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New Orleans is a teenager... by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
New Orleans is a teenager, all full of potential looking forward to the life standing in front of it. It’s hard to imagine middle aged from that vantage point. Middle Aged being a little more mature, a little more knowing, a little more than it was. Mistakes are made, paths that are followed for some time and abandoned for better paths showing that show themselves with the acquired knowledge of the passing of time. Few people know who they are or who they’re going to be as they move forward into the world. Some think they know and are wrong. Some seem to be right but there’s this nagging feeling that with more exploration; more mistakes, they could have been something else - not better or worse - just something else.
The people of New Orleans are all these possibilities swirling around in this pubescent weird-ass. Some moments one potential is dominant but it drifts away. Another steps up and as surly drops back. And it seems, at some point no one potential wins, but rather a combination of potentials. There’s a job, and a hobby, and a passion, and the unfortunate things that must be done in order to survive. Some things are done to impress others and some things are done for self fulfillment. Still others are done in the daily movements of life that seem to have no bearing. All these things swirl still even in the later years of life though they may take on a different shade, they ad foils and complexity. These lost potentials take the form of regret and sometimes a striking sense of loss. There’s something compromisingly organic about it. I like that.
Imagine having a child and planning out with unwavering conviction who, what, when, where, and how all that will be, will be. It’s hard to imagine because that’s not how shit is. It isn’t that we lack the ability to do this. Get a computer and model a child through old age and you’ll be about as accurate as a weather prediction I suspect. It’s close enough, but if everyone could look at the maps and the little symbols and comprehend their meaning then there would be no meteorologists. More than that, the weather can’t understand itself in those terms. The weather couldn’t look at the map and follow the course modeled even if it would try. But why would it try?
New Orleans is a teenage coming out of adolescence to celebrate the new year. Reincarnated as an infant in the last days of August, it’s grown and matured in the intervening months under the tutelage of the government and the National Guard’s disciplinarian hand. Now it’s at that awkward age on the brink of everything it could be. But like a teenager, with the influence of friends and family and the world at large, it has to make up its own mind what the first steps will be. Our maternal love aside, we have to let it go on its own. In all the heart wrenching mistakes and all the new found talents discovered along the way, New Orleans has to be New Orleans long after every one of us is gone. Can a city have free will? Can a city have its own personality? If a New Orleans fell in the wood and no one was around to hear the blues would it still be New Orleans? I like to think so. There’s something organic about it. That said, could a city be happy without love? Could it stand in a swamp amongst the trees and moss and feel whole? Would it cry in the moonlight? Would it not be able to sleep or would it dream the most wonderful dreams of sound, and smell, and light swirling around inside of it? I remember being lonely as a teenager. I wonder if New Orleans is lonely now as the parents sit in the kitchen making college plans for it?
** Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
New Orleans is a teenager, all full of potential looking forward to the life standing in front of it. It’s hard to imagine middle aged from that vantage point. Middle Aged being a little more mature, a little more knowing, a little more than it was. Mistakes are made, paths that are followed for some time and abandoned for better paths showing that show themselves with the acquired knowledge of the passing of time. Few people know who they are or who they’re going to be as they move forward into the world. Some think they know and are wrong. Some seem to be right but there’s this nagging feeling that with more exploration; more mistakes, they could have been something else - not better or worse - just something else.
The people of New Orleans are all these possibilities swirling around in this pubescent weird-ass. Some moments one potential is dominant but it drifts away. Another steps up and as surly drops back. And it seems, at some point no one potential wins, but rather a combination of potentials. There’s a job, and a hobby, and a passion, and the unfortunate things that must be done in order to survive. Some things are done to impress others and some things are done for self fulfillment. Still others are done in the daily movements of life that seem to have no bearing. All these things swirl still even in the later years of life though they may take on a different shade, they ad foils and complexity. These lost potentials take the form of regret and sometimes a striking sense of loss. There’s something compromisingly organic about it. I like that.
Imagine having a child and planning out with unwavering conviction who, what, when, where, and how all that will be, will be. It’s hard to imagine because that’s not how shit is. It isn’t that we lack the ability to do this. Get a computer and model a child through old age and you’ll be about as accurate as a weather prediction I suspect. It’s close enough, but if everyone could look at the maps and the little symbols and comprehend their meaning then there would be no meteorologists. More than that, the weather can’t understand itself in those terms. The weather couldn’t look at the map and follow the course modeled even if it would try. But why would it try?
New Orleans is a teenage coming out of adolescence to celebrate the new year. Reincarnated as an infant in the last days of August, it’s grown and matured in the intervening months under the tutelage of the government and the National Guard’s disciplinarian hand. Now it’s at that awkward age on the brink of everything it could be. But like a teenager, with the influence of friends and family and the world at large, it has to make up its own mind what the first steps will be. Our maternal love aside, we have to let it go on its own. In all the heart wrenching mistakes and all the new found talents discovered along the way, New Orleans has to be New Orleans long after every one of us is gone. Can a city have free will? Can a city have its own personality? If a New Orleans fell in the wood and no one was around to hear the blues would it still be New Orleans? I like to think so. There’s something organic about it. That said, could a city be happy without love? Could it stand in a swamp amongst the trees and moss and feel whole? Would it cry in the moonlight? Would it not be able to sleep or would it dream the most wonderful dreams of sound, and smell, and light swirling around inside of it? I remember being lonely as a teenager. I wonder if New Orleans is lonely now as the parents sit in the kitchen making college plans for it?
** Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.