new city, new hope

It has to be true that all the “new” New World names, i.e., New England, New York, New Orleans, were dubbed thusly with utmost hope and belief that they’d be the shining, exemplary beacons that the original “failures” never were. The natural human hunt for something better. I like to think of it in the same way that we tend to think of anything new. THIS time it’ll be different. No, but, for real this time.

We place our hope in the future. Our happiness couldn’t possibly be woven in with the threads of the present which is so laden with dissatisfaction. “Oh well, it will be better when…”, as we march surely forward, possibly toward a cliff’s edge, propelled by hope.

It will always be better when. When you’re no longer in Europe. When you’re no longer under oppressive rule. When you’re on a different continent. When you pay off your debt. When you get a job you actually like. When you move to another place. When you find someone who understands you. When you have a new life.

But “new” is a place that exists only in your moment of hope and actualization. Oh if we could have the new feeling forever. Instead of it fading. But look at how beautiful… the wrinkles on your lover’s face as time and laughter bear down in a bittersweet erosion of youth. Perhaps the more threadbare, the more visible the soul.

Much like this city I first experienced this month. New Orleans, not new at all, in fact… rife with beautiful decay, smacks of that hope we so dearly love to memorialize. “What poor fools,” we think, as we historically separate ourselves from our founders, reading on placards in museums about the retrospectively obvious pitfalls they succumbed to. It’s so easy, as tourists, to assume the clarity of future peoples. As though serving as later witnesses was something we put any work into at all.

No. We’re just here. And someone will be here after.

Guffawing at our shortsightedness. Taking photos of our remnants from a tour bus.

But not all places, and not all remnants will be as endemically charged with life force as New Orleans. An impetus launched by the collision and incorporation of beliefs and backgrounds as disparately tinged as the mish-mosh of food, music, and architecture.

When you feel the place, you can sense the hope for new, the promise, the search. It’s as though an entire city culture collectively said “aw, fuck it” and promptly went out into the street to celebrate being alive… if only for today. A city where grownups are given permission to delight in their fleeting, tactile existence instead of just plodding along. It also seems fully aware that it is a city required to do city things, like make progress and do business. Yet it is more conscious than most that everything falls apart.

I mean, when a majority of your city is sitting below sea level, what more impending gravity do you need to remind you…

But the gossamer sails of this city are full, and the lights burning dangerously close to such billows are the tragically brave souls of the city that seems simultaneously the most doomed and the most blessed. Refusing to have it any other way. Uncompromising in placement and principle:

Life over fear.

Certainly not life without fear. But life with a greater fear of hiding away in silent safety due to a broken spirit, than getting out there and being wildly alive …even knowing how much it could possibly hurt. More afraid of being dead inside, than dying outside in a soaring apex lightbomb like the swansong arc of a firework.

A culture that can’t imagine a day without a parade. In a heavy world that’s falling apart, that’s a way of living I can get behind.