trees, Katrina and Spike Lee

last night my yin and i continued watching Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, which is quite excellent. i remember Katrina clearly, in spite of my overwhelming drowsiness, and seeing these images again helped me to get back in touch with the anger, outrage, and bewilderment i felt in the late summer of 2005:

but this is beside the point.

the point is that person after person spoke of their sense of loss, their sense of connection to New Orleans that had been severed forever. they spoke of their ancestors and of the streets and neighborhoods of Orleans Parish as a living, breathing entity. for them the city was part of who they were, and now – dispersed across the nation to places lake Baton Rouge, Houston, and Utah – they felt its throbbing presence like an amputee feels his missing limb.

my yin said she thought it was strange, how much they identified with the place. something about this statement didn't feel right, and at the moment i could only articulate that it was "a different culture." overnight, however, amidst a seemingly endless cycle of waking, pursuit and nightmare, something clicked for me, and this morning i found myself writing:

the sense of being One with a place, of it defining you, of it being you, is a much older way of experiencing our humanness. people have lived this way for most of our existence, and our current facile mobility, historically a very recent phenomenon, has helped to engender a sense of not belonging to any particular place. the lack of roots, the lack of place, can be seen – and is perhaps better seen – as a symptom of modernity and its concomitant fracturing of familial and territorial ties.

i told my yin that it isn't so strange to me because of my own upbringing as a member of a dying folk culture, as a witness (and sometimes accomplice) to its murder. i thought of my own family and how even after various dispersions, they have all recongregated within thirty miles of one another. my mother, my father, my aunts, my brother, my grandparents, my cousins – they are all there.

(i am here, and
this place is not
without sadness)

i thought of a tree. a tree has roots, planted in a specific place, and if it moves, then the soil and roots must travel with it, or else it will die. in this process of moving, the tree inevitably experiences trauma; but, if the soil is good, if the tree is cared for in its new home, then it will grow strong again and survive.

this did not happen in New Orleans.

(occasionally a seed
is dispersed by wind
or passing fancy but
by and large, trees
stay in the forest)

picture of a tree, roots unseen

the other option, the one many of us live in, is that the tree turned into a board. a board's beauty lies in the certainty and elegance of right angles; and, even in its rigidity, the board can be turned into many beautiful forms.

but
the board
is always dead,
no matter what house
it finds itself constructing
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