EULOGY FOR NEW ORLEANS

this is an excerpt from Bob Dylan's Chronicles 1......how poignant and apropo....

"The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying
grounds-the cemeteries-and they're a cold proposition, one of the best
things there are here. Going by, you try to beas quiet as possible,
better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman sepulchres-palatial mausoleums
made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay-ghosts
of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in
tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead
for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear
the heavy breathing-spirits, all determined to get somewhere, New
Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you back to and that don't have
the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none
of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something
daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something
obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with
their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and
the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades
requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you
know it's here. Someone is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from
some very old Southern families. either that or a foreigner. I like the
way it is.

There are lots of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.
There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you
could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods,
titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and
drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you
might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city
is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates.
Flower bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea, and purple
oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou Temple-type cottages
and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of
wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek revival standing in a
lomg line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches,
turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades-thirty-foot columns,
gloriously beautiful-double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the
whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where
public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other
dimentions. There's onlyone day at a time hereand it's tonight and then
tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the
trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like
a ghost from one of the tombs,like you're in a wax museum below crimson
clouds. Stat empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals,
Lallemand, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a
place to for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted
around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like
everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New
Orleans. Exquisite, old fashioned. A great place to live vicariously.
Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to
really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and
you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A
place to come and hope you'll get smart-to feed pigeons looking for
handouts. A great place to record. It has to be-or so I thought.