Missed Directions
Mapping the absent, a semi-impossible prompt. Plus The Heard.
Last week’s post about things that used to be there drew a number of notable responses. A couple mentioned people who used to be there, and the way people and places can be intertwined in memory. Others noted how tricky it can be to recall the specifics of what’s no longer there. “I have often found that when something is suddenly gone,” Eddie Kunz wrote, “no matter how long it was there for or how may times I have seen it, suddenly it is hard for me to picture how it looked before.” I know that feeling!
A couple of related comments gave me an idea for a (possibly impossible) challenge. One was from Erin, responding to my reference to the way that an awareness and regular evocation of what “ain’t dere no more” often strikes me as core to New Orleans culture. “I'm not sure I conceived of this as a defining NOLA thing when I was growing up,” Erin wrote. “But of course, almost every set of directions included ‘turn left past where the K&B used to be’ or something equivalent. Looking back I'm grateful for the tenacious oral history of it all.”
I was still pondering that “tenacious oral history of it all” (and I suspect not just in N.O.) when friend of TAoN and creator of the invaluable Choose To Be Curious radio show Lynn Borton posted this comment:
Years ago (like, 25...) my family and I traveled in Costa Rica with the help of a spiral ring notebook of driving instructions for the roads which were then entirely unmarked, mainly unpaved and an adventure in every sense. Directions often included things like, "turn right 30 meters past where the church used to be..." — which would make sense to someone of the community who knows what, but were challenging for newcomers like us. We improvised pretty often on that trip, with more than one excursion down someone else's memory lane. It was wonderful.
This, of course, is fabulous. I should probably be dropping some references to Borges or Calvino now, but I’m going to skip that to just say what a great, somewhat surreal challenge lurks here.
