It

The seat of consciousness

Let it breathe. Be curious. What is it? That’s the question Frank Conroy asked the first day of class. Then he walked to the chalkboard, wrote those two little letters and sat. He let us think. He let us try to give answers. He wanted us to understand specificity.

It is the structure that I built to try to protect fruit trees from this unprecedented freeze here in New Orleans. It is the visqueen that I will open from 11-5 to let the plants breathe. 

It is the future. It is knowledge. It is the seat of knowing.

What is visqueen? I knew that some of you would ask this. It…you see how this “it” refers directly to the aforementioned, to visqueen? This “it” would be acceptable. This rambling would not. Unless perhaps you wanted to establish voice. This carrying on, stringing along the reader, taking him for the proverbial ride could also be an example of tension, a drawing out of what I have promised to give you. 

Vonnegut, who Conroy loved, but whose writing he didn’t think much of, said to start with a problem, even something as simple as dental floss snapping and the protagonist having no more.

Some might say we have a big problem. There is still snow on the ground here in New Orleans. My phone says that the temperature is seventeen degrees. That’s Fahrenheit. That’s in the deep South. 

There is something about a window, about sitting and watching. There is something in the way the flakes kept blowing yesterday. What the phone will not tell us is the feel of a hand reaching into the snow or how each person is having a different experience of what it means to be slowed, of what it means for traffic to stop, of what it means to struggle to stay warm.

I consider the homes with drafts, kids in winter jackets and how many pipes have frozen. I consider rooftops weighted with snow and which of these same kids still believe in Santa Claus. There is something specific about shivering in pajamas before seven in the morning, and there is witness in uncovering what you tried to protect.

There is also forced metaphor somewhere in the preceding paragraph and this is yet another no no. A no no that is bound to happen when you look through windows or walk through doors. A no no almost as bad as rhyme in prose or stealing words from Bob Dylan and putting these into a Barenaked Ladies song.

There’s all kinds of wrong. And all kinds of right. And when we sit and look at life from this angle, we just might miss the heat of the visqueen unfolding or even the light that comes when the sun rises and shines on a foot of snow in a place where something like this has not happened since 1895.

I wonder what they wore back then. I wonder how many died in the cold. I wonder how many heroes whose stories never got told did what they did because they believed it was right. 

Much of this we will never know because they did not have phones and they did not have google, but I believe the untold stories are still with us, never left us, that they spread through every hug and handshake and through every touch, and I believe that all of everything is within us and that when all of this snow melts we will see the ground once again. 

And that’s it.