Lancelot

I just finished reading Walker Percy's Lancelot.

I received the book as a gift about eight years ago but was scared off by the description on the back cover, which struck as slightly too close to my life, inclinations, and fears of the future at the time.: "Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering . . ."

Still not entirely disenchanted and managing to keep myself out of the asylum, I was recently inspired to revisit the book. (I lost the paperback that I had been given but had since bought an old "discard" hard copy from the New Orleans Public Library, which seems a fitting vessel for reading Walker Percy, one of the city's finest writers.)

In the book, Lancelot, the lawyer, teases through the details of his life and the world with a critical lens as he explains how he came to burn down his home, an old River Road mansion. The truths expressed by the narrator reminded me of how frequently it is the case that people with nothing left to lose, people at the very bottom of life, are most free to express truth.

Here are a few of my favorite passages:

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

***

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison - except in the summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city has a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can't quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? When I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans, I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that's not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It's not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. The city's soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don't have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ's forty-day fast.

I like you banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carre. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn't that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, had something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan-Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent - except a chess player, the world's greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.

***

Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body on the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.

***

I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable - except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don't feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good.

In Memoriam Ms. Blettner

When I was a sophomore in college, I became obsessed with the vanity of human existence. As with extremists and polemicists before me, the Bible became the sword I would wield to prove my point. I would quote the Preacher from Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” I asked my music professor Elizabeth Blettner to advise an annual thesis paper I wanted to write on the subject. She worked with me over the course of the spring on the paper. An essay that would have otherwise taken the darkest view on the human condition and the futility of human action became, instead, under her influence, a thoughtful meditation on the balance in life. In our conversations, she was terribly enthusiastic about Ecclesiastes’ other well known maxim, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” and pointed to how things in the world were seemly and related to the whole, when perceived with Wisdom, and were, for that reason, beautiful. She pointed out that Vanity in Ecclesiastes could be weighed against the value of Wisdom, “the Tree of Life,” in Proverbs. With her guidance, I wrote an essay that made clear that the Preacher was right that the risk of vanity and folly in life were overwhelming but that by turning life into a struggle to achieve Wisdom and Truth we can stay out of the “shadows of vanity” and “choose life over death.”

Ms. Blettner, with whom I had not spoken since leaving college more than a decade ago and who died earlier this year, appeared to my nineteen year old eyes to be living the proposition that she convinced me of and which concluded my paper. I got to know her – though only as a teacher – over a year of the most intense and sublime hours of my life sitting in her music tutorial, listening to Mozart, Bach, and Schubert. She was odd and old fashioned, with long elaborate dresses, thick grey hair worn in long braids under a kerchief, and frequently wearing either a nervous or troubled expression. But that look was sometimes quickly replaced by a smile that hinted at both mischief and ecstasy when things, a note of music or a comment from a student, came at the right time, showed that the stars were aligned and that the world (at least of her classroom) reflected some greater order. For my part, I was a high school dropout who had only a year or so earlier opted for drug rehab to avoid juvenile prison, whose admission to this college, the only one that would have him, shocked his parents and reflected the moral commitment of the college to accept anyone who applied and to use books and ideas to transform them into better people. Given our contrast, and the fact that she appeared to me to be some kind of mystic or angel, the attention that she gave to me, both on my paper and in class, felt more like spiritual guidance than education. We would listen to a Mozart piano sonata, two or three times, and she would point things out but would be coy about what she saw as most significant, and you would speak up, point out the repeating patterns, that it began and ended in the same place, how some small part of it related to the whole, or how it all related to some other bigger whole, and she became bright like the sun with joy because she loved so dearly small things that reflected the whole, things that begin and end in similar places. When you are a lost teenager, when the world of music, art, and beauty offer salvation, you grow towards that light, you hope it shines on you, and you bask in it when it does.

In my time with Ms. Blettner, she would say little things about her life, about studying philosophy in the mountains at Penn State, about her niece – her “namesake,” and she would be unable to repress certain views – like her shock when I was taking notes in margins of my Bible as though it were any other book. But every minute she spent with me, whether she was talking about Mozart, the Bible, or political squabbles in the music department, made me believe that maybe I was a good person, something that I seriously doubted (even more than I doubted the goodness of the bigger world), and that I could follow truth and beauty and avoid the snares of ignorance and vanity. She seemed so good, so full of truth, and she seemed invested in me and my thoughts. So I must not be all that bad, I hoped.

Though Ms. Blettner has not been in my life for a long while, her influence had deep marks on my daily life. Many of the things that I enjoy most, that cast away vice and vanity and make life worth living, are things that I learned from her. For me, works like Mozart’s Magic Flute or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion remain powerful responses to the Preacher inside me.

I have heard that the last month of Ms. Blettner’s life was filled with music and singing from her guests – former students and colleagues – who visited her at her hospice. I suspect many of the pieces that she taught us were played, as they have been in my home. In memorial, I resolved to someday teach these same pieces to my daughter, now one year old, and look forward to smiling excitedly when she finds something special or beautiful for herself in an opera or a piano sonata that I first heard with Ms. Blettner. And if she could see it, I am sure that she too would smile at how her end was a beginning for another and how all these little parts of life relate seamlessly to some glorious and beautiful whole.

Welcome Prize

The day is still young but this anti-Latino David Vitter attack advertisement is the most offensive thing I have seen so far . . .



God knows that people come to this country from Latin America to be mocked and caricatured, for free hand outs, to commit crimes, and for limousine rides. Surely not to work hard, to improve the lives of their children, and to participate in civic life in a great democracy, like my grandmother's parents, who immigrated from Eastern Canada in the 1920's and who had children in Massachusetts and New York that became American citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment, now under threat.

Vitter's implicitly attacks the family histories and American identities of anyone whose family origins began outside this country (and that's quite nearly all of us), including many of us whose families have long shed any hint of foreign origin.

But for anyone who has an aunt, or a grandma, or a great grandma who spoke English with a little accent by virtue of having been born in some other country, you should be very offended.

"We have authority by martial law to shoot looters"

I wrote an op-ed for the Times Picayune about the nexus between Mayor Nagin's panicked post-Katrina declaration of martial law, the now clearly false and exaggerated claims made by Nagin and former New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass of a lawlessness among citizens that included racially tinged fantasies of armed attacks on Children's Hospital and baby raping in the Superdome, and the simultaneous attack on the citizenry by the NOPD that left eleven unarmed people shot, including five fatally, and 16 officers charged with involvement in the incidents or subsequent coverups.

It appears in tomorrow's paper:

Martial law? There's no such thing: A guest column by Billy Sothern

In the wild days after Hurricane Katrina, when a perverse game of telephone turned the actual chaos and misery occurring here into fictions of mobs invading Children's Hospital and shooting down medical helicopters, word was reportedly spread among the rank and file of the New Orleans Police Department, "We have authority by martial law to shoot looters."

It has been reported that there is now an internal NOPD investigation as to whether a "shoot looters" order was in fact given. Whether or not such an order or authority was carried out is not known at this time. What we do know is that, in the end, at least 11 unarmed people were shot by NOPD officers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina under seriously questionable circumstances.

Of those, five died and can be rightfully added to Hurricane Katrina's 1,500-plus death toll in Louisiana. And 16 NOPD officers are now charged with federal criminal violations related to these incidents and the subsequent cover-ups.

One would think that if martial law was in fact permissible under Louisiana or U.S. law, that we would be hearing that various of these shootings were justified under that theory. In fact, martial law doesn't exist in our state and there is no authority under any law in this country that would justify shooting civilians who do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm to officers or others.

Martial law -- literally, the law of Mars, the God of War -- is a suspension of existing civil laws and authority during a time of war or when civil authority has ceased to function, which suspends the ordinary administration of justice.

Generally, it places all legal authority in the will of the commander of an army and "is established and administered in a place or district of hostile territory held in belligerent possession, or, sometimes, in places occupied or pervaded by insurgents or mobs," in the words of Black's Law Dictionary.

Because our system of government is predicated on the rule of law, there are few historic precedents for martial law in America's history books. Tellingly, the example most often pointed to is President Lincoln's Civil War suspension of Habeas Corpus, a common law right of judicial review of a prison or death sentence, when Lincoln also established military courts in the South and West.

These measures were rejected by the United States Supreme Court, which said that even the Civil War did not justify what was essentially the imposition of martial law by Lincoln: "Civil liberty and this kind of martial law cannot endure together; the antagonism is irreconcilable; and, in the conflict, one or the other must perish."

If Abraham Lincoln, the president of a fractured country at war with itself, didn't have the constitutional authority to declare martial law, it can be safely assumed that a mayor or a police chief or captain, even in post-levee failure New Orleans, also lacked that authority.

So it's hard to know what the mayor, Ray Nagin, was saying when he told a journalist, "I've already called for martial law in New Orleans," as was recently rebroadcast in PBS's stunning "Law and Disorder" documentary on Frontline. If indeed any police officers even heard this order, they were obviously in no position to research the constitutionality of the claim at the law library of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Instead, they would have understood that the mayor was telling the world that he had lost the city to "insurgents" and "mobs" and that they needed to take it back without regard for the normal rules.

In the defining moment of crisis, when panic and passion were already so likely to overcome judgment, it appears that those in charge illegally threw out the rule of law. That they might have panicked and believed the rumors and very worst exaggerations about the citizens of our city is no excuse. The problem with the Law of Mars is that it easily confuses the blood of the guilty with the blood of innocents.

Of the many lessons learned from the chaos and confusion following Katrina, we now know that sometimes the only protection we really have is the rule of law. We abandon it at our peril.

Billy Sothern is a criminal defense attorney in New Orleans and the author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City." His email address is billysothern@gmail.com.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.

Five years ago, I was in Oxfordtown waiting out the storm.

Sitting back in my house in New Orleans, all this time later, I still feel lucky to be here. From where I sit, I see four cypress doors with old rim locks, brown and white porcelain knobs, and transoms above, an old river clay brick fire place that used to provide heat when this room, now my office, was the back of a slave quarters, and a double hung window looking out to a Japanese magnolia, a mimosa tree, and endless cat's claw vine consuming everything in its path beneath a blue sky. It is an unexceptional New Orleans room but better than any room anywhere else.

From Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume 1:

I showed up in New Orleans in early spring, moved into a large rented house near Audubon Park, a comfortable place, all the rooms fair sized, furnished quite simply, wardrobe cupboards in just about every room. We couldn’t have come to a better place for me. It was really perfect. You could work slow here. They were waiting at the studio, but I didn’t feel like jumping into anything. Sooner or later I’d have to get to the point but I could try it on another day. I brought a lot of the songs with me, I was pretty sure they would hold up veil.

Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn’t move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive. The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts.

If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise

An essay I wrote for Salon about Spike Lee's new documentary and New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina.

"If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise": Spike Lee's riveting look at New Orleans, now

The filmmaker's new documentary argues that the troubled, extraordinary city holds the key to our redemption

By Billy Sothern

A still from "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise"

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans remains one of the most troubled places in the United States. Its woes are a consequence of the civic collapse that preceded Katrina, the devastating levee failures following the storm, and most recently, the unrivaled environmental devastation from the BP oil disaster. But New Orleans also remains the heart of American culture. It's a place unrivaled in vernacular richness where people come from world around to eat, drink, listen and see — to live for a few days like many of us here live every day. Is it possible that the national seat of American tragedy can also redeem this country by refusing to give up its bon temps while fighting for its survival?

Spike Lee gives his answer in a new documentary, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise," a loosely structured, four-hour meditation on everything right and wrong with New Orleans five years after Katrina. It premieres Aug. 23 and 24 on HBO.

The tensions are on display from the film's opening. Its first scenes include, in sequence, an angry and defiant poem ("No more use of our Gulf Coast waters, wetlands, heritage and soil/ No more 'Up yours Louisiana,' because we all know there's blood in that BP oil/ If God is willing and the creek don't rise") read by the star of Lee's earlier New Orleans documentary, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc (now a star of David Simon's "Treme"); images memorializing Katrina's devastation; and the joyous celebrations of the Saints' improbable 2009 Super Bowl victory. Interviewed in a throng of people following the Saints win, an unnamed woman sums it up, "Four and a half years ago we lost our home during the flood, and we are so privileged and honored to be here. Living in New Orleans is a privilege. It's not easy, but it's a privilege and a blessing."

• Continue reading

The claim that it is "not easy" to live in New Orleans turns out to be one of the very few understatements in the documentary, which dwells at length on the many things that create this dis-ease — separate and aside from the storm that drew the country's attention and the oil spill that refocused it. The viewer is led through policy debates and critiques and personal stories highlighting the demolition of New Orleans' public housing projects and consequent housing crisis; the collapsed healthcare system (New Orleans' public hospital remains shuttered because of political wrangling about the future of healthcare); the mental health crisis that has been responsible for murders, suicides and less-than-joyous substance abuse and drinking since the storm; the incompetence of FEMA in providing post-storm assistance to the city and the agency's mismanagement of its emergency housing plan; the civil engineering missteps by the Army Corps of Engineers that made the city vulnerable to flooding and that have degraded our wetlands; the shattered education system; the out-of-control crime and violence that have plagued the city; the police corruption and history of police violence that have led to numerous federal murder and conspiracy indictments for officers involved in several, separate incidents; and deregulation that provided the opportunity for corporate greed's fouling of the Gulf.

Any New Orleanian living here during the past five years will be familiar with these issues from their daily lives and from the news on the front page of the Times Picayune. They are issues that you live when you can't find a place to rent that you can afford, when you cannot find a school where your child will receive a decent education, when you wake in the middle of the night to hear gunshots and know that someone's life may have just come to an abrupt and violent end. These are the daily challenges of living here. And it's useful to recall, in watching this documentary, that our individual efforts to overcome these obstacles are not just personal but part of a collective effort to keep this city alive.

The people telling the story in this documentary are many of the same people whose names appear in the paper. Some are policy wonks; others, activists or artists; but nearly all are fervent New Orleanians. Some of them speak in a strongly held hyperbole that hints at madness or mania, both about the good and the bad here. There are angry words, never precisely defined, about "the powers that be" and their efforts at "ethnic cleansing" on the one hand, and on the other, references to the Saints' Super Bowl win that suggest a local belief that the victory was an act of God, as if New Orleans, like the long-suffering Job, had been rewarded for its faith. This is the bipolar parlance of life here, stemming from the widely held belief that the city is vastly better than, worse than, and not really a part of the rest of the country. Most of these sentiments are presented in the documentary without any evident endorsement from Spike Lee, who seems more enamored with his subjects' intense feeling for their homes and threatened way of life than with the specifics of their claims. He is particularly interested in their suspicions about race, the government and corporations. The firmness of the beliefs held by so many people here is just as important as the accuracy of their claims.

But implicit in the framing of the documentary, and of most of the engaging books and films to come out of New Orleans since the storm, is the notion that the challenges that define life in post-Katrina New Orleans are the same vexing national crises on which the quality and success of 21st-century America will be, and should be, judged; that the same problems also exist in Lee's beloved native Brooklyn and so many other places in this country. Despite Lee's critique of the political and social realities that made the Gulf's twin disasters possible, despite the seemingly endless images of dead bodies — human and animal — that we see in this film, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise" shows that Lee is not without hope.

He is clearly a partisan of this city, a place where real recovery and reconciliation are the daily work of thousands of people. The efforts of the people of this city and region appear to have given him reason to believe — despite the ever-present risk of rising water — that something better may yet emerge from the tragedies along the Gulf.

death i think is no parenthesis

Earlier this month we stayed in a pleasant little cottage on Peaks Island in Maine. The house had belonged to a somewhat recently deceased woman for many years and her things - her white furniture, artwork, photographs, and books - kept the place Christina's Cottage, which is what everyone called it. While the home was unmistakeably her's and left a strong impression of her as a person, we felt comfortable there and had some vague sense that we liked her from her house, her things, and the impression it left about how she lived her life.

The first night we were there, when Nikki had fallen asleep upstairs, I picked out an anthology of poems from the bookcase and went to a dogeared page. I imagined that Christina had read the poem years earlier, that it had moved her, and that she marked the page to remember it. I too was moved, thought of my wife upstairs and the woman and her children who had lived there.

I read it to Nikki in the morning. She said that it was her favorite E.E. Cummings poem, which she hadn't read in years, and that it reminded her of her sister, who passed away years earlier.

since feeling is first
E.E. Cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis