Ambiguous Loss of Home

It's fairly rare to find poetry in The New York Times, if not as rare as it was a generation or two ago. Mostly, it's confined to the work of a few eccentric, "atmospheric" reporters -- Francis X.Clines (whom I've always loved), Rick Bragg -- whom the Times gave their heads and allowed to break up the gray columns with brightly daubed word painting.

There's something about the near death of New Orleans, though -- something about New Orleans itself, its dreamlike, Venetian frailty and revelry -- that has sent more straightforward reporters' minds down some strange turns. A piece on the psychological aftermath of the hurricane by Benedict Carey strayed onto this startlingly unclinical road less taken:

In time perhaps the memory of this now-sodden city will be what brings together the evacuated and the abandoned, the well-off and the unlucky, in common purpose. Unlike a fire or earthquake, which reduce many buildings to rubble, a long period of flooding usually leaves many structures intact but uninhabitable, deeply familiar but permanently altered, like a loved one who is alive but unable to speak or interact, psychologists say. And there is an overpowering desire to make those buildings whole, to bring them back.

Children in particular feel this loss deeply, experts say. They often look for a toy or a coloring book, something to provide a connection to their former life. After this flood, anything they find will be ruined, a confirmation of their current desperation.

"People don't know until something like this comes along how much the shape of their house, the texture of their house, the mood of their neighborhood, are important parts of who they are," said Kai Erikson, a sociologist at Yale. "People take all of this so much for granted that when they return and the house is gone or not habitable it disorients them, makes them more lonely and more afraid, and they don't know why.

"This is true of public spaces and streets, too," Dr. Erikson continued. "You have no idea how much they mean to you until they are gone or permanently altered."

This is a striking description of "ambiguous loss," the concept described by Pauline Boss in her book of the same name, and by a reviewer of the book as "the particular difficulty in mourning something that is both there and gone: a soldier missing in action, for example, or a parent whose Alzheimer's disease has taken away their minds but not their bodies."

The recognition that we can mourn places just as much as people, however, could come straight out of the work of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who writes about the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and how it nourishes our souls when cherished and tended, and sickens us in ways we can't understand when neglected or forgotten. Hillman thinks the blank amnesia of our material world, caused by profit-driven development obliterating the old places we love and remember -- digitizing our psyches' foundational images into numbers -- is an unacknowledged source of the current epidemic of depression, and one that can be numbed but not healed by the likes of Prozac. From a Gadfly Online interview with Hillman:

Hillman lives in Thompson, an old Connecticut town . . . In recent years, he and his wife [artist and author Margot McLean] have fought to stop a massive "Big Dig"-like sewer project that threatened to devastate the historic center of Thompson. In battling to preserve the quality of life in his community, Hillman put into practice an idea he has talked about for decades: the therapeutic value of preserving one's community and the natural environment. . . .

Talking about development and the defacement and razing of beloved places, the interviewer says:

I feel it the way you feel a tooth that has been pulled or a limb that has been amputated. I feel a phantom limb. I will always drive by that lot and remember the trees that were there, even though houses are there now. Even ten years later.

And Hillman says:

Oh, it hurts! It hurts. When I see an old tree go down . . . [i]t hurts more than if somebody dies in the neighborhood. . . . It's that feeling of being hurt when those cows are gone and you walk past that place and you see those houses. . . . And that raises a very profound and important philosophical question. Is memory only in your head or is memory also in the world? . . . [I]f you tear those buildings down and put up a new Trump Tower, where is the memory? You see, there is something that remains in these places. . . .

If you don't do anything else today, take a few moments to read Hillman's short essay from Resurgence called "The Virtues of Caution" -- an argument for preserving, for pausing, for beauty, against hurry and competition. ("The gasp, 'ahh-h', lies at the root of the word ‘aesthetic’.") It would have been a fine argument for rebuilding the levees, to shore that consummate city of the soul against inundation by the haste and greed of the world outside. It is a fine argument for letting the city rebuild itself organically within rational new defenses, not turning it into an antiseptic theme park of itself.

The loss of New Orleans has brought us all up short -- not only reporters. The imperilment of its last bit of habitat has reminded us that our own soul is an endangered species. New Orleans was a sort of moated zoo habitat or reservation for the soul, a small space where it could remember how to roam freely and feel at home. It may have been out of indifference to such intangible values, even more than out of indifference to the poor and the black (out of whose rich alluvial lives jazz flowered), that the city was left so exposed. Particularly fascinating is that Hillman says the spiritual values of heaven and salvation from sin are as inimical to soul as the material values of progress and profit.

It is those two unlikely (on the face of it) allies that have joined hands over New Orleans' grave.

Comments

[Greta]

A highly interesting post/thought - gave myself the luxury of reading it even though I´m supposed to be on a blogging abstinence (to rest my eyes).

[Laurie K]

>>New Orleans was a sort of moated zoo habitat or reservation for the soul, a small space where it could remember how to roam freely and feel at home.<<

After paying a visit to the Big Easy, I thought of it as an old, sad prostitute whose charms were a pathetic shadow of itself, and who kept turning tricks because she doesn't have anything else to offer. These fanciful notions a New Orleans that didn't exist won't help it get rebuilt. It was dirty, corrupt, and dangerous for its residents, and, in the end, demonstrated a cruel indifference for the least among them. If it's to be remade, let's do it right -- not based on some goofy flight of fancy that sounds like a travel agent on acid. Let's do it better than that -- let's make it a decent place for people to live and work in, not a hive of want and violence.