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The Sound of Distant Thunder The news reached Dharamsala that Hurricane Katrina had attained maximum strength and was heading across the Gulf of Mexico on a direct path toward New Orleans. As Katrina approached the city, twenty Tibetan monks came together, here, on the other side of the world, to offer puja for the threatened city and its people. * = See www.lhainfo.org I was in India with the Louisiana Himalaya Association, a group from New Orleans that works with Tibetan refugees*. The monks, friends of the LHA, came to the group’s center to express their compassion for and solidarity with those of us from New Orleans. We sat in a large circle, with the five of us from New Orleans at the front of the room. A number of the students from the English class I was teaching were there. My monk friend Tsering led the chanting, which seemed to By the evening we heard that the hurricane had turned slightly and was passing a little to the east of the city, saving it from the most dangerous winds. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. Apparently the puja had worked! Once again, as for so many times over the past forty years, our city had been saved from disaster at the last moment. Or so we thought, until the next day's news revealed what Katrina had actually brought to New Orleans. Over the next few days the horrifying tragedy unfolded. We watched the reports in disbelief, as did much of the world, astounded that the world's richest and most powerful empire could abandon one of its most historic cities to suffering, death and desperation for days on end. Four-fifths of the city was underwater. Bodies floated in filthy, toxic water. Thousands cried desperately for help, stranded on housetops without food, water or medicine. At the city's hopelessly inadequate shelters tens of thousands suffered in sweltering misery as elderly people died in their wheelchairs, overcome by the heat, the stress, and perhaps the despair. Desperate citizens searched for food and water in the stores that had not been inundated. Some went on rampages of looting, carrying away the treasures of consumer society to a ravaged environment in which most of the stuff would be useless. Huge quantities of drugs, alcohol and firearms were plundered. Fights, shootings, arson and vandalism broke out. The police responded with repression, violence, brutality and occasional looting of their own. Mass arrests were made on the flimsiest of pretexts. Amid the breakdown of all institutions there was one civic initiative: a makeshift prison was set up at the bus and train station and its squalid wire cages with cement floors were quickly packed with prisoners. Guantanamo at the Greyhound Station. We were later to discover that well over a thousand lives were lost in the New Orleans area that day. The equivalent of fifty years of destruction of the surrounding wetlands, the city's major protection from storm surges, had taken place in a few hours. Dozens of neighborhoods with many generations of rich history and cherished traditions were lost in a single day. Several million people in the region were displaced. Hundreds of thousands from the city itself were fated to remain scattered for the next year, facing an uncertain future. Fundamentalists gloated that God had finally destroyed a corrupt city of sin, home to a carnivalesque culture of licentious hedonism, to saint-worshiping Catholic idolaters and heathen voodoo practitioners, and to every form of sexual perversion, as epitomized by the city's annual "Southern Decadence" celebration. The irony that the devastation was greatest in quiet residential neighborhoods, while the notorious French Quarter survived almost entirely unscathed, was lost on these apostles of divine retribution. In fact, whether or not an angry God fanned the furious winds of Hurricane Katrina, it was not these winds that brought catastrophe to New Orleans. It has been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it was the failure of the unsafe, defective levees designed and built with abject incompetence by the United States Army Corps of Engineers that was the immediate cause this disaster. It is also clear that the destruction of 1800 square miles of the state's protective wetlands, most significantly by the ruinous practices of the oil industry, was its major long-term cause. Given the effects of human negligence, incompetence, injustice and opportunism in creating the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, there was little room left for a vindictive God to take any credit. Touched by Devastation An idea that recurs in all the great wisdom traditions is that the confrontation with death, dissolution, and mortality is often a path (perhaps even a necessary path) to spiritual awakening and metaphysical enlightenment. Western mysticism testifies to the existence of a Dark Night of the Soul in which, says St. John of the Cross, the spirit is purified and stripped of all attachments so that it can unite with God. According to the great German mystic Jacob Boehme, when one is in the depths of anguish, divine love wells up in its midst and leads one to Divinity itself, the groundless Abyss of Nothingness. Similarly for Hegel, the great biographer of Spirit, we must go through the "Night of the World" in order to develop spiritually. We must face death, whether literally or figuratively, fully experiencing the contingency of all things, including our own fragile existence. "The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself." "Spirit," he says, "is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it."* * = G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller trans., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 19. All this is strikingly reminiscent of Buddhist practice, which also aims at an acute awareness of the emptiness of all things, including one's very self. It teaches that out of an apprehension of emptiness arises a profound appreciation of the world, a deep feeling of compassion, and dedicated compassionate action. In Dogen's famous formulation, "To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one's self and others."** ** = This is the popular translation of the famous quote from the Genjo Koan. See Dogen,"Actualizing the Fundamental Point" [The Genjo Koan] in Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds: The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1999), pp. 35-39. It is remarkable how this practice has been integrated into the daily lives of the Tibetan people. An endearing quality of many Tibetans is their calm and often lighthearted view of things; the manner in which they greet the small incidents of life with a smile and even laugh at aspects of life that others might find dismal and depressing. Also impressive is the extent to which kindness, consideration, concern for others, and a sense of gratitude pervades the everyday life of so many people. Buddhist compassion is expressed in an everyday ethics of care, and a pervasive spirit of generosity. And what is perhaps most astounding is how in just a few decades a small, once isolated people could have suddenly done so much to communicate this spirituality and ethics to a world in which such values as non-attachment, non-egoism and compassion seem so alien. There are, of course, causal factors. Tibetans have a thousand-year history of meditating on the emptiness of the self, the world and the things that usually weigh us down with all their ponderous insubstantiality. Even Tibetan humor on the deepest level is a kind of ongoing everyday practice of non-attachment coupled with a sense of generosity and sharing. In addition, Tibetan society is not so far from its roots in traditional culture in which local ties, familial connections and other intimate bonds are much more important than they are in the rationalized, economized, mediatized modern culture that we strangely think of as a normal environment for human beings. But none of this seems to explain the Tibetan miracle adequately. It seems to me that it must also be understood in relation to the recent trauma of the Tibetan people. They have endured and are still enduring the dark night of their collective soul. They have faced destruction of their community on a terrifying scale-twenty percent of the population killed, masses of people imprisoned and tortured, thousands of monasteries destroyed, much of their cultural heritage of art and artifacts sacked and ruined, and for many, perhaps unending exile. It is impossible not to ask to what extent the trauma of social catastrophe led to a rebirth, to the flowering of the Tibetan spirit. As the Dalai Lama has said, awareness of this connection should in no way lessen our sense of the injustice that has been done or reduce our resolution to help end the immense suffering that still continues. But miracles do come out of tragedy. Reflecting on the fate of Tibet let me pose another question: Might the catastrophe we are now suffering through in New Orleans lead us to a kind of awakening, to a new awakened practice, perhaps to finding a gift of great value that we can give to one another and to the world?
One Stanza on Emptiness "Everything is impermanent," said my friend Tsering as we walked along a road in Dharamsala the day after Katrina. "All things come to an end. Some just end a little more quickly than others. Some end sooner than we expect them to. But they are all impermanent." "All things come to an end." It goes without saying, one might say. After all, in Buddhist teaching, impermanence is one of the Three Marks of all existence. I had heard the news. Why then would this compassionate monk mercilessly beat the dead horse of substantiality? It was just a helpful, and quite necessary, reminder. For sometimes we forget the most obvious things. Ironically, we often forget them precisely when they become most obvious. I was soon to see New Orleans, the city I love deeply, the city in which my family has lived and died for twelve generations, illustrate this simple truth. And it would all seem quite unbelievable. It would be mentally and emotionally unacceptable, as predictable as it certainly was. The mind inevitably seeks escape from harsh realities.
In the Land of Dreamy Scenes As much as I loved Dharamsala and those around me, I yearned to return home as soon as possible. Almost two weeks after the hurricane I had finally ascertained that most of my family was scattered across several states but one of my children, who was later found, was still missing. I yearned to be reunited with loved ones, to find out the fate of my home and neighborhood and those of my family and friends, and to get involved in the process of healing and recovery of my community. So I left India, and flew to Toronto, Houston, and finally Lafayette, Louisiana, the closest it was possible for non-military aircraft to get to New Orleans. Thanks to the kindness of a friend, I got a ride into the city. A mandatory evacuation order was still in effect, but we managed to get by the roadblocks. I was finally home! I never thought I could use the old Dickensian cliché "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times" in a non-ironic sense, but this is precisely what I felt about New Orleans in the period after Katrina. On the one hand I was surrounded by almost unimaginable devastation. On the other, I saw an outpouring of love and generosity, and a spirit of dedication and cooperation far beyond anything I've ever experienced. Devastation has many dimensions. One might be called the sublime horror of catastrophe. This was caught in some of the news photographs. Images of a vast urban landscape covered with water; of a huge area completely leveled, Hiroshima-like, in the Lower Ninth Ward; of large boats sitting in the middle of streets, cars sitting on top of houses and houses on top of cars; of large crowds of battered and distraught victims clustered on overpasses and around shelters. But as everyone who has come to the city has repeated, no news photos or video footage has quite captured the awful reality of the devastation. The feeling of overwhelming destruction really sets in when one travels through street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood, and sees many thousands of houses and other buildings ruined and deserted. Particularly at dusk or in the weird glare of headlights in the dark of night, one is overtaken by the nauseating and dispiriting feeling evoked by the decomposition, decay, and mortality that pervades the deserted neighborhoods. Another dimension of devastation we might call the intimate world of catastrophe. Its truth is the subjectivity of disaster. Since my own home, though seriously damaged, was not destroyed, I first experienced it in its full force when I visited the ravaged home of my daughter's family. The experience is reminiscent of a certain kind of nightmare. I am in a place I know but it is horribly transformed into something radically different, something dead. It didn't register immediately but what I was seeing eventually sank in: it was the corpse of a place. There is rubble everywhere. Around the house everything is brown and grey, the grass, plants, shrubs, and trees. The floor is buckled, all the windowpanes shattered. Objects, scattered everywhere, are broken, twisted, covered with sediment, moldy. The refrigerator is turned on its side and sprawled across a doorway. The clothes dryer rests on top of the washing machine. The yellow-brown waterline cuts across the walls of each room, marking where five feet of water had stood in the house for weeks. The most heart-wrenching experience of all is to see the most personal expressions of the family's life reduced to debris. For a family of artists this means sculptures, paintings, drawings, delicate handmade objects, photographs. On the floor lies sadly a mold-covered chart entitled "Brianne's Ancestors", a school project of my granddaughter. Personal history has enveloped personal history. Hundreds of thousands of our families have gone through this process of experiencing the death of their homes, the death of their neighborhoods, the death of the places that they loved. If I spent too much time among these ruined homes and ravaged neighborhoods it was difficult to resist the onset of severe, incapacitating melancholy. Meditating on a corpse is one of the most ancient and most useful meditative practices, but we are not meant to dwell in a community of corpses. Yet a confrontation with the reality of mortality can help us return to our living community with a new appreciation of its vitality, and with a new spirit of engagement and compassion. A Street Named Desire The day I returned to New Orleans I heard from my friend Leenie Halbert, who had opened up her house in an unflooded part of the city's Ninth Ward as a center for relief activities. A group of volunteers-a motley, high-spirited collection of anarchists, greens, activist students and neighborhood people-had materialized spontaneously, inspired in part by the Common Ground Collective that had organized a week before in the Algiers neighborhood. By that evening I had moved to Leenie's and began working with the group. A reporter from the New York daily newspaper Newsday wrote an article about our work at Leenie's. He entitled it "On a Street Named Desire", for our little collective was indeed located on the street famed for its streetcar of bygone days. It is also known as the site of one of the city's largest and most historic, but also most blighted and crime-plagued housing developments. It is called, with inadvertent irony and pathos, "the Desire Project". We were undertaking a kind of Desire Project ourselves. From a certain perspective, the cause of our problems today - the deep, underlying social and ecological crises of which the Katrina disaster is a cruel manifestation - is desire. And the solution is also desire. There is a kind of desire that consists of hopeless craving for an impossible object. It rises up out of an emptiness of the spirit, a lack that may be imaginary but has a quite material basis far back in the history of our species and our civilization and a quite material, tangible effect on us today. It fuels a futile quest to fill up the illusory void. Strange as it seems, we're running on emptiness. What's more, we're running out of control, despite all our illusions of power. This emptiness has powered a long history of domination, despair, cynicism, and rage against reality. But there is also another kind of desire, a desire that seeks to heal divisions, break the chains of illusion, and restore a certain contact with long-obscured or forgotten realities. Sometimes in the trauma of crisis it is reawakened. This was our desire project. It seemed to me that this project was very much in the spirit of the non-attached compassion that, according to Buddhism, arises out of the awareness of emptiness. In New Orleans this compassion is now widely known as "Solidarity not Charity," the motto of the Common Ground Collective. In fact this is an almost exact synonym for "non-attached compassion" - for what is "charity" other than compassion distorted by condescension and ego-attachment? * = Alex Martin, "On a street named Desire", Newsday (September 26, 2005) The Newsday reporter said that for the first time in his life he had met a group of "communitarian anarchists, people who believe in do-it-yourself action within small groups", and who wanted to "feed the hungry and bring water to the thirsty, to fix the broken homes of [the] neighbors and to offer a sense of community in their deserted streets". He was willing to concede that "whatever Leenie and her friends called themselves and whatever they believed, though, they were doing a good thing." As Leenie herself explained it, "I just wanted to bring love back to my neighborhood". * ** = Information on all aspects of the work of Common Ground can be found at www.commongroundrelief.org What our little group tried to do on a very small scale for a short time has been carried out on a large scale and for the long-term by our original inspiration, the Common Ground Collective.**
The Groundless Ground of Compassion Common Ground began in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans one week after Hurricane Katrina, when, according to a now legendary account, three friends sitting around a kitchen table, with nothing but a cell phone, $50 and their own energy and vision to work with, decided to take direct action to save the community. In its brief nine months of existence over eight thousand volunteers have participated in Common Ground's projects and its aid programs have helped 80,000 people. Volunteers have ranged from students who have come for a week at Thanksgiving or Spring break to long-term relief workers who have stayed for months or moved to the city more or less permanently to act as program coordinators. The organization now has projects in a number of neighborhoods, including a large center at St. Mary of the Angels School in the city's ravaged Ninth Ward. Every classroom in the school building is filled with cots and five-hundred volunteers can be housed there at one time. There are several distribution centers, a media center, a women's center, and several clinics. Common Ground has instituted a vast spectrum of projects, including house gutting, roof-tarping, tree removal, a newspaper, community radio, bioremediation, computer classes, childcare co-ops, worker co-ops, eviction defense, prisoner support, after-school and summer programs, and wetlands restoration work. One of the volunteers I met immediately after returning to the city was Francisco di Santis. Francisco, who calls himself an "embedded artist" and "visual folklorist", arrived on September 11, less than two weeks after the hurricane. He immediately began talking to survivors, evacuees and volunteers and sketching their portraits. Over the past eight months he has created a collection of over a thousand powerful, stark, dramatic, expressive portraits, and on each of them its subject has written his or her story or dictated it to be written. Francisco's "Post-Katrina Portrait Project" is now one of the official projects of Common Ground. Almost 350 pages of images and texts have recently been put on a website and anyone who wants a deeper insight into the experience of the grassroots recovery movement than these few words can begin to convey should explore this material.* * = See www.postkatrinaportraits.com Gary Snyder has said that "the truly experienced person delights in the ordinary." To me, this is exactly what the portraits are about, the miracles in the everyday lives of ordinary people-though in extraordinary times. They are the story of how the shock of awakening can open us up to what the surrealists called "the marvelous" that lies, usually hidden, all around us, in those we meet, within ourselves. A few examples from this wealth of testimony to the miraculous . One volunteer expressed a sentiment repeated by a great many others: that the confrontation with overwhelming disaster might have produced hopelessness and inability to act, but the precise opposite results when one acts as part of a caring community. "What could have become resignation instead sparked a desire, an awesome will to effect change. Surrounded by those who care, I have realized a different future, a hope that can become a reality". A survivor wrote of the mutuality that develops between residents and volunteers as this caring community emerges. "My eyes have been opened wide to those who come from afar to help us. I see your eyes open to us and our lives". She also described a new relation among local residents who endured the disaster together. "Once I met a fireman who I helped in a very small way. Both of us with tears in our eyes promised to never forget, never forget, how much we needed each other. I see the hope and promise of a new day". A volunteer expressed similar ideas. She writes of coming to work on the house of an elderly woman and seeing the tears in her eyes. "I sat and listened to her sing her heart song, and we cried together". The volunteer sees her caring efforts as part of a larger process of restoration and healing. "Louisiana sunshine rests cozily on a shoulder. Whole towns sweats through universal pores. It beads and glistens as it slowly begins its descent down the crease of a back or the tip of a sun-burnt nose. It's wiped away with a dusty finger as its creator labors away at the exhausting endeavor of making this body whole again, so that we all may breathe and laugh and dance and cry, as if New Orleans had never been severed before." A persistent theme of survivors and volunteers is their new recognition of what is of real value. A survivor who had lost her home told the volunteers, "You know what? It's a relief. I feel free . Sometimes it takes the complete stripping of your home or possessions to really see what life's about". This echoes the ancient ideal of the bhiksu, whose embarking on a spiritual journey is described as accepting a state of homelessness (pravraja). The idea is that the loss of exclusive attachment to ones home can lead to a larger sense of being at home in the world. The portraits reveal a wide spectrum of experiences and emotions. One extreme is conveyed well by a volunteer who said of first seeing the city: "Emptiness . that's all my mind could comprehend". In almost all cases this experience of desolation was followed by one of powerful affirmation. "I see heaven in the eyes of every person I've met . I'm going to do everything I can to better my own community, just like we're doing here. Heaven is everywhere sacrifice for humanity takes place". Another volunteer spoke of "seeing flowers and birds coming back literally and figuratively". After coming briefly and finding in the relief effort "a lot of authenticity and a model of people being the power", he left for home. For the next three months he found himself all the while longing to return to a place where "out of deep hurt can come beautiful transformation personally and collectively." He's now back for a longer stay. One of the many reasons that the Post-Katrina Portraits are important is that they give an intimate human face to a profound truth. This truth is that out of an openness to the reality of suffering-both one's own and that of others-can come deep compassion; out of the encounter with the mortality and impermanence of all things can come a deeper love of other human beings, of the community, of the spirit of a place. This is certainly a pleasant thought, but as mere mental furniture it has no more than a faint reality. As the living truth of people's experience it has overpowering, transformative force.
The Killing Season It's now nine months since Hurricane Katrina. Most of our fellow citizens remain in exile and there is no large-scale, official effort to bring them back. Vast areas of the city remain in ruins, and there are no programs to rebuild them. Even if the repairs and reinforcement of the levees that are underway are completed, they are unlikely to prevent flooding if another storm at the level of Katrina should hit us in the coming months. Should a more powerful storm strike the city directly, the result would be much more catastrophic than anything we have ever seen in the city's history. The worst case scenario foresees twenty feet of water covering even the highest ground and the city remaining inundated for months. At this time there is no plan to construct levees that would protect us from such a killer storm. Neither are plans being implemented to restore the wetlands that are our first line of defense against a powerful storm surge. As the hurricane season begins this week, one must wonder, will this be the season of our disappearance? Relatively few seem to take seriously such a possibility. In the city, most of the people who are back carry on, some immersed in the cares of everyday life, some busy trying to forget them. And once again we celebrate. The Mardi Gras Indians have marched, the second liners have second lined. The rhythm is back, and so are the blues. Will the harsh light of everydayness blind us to the truths revealed in our dark night of the spirit, or are we at the dawn of a new awakening? 30 May 2006 |