Slate on Slat
by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08
What is a house anyway? You can understand it from the exterior as architecture and history, but for me it’s a big chunk of psyche. The house in our dreams is the house where we dream, Gaston Bachelard, that old ex-postman and philosopher, explained in The Poetics of Space. The “house” is not just a bunch of bricks or wood, it is a poetic topography and place of reverie: it’s the imaginal house that counts, where you make poems, make children, make life. And it shows up in your dreams because the house is your self.
There’s the propitious dream where you discover your house has an extra room, an extra floor you didn’t know about—that means something eager and new is opening up in you. There’s the dream of change where a new wall is being built and lots of busy, energetic strangers are in the house and you’d better welcome them all. And then there’s the dream where the porch is rotting off, and chunks of you are falling off with it, and you look down and the hole is deeper than you could have imagined and you know you are going to have to go down into the place you’ve spent your whole life avoiding.
How do people act in the face of catastrophe and near-total destruction? Pretty crazy, actually. The heroes are crazy heroes, the villains are crazy villains, the politicians are crazy-assed thieving politicians going into overdrive, and the word loses all its value—only the dream survives. Everyone wants to play the savior, and half of them are Satan. But most people, most ordinary people, are just trying to put the pieces back together, kneeling in the ruins, salvaging the scraps. Some cling to picture frames, old photos of their children; others cling to roof tiles or slates. People ask, even now, how will New Orleans get rebuilt?
And I say, The same way it got built in the first place.
The continued survival of New Orleans is an affront to urban planning, an affront to rationality of all kinds, the grandiosity of the human problem-solving mentality. It’s not a can-do city. It’s a can’t-do, why-should-we-do city. There’s really no way to understand what a city is without spiritual perspective, because a city is above all a place that has its own angel, its own spirit hovering over it. You can’t plan an angel. And less and less in America do we even understand the concept of “the angel of a city” or the angel of a nation, what with the relentless machine crawling across the land, squirting concrete over it and then squatting and plopping out an Appleby’s and a Wal-Mart before moving on to the next degradation.
In other words, New Orleans—what’s left of it—is a place of contemplation and pleasure, and it’s a state of mind, or a city of mind. Take that away and you might as well give in to the machine or to paranoid architecture: like the weird all-steel houses I see a few blocks from me, dropped down like alien life forms, guaranteed to survive any storm because they aren’t alive in the first place. Not houses but people-storage containers, closed systems, cubes of steel you can live inside for centuries. The wind can’t touch you; the water won’t wet you. They can’t be damaged, which is the problem: for everything that has to do with soul is thin and delicate and strong, like a slate, and can endure and can be damaged.
And has holes in it.
My house was built just before the pumps came in 1912 that drained out the middle of the city and made it possible to build where water used to stand. It was built up off the ground to circulate air underneath it, which is why, when our street became the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, none of it got into the house.
Another design feature was the roof. Slate on slat, it’s called. It’s a technology suited for a climate like Louisiana’s, where humidity and mold are the problems. Slate on slat means that slats are nailed rafter-to-rafter, with space in between, which sounds vulnerable until you understand that the enemy is as much the moisture within as without. The grey slates are nailed to the slats by hand, with no sheathing underneath. That way the air circulates through the slates and keeps them dry top and bottom. They can last forever or a hundred years, which in America is like forever.
I was determined to save my slate roof after Katrina. I was more than determined, I was weirdly obsessed. I not only wanted to save my slate roof, I wanted my neighbors to save theirs. I took an earnest interest in everyone else’s business. Not that I said very much, but when I saw a neighbor ripping down a fine old slate roof and replacing it with architectural shingles, I felt betrayed and sick at heart.
This was not a rational point of view. It was just my initial response to the catastrophe. By reflex, I was taking one of two possible positions towards loss and destruction: restoration or renewal.
