particular reason for hope, and so is just staring up. We would all give her hope. Comfort. A part of ourselves. Perform an act of renewal. It’s hard to make sense of this, we say. But it makes sense. Making sense just doesn't help. A wall on the top floor of Antoine’s restaurant gave way during Hurricane Katrina, revealing stacked chairs. photograph by Louis Sahuc Fall 2005/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 23

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 Contents Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina and Rita Tabasco: Edmund McIlhenny and the Birth of a Louisiana Pepper Sauce Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans’ Coffee Connection No Man’s Land Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by Roy Blount, Jr. )

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

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