Mardi Gras and New Orleans this year.

EVENT

The New York Times: In Mardi Gras, a City Learns to Party Again

from the article:

No more than 200,000 residents have returned to what had been a city of 465,000, and those who ventured to the parade route were joined by only a scattering of tourists...

Tourism officials say that Mardi Gras usually attracts as many as 1.2 million visitors a year. This year they expect 700,000 at most...

Frankly, I'm surprised the numbers aren't more drastic. Our media conglomerates have not kept close tabs on the ongoing effect of Hurricane Katrina, but among all other figures, the number of deaths has topped seven hundred. The city's population of 200,000, held above in contrast to its preflood 465,000, may be just as validly compared to the scant few thousands (I heard figures from major news sources ranging from 5,000 to 30,000) left at the height of evacuation. I think 200,000 residents and 700,000 tourists is a pretty impressive comeback within one year.

I've already established my weird inductive connection to this event. Besides the sympathy (empathy?) that arises naturally from being another American in the mix, and the equally dubious empathy (sympathy?) that I've felt watching from a safe distance as my hometown continues to devolve, I'm immediately just one or two degrees of separation. I made it past the "first round" in applications to two MFA programs. New School in NYC accepted me outright, and University of New Orleans wait-listed me. As a result of this, and only as a result of this, I was driving east, not south, at the end of the August. It's not often we get to see possibilities for our lives divide both clearly and with force, and this was not lost on me as I followed the events of last September.

Now, however, I have a further connection. Erica, one of my best friends at New School was also traveling to New York last September. She, however, was travelling from New Orelans, and her sister is an alumnae from the same MFA program at UNO at which I'd been waitlisted. This week she's traveling back to her city for the first time since the Hurricane to celebrate Mardi Gras. I'm looking forward to hear her impressions, stories, and see the pictures she brings back.

Chris, another New Schooler I know from New Orleans speculated that there wouldn't be any Mardi Gras this year. "The floats are all ruined," he said. While his statement isn't strictly true - many floats were damaged and many were not - even at the time I felt that this wasn't remotely to the point. Even if a "float" consisted of a diva waving from a cinder-block throne as some children push her down the street in a bright red wagon, it's essential this year for New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras.

If you like, you can boil this down to a "demonstration of the indominatable human spirit" argument. It can also easily reduce to a gothic funky sort of bittersweet: happiness is rendered more sharp with some sadness, or tragedy is made more poignant against joy. These are both true, but I think in this case, the situation is immediately more delicate and multivalent.

For starters, there's a powerful economic incentive. New Orleans is utterly strapped for cash right now. Even before the hurricane, it was one of America's poorest cities, and Mardi Gras was a ponderously important part of the local economy. The need for a Mardi Gras-style event now is greater than ever. This is a liability in the sense that New Orleans must turn attentions away from the strict demands of reconstruction, but also a boon in that Mardi Gras is an affair of the spirit and the senses?

Is it? Well, last year, before even thinking about hurricane, I talked about the specific relationship of Carnival and Lent, of Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. In a Catholic mindset, these are the two seasons is sharpest opposition, spiritually, one defined almost uniformly by extravagence, the other by austerity. And they are pressed, at the height of each of these aspects (beads around the neck and ashes on the forehead) separated by just one midnight. It is, in other words, a paradox in the spirit of celebration that nobody can over look.

Or do I overlook the secularization of Mardi Gras? What I said above would certainly affect the way the occasion plays out to practicing Catholics, and there are plenty in the Big Easy, but they don't exclusively (or possibly even in majority) comprise the 1.2 million tourists each year. This isn't a theological argument... Protestants, outsiders, whatever, have to notice the contrasts all about them. If Bourbon Street and the Garden District are bedecked in color, these are areas reached by passing numerous cemeteries in a city known for gray moss and cypress. And is February as dreary in the South as is it up here?

These contrasts, stacked up next to each other, are true whenever (and to a large extent, wherever) Mardi Gras is celebrated. But another contrast that nobody will escape this year is the one-two punch effect. The event will be seen not merely as a response to the hurricane, but as a second act to the hurricane. By its mere existence Mardi Gras implies that an event follows, that the hurricane is not the epilogue to the city. Perhpas not even the final act. Here, I even admit a little bit of jealousy... is there an event in which Flint or Detroit can so completely encapsulate a "stepping beyond" or better, a "stepping through."

It must be a unique experience to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans this year. It must be painful and difficult, especially for those with a personal investment in the city. But it must also feel a priveledge, a true admixture of austerity and extravagence and mercy, to experience paradox so sincerely.

Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I've never been there.

But I'm glad that New Orleans will be having Mardi Gras.

END OF POST.