New Orleans and the Superbowl

Other teams can talk about it being a business, or even a game. Here, and now, that's just a by-the-way. It's a myth.I woke up this morning to the oddest sound in the world. A garbage truck doing its usual thing: making the rounds, keeping civilization civilized, that ordinary everyday business of not living in our own garbage.

It was a gentle, weird reminder that I'm still on planet earth.It didn't feel like waking up. Still dreaming, maybe. I turned on the radio. National Public Radio: something about some bill or other dying in Washington. Maybe after coffee. Right now, it feels though that this city is floating, and things outside of it are weirdly foreign. Better go with the local news. Hit the preset and close my eyes.

Commercials: the usual patter of daily life in America, and not the best of it, the mechanical drone of a priesthood of acquisition. Buy siding, use a local print shop for all your printing needs.

Then the announcer, his voice animated, excited. "WWL Big 870 A.M., F.M., and Dot Com! The news: if you're waking up in New Orleans, it's beautiful, bright, you have a headache, but you don't care!"

Ah, yes.

Last night, the clock ticking down. Wandering into the streets with all the other people half-dreaming, and hearing one long shout from Mid-City to the River Bend, up St. Charles Avenue, through the Garden District, around Lee Circle, into the French Quarter. The television assured us the French Quarter was exploding into the street, but it was just the head of a great, sinuous dragon that wound its way through every neighborhood of this weird city.

There's always been something a little different about New Orleans. It's often reminded me of the useless sibling who makes every party five times as much fun, whose absence makes things a lot more sedate, who isn't terribly productive: but when they die, you feel some great light has gone out of the sky, and you start to wonder what they knew that you ought to know. You balance your good, virtuous lifestyle, your hard work, your ethics, and you know you could never betray them, but you wonder how this joker, this wild-card, this fool-in-the-tarot-pack, managed to wander from grace to grace in spite of this silly, mystical hedonism, how it could find its way through pleasure like a farmer plucking only the ripe fruit from the tree or a prospector smiling to himself as he finds diamonds on the ground.

New Orleans is a place of secrets. You always feel that there's something lurking behind the wrought iron and around the next corner, in those quiet courtyards where fountains splash under banana-palms and oak trees, some magic you can feel humming just beneath the level of the ordinary. Here, it's the ordinary that is the dream. New Orleans lives in a mystical place where everyone is a little hopelessly sad, and finds pleasure in a short life, and builds a city to honor an instant of faith in this moment and its importance.

It's always been more European than American, this place, but even Europeans are a little thunderstruck by New Orleans. One of my favorite European writers, Umberto Eco, once said that it was unlike any city in America because it has a memory. He's right. New Orleans remembers where its brothels were and who ran them and worked in them, who patronized them. It remembers the back rooms where Jazz was given birth by freed children of slavery playing the wounded brass instruments of Union Army bands, left behind as Reconstruction receded. It remembers the club down at the river-end of Jackson Avenue where Buddy Bolden played the trumpet so strangely that those who remembered said Louis Armstrong was only a vague recollection of his madness and lucidity. We remember the barrooms where drinks were invented in the 1920's as well as the ones where Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte planned the defense of the city against the British. We tell stories about the May 3rd Flood, about the snow that fell on Mardi Gras more than a century ago.

But we don't tell these stories like other places tell their stories, as though they were over, in the past. We live them. They are with us, so much so that as the Saints made their run for the Super Bowl, you could hear reasonable people talk about how their dead grandfather breathed on the coin to give the Saints the ball in overtime against the Vikings, or how they could see a dead uncle in the huddle with the Saints. They aren't joking. They aren't ironic. Our dead are with us here. Those odd whitewashed necropolises that are so photogenic keep us tied to them, and our neighborhoods are not memorials to those who went before but kept as they would have liked them.

Which goes a long way towards explaining how it is that New Orleans has so much trouble negotiating with the future, and planning for itself, but how little it seems to care about that.

Until The Big One hit.

And without mentioning the K-word (I'm sick of it too), lately that strange wanderer of a city has had the Greek mask of its laughter turned upside down, and has had to remember who it was. 

And it's had its memory electrified. By a team it loves as only a joker can love, with the sad desperation of incompetent passion. 

This year's Saints reawoke the old nobility of the place that had really begun to lose faith in itself. Time was, the rich and powerful threw a party for the poor of the city: it was called Carnival. They are doing it again. Those who have power are bringing joy to those of us who were forgetting why we live like this. 

It's funny. I have a mental condition that ties me to my city: it was diagnosed as a form of depression triggered by a low-grade post-traumatic stress disorder. It felt always like this city was my life, and as it foundered, so did I. It sank deep into debt to those who helped to heal it, people from the midwest and the East Coast and the Rockies and the West who came to help us find ourselves again, who said to us, "You're pretty useless, but we love you." I, meanwhile sank deep in debt trying to get diagnosed and healed of the nagging sense that I was no longer living my own life and my own self.

Today, New Orleans isn't below sea-level anymore. It's floating a little.

A bitter Vikings fan on ESPN responded to a comment I made there, "Enjoy your victory for a few months before your Saints fall apart and the Refs stop handing you victories. Now stop bitching about Katrina." 

That's football nonsense, but more importantly, he really doesn't understand a few things. You can't understand this (and you can't understand the Bible, or the lure of Islam, or religion generally) if you don't know what myth is like, how it tells the story of our confrontation with the world, and how it structures our feeling. And it occurs to me that what's happening to me is what sports are really for. I've lived in other places where the relationship between a town and a team has been cordial, but distant. The fan determines whether the team is worth the entertainment dollar, or, if rabid (as in Green Bay and Philadelphia) laments endlessly that the team isn't worth it while being addicted to it.

Here, the team came to symbolize the city's dying soul. Anywhere else that would have been powerful enough. Here, where the dead walk among us and where "symbol" is not merely an emblem but transformative, the thing itself, we are like those who dream.