Today DY and I met with the Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne and his staff to discuss the last stages of the “40 Days and 40 Nights” exhibit and archive in development for the Louisiana State Archives. The show opens August 9, and I’m trying to wrap up Tulane’s participation in my final few weeks here.

The show will begin being shipped to Baton Rouge next week, and by the time installation begins, I’ll be settling into my new home in North Carolina. This “40 Days” project is one that has been really important to me over the past year and a half, one which I’ve put a great deal of energy into, and which feels like a good effort to help with the recovery of our city. About 100 artists will tell the story of rebuilding our region, and these are people who were putting their lives and communities back together while continuing their artwork and professional lives.

A lot of people have put a lot of work into this project: the curators, the artists, the archives administration, the Secretary’s office, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. And a lot more will happen over the next two months; carpenters and event producers will get the tangible parts underway with displays and audio and sound systems. 

I’ll have completed most of the work that I’m doing for the project before I leave here, with some small hope that the funding will come in so that a book can be developed featuring each of the participating artists. But really, by the time the show opens, I’ll be embedding myself in a new community.

A story that ran in the Raleigh News and Observer today gave me a glimpse of what’s ahead, what I’m excited about. The story was written by a woman who moved from New Orleans to Raleigh, and it was about how she’s found a new community that’s happier, healthier, and safer for her family.

So the meetings today in Baton Rouge presented another little goodbye, knowing that it’s unlikely that I’ll return for another “40 Days” meeting, installation, etc. — and that the next time I arrive, I’ll be just another visitor to the exhibit.

I’ll be so happy to have been a part of it.

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A few weeks ago, C.X. and I had a conversation in which he was describing the revisiting of a period twenty years prior as a result of a writing project that an old friend was doing. It was bringing up details he’d have just assumed kept where they were, in the past, as the friend had questioned him about behavior he, the old friend, had exhibited before dealing with his serious alcohol and drug problems (lost his children, ended up in jail, etcetera, etcetera). C.X had helped him out, even by taking care of the kids in his absence, and though decades have now passed, C.X. was experiencing what I like to call “emotional time,” which is the squooshing together of moments in chronological time based on their emotional relationship rather than their time/chronological relationship to one another, and thus, C.X. was having coffee with me in the middle of an emotional time crash. I had recently experienced my own squooshing of moments when an old friend and his wife came into town, and a very simple and innocent question on her part, asked in the right place at the right time, made me suddenly teary. I described the moment to C.X. — how I was standing in the lobby of the Port of New Orleans, the first place I saw a friend after the storm, and the city was still closed, and everything was still devastated, only she was asking the question at Mardi Gras, years later, on a beautiful afternoon when we were about to board a boat for a ride upriver, and her question made me laugh, then cry, and, for a brief moment, reexperience a sadness about loss that will likely endure for the rest of my existence.  

Both of us being writers — C.X. and I, that is — we spent some time discussing the life moments and then moved onto discussing works that had successfully employed emotional time instead of chronological time. I described marveling over how Robert Penn Warren altered time in ”Audubon: A Vision,” and how, upon reading it, I could first articulate what I meant by “emotional time.”

In the poem, “The Northwest Orient plane, New York to Seattle, has passed, winking westward,” and even in this small example, the plane is winking after it has passed, a brief example of how so many moments in the poem shine in memory after they’ve occurred, and often gain emotional impact upon being re-experienced in relation to some other event instead of holding value because of their initial moment in time.

C.X. said, “Have you read Slaughterhouse Five? You sound like you’re talking right from the pages.”

So finally I picked up Slaughterhouse Five.

Another friend said, “You’re reading Kurt Vonnegut?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know you’d read anything so–”

He paused, then settled on, “Contemporary.”

“Did you think I read only obscure dead Polish poets?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

It was really fun to read some Vonnegut — what a master of time! — and how MUCH did I appreciate such a sad story told with such humor. Such a revelation of the human condition. The universal experiences of destruction and madness. Illogical human behavoir. Emotional time making benign events malignant and vice versa. 

One of those books that I was constantly racing to the next page. Was sorry that it ended. But it had to end. As all books do. And so it goes.

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There was an interview re-broadcast on NPR on December 27, 2005, that I have been thinking about since then. I’ve written to friends about it, talked about it, and written and re-written about it. Today I finally finished the *first* version of a poem about it. Only took nineteen drafts, two years, and two days to get there. And who would have guessed I’d have ever found a way or reason to rhyme “cinammon” and “Brooklyn”?

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After tossing and turning, I finally got out of bed and made a cup of dreadful Thera-Flu. I’m stuffy, congested, puffy eyed, and monkey-minded. I wanted a cup of Thera-Flu like I wanted the plague, especially since it tastes like a terribly prolonged serving of Robitussin, circa 1978, but after hours of an inability to sleep, it looked like the best solution to this cold/virus/whatever that I have been unable to kick for the past week but am happy to report isn’t strep throat.

What I think about when I can’t sleep:

1. That days that begin at 5:45 a.m. and find calmness around 9:45 p.m. feel much longer when one feels sick, and that the beauty of such long days is that they are packed with fun kids, interesting projects, phone calls from friends, an occasional coffee break, and some nights at the gym, and therefore bring an easy ability to fall asleep by 10 p.m. to start all over again, but that by staying up too late, especially because I don’t feel well, the next day is likelier to feel longer, my head cloudier, all of the activities more difficult.

2. It is already the next day.

3. Does World Literature Today have advertising? And if so, can I remember any locations other than the back cover? No, I decide. When I finally get out of bed, I discover the magazine has advertising on the inside front cover and the inside back cover as well. This is actually very important.

4. I ponder: what is it that I really want to do next? And how come people keep sending me job announcements for jobs that sound terribly interesting? How come I keep digging my feet in deeper in a city that sometimes provides hope and sincere opportunity and sometimes makes me think I am a deluded fool for finding any sense of hope and sincere opportunity? And why do some of the most intelligent, hard-working people I know move away? And how long will they miss their friends who have been murdered here in the recent years?

5. And, for that matter, why do humans treat each other so terribly?

6. And what can we do about this AIDS crisis in Africa?

7. And why can’t I sleep? And why am I so stuffy again?

8. And am I really going to Addis Ababa?

9. And does a small but nice string of awards lately matter?

10. And if I go to Addis Ababa, and if I write about a significant AIDS project, will this help alleviate any sense of midnight stuffy-headed, inability-to-sleep thoughts about #5 and those people who move away from this city because they are tired of being afraid? And tired of unecessary loss?

11. If there is “unnecessary loss,” what the hell is ”necessary loss”?

12. Why wasn’t Amanda Griscom Little’s essay “Not in Whose Backyard?” (this week’s NY Times Magazine) about poverty’s proximity to environmental pollution twenty times longer than it was? And when do we get to read her book on this subject? 

13. And when will I find the time to finish reading The Goat Bridge? And how come when I decide to read more of it right now, it’s no longer on my desk?

I have to be up in less than five hours, and this just doesn’t work. This is ridiculous that I’m still awake. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about my schedule, and about how much more productive I’ve been since I’ve had kids, and how parenting required creating a schedule, which has allowed me to be more productive in shorter available spurts – and his response was that it wasn’t *my* schedule I created but that I simply adapted to my children’s schedule and their need for routine. Which reminds me that

14. How come when I stop at my kids’ school to drop off papers after 9 a.m., so many kids are coming in tardy? And how come this is an everyday experience for so many of them? And what universe do you have to live in to think it’s okay for your child to be tardy ten or fifteen or thirty times in a school year? And why do these things happen more in areas with problems like #12 and the collateral social ills?

15. Maybe if I had cable, I would have just turned on the television a couple of hours ago.

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