the cassandra pages

Looking Back at Ten Years Ago, and Facing Forward

This afternoon we walked up to our studio; it's about a 25 minute walk through Montreal neighborhoods. Today was chilly, but not freezing, and most of the trees have already lost their leaves. Some of the last to fall are the ginkgos, and now and then we came upon a wet pile of their golden leaves. In front of many houses, people had already bundled their less-hardy shrubs into structures of wood and burlap, or tents of green plastic-impregnated cloth. We had snow flurries a few days ago, and it won't be long before winter actually descends.

I don't like carrying my laptop in my backpack; it's just a little more weight than my back wants to bear these days when I'm on foot. So I had asked J. if he could set up an old computer for me at the studio; I can use my phone for any connectivity or communication needs while I'm there, but if I'm doing artwork and need some photo references, that's when the large computer screen is helpful. After we arrived, he found an old ASUS computer and set it up on my desk, plugged in the power adapter, and clicked the switch. It came on, we both gave a little cheer, and he left me to it.

From the outside I hadn't been sure if this was one of his or one of mine, but certain keys was very worn, as they tend to be on all my keyboards, and I recognized the home screen immediately:  a carved pillar from an English church we had visited. It turned out, though, that this wasn't the computer right before my current one, but two computers ago. As it booted, I remembered how slow it had been. I looked at the programs on the desktop and in the tray; similar to now, but different. The keyboard layout was French, and didn't come back to me right away. Neither did the dated interface. I clicked on the photo archive: what came up were images from 2011. It was a little bit like opening a time capsule from ten years ago -- which, in digital years, represents quite a distance.

One of the first things I saw was a photo of our cat, Manon, on the first day she came to us after having been hit by a car and rescued by someone in our studio building. There were drawings I had done at a concert, in the metro, and in airports; I was just starting to keep sketchbooks and draw seriously again; that was also the year I started making linocut prints.

Olives, watercolor, 2011.

Manon, 2011

There were photographs of trips to Florida to visit Jonathan's elderly uncle, gone now for a number of years; photographs at MOMA seeing the retrospective exhibition of Robert Frank's "The Americans" with dear friends -- one of whom is also gone now, far too young; there are also pictures from the launch of Open City. For that matter, J. and I both look quite a bit younger ourselves - I was still in my fifties then, and taking pictures with a Canon digital point-and-shoot; at the time I was sharing my photos and artwork on Flickr.

On July 14, 2011, I wrote that we bought our first smartphones. Facebook was in the bookmark bar at the top of the screen - I'd joined fairly recently -- and Twitter was there too. That fall, we went to Iceland for the first time, and then on to London to visit dear blogger friends. My excitement and enthusiasm are palpable: in October of that year, I wrote fifteen blog posts, and in early November I started to make a series of huge drawings based on what I'd seen in Iceland.

--

This year, 2021, I wrote one post in all of October, and only 2 in September. Counting back to 15 posts ago takes me all the way back to the beginning of June. I've noticed my flagging attention to the blog ever since wrapping up my pandemic diary last March, after we passed the one year mark. I honestly had no idea what to say there anymore, and didn't feel like adding to the cacophony. In our focus on downsizing and re-organizing our lives, I haven't been doing that much artwork either, which has depleted away another major subject area. And of course we haven't seen many people, or gone anywhere to speak of, except to those often-dark interior spaces of the self, where I've certainly reflected and learned a good deal, but much also remains unprocessed -- as I think it will until this period in our lives feels much further away in time. In 2011, who would have predicted the convergence of social, medical, political and environmental challenges the world would be facing in ten years? Who could have predicted how it would affect each of our lives?

I've felt myself becoming more silent. In the past eight months, I've become even less tolerant of social media, both because of what it is, and because of how I feel after spending time there. FB is now gone from my bookmarks. I check it very infrequently, and have stopped interacting there much at all. I'm almost never on Twitter, while Instagram continues to be a quiet but important artistic community for me. But what about the blog? Readership and commenting are greatly diminished from ten years ago, but there are still some faithful readers and correspondents -- maybe that's you. I ask myself: what is the blog's real function? Do I write here for the readers, or for myself? And when I'm not writing, is it because I'm unhappy but don't want to say so, or because it feels pointless or redundant... or what?

The Cassandra Pages was eight years old in March, 2011; it's now 18, going on 19. But for many years before I started the blog, I had kept a written journal. In January, I usually printed out the journal and all my significant correspondence, and bound them in a book. After ending the pandemic journal this past March, I started archiving my correspondence again, adding some diary-like notes, and any blog entries that I did make. Apparently that's my default: to make and keep, in some form, a record of this life, and to try to learn and grow from the process of writing about it. I didn't stop doing that.

Being neither a voyeuristic person nor an exhibitionist, privacy and discretion are important to me, so I carefully weigh what gets included in any public writing, the same as I weigh what I take into myself from the media and from others. And I also try to be aware of my ego, and the way it affects my thinking, my desires and expectations, and gets in the way of real growth and change. In our internet world of influencers, "Likes", viral posts, advertising, and money, so much communication has become shallow, and "success" cheapened to the point of insignificance when it comes to shaping a human life, gaining wisdom, and helping each other. At its best, social media connects us and allows us to encourage and help each other. At its worst, it both preys upon and actually increases people's insecurities, desire to be liked, and endless need for attention. There's a reason why the sages throughout the millennia have retreated to the desert, to mountaintops, and to wooded hermitages in search of silence and solitude, and why they have always recognized and resisted the marketplace, the crowd, and the allure of fame and the glittery but transient material world. The words that do come from them may be few, but they have meaning.

Over my own life, writing these journals (especially the blog) has changed and helped me, and the bonus is that through the blog, I've met you. For although I value and crave solitude and contemplation, I'm not a hermit by nature, but someone who needs and loves other people, and wants to talk, interact, and share. I also have a degree of healthy skepticism about my own thoughts; it's through reading and conversation and argument, as well as reflection, that we're able to sharpen our ideas and come to a greater understanding of what it means to be human, and also how to be a human in this ever-more-complicated world.

Where to find that balance and space is a question for all of us to ask, and the answers will differ. I do see that, for me, a withdrawal has been necessary, partly because too much noise and too many words dissipate my reserves of creative energy and positive thought, and partly because the companies that control those spaces have become increasingly predatory and toxic; I can't continue to participate and hold onto my integrity. That means accepting less interaction in a quantitative sense, but nurturing and being grateful for higher-quality interaction here, or in letters, calls, or in person.

But there's more to it than that. To be honest, this period of time has been one of the hardest in my entire life. I was OK for the first year, and then things started to feel much more difficult -- though they are now feeling less so. At times I've felt despair about both the present and the future, as have most of us -- but I haven't wanted to write about that here, where I know people often come to feel a little better, or to see something beautiful, or to be encouraged. And also, in real life, I've been responsible for other people and groups, and that has taken precedence. I simply haven't had much creative time or energy, or anything extra to give. Is that an apology? Yes...but it's also a statement about the reality in which many of us have been living. Things changed for almost all of us, and they may not be going back to the way they were. Loss, grief, letting go, and acceptance are all part of that, even as the world seems hell-bent on returning to "normalcy".

Looking back ten years into that old computer was instructive, as I consider the next decade. For me, it comes down to this: if I'm fortunate enough to still be here, ten unpredictable years from now, I don't want to look back and realize I wasted whatever precious time I had, either for myself, or for the people and purposes that go beyond me and give life meaning -- of which this blog and its readers have been one. That means making decisions, setting clear priorities, and cleaning out my spaces so that there is room, both figuratively and literally, to grow and change, and -- one hopes -- to have something to say.

 

 

All the Beloveds

Yesterday was All Saints' Day, and, in Mexico, the Day of the Dead. A few days before, we made our annual ofrenda in our home, and each evening, we've lit the candles, eaten our dinner, and sat with our dear departed ones. I'm surprised how comforting and welcome this ritual has become, connecting us both to our friends and family, and to Mexico, which we miss very much too. The tradition is to put little offerings of favorite foods or drinks or pastimes in front of the photos of each person to encourage them to return to be with the living for the evening, so the whole thing ends up becoming poignant, quirky, and personal. I didn't have marigolds, which are a traditional part of everyone's altar in Mexico: the color and pungent scent are supposed to help guide the dead on their journey. But we did have orange zinnias, sunflowers, dahlias, cacti and herbs,copal incense, Mexican pottery and textiles, and small reminders of each person.

And because my sketchbooks are becoming a visual diary of my life that feel more and more significant to me, I decided to do a drawing of the central section of the ofrenda too. What a complicated and busy sketch it turned out to be! I liked the black-and-white drawing, but the color made it all make more sense, and the process of doing it was one more way of connecting to the people and the tableau we had made.

I know I've been scarce around here. We're working on cleaning, reorganizing and downsizing both our home and our studio. We're keeping the studio for one more year, but it's been emptied of more than half of its contents. And I admit to struggling to keep my mood up, as the days have grown shorter and colder, the pandemic continues, and I've had very little time for writing, music, or art, let alone meditation: the things that center and ground me. Now that we've reached November and life has moved mostly indoors, I actually feel better in the coziness and warmth of home, and seeing that there's some light at the end of both personal and global tunnels. We're gradually beginning to be more social, to take public transportation and do a bit more out in the city, and starting to think about traveling somewhere else again. I'm hoping to be able to write more here, too, soon.

 

 

Autumn Days

The trees in the Adirondacks were beginning to turn when we drove up the Northway two weeks ago, but it's only in the last few days that the city park has begun to show color. It's been so beautiful that I couldn't resist getting out my watercolors to make a couple of sketches. The one at the top of this page is the second and more refined of the two; the first one I did is below. I posted it on Instagram and got a message from my friend Michael Szpakowski in England. He's an artist and art educator, and we've been following and commenting on each other's work for years, first on Flickr and now on Instagram. The conversation we had was helpful for me, in thinking about what I was doing, and I asked his permission to reproduce it here. Thanks, Michael!

 

MS: Gosh that is lovely! & what a tremendous command of colour you have!

BA: It's nature that commands the color! But thank you. I tried to just get it down fast and not fuss.

MS: You are far too modest. I do not believe there is any such thing as a simple transcription of colour or light or geometry or whatever, simply because of the nature of our embodiment and how sight and brain work. Even the most accurate photographic representation of a scene will differ in many ways from what the eye sees (indeed different *eyes* see quite differently) The artist uses her skills to create something which *summons* in the eye and mind and memories of the spectator a *sense* of what the original scene looked like. You do that with such joy and verve and delicacy and also boldness here…

 

BA: You're completely right [about how we see], and I didn't mean to send you a disingenuous reply, it's just that Instagram feels like a hard place for substantive art discussion. Let me try, though. Nature is the guide, and I'm always trying to find aspects of a scene that "sing" somehow, sometimes through form, but more often through color. There is a pair in this sketch -- the blue-green hedge at right center, and the reddish-purple tree -- that I took as the key, but without completely realizing that was what I was doing. All the other greens in the picture are supporting characters, as it were; it's that blue-green and its complementary relationship to the tree that are interesting and emphasized. Everything was backlit, so the color of the highlights was also important -- for most of the greens, there was a range from grassy/bright green to yellow, but in the hedge, the highlights were blueish-white. So then the question becomes, whether to use green pigments or mix the greens from yellows and blues on my small watercolor sketch palette. In this case, I used viridian for the hedge because I wanted its clarity and coolness rather than, say, using a mixture with cerulean blue which would have been more opaque. Then it was important to choose a cool-toned red to mix the purple shades for the tree. I wish now that I had subdued all the background yellows a bit more - there's a little too much warm color there that comes forward and competes. But I'm learning as I go, there's always something new to learn, and going back and analyzing the picture (which you've gotten me to do, thank you!) is the biggest help!

 

MS: That is a very generous & interesting reply! I think we’re on the same page in a number of ways (the broader question of the relationship of what was seen to what gets depicted and how) but your razor sharp focus on colour and the chain of questions around it is both fascinating and completely alien to my own methodology ( which is, essentially, ‘hmmm let’s bung a bit of *that* *there* ) and hence doubly worth me reflecting over…

 

 

 

Having had that conversation, I tried again a day or two later, and did the painting at the top, of which the image above is a detail. It's certainly more polished, thought-out, and composed, though it doesn't have the energy or wildness of the first sketch. But again, I learned things doing it, and in this case tried to listen to what I had criticized about the sketch. I especially like this bit, with the children's bright blue climbing gym and slide just brushed in quickly, and the shadows on the back of the hedge under the trees.

 

Sometimes I don't know why I do watercolors - they're such a struggle, and usually a disappointment, at least in part. But there's something magical about their purity and spontaneity that never seems to happen in other media; I suppose they're more like drawing, in that you can really feel the artist's hand and brush moving over the paper. The accidental is always a part of the finished image, because it's a medium that can't be completely controlled when you're painting freely. Because of that, chance plays a part, as does the subconscious; some decisions have to be made instantly, and the result really can't be predicted. When I look back through my sketchbooks, I feel like I not only remember those moments the pages attempt to capture, but I learn something about myself. These were the last two pages in a sketchbook I've kept for the past year - in fact, the very first page in it is also a watercolor of the park and the fall leaves, from a year ago (shown below). A lot has happened in that year -- in the world, to me, and to all of us. I don't feel as exuberant, for sure. But I'm still here: still making art and setting down words.

 

Lake:Mood

The tenderness of morning

drifting veils of fog

raindrops and rising fish

a stubbled field

Arachne in a forest of green spears

the beloved trees

moths in the lamplight; thrum of crickets

and a thousand frozen stars

 

 

The Truth in Ordinary Things

In his Nobel address, Seamus Heaney spoke about the issue that's been obsessing me lately: how, as artists, do we continue to do our work when the world seems to be so filled with sorrow, violence, and despair? What is our responsibility toward expressing that? How do the quotidian and personal intersect with the larger issues that we face, and with the suffering of people far away? The ink and watercolor drawing above might not feel connected to those things, but I discovered it actually was. Let me begin, though, with Heaney.

He starts by quoting a poem by W.B. Yeats, from his series "Meditations in Time of Civil War", written when Ireland was struggling internally following the war of independence from Britain. Yeats had noticed honeybees working in the cracks of an old Norman tower where he was living, and he used that image to speak about the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of senseless human tragedy.

Heaney writes:

"[The poem] knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minivan are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences in times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth-telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust..."

Then he goes on to quote a passage from the Iliad, where Homer describes a woman who runs onto the battlefield to her fallen husband. As she bends down to take the dying man in her arms, crying out, she feels the spears of the enemy prodding her back, and is soon bound and led away into slavery. Heaney praises the concrete quality of that image of the cold spears on the woman's shoulders, noting that:

"Even today, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear-shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Homer managed to express the tragedy of war in a document that has lasted for millennia. Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings and Picasso's "Guernica" have the same direct power. But it's important to remain true to ourselves: we are not all given to painting or describing things literally. Heaney himself seldom wrote directly about the Irish "Troubles," but used images and metaphors from the past and from his own life -- things as simple as plowing a field -- to evoke exactly what he wished to say.

For myself, I know that it would be a stretch and probably false for me to try to draw pictures of human suffering, or to devote myself to describing it graphically in words. It's also important to keep things real: I don't feel comfortable talking about events I've not witnessed or been told about directly, only my own reaction to those events. In the case of the crisis facing our earth, that's a different matter: we're all experiencing those changes in our own lives, and nature has always figured heavily in my art and writing. I was serious when I wrote about finding trees a powerful symbol of human resistance and resilience, or realizing that there is often a hidden symbolism in my still lives.

The act of drawing/painting is often a meditation for me -- even a kind of prayer, if you will -- in which I allow myself to be led by intuition in the choice of objects, the medium, and how I depict them. There are a lot of "no's" on the way to the eventual "yes." In the case of the seemingly innocuous still life here, I now realize that there was more going on than a clichéd "bowl of cherries": the deep red color of the fruit, the memory of their bloodiness on my tongue and hands, the sense of sudden interruption of a meal represented by the torn, partial piece of bread. Looking at it later, I recalled a passage in Nadezdha Mandelstam's book, Hope Against Hope, where she describes the evening when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was taken away by Stalin's henchmen - he would later die in a concentration camp. But she writes about how he was eating a hard-boiled egg, which he had just dipped into salt -- and that image is what stayed with me. Probably what the viewer sees in the still life is simply moment of calmness and beauty -- and that's also as it should be. I just find it interesting to realize that for me, the maker, there was quite a bit going on, and whatever healing or calmness I found in the making also had to do with the choices and subterranean current I followed, but barely recognized at the time. I felt satisfied with the result - it felt right and somehow complete, but I couldn't have explained why.

Does this subconscious process impart some ineluctable quality to the finished work? I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure it's my job to know. I feel like my job is to show up in response to the inner prompting, and do the work.

To close, I was moved by this passage by Marina Tsvetaeva, from a collection of letters written in 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted recently by my friend Rory (thank you!) Tsvetaeva was referring to Rilke, but Rory has replaced his name here with "the poet":

"[The poet] is neither the mission nor the mirror of our times; he is their counterpoise. War, slaughterhouses, flesh shredded by discord – and [the poet]. The earth will be forgiven for our times for the sake of [the poet], who lived in them. He could have been born only in our times because he is their opposite, because he is essential, because he is an antidote. That is what makes him our contemporary. The times did not commission him, they brought him forth… [The poet] is as ineluctably necessary to our times as a priest is to the battlefield: to be for these and for those, for them and for us: to pray — for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen."

When I read that last line, "to pray for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen," I thought of the images of the funeral of the young Palestinian boy recently killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza: the rawness of the sorrow on the faces of his friends and relatives, the wrongness that they are there at all, the fact that killing has gone on and on and on since Homer's time and long before that, and we never ever seem to learn.

Heaney again:

Poetry's power (is to do) the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."

So our mind's eye holds the families killed by the suicide bombers in Kabul, the children killed by the retaliatory U.S. drone strike. And yet, in the face of all this horror, we must continue to create out of "the vulnerable part of our consciousness" which is right in spite of the wrongness all around it.

 

Drawing my way through a rough week

Bone. Pencil drawing, August 19, 2021.

For any of us who care about other parts of the world and the people who inhabit them, it's been a difficult and emotional week. I'm not going to get into any of it here. Suffice it to say that this blog wouldn't have been named what it was, back in 2003, if I hadn't foreseen much of the tragedy that would unfold as a result of American foreign policies -- though I fervently wish I'd been wrong.

Obviously we need to continue to do whatever we can to alleviate suffering and work for justice and for positive change, while caring for those closest to us as well. Our primary responsibility is to remember to take care of ourselves so that we have a chance of being able to help others. What does that mean for you? Have you ever thought about it in depth, and written it down?

The monastery garden at San Giovanni degli Eremiti, in Palermo, Sicily. August 18, 2021.

Many monastic orders follow a rule of life that not only gives structure to the day, but helps the mind find the stillness at the heart of everything. I've always been interested in this, and read a good deal about it. While I don't feel called to that degree of commitment or structure, I know from long experience that without paying attention to a personal set of basic practices, my anxiety goes up, I'm unable to concentrate or get things done, and I'm likely to experience feelings of helplessness and depression. I'm also a whole lot less pleasant to be around: cross, frustrated, impatient, and apt to blame those feelings on others. On the most basic level, I want to be a loving partner and daughter, and to keep in touch with family and friends to the extent I feel able. Now, with not only the world situation but the prospect of yet-another pandemic-restricted fall and winter, it's clear that self-care needs to be intentional.

A street corner in St-Lambert, Quebec. Fountain pen; roughly sketched on location and finished with watercolor later. August 16, 2021.

What this means for me (in no particular order) is maintaining a daily practice of drawing and/or music, so that I don't forget who I am, even if it's just fifteen minutes. It means taking care of some plants and flowers, and petting the cat: remembering that there's a lot of life that isn't human. Food is part of that category: paying attention to ingredients, and cooking meals that have some love and care put into them. Taking some time each day to read a good book, and to learn something new: for the past 18 months that's meant daily language-practice for me.  Making the bed, taking some care with my appearance, picking up the house, keeping things in relatively decent order. Getting some exercise, and trying to get enough sleep. And, both first and last each day, feeling gratitude and making a point of remembering specific things that I'm grateful for. I wish I could maintain a meditation practice but it doesn't seem to be in the cards for me right now: basic mindfulness, gratitude, and the contemplative practice of drawing, and following my breath during lulls in the day or wakeful periods in the night, seem to fill that niche.

Plants on the terrace. August 15, 2021.

Do I succeed at all of that every day? Of course not. But having a basic, thought-out framework seems really helpful in trying to keep some order, sanity and calmness in my life -- and when I forget, which of course I do, it's there to go back to.

Begonia. Pencil. August 14, 2021.

For instance, I hadn't been drawing every single day, but this week gave me a wake-up call to try to get back to it. There you have it: we can always begin again.

 

 

Gathering the Summer Fruits

Edge of a cornfield, central New York.

It hasn't been a normal summer for any of us, but it's been a whole lot better than last year, and for that I'm grateful. Vaccination proofs and passports in hand, we crossed the Canadian -U.S. border in July, for the first time in 18 months, to visit my father. My sister-in-law also drove over from Massachusetts to see us for two days, which was a special and unexpected pleasure. Dad and I were so happy to see each other again, and even though he's having trouble with his legs and back -- very difficult for someone who was always so athletic -- he's still doing remarkably well for his age. I wish I could say the same for the United States. I was shocked to see and hear the polarization expressed so vehemently, and often crudely, on lawn signs and in conversation even in the small rural towns we visited. The vaccination levels are nowhere near what they are in Canada, (but far better than the U.S. South) and with Delta the cases are rising fast, but people were acting as if the pandemic were over. It was, to say the least, pretty disturbing to witness what seem to be two distinct realities between our countries. Nevertheless, finally being able to see family and friends in person, both there and here at home, has made a big difference in my emotional equilibrium.

A corner of G.'s garden.

Last week we went out to the Eastern Townships to visit our friend G., which is usually an annual pilgrimage, but one that we missed last year. We enjoyed his gorgeous perennial garden, in the last flush of summer bloom, and shared a memorable meal of fresh sweet corn, tomato and basil salad, duck confit, and blueberries. While there, the three of us picked the black currants that the squirrels and deer had left on G.'s bush, and later that weekend I managed to eek out four jars of intense, deep purple jam, to be shared with G.

Picking black currants, photo by J. - my new favorite photograph of myself.

A few days after that we hosted a tiny candlelit terrace dinner party for our friend V., with just four of us; Julia Child's butter spongecake (French Cooking Vol 1) was the hit of that evening, filled with mascarpone cream and sliced Ontario nectarines and topped with whipped cream and more nectarines and raspberries.

Our terrace garden is mostly flowers and leafy plants, heavy on the begonias, but it's also yielded a bumper crop of grape tomatoes and non-stop herbs, of which I've especially enjoyed the Thai basil and regular Genovese basil and its small-leaved Greek cousin.

Of course some of these summer scenes and bounty have made their way into my artwork. I spent several hours one afternoon sketching the hemlock trees on my father's front lawn, above the lake:

And on the non-edible side of things, yesterday I did a painting of a branch of monkshood, Aconitum, from G.'s garden, and found myself struggling to find the patience to do that sort of detailed botanical painting after a long hiatus.

But I'd wanted to capture its fantastic shape - those dark blossoms that are so evocative of the monk's hoods for which they're named, and because it feels somewhat connected to G. himself, who lives an intentionally contemplative life. Monkshood has quite a history. The botanical genus name Aconitum (there are 250 species) is most likely from the Greek word for "dart," because it was used in antiquity and throughout history as a poison on arrow-tips for hunts and in battle. A couple of grisly anecdotes: in 1524, Pope Clement VII decided to test an antidote for this plant -- also known as the "Queen of Poisons" -- by deliberately giving aconite-tainted marzipan to two prisoners; the one who received the antidote lived but the other died horribly. And in 2020, the president of Kyrgyzstan touted aconite root as a treatment for COVID; four people were hospitalized before his suggestion was debunked.

So in the middle of the summer harvest, it felt rather exotic to learn all of that about a common plant of northern gardens -- in fact, there's quite a bit of it in one of the city's gardens in a park near my home.

I think the limitations of the pandemic have created greater pleasure in these small things; I find myself paying closer attention, and appreciating the first ear of corn, the succulent strawberries, the succession of bloom and the phases of the moon. I dreamt the other night that I had awakened at my father's house at the lake, and looked up through the bedroom window to see the sky glittering more brilliantly than I'd ever seen it, with millions of stars.

People here are still being very prudent, and not gathering in large groups; masks are required indoors, and everyone is bracing for the fall as cases due to the variants begin to rise, even though 84% of the population has had at least one dose, and over 70% have had two. As elsewhere, almost all the hospitalized people are unvaccinated, but there are breakthrough infections and we can all transmit the virus. Please get your shots and be careful, wherever you are.

Olive Trees at Epidaurus

When I began this pastel a month ago, I was thinking with longing about the silvery olive trees in Greece, billowing in the wind off the sea and the mountain tops. That was before the wildfires began that are now raging across the mainland and the Peloponnese, bringing enormous destruction, suffering and loss. Today I look at this picture with different eyes, and have been thinking of the legend of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humans -- for that deed he was glorified by humans, but punished by Zeus, who chained him to a rock where an eagle continually preyed upon his liver, until Hercules freed him many centuries later. But it has taken three millennia for us to begin to understand the deeper meaning behind that myth, and why the gods might not have wanted man to have fire, and to start to recognize the results and the price of our selfish neglect of the earth and all its gifts.

--

This particular olive tree grows at the top of a hill in Epidaurus, site of perhaps the most perfect ancient Greek theater, and of the shrine of Asclepias: a sacred place of pilgrimage and healing for the ancient Greeks. I had climbed up all the steps of the theater to the very top, and then looked out over the back in the opposite direction, where there was a farmer's road and a grove of olive trees, whose leaves made rustling music in the wind.

In the pastel, I tried to capture that sense of restless, continual movement against the stony ochre-tinged earth and the tall mountains in the distance: the time I spent contemplating that scene remains a memory just as vivid as that of the theater and the surrounding shrine. Here is an early stage of the picture, after the first few hours of work:

and another, after a second session:

In the end, it took quite a bit of time to figure out where I wanted to go with this, and how to create a feeling of density as well as movement, where light played with obscurity and shadow. The colors changed too, with the hills and sky becoming a much brighter, clearer blue to complement the reddish earth under the trees.

Because pastel occupies a sort of middle-ground between drawing and brush-painting, it lends itself to expressive drawn strokes as well as rich color and texture that can be built up through layer upon layer. In this case it seemed to suit the way the olive tree grows -- all those tiny leaves that actually create a dense, thick mass of foliage that's dark on the inside, close to the trunk, and shimmery on the outer edges where individual leaves catch the light. As I worked, I had the sense of building something solid out of evanescent powder and pigment, some of which comes originally from the earth -- which is the strangeness of this particular medium.

Like so much of nature, the olive tree is an enigmatic combination of strength and delicacy, and yet it cannot withstand fire. In Greece, much of the land is covered with trees, and an unimaginable number of those trees are olives -- so surely they are burning.

The Greek poet George Sefaris wrote a poem called "Fires of St John." The title refers to the Christian practice, begun in Medieval times, of lighting fires on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, who was described in the Gospel of John as "a burning and a shining light". His feast day is June 24, so it coincided loosely and conveniently with the Summer Solstice, when pagan elements like fire and light and water were already celebrated. The tradition of lighting fires on the eve of St John's feast spread throughout Christendom, and in rural mountainous regions, fires were often lit in a succession along mountain tops. In Sefaris' childhood village in Asia Minor, it was traditional for children to light small fires in the streets and jump over them for good luck. The poem also mentions Herostratus, a Greek arsonist in the 4th century BC who set fire to the Temple of Artemis in order to gain immortal notoriety for himself - a reason he confessed under torture. After his execution, it was forbidden for his name to be mentioned ever again, but instead, it's become synonymous with a person who commits a crime in order to become famous.

Here's the second half of Sefaris' poem:

It is the children who light the fires and cry out before the

    flames in the hot night (Was there ever a fire that some

    child did not light, O Herostratus)

and throw salt on the flames to make them crackle (How

    strangely the houses - crucibles for men - suddenly stare

    at us when the flame's reflection caresses them).

 

But you who knew the stone's grace on the sea-whipped rock

the evening when stillness fell

heard from far off the human voice of loneliness and silence

inside your body

that night of St John

when all the fires went out

and you studied the ashes under the stars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Walk in the (City) Woods

There's a place in the northeast part of the island of Montreal where a stream has been allowed to stay in its natural state. It's surrounded by woods, and a path runs along the top edge, but there is also a path that leads down into a rather deep gorge where the stream flows.

We had never been there, and visited on Saturday afternoon. Hardly anyone else was in the park. As natural places go, it's not extraordinarily beautiful -- what's remarkable is that it exists at all. Elsewhere on the island the natural waterways have all disappeared -- been diverted underground, covered, paved over, built up. I've never gone on an urban walk that visits some of these areas, but I'm sure remnants and signs of the former environment are still there, and a few people know all about them.

We were glad to have made the trip to find it. The stream seemed to be in fairly clean condition, and the aspen-filled woods were light and lovely, giving us a respite from urban life before emerging again into the northern suburban neighborhood bordering the park.

A Somber July 1

Though I'm a relatively new Canadian, I am a North American of New England settler/colonial stock, and therefore share in the shame of what was done to the indigenous population of this continent. There is no way I can celebrate Canada Day, in light of the discovery of the graves of nearly 1,000 children who died at residential schools -- and there will certainly be many more. I urge all of us to spend at least some time this day in reflection and sorrow about the tragedy that took place on this soil, and consideration of what can be done to make reparation.

 

In addition, the indigenous people have warned repeatedly about the damage being done to the natural world, and have never abandoned their sense of stewardship. Do we need any more proof than the temperatures and wildfires in western Canada, or the recent tornadoes and violent weather here in Quebec? This is a time of reckoning on so many fronts, and we can either bury our heads in the sand, or demand genuine action by our governments, and work individually for change.