Old sign in New Orleans' Warehouse District. More photos from the recovering city here.
You could fill a bookshelf with the books about Hurricane Katrina that have been published in the last four years. They started flowing two months after the storm and haven't stopped. Which makes sense, because the stories from the disaster could fill a library (or, indeed, a city).
Dave Eggers may have hit on the mother of all these stories with his new book, Zeitoun. There's also at least one Katrina novel out there now, and it's unlikely to be the last. If ever there was a catastrophic event crying out for fictional examination, surely this is it. And yet. This is also a case where the 'life is stranger than fiction' reading is off the dial. And for that matter where the greater narrative remains unresolved. It's difficult to write about something that's still in progress. I get the feeling that many in New Orleans are now finally beginning to see with some clarity just how dreadful the long purgatory has been, but the full story arc that is Katrina (and its aftereffects) won't be visible for years yet. Stare into the eye of this storm, and the storm still wins every time.
Maybe this was why I liked this exhibition so much. Because it did not in any way attempt to contain the storm or even to frame it. Instead, locally based artist Raine Bedsole has visually re-framed part of it -- the long wait for return and recovery -- by loosely comparing it to an ancient story, The Odyssey.
One object seemed especially poignant and relevant, to me. It's an oar bearing fragments of an un-credited poem (When his boat snapped... from its mooring... he tried at first... Somehow he felt absolved... As if it didn't matter... and so on...), in strips obscured by a an effect resembling water damage or fire, making the oar look like an object found long after a terrible event, as if it and the story that cast it off have somehow become one. The poetic fragments, it turns out, are from 'The Long Boat', a brilliant poem by Stanley Kunitz.
For those of us who primarily work with words, here is a useful reminder from the visual art world of the power of metaphor, the importance of word-design alchemy, and the benefits of 'borrowing'. Not to mention the way in which a few select words can evoke a much, much bigger story, in part by keeping the vast majority of it momentarily out of view. They may even reveal something about it that has never quite been seen before.
Image (above right; click to enlarge): Oars, by Raine Bedsole. The 'Long Boat' oar is second from right.
