I Am a Homeless Man

Continued from page 1

But the thought of all that water did not let me go. There is an image I've seen on the television of the water from Lake Pontchartrain floating over the broken levee into the city. It is very beautiful, that image. Peaceful water going about its business, which is to flow and seek its own level. It is powerful and terribly violent to be so peaceful.

Water is very heavy. That is something to think about. Surprisingly dense and nothing stops it very well. For a whole day we'd felt and seen the water flowing into the city, though the gentle word "flowing" hardly does water justice because water is so basic and so powerful and so necessary and we human beings are very arrogant but very weak and frail. We can't stop a common thing like water.

Not easily.

So I imagined the water rising on my street, up the steps into the first floor, and lifting that old spinet my mother bought--it was for her such an important investment in culture and a different way of living than her poverty and depression--and then in my dream I saw this: my wife with a pile of photographs, beautiful images, and under one, which seemed to show water flowing in grey lines into the sky, I saw underneath this legend in black print: An image is a pump.

Then the dream seemed to shift, and I saw my mother's piano lifted up in the living room, turning delicately--water can do this, lift whatever it gets underneath, an SUV, a tractor trailer--so why not a piano? It lifted the piano as the first floor filled with black water, and the piano turned daintily, like an elephant dancing under the big top.

But none of this happened. The piano is not wet, probably. The living room is not full of dark water. It was just a dream about the house I remember and imagine--part remember, part imagine--the house I cannot live in, and won't for months and maybe not ever again.

Houses are fragile. Wind and water can take them down. And fire. And indifference and neglect, and racism and separation, the separateness we feel from others who don't look like us, or live like us. The others for whom we are an us.

Today I know my house is dry, and so it is now the looters I fear. I fear them, but I don't condemn them. Some are criminals going about their criminal business, but others, most of them, are just me. They are just me.

If I were there, I would be them. I would thirst as they thirst, and hunger as they hunger, and I would break any door, I would enter any store or home, I would steal, I would do whatever I needed to live and to make sure those I love would live. My wife, my children: Yes, for sure, for them, I would do what I needed to do.

And I feel the same way about my city. My beloved New Orleans, which is submerged right now, and which I hope one day will rise again.

An image is a pump. An image has the power to move energy from one realm to another, from the realm of reality to the realm of imagination, from the realm of imagination to the realm of reality--from the realm of dream to the realm of fact, and sometimes back again, recycling, pumping.

So we absorb televised images of people we don't know, of people who are thirsty and sick and scared, people on rooftops who are lifted in the air by rescue helicopters and dangle there, the children too afraid to look up as their rescue basket ascends in the sky. Images of people who have lost husbands and wives, children and grandmothers. Images of men and women and children, abandoned by all of us--abandoned by "us" because they are not us: They are poor and we are not; they are black and we are not; or they are ill and we are well. They are old and we are young. Images of those abandoned because of indifference bred of separation. But images break through barriers, they flood us.

An image is a pump, from the realm of dream to the realm of fact, and then back again, turning, turning like the piano floating in a pirouette, then delicately spinning down to the ground.

That is how an image plays in the mind.

An image is a pump to turn fear into beauty, and maybe beauty into terror. My fear of losing my house to water becomes a piano spinning in the dark, and an elephant turning on its toes.

And then the water subsides and the piano settles down. But all is not well.

What I carry in my heart
Read more on page 3 >>

_Related Features

Karma and Suffering Rabbi Harold Kushner: Thinking about Calamity The Defiant Person of Faith

Continued on page 3: »