the cassandra pages

Contact

I've been haunted all day by the aerial pictures taken of an isolated, previously-uncontacted Brazilian tribe: the red-painted men shooting their arrows up at the airplane which returned six times, the black-painted figure, possibly a woman, looking upward. The body paint and bows and arrows appeared after the first fly-over,  when all the people ran away.

How terrifying the airplane must have been - like the recurrent nightmare I've had where black planes slowly appear over the lake of my childhood, finally darkening the sky, and bombs begin falling in the distance, or paratroopers start hurtling down into my world.

These are human beings, even if we insist on returning and photographing them, capturing them for the world to gawk at. The Brazilian native Indian foundation insists that the tribal lands are protected so that the people can remain autonomous - but why, then, did they take and publish these pictures?

Get away! I want to shout, along with them, though they seem to be silent as they stare up at the airplane. Let these few last isolated inhabitants of the planet remain in their innocence of what the rest of us are doing and have done.

Technique and Finesse

Two nights ago we called, on the spur of the moment, and bought tickets to the final evening of the Montreal international Piano Competition. The second three of six finalists, between 18 and 30 years of age, were playing that evening, each performing a full-length concerto with orchestra. I had heard the other three the previous night on the radio during a live broadcast from Place des Arts, and had gotten pretty intrigued.

Being an amateur pianist - very far out of this league - I'm still familiar with some of the repertoire and can identify with the difficulty and terror of performing, and totally fascinated by it at the same time. I'm in awe of the discipline and sheer hours of practice it takes to rise to this level of international competition, and very curious about the combination of personality, music choice, and performance chemistry that bring a very few to the top, and leave so many other extremely talented individuals out of the international careers they hoped for. A few years ago we rented a documentary film about the Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth, Texas; it's called Playing on the Edge and was, for me, way more exciting than one of those poor-boy-makes-good-in-boxing-ring movies. That competition has the ability to catapult the winner into the spotlight, with many performance and recording opportunities - but even then, few of the winners become the first-rank pianists whose names we know.

The Montreal concert was terrific. The first competitor, Elizabeth Schumann from the U.S., played the Chopin concerto #1 very well but she was too restrained, almost ethereal, her sound often falling beneath the orchestra; the young man next to me, a Montreal doctor who plays chamber music, called it "salon music;" pretty critical but close to right, I think. The second performance was the huge Rachmaninoff 3rd by a 27-year-old* Russian, Alexandre Moutouzkine, with formidable  technique; he won a standing ovation. Finally the Tchaikovsky 1st; was played by Nareh Arghamanyan, a nineteen-year-old prodigy from Armenia; her performance was beautiful, nuanced but intense, and after a half hour of deliberation the jury awarded her first place. Moutouzkine tied for second place with Masataka Takada, from Japan, who had impressed me the night before with his performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto. By the time the winners were announced we had become totally drawn into the drama of the contest, the very different personalities of the musicians, the professionalism of the orchestra conductor, and the intensity of the performances; we were thrilled for the winners, sad for the losers, and so glad we had been able to be present in person.

All the competitors had to play in several elimination rounds, ranging from shorter pieces in a variety of styles to a 45-minute recital, including sonatas, during the semi-finals, and then the concerti with orchestra in the finals. If you'd like to see what it was like, video and audio of the performances are available on the Espace Musique website (Radio Canada). The Montreal competition moves in a three-year cycle, piano one year, then voice, then strings. Next time I'll be more on top of it and make sure to see more of the events; I can hardly wait!

*thanks to DLEE for the correction about Moutouzkine's age; I originally had it as 30

Slow Motion

"Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity..."

T.S. Eliot, East Coker

Finding it hard to write much. I'm chipping away at deadlines, which is good; and the weather is finally a bit warmer, which makes afternoon walks and the planting of windowboxes and terrace containers an absorbing activity. J. and I went out for a while this afternoon, taking photographs in the park and wandering slowly down to the hardware store to get some keys copied, find some gardening supplies. For dinner I made Asian-flavored fish cakes with lemon grass and ginger, and a stir-fry of baby bok-choy, mushrooms, zucchini. Simple feels good, comforting. I'm tired, on the inside.

My father-in-law is not doing well. Since the weekend he's been disoriented, unfocused, totally turned-around as to day and night. When we call he barely connects with us. There's not much to be done that we haven't done; like the doctors and caregivers we're waiting to see if he snaps out of this or if he's entered a new phase. I'm distressed, of course, that he has to go through this, but I also accept it - what choice is there? And he's much more fortunate than many old people, living as he does in such a good place, surrounded by caring friends and helpers. What's most difficult is feeling helpless, and then the inevitable projection of myself and those I love into the future.

So tonight I was happy to find this post at Peter's blog Slow Reads, one of the best things I've read in a long time, full of searching thought about who we are in our youth, middle age, and old age. It rang very true to me, and I was glad for his unseen companionship tonight.

(Illustration: a detail from The Adventures of Hamza, exhibition catalog from the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

Memorial Day Update

Quebec farmland just above the border with Vermont, Jay Peak in the distance

Back in Montreal tonight after five intense days in Vermont; Saturday was the memorial service for my dear brother-in-law (the husband of J.'s sister) who died recently, and so there were many family gatherings, many conversations, many meals, and also the happy reunions with old friends who called or came to the service and reception. My husband and I had also organized a meeting of the whole caregiver team for my father-in-law on Thursday, which turned out to be a very productive thing for all of us.

I'll try to write more about all of that when I'm rested, settled, and caught up with work. Tonight I'm listening to the first night of finals in the Montreal international piano competition (on the radio), eating Chinese food we picked up in Burlington on our way through, unpacking, and catching up on email and blogs I haven't read for several days.

The transition began this afternoon when we left the highway and entered Canada at a small crossing point, driving slowly through little farming communities and beautiful farmland that was new to us. We passed a farm where these animals were being raised: they look like reindeer but seemed bigger -- does anyone know what they are? (I must say that the idea of eating Rudolph doesn't hold much appeal.)

It's hard to believe that last year I was driving my father around Chenango County searching for family gravestones - his first real outing after knee surgery. Yesterday he played nine holes of golf and did his usual 75 push-ups in the morning, along with the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises he's done every morning since the 1960s. What a testament to courage and determination!

Finally -- thank you all for your comments on the previous post. I was moved by them and by your insights, and grateful.

Remembering

My  mother died two years ago today. I had wanted to be with my father today but couldn't because of responsibilities to the other side of my family. So my father and I talked early this morning, and will probably talk again tonight. I told him I was happy that, for the most part, I was able now to remember the good things about her and not dwell on her illness and her dying. It seemed like that would never happen, but it has. And I told him how proud she would be of him.

Loss opens up an abyss larger and deeper than you thought possible. There is both a seemingly bottomless void, impossible to fill even with your tears, and a gulf separating you from the person who has always been there, able to touch and be touched, to listen and speak, to hold up a mirror for you because they knew you so well. And for a long time it's like that: you stand on one side, terrified and sad, while they recede into the shadows of the other unknown side of the abyss.

But, as other daughters told me, this changes. You still find yourself startled at not being able to pick up the phone and tell her what you saw or did, or listen to the little details of her life that once seemed trivial but would now be priceless -- but one day, you realize the conversation is continuing. Love, when it is full and real, penetrates so deeply inside us that it becomes inseparable. It's impossible for me to stop loving my mother, or to stop feeling and knowing her love - not as a memory, but as an intrinsic part of who I am. She is physically gone, but in a very real way she is not gone at all. Her love lives in me, animating what I do, helping me continue to create, to be strong, to be patient and kind when both qualities feel in short supply, to love other people and the world more deeply: to be more fully myself. It's hard work, living without the people we love. I also realize that, to some extent, we don't have to.

I'm extremely fortunate to have received this kind of love. So many people don't. But it is not a finite commodity. Like those seemingly endless tears, love of this kind also pours forth from an artesian well. The emptiness is full, the abyss not bottomless, but grounded by a river that never stops flowing. Even at my most desperate moments, I've realized it still flows in me, and is not meant for me only: it's meant to flow outward, always outward, always expanding.

I wish I could tell my mother, who was an artist and a lover of the arts, that I'm starting to draw again. I'd like to walk with her in a meadow like this one, where we stopped the other day, because she would have loved to feel the sun on her back and listen to the swallows singing as they swooped from their nest into the sky, just for the joy of it. But now I see that she was there with me, as perhaps I will be with someone after I'm long gone from this earth too. Not in the sense of a ghostly presence - not that at all. But as a quality of love, endurance, appreciation, and centeredness that has gradually moved, as my understanding has increased, from external to internal, from mortal and finite to undying and unchangeable. And I am not talking here about faith in a traditional god or belief in heaven or some other paradise that has little to do with here and now.

All love is an expression of that force we know by many names; all people are neither separate one from another, or from that which IS and which continues without change. We are all a part of the great I AM, and therefore we also ARE, beneath our layers of fear and shame, our smallness and isolation. I can be alone in this field with my sorrows and shortcomings, but I can also be there with my husband and my mother and father, and my mother's mother and her mother before her who taught her to love the natural world. I can be there with the painters who have painted such scenes or composers who have written songs like the lark's. It is a question of persistence, of refusal to give in to despair, and of loving with great fierceness and gentleness, both at once.

A Fresh Start in a New Place

This week I discovered, through a comment on my own blog, a new blog and a new voice. The author is writing about her fresh start in a place new to her, but very familiar to me - a rural town in Vermont. She is telling a story that took place in the 1970s, the same time I moved to Vermont myself; she was then about the age I am now. I can vouch for the fact that the story is honest, compelling, accurate down to its baskets-in-the-rafters, pine-floor details -- and it's beautifully, fluidly written. The author is, well, not young anymore, and I really admire her for sitting there at a computer and knocking this story out. She deserves more readers. Kind, careful, appreciative readers. Like you!

Today I met my friend V., also a writer, at the Bibliotheque Nationale and later we went to Camellia Sinensis for (obviously) tea. Over our pot of darjeeling, and plates of ginger-lemon scones, we were talking about writing about place, and I was telling her about this blog, and she talked about a Wallace Stegner novel set in Vermont that she'd recently read. V. has spent quite a bit of time in the Green Mountain state too. She said, "You know, when I knew I was going to India I read all sorts of books set there, and each was fascinating in its own way, but you have no way of judging how true it really is. Whereas when we read books about places familiar to us, you just know.

It's not merely a story about Vermont, of course, but about a person starting a new life somewhere totally different. And that resonates with me, and might with you.

From limitation to limitlessness

I’m getting toward the end of Arnaud Desjardins’ small book, Pour une mort sans peur (For a Death without Fear.) It’s only in French, and if I had more time, skill, and confidence I would set myself the goal of attempting to translate part of it myself; the French is not difficult, I'd learn a great deal, and it is a remarkable book. I wanted to share the following excerpts, especially for a friend, but also because what Desjardins says about human nature and the way we limit our spiritual progress toward wisdom, fearlessness, and ultimate consciousness – here and everywhere in the book - is simply so true.

Regardless of how “open” we think we are, he states, we have all received a restrictive education, by virtue of growing up in particular cultures, families, places, each with their set ways. Those limitations and boundaries, often unseen, imprison us in our cherished opinions, judgments, insecurities and fears. It is up to each one of us to investigate our particular set of limits, and begin the work of dismantling them. In case his audience (the book is drawn from lectures at his French ashram) doesn’t think this applies to them, he makes the point using opposites:

“You, you are entirely French, entirely Protestant, entirely Catholic, entirely atheist, entirely to the left, entirely to the right, entirely bourgeois, entirely in reaction against the bourgeoisie -- entirely prisoner.”

He exaggerates of course; most people do exist with some internal nuance. But he insists that something very concrete is possible for us in this area, if we are willing to look deeply. One of the major keys is a willingness to open to life -- to say "yes" to expansion and growth.

In the chapter, “From Limitation to Limitlessness,” he talks about what holds us back, and the goal: expansion. For this he uses the image used by his own guru -- apparently common to many Hindu teachers when talking about individual and universal consciousness -- of a drop of water falling into a pond, forming concentric circles on the surface which become larger and larger until they eventually disappear and merge with the water itself.

  Each little circle formed on the surface of the river which runs in front of the hut of Swamiji -- each little circle follows the law of growing, growing, growing. It is you who hold back your own development. These little circles return to the infinity of the water only when they are completely expanded. And you, you are called to that, to pass from the pettiness and narrowness of your consciousness to the immensity and vastness of the Consciousness…

Break out of your narrowness, become vast, and include in yourself the entire universe. Then the circle of the little drop of water will grow, grow, grow, and the ego itself transforms into Atman, into infinity. Many times, in front of me, Swamiji made the gesture of opening his fist which had at first been closed:  loosen, unfold, open, open, expand. And then it’s finished, completed. When will you be able to say: it’s over, it's realized, I’ve left the narrow strictures of my ego and found the immensity of the universal? Become universal.

An Outing

The caregiver called at 3:30 pm, her usually calm voice betraying a slight note of panic. "They've been gone since 10 this morning and I'm getting worried about your father. He can't stay out this long! Do you have any idea what's happened?"

My father-in-law's brother and sister-in-law arrived yesterday from Florida. Uncle A. is nearly as hard-of-hearing as his older brother, but his wife is younger, resourceful, and capable and usually exhibits a lot of common sense. We were pretty sure they had taken J.'s father somewhere - but where might that be, and why had they been gone so long?

"Call me when they get back," J. said. To me, he said, "They've probably taken him back to their hotel room, and he's lying on the floor and they're feeding him grapes and he's in seventh heaven."

I raised my eyebrows; that sounded doubtful to me, at least for this long a time. "He'll be totally exhausted," I said. "But who knows what they've gotten into."

In another half hour, the phone rang again: it was Uncle's wife. "Well, we had an adventure," she said.

"Is my father still alive?" J. asked, dryly.

"Oh yes!" She is a North Carolinian with a warm voice and a Southern accent. Her husband is a very funny man and a storyteller like his brother; we're fond of both of them. "When we arrived around 10:00 this morning, your father said he wanted to go to his old church."

Oh, really! That in itself was amazing; he's barely been out of the apartment for six weeks, and has barely enough stamina to stay up in a wheelchair for an hour at a time; other than one trip to the doctor, a few lunches in the dining room, and an appearance last week, in our care, at the memorial service for a friend at the retirement home - in the gathering room just a short distance away from his own apartment - he's had no desire to go anywhere. But, OK, that's what he said he wanted, and what did they know, not being privy to recent history? They were there to make him happy, and spend time together: off they optimistically went.

"So we loaded him into his wheelchair and got him into our rental car," she continued. "I wasn't sure which of his old churches he meant, or how to get there, but I was certain once we got going he'd know the way. But when we got onto the highway I realized he had absolutely no idea where he was or where we were going, and of course we didn't know either. So I went in the way I kind of remembered, and we drove around for a while, not finding anything very familiar, and of course neither your father nor his brother were of any help. They were shouting away at each other, though, perfectly happy."

"Eventually we got to Q__, - it was close to noon by then - and I saw a restaurant and said,'Well! Let's have lunch!' so we all went in and ate. Your father had poached eggs and toast and seemed fine; he'd given up, or forgotten about, trying to get to the church. When we were done we got him back in the car and started for home. But in a couple of miles I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw your father pulling at his clothes and realized, 'Ohmigod, he's got to go to the bathroom.' I was measuring the distance to the woods in my mind's eye, but just then we came upon a Baptist church with a few cars still in the driveway, so I pulled in and explained the situation and asked if they could help us, and they said 'of course!' and three men came out and got him in there. Then we started for home again, and have just gotten back." (It may not have been North Carolina, but it was Baptist, and -- she must have felt -- close to salvation.)

Unbelievable.

In another half hour, our phone rang again. It was my father-in-law. "They've just left and I'm totally exhausted!" he told J. "I don't know where we were, but it took three Episcopal priests to carry me into the bathroom!"

Today's Walk

Northern Pastoral

(Camel's Hump above the Winooski River. click for a larger version)

We drove back to Vermont today, through the glorious spring, and it enticed us off the highway and onto the  local roads that meander under Camel's Hump and along the Winooski ("wild onion", from the Abenaki), stopping often to take pictures and enjoy the light, the blooming trees, the feeling of warm air on our bodies. These roads are literally cut though the Green Mountains, and at one particularly beautiful outlook, toward the iconic summit of Camel's Hump, I became mesmerized by the rock wall to our backs, on the other side of the road. Water was sheeting slowly from high above over the slate face, painting large graphic pictures. I noticed clumps of emerald-green moss, topped with new fruiting spores, growing in the crevices; dead leaves plastered to the smooth rock and embedded now in a constant bath of water that was slowly dissolving them back to ribs and shadows.

(Homage a Rauschenberg, with a nod to Marja-Leena; click for a larger version)

And, as I learned from the spray and discrete drops that hit my face as I got closer, the sheets of water were accompanied by more delicate patterns of falling water, as single drops fell from considerable heights onto stony shelves to split and catapult outward, or form a mist from the mossy, ferny edges of the rock face far above my head. The whole outcrop was, in fact, a living sculpture, a fountain, a Rauschenberg abstraction worked on simultaneously by the water and the bright sun on the rock canvas, hot here, cool there. I could have watched it all day.

We called ahead and picked up Chinese food in Burlington, and then drove north to St. Albans and into Canada, slowing down and stopping, once again, to photograph the farmers in their huge, already dusty fields. It was mid-afternoon by then, and I sat on the edge of a drainage ditch while J. waited for a tractor to approach from the far reaches of the long field. A pair of red-winged blackbirds were nesting in some of the tall grasses in the ditch, and the female rustled her feathers nervously on a small shrub while the male took a few half-hearted flights in my direction, his epaulets fluffed red and fat, and then  decided to ignore me. The sun baked on my back as I watched the sparkling water flow over mud and grasses and listened to the calls of the birds and the wind rushing in the poplars that lined the roadside near the farmhouse. The field stretched flat and empty to the horizon, waiting to be split open by the first emerging shoots of corn. I thought, briefly, of Cadmus sowing dragon's teeth, and the warriors that sprang from his furrows, grateful these fields only yielded a fresh crop of rocks every year, before they turned velveteen and lush.

How little time we've had like this in recent years - time to meander, take the back road home, sit and watch nature paint her paintings and play her music. How good it felt. I think I'll stay there tonight, for a while, in that emptiness rich with possibilities.