the cassandra pages

Cassandra at Twenty

Today this blog celebrates its twentieth anniversary. I almost forgot, because I was focused on it being the first day of spring: an event we're eagerly anticipating up here but about which there's been precious little evidence, other than the maple sap running, and brighter, longer days. However, I'll post these grape hyacinths in the hope that we'll be seeing real ones -- in about a month.

The craziness of living in, and enduring, such a northern climate may be matched by the craziness of having blogged here for twenty years. Or perhaps I'm just stubborn. Social media was supposed to be the death of blogging, and it did do-in most of the blogs that started when mine did. Other platforms were touted as the next best thing, but I think most bloggers just got fatigued. Keeping up a blog, trying not to repeat yourself, and finding something personal to say is hard enough over years and years, but when the readers and commenters start to go away, it's even harder to remember why you began it in the first place.

But I do remember: I was a journal writer and determined letter-writer, with a well-established practice, and blogging fit me to a T, not only because it satisfied those same urges, but because it also added the possibility of a visual component. The latter, of course, became the raison d'être for Instagram, and I have loved being part of a community of artists and photographers there. But for those who want to write regularly and seriously, nothing has really worked as well as blogs, and for someone like me who's a visual artist as well, and wants to own her own website rather than be data-harvested at every click of the mouse and keyboard, blogging has continued to be the best choice. I guess stubborn perseverance has just kept me at it, because first of all I write and make a record of my art for myself -- I'd do this anyway -- but how much better it is to share it with you, communicate with you, and get to know each other.

Jacaranda blooms in Mexico City, back in March, 2017.

The doubts I was having about blogging a few years ago have mostly disappeared. It's clear to me that this is where I belong, and that it works for me. Adding an art education component will satisfy another strong urge in me: to teach and encourage others who may have always wanted to draw or paint, or who want to do it better; or encourage those who loved making art when they were kids, only to get discouraged or distracted along the way.

A recent change is that I have begun mirroring this blog on Substack. The content will be exactly the same, but if people want to subscribe there and receive a notification via email when there's a new post, that's an easy way to get one. (I know some of you don't use feed readers, which is another possibility. While I do always post a link to new posts on Facebook, you may not be there either.) Substack posts also receive a link on my Twitter feed. Many Substack writers are trying to get people to subscribe for a monthly or yearly payment. I'm not going to do that; the content here has always been free, and I see no reason to change that. The only possible exception would be if I decide to offer formal online art courses, but that's a ways into the future and won't impact the blog at all.

Red bottle-brush tree bloom, from the same Mexico City trip.

Whether you have been reading my words and looking at my pictures for twenty years or have just found me recently, I want to say thank you. It's humbling to know that people come here repeatedly, looking for some solace or calmness in the difficult days we are all facing, and I'm glad that the writing and art which help sustain me also, sometimes, help to sustain you. After all, that's why we think deeply, why we create, and why we are here together. Thank you for visiting, and for encouraging me with your presence. If you've never left a comment, that's absolutely fine, but please don't be shy -- I try to respond personally to all comments, and will be really glad to hear from you. And for those of you who've become my friends over the years, whether virtually or in real life, and in so many corners of the globe -- how amazing it is that we found each other, and how everlastingly grateful I am for the ways in which we enrich each other's lives! 

Coming Up for Air

Almost sunset. Acrylic on sketchbook paper. 10/26/2022.

Well.

It's been quite a stretch of time since March: a house move, caring for my father in four different living situations, a studio move, my father's death and funeral, and a whole new set of responsibilities, all of which has taken place during a pandemic which -- for us -- continues to be a concern and a factor in many of our decisions. We returned from our latest trip to central New York on Sunday night, and for the first time in all of these months, there's no more moving to do: I have a little bit of free time and the chance to consider what I might want to do with myself. 

So much has changed, and I have changed with it; this is not a simple matter of picking up where I left off, either last March, or before the pandemic began in 2020. When I ask myself, "What has not changed? What are you still passionate about?" the answers are easy: the people and creatures I love and care about; art; music; writing and reading; the natural world...and learning. But because of COVID, that "learning" component isn't going to include a lot of foreign travel. We are not ready to start traveling to the kind of destinations we used to, and we aren't going to be participating in large indoor group activities or crowds, or going to restaurants or parties with a lot of unfamiliar people. Pretty much everyone we know who has done these things has eventually gotten sick, and unfortunately we aren't in a position to risk that; even with all the vaccinations and boosters, there's no way to tell how the virus will affect an immuno-compromised person. We're using public transportation again, and going to certain kinds of gatherings; we do have people over here and have gone to friends' homes; and in good weather we did plenty of outdoor socializing -- and, luckily for all of us, that balmy weather stretched well into November.

The height of autumn. Watercolor in sketchbook. 10/9/22.

But last night it snowed in Montreal, and it's been snowing all day today. The stark fact, as I consider winter, is that society has moved on without us; we are like people with a disability, and it is up to us to figure out how to structure our lives in the new reality in which we find ourselves: how to combat isolation, deal with loss, find meaning and connection and purpose within certain limitations.

So the deficit side of the balance sheet includes limited travel; no longer singing in the choir, which was a huge part of my life; and some limitations on gatherings and events. I'm still dealing with grief, loss and change -- and I'm older. I may not feel it very much, but it's a fact.

In an undecided middle area are my publishing company, Phoenicia, and my involvement with social media, with the latter tipping decidedly toward less involvement rather than more, though I'll continue connecting with my creative community on Instagram.

Late fall view from my studio window. Acrylic on sketchbook paper. 10/20/22.

On the positive side is a greatly-improved, integrated living and work situation that's going to work a lot better for us. I have several unfinished projects begging for attention -- two book projects, and the body of drawings about Iceland that I began long ago and which is about 3/4 finished (more on these in a subsequent post.) My piano is finally in my home again, and there's good soundproofing here; I've been playing nearly every day and working on learning some new pieces of music. The piano is out of tune, but that's temporary, and maybe there will be new and different opportunities for making music with other people. The weekly online book group I helped organize back in 2020 is still going strong, and I've actually made a number of wonderful new online friends over the past couple of years, and a couple of new in-person friends too. Access to nature is greatly improved by the fact that I've inherited my father's house in a beautiful rural place, and though it's six hours away, we can go there when we want a change from the city. 

City at night. watercolor and gouache on sketchbook paper. 10/13/22.

Finally, there is this blog, which has endured all sorts of personal, technological, and societal changes since it began in 2003. As a firm believer in owning and controlling one's own online content, I've no intention of letting it go, and instead, have been thinking about how to infuse it with more energy now that I have some time.  Could it be more educational, more helpful? Could it help to launch new projects and bring people together, as it has in the past (quarrtsiluni, Phoenicia Publishing, online groups)? What else is there that I haven't considered? There's nothing wrong with social media functioning as a hub where interested people find content and go to it, but as our disillusionment with these social platforms and their capitalist agendas grow, could blogs regain some of their gravitas and a new sense of purpose? I wonder.

It depends somewhat on our expectations. I do know that I don't care about the number of followers or readers, and we are long since past those heady days where aspiring writers thought they'd become well-known through their blogs -- there's no way that someone steadily writing good but long-form posts would become famous like a seductive Instagram influencer, not in today's world! But careful and engaged readers and writers still do exist: Dave Bonta's weekly poetry blog digest bears witness to that. Blogs like Language Hat, Velveteen Rabbi, Hoarded Ordinaries, and Whiskey River have kept on quietly, steadily, thoughtfully posting for nearly two decades now, and there are many others. If these are not impressive and worthy bodies of creative work, I don't know what qualifies.

We can't tell what's ahead, as we've all found out, but we can certainly think about the present and what to do with it. I wonder how you are feeling right now, and what your insights are -- I'd be happy to hear from you in the comments.

 

Desk, Domain

I'm sitting at my grandmother's antique slant-top desk. It's a gorgeous piece of cabinetry, larger than my own desk, with detailed inlays and dovetail joinery, drawers for pens and supplies, vertical pull-out holders for writing papers, and a locking cabinet in the center. I feel a bit dwarfed, a sensation which isn’t helped by the fact that all the chairs in the house are too low for it.

When we lived in the big house in town, this desk was always in the front room downstairs, its rich brown wood contrasting with the Victorian floral wallpaper behind it. The desk was directly across from the upholstered chair where my grandmother read and knitted and embroidered, drank martinis in the evening, and played canasta. Its right side touched the wooden frame of the wide doorway between the living room and the dining room -- and on that frame were scratched the heights of my cousins and myself each year as we grew.

My grandmother used the desk when she sat down to do her daily correspondence, and I think also to pay bills -- but I never remember my grandfather sitting at it. The top held various curios, most of which have now disappeared, but were fascinating to me as a child: a heavy, dark purple glass bear whose head came off to reveal a container inside; two Chinese brass vases and an ivory elephant: gifts from faraway from my mother's high school sweetheart who was beloved by the family and had gone down with his Navy ship in the Pacific in WWII; a little oval wooden box filled with tiny South American figures -- no more than half an inch high -- dressed in colorful costumes made of bits of fabric and wrapped, colored thread; and many other things that I might be allowed to play with and dream about on a special day. It was clear, though, that I was never to open the drawers or look at any letters or writing: this was her private domain.

After my grandparents died, in their nineties, my parents built a large living room addition on their own house here at the lake, and moved some of the furniture they had inherited. The desk was placed against the back wall of the new living room, fitting perfectly into the center of the white-painted paneling my father had carefully constructed. The four big drawers below held maps and stamp collections, papers and scrapbooks, but if my mother or father ever used the desk itself, I didn’t know about it; they did their paperwork on a modern desk downstairs, or on the round oak table where we ate, near the kitchen. For them I think it was mostly a decorative, formal showpiece that offered convenient, out-of-sight storage, and they kept the slant-top closed. Three Wedgwood vases stood on the top, along with a pair of candlesticks, and above them hung an airbrush painting of mine from the 1980s that is a closeup of a purple pansy, rather Georgia O’Keefe-esque. In the thirty years since they built the addition, this arrangement never changed.

During our current stay at the lake house, since we are now alone here and likely to remain so, I’ve taken a few tentative steps toward moving a few things around: a decision that feels both illicit and liberating. We had already moved a few pieces of furniture to my father’s room in his assisted-living home, so that was the beginning, and my father’s presence during that process seemed to give permission. The other night I removed several other things from the bedroom, cleared off the top of the dresser and replaced figurines and photographs with a single modern ceramic vase I’d given my mother years ago. I think the urge to do this came from the radical cleaning of our apartment we’d done before putting it on the market, but it had barely occurred to me before that I could do any such thing in this overcrowded house. I continued by clearing the counter at the top of the stairs; I stripped the kitchen countertops bare and polished the white formica before replacing only the barest essentials and stowing everything else in cupboards; we bought a mop and scrubbed the tile floor. Outdoors, I picked up a decade’s worth of fallen branches, raked leaves, pruned overgrown bushes, swept the railroad-tie steps going down to the lake, got out the outdoor furniture and put it in a different spot, and with my husband’s help, dragged a bench down to my favorite place just above the shoreline. All of this took place at a slow rate of one project every day or two.

Tonight, tired and worried about my father, I came into this room, which we seldom use, and stretched out on the couch. I did my Duolingo lesson and the Times mini crossword and Spelling Bee on the free phone app which always kicks me out after a certain point. Then I pulled a knitted afghan over myself, thinking I might take a little nap, accompanied by the contemplative robin that’s nesting in the light fixture just outside the terrace door...but my eyes kept opening and gazing across the room at the desk. After a few minutes I had gotten up, opened the top, and set to work sorting the incongruous things I found inside: a strange, heavy antique brass writing stand with two glass inkwells; bottles of disk cleaner for LP records; three old letter openers, an intricate silver one that looked Turkish and quite lethal, and two that are clearly African; a collection of DVDs; a Silva compass with a leather case; a collection of old brass drafting equipment and a velvet snap-top jewelry box filled with old Schaeffer and Parker graphite leads; a handwritten wiring map for my father’s cabinet of turntables, tape decks and DVD players. As I did this, slowly, the thought began to form: could I actually use this desk? Could I write something here? When all the surfaces and pigeonholes were empty, I removed the vases and candlesticks to the piano, and wiped the wood with a barely-damp cloth. My sketchbook and watercolor palette went on the left side, some pens on the right. Then I ascertained that, yes, there was an outlet on the wall in fairly close proximity, set my laptop, mousepad and mouse in the center of the open desk, noticing for the first time the reassuring dents and scratches in the old mahogany -- and turned the computer on.

It felt like... a moment. Like introducing your close but perhaps slightly questionable young friend to a beloved elderly grandparent. But the hinges didn’t give way, the marquetry didn’t fall out: in fact, the wood felt warm and beckoning and somehow personal, and I began immediately to write.

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

Hermit Diary 60. Full Circle

When I began writing this blog, eighteen years ago today, it seemed appropriate to name it after the Trojan princess Cassandra, cursed by her spurned lover, Apollo, to utter prophesies that would always be accurate but never believed. That was on the eve of the Iraq War, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, which I was certain would plunge the world into an endless war between cultures, and a great destabilization that would cause untold human misery through civil war, destruction, loss of life and livelihood, and migration that would be rejected by much of the western world, which would also refuse to admit they had caused it. I am not happy to say that I was right; I would have loved to be wrong.

At the time, I couldn't have predicted the exact shape that the far right would take in the United States, or in other countries: this has been worse than I ever anticipated. Climate change has accelerated even faster than I feared, and I never would have thought the United States would actually withdraw from international environmental agreements - thankfully, this decision has been reversed. I didn't know that I would not only move to Canada, but become a Canadian citizen, though it was a possibility. I'm appalled but not surprised by the racism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and violence of these years,  as I wrote in that first blog post in 2003:

And so I’ve spent the day -- this day that feels like an ultimate Good Friday -- trying to work, trying to do "normal" things, well aware that nothing is normal, that it may be a very long time before the world feels normal again. As a pacifist and a liberal Christian, I’m wracked by two conflicting emotions: the desire to be peaceful and centered ... and an intense anger at everyone who has contributed to bringing us to this abyss. On this day of self-examination I don’t exempt myself. Somehow it doesn’t help in these final hours to know that I’ve been a dedicated antiwar activist, to know I’ve tried. All I have to do is look around at my comfortable home, or hear the oil-burning furnace come on, or draw some clean water from the tap. All I have to do is walk over to the filing cabinet and take out last year’s tax return with my signature at the bottom, authorizing the use of my money for whatever purpose my government decides. What percentage for tanks and bombs and depleted uranium shells? I could do the math and figure out my personal subsidy. If I really wanted to go crazy, I could do the math.

The anger persists, and toward mid-afternoon I realize a lot of it is anger at that particular kind of high-testosterone male aggression that is fueled by revenge. It cannot see the victim, cannot empathize, cannot imagine another way other than striking out with violence. It feeds on itself and on talk with other like-members of the species, enlarging, encouraging, exaggerating, moving inexorably toward a violent, cathartic release...

This is the maleness that has given rise to, and perpetuated, all patriarchal systems. Theirs is the personal patriarchy that treats women as property but insists it is only protecting them. Theirs is the patriarchy that institutionalized oppression of women, and allowed slavery, and fought tooth and nail against emancipation and equal rights for any groups other than itself. It is the patriarchy that destroyed native cultures, and gave rise to colonialism and empire-building. It is the patriarchy that chooses theory over empathy, the patriarchy that always knows best.

Eighteen years later, I wonder how many deaths will it take. The United States has glossed over so many, from the bombing of faraway innocent children to the murders of its own Black, Asian and Hispanic citizens; deaths in the desert and at the border and in prison camps; deaths of women from domestic violence; deaths during an invasion of the nation's Capital;  even -- incomprehensibly -- the deaths of little American children gunned down in their classrooms. Right-wing hatred is continually directed at The Other, but the perpetrators of this terrorism, in almost every single case, have been angry white men.

Still, I never would have predicted what the world has lived through over the past year: a pandemic of such magnitude that it brought the entire world to its knees, cost the lives of millions, and caused untold human suffering that has been unjustly borne by the poor, by people of color, the elderly in care homes, those working in high-risk professions without proper protection, and those without access to technology. 

Because I am not in those categories, I have been safe throughout this long year. Two days ago, I had my first vaccination. It was given in a huge conference center here in Montreal, the Palais des Congres: Quebec has made a commitment to vaccinate all adults with a first dose by our national holiday, June 24, St-Jean Baptiste Day and they are moving very fast toward that goal. The nurse who gave me my shot seemed to be about my age, and I asked her in French if she had been working throughout the pandemic. No, she replied, I'm retired, but I volunteered to come back and do this because I have the training. Merci beaucoup, I replied, and our eyes smiled at each other above our masks. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude -- for the scientists who dedicated themselves to developing the vaccine, the people who were working to deliver it, for being in a country that believed in science, planned well enough and has the money to provide for its citizens, and for reaching this point of greater safety. And I felt overwhelmed, at the same time, with sorrow for the loss, suffering, separation, and disrupted or damaged lives that may take years to recover, if they ever do.

--

I also couldn't have predicted that I would have spent this year making music with a virtual choir, or that an online reading group I organized would have just finished reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon via Zoom, where we can see each other and talk easily in spite of physical separation. The final words spoken in that play by Cassandra, before she dies at the hands of Agamemnon's wife, remind me that human beings haven't changed that much since this lament was written 2500 years ago:

Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well

a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind

one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out;

and that is far the most unhappy thing of all.

 

 

So, as with the images I've posted here, it's a question of holding both the darkness and the light. It's been a year since I began my pandemic diary here. We will continue to be very careful until we've had our second shots, and I think today of my many friends in Europe who still have no access to vaccines, as well as the people of Mexico and Brazil and so many other countries who are having to wait, and wait, while the virus continues to surge. But the light is returning to the north, and to our lives, as we begin to see a way out and a way forward. I'm working on several creative projects that will attempt to express and preserve something about this time, and I may consider publishing a collection of the essays I've written here -- it would be good to know if any of you would be interested in that. I also want to try to encourage others who are younger and having difficulty seeing their way into the future. It's somehow easier when you've lived a long time. Life, you find out, is always unpredictable in both collective and individual ways, and part of living is learning to deal with uncertainty -- not that any of us are able to do that with perfect equanimity, or all the time. Here is a final excerpt from that first blog post, which I think still holds true:

Yet I believe the days of patriarchal power are numbered. The ranks of women and men in all cultures who understand and voluntarily choose a different way of being are increasing. Threatened people will instigate huge battles to maintain the old systems, and for a time it may feel that we are going backwards. It’s unlikely that these changes will happen in our lifetime; perhaps they will take another hundred years or more. But the ultimate trend is clear.

If I am going to deal with my own anger constructively, perhaps I can dredge up some compassion for people who sense, even dimly, the threat to the only system they know, the only way of being they can comprehend... they are locked in a cage that only they can see. How horrible it must be to experience life this way, whether you are Osama bin Laden, hating and fearing the West with its personal freedom, its emancipated women, and its lack of understanding of all the traditions and values you hold dear, or George Bush, thinking that friendship and loyalty can be bought with dollars, terror quelled by violence, and true democracy established by the forced occupation of a sovereign people and the repression of your own.

The world sees through them both, as it begins to see with clearer and clearer eyes all patriarchal systems that promise protection in exchange for economic or political or sexual submission. On this eve of destruction, perhaps we can try to look forward, far forward, seeing these terrible and tragic events as part of the death-throes of patriarchy: a crucial step toward real freedom and justice for all the earth’s people.

 

Hermit Diary 55. Inside, Outside, and Elsewhere

Interior with rubber tree and straw angels. Sailor fude-nib fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

I've been trying to draw and paint more regularly. It's therapy, and it's a joy, and it's a way to remember who I am -- as well as, I suppose, record who I was. My sketchbooks are just as much a diary as a written one, but that reminds me of my recurrent dream where I'm seated at the piano and required to play, except that what's on the music stand isn't a musical score but a painting. Somehow, I start playing what I see, and in the dream, it seems to make sense...

For someone who works in both words and in images, as well as being a musician, that dream feels all too real, and it makes me ask the question of whether a diary of one's days isn't just as valid if it is drawn as when it is written. Of course, the two can be merged together, as I guess I sometimes do here on my blog. But because I often find words (and especially, my own words) tedious, I like the idea of "reading" a sketchbook in order to discern something about a person's life.

Orchid and quilt. Sailor fude-nib fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

When I look through my drawings of the past year, however, I don't think anyone else could tell we're in the middle of a pandemic. Taken in the context of all the other sketchbooks from other years, it's clear that the artist often goes other places, and hasn't in a long while. But otherwise, except for a couple of pages at the beginning where the chaotic state of my mind was evident, all I can detect is a turn toward more color, the same objects appearing repeatedly, and occasional forays into places I've visited, mainly Mexico City, Sicily, and Greece.

As we near the one-year mark of isolation, in another month, in the middle of yet another winter, I can tell you that I am intensely tired of these walls and these two rooms. I've been going up to my studio a couple of afternoons a week, and managed to do a painting of Sicily this week.

Segesta, Sicily. Watercolor, 12" x 9".

I was working on a Cartiera Magnani "Toscana" watercolor block, which is very different from my usual Arches paper: much more absorbent and "cottony", without sizing. Although the colors immediately sank into the paper and were both harder to manipulate and less vibrant, I found I was liking the effect, the difference in feeling, and not being able to rely on a practiced technique. I painted everything until the very end with a 1/2-inch dagger brush from Rosemary & Co., and that was a departure too. Sometimes it's good to shake things up. And it's good to go places in our imaginations, and in the books we read and the drawings we do. For now, that has to suffice.

Hermit Diary 29: On Journals

Last week, I was invited to participate in an online reading party centered on journals. The host asked us to choose a favorite journal to read from, and for the few days leading up to the gathering, to make some brief notes about what we had chosen and why. As it turned out, I couldn't participate on Sunday, but I ended up with the following notes (not brief at all) and today it occurred to me to post them here.

 

Friday. A journal to read from. What should it be? I pull out Transtromer’s Baltics, glance at the large spine of Anne Carson’s Nox, think about the Derek Walcott poems I’ve read recently that are diary-like, addressed to the poet himself. Virginia Woolf -- an obvious choice, but no. Then there’s Knausgaard, but what to choose? Or how about his Latin American counterpart Ricardo Piglia, in The Diaries of Emilio Renzi?

I realize with some dismay that one of my favorite journals, Thomas Merton’s The Sign of Jonas, is lent to a friend.

Your request feels pretty personal to me, WM., since practically everything I write is in the form of a journal. I’ve kept diaries since I was very young, and long before I began my blog I kept a paper -- and then digital -- journal, and for a while I even printed out the entries at the end of the year and hand-bound them, interleaved with that year’s correspondence.

Then The Cassandra Pages began, in 2003, and I’ve written it as a personal journal ever since. Then there are journals-within-journals -- a trip to Obama’s inauguration; our first month staying in Montreal; trips to lots of other places; the three-year decline and death of my father-in-law. At the beginning of the pandemic I started what I called A Hermit Diary, on my blog, thinking I would write about life in isolation...an echo of Merton, maybe. In these three months I’ve written 28 entries, each spaced further and further apart. At the beginning there was so much to say, and now, much less, or so it feels to me.

But there’s also another, parallel, private journal on my computer. It begins on April 26, 2004, with a quotation from Merton, a week before we began our move from Vermont to Montreal, and the most recent entry is on January 29 of this year. The wordcount at the bottom says it now contains some 311,414 words. I almost never go back and re-read this journal. (Is it private, even from me?) It’s where I work things out, write down dreams, copy out passages from things I’m reading, letters I’ve written or received. It’s where I complain and worry and try to get my head straight. Once I’ve written through whatever it is, I rarely feel like I want to revisit. And it’s not usually the sort of writing that I would go back and polish and make into a blog entry, or mine for an essay, though sometimes that happens. It’s more like meditation. Or wrestling with the angel who has wounded me.

 

Saturday. There are so many levels of private vs public, raw vs. honed, in my own journal-writing. This makes me mistrust other people’s published journals a little: how reliable, really, is this narrator we want to see as totally so? In fact, I think we’re rarely seeing the raw, uncalculated, truly private version, even in Knausgaard, though he wants us to think that we are. The skilled and practiced journal-writer who is also a writer is always aware of the possibility of a reader. So I keep coming back to Merton, whose journals influenced mine so much.

Merton’s The Sign of Jonas is a book drawn from his journals; he edited and rewrote what he had already written. It came out a number of years after The Seven Storey Mountain, the book which made him famous, and which he came to abhor. His private journals were published long after his death, and I’ve read them all, but even they were carefully edited. Still, what they reveal is that after years as a cloistered monk, living in silence, devoting hours and hours every day to contemplation, he had become keenly aware of all the games he played when presenting himself on paper, all the tricks of the ego, all the ways in which he sought fame or praise, and disguised and disgusted his true self in the process. He had left the academic world of New York in order to seek God and some sort of personal overhaul. He was aiming at authenticity, transparency, honesty, directness, egolessness... and yet he learned how the very act of writing -- which he couldn’t help, couldn’t give up completely -- became a trap for the ego. He talks about it a lot. This was his huge struggle: the need to say what he saw and felt out of the depths of his contemplative experience, to communicate it to others, and to try to make a difference in a broken world, but how writing can become performance that addictively seeks something else entirely: admiration, praise, fame. Just before his accidental death, Merton wrote this about his vocation: "He struggles with the fact of death, trying to seek something deeper than death, and the office of the monk, or the marginal person, the meditative person or the poet, is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life."

Merton held up a mirror for many of the struggles I was having in writing and in art and in life, and in that mirror I saw myself, my games, my desires more clearly. The mirror shows the whole room: what we need to throw out, and the bits we should keep, and it’s a process that never ends.

 

Sunday. So, here’s the beginning of my private journal, April 2004. It’s Merton, writing on January 8, 1949:

In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor. We are the ones who are supposed to be poor; well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lived in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious-looking anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter. And I thought of Gethsemani where we are all steamed up and get our meals, such as they are, when meal time comes around, and where I live locked up in that room with incunabula and manuscripts that you wouldn’t find in the home of a millionaire! Can’t I ever escape from being something comfortable and prosperous and smug? The world is terrible, people are starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan-mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. I’d like to ask them, what have I given up, anyway, except headaches and responsibilities?

Next time I am sulking because the chant is not so good in the choir I had better remember the people who live up the road. The funny thing is, though, they could all be monks if they wanted to. But they don’t. I suppose, somehow, even to them, the Trappist life looks hard!

 

This follows, written by me sixteen years ago:

It’s a grey, dark day here, and when we woke there was rain pelting against the roof. It’s let up now, and in the bathroom the rainwater is slowing sliding down the incline of the skylight, blurring the silhouettes of the bare-branched treetops. This is the sort of weather that has been depressing me all through the late winter, but today it seems almost indescribably beautiful. It is practically the last day for bare trees; leaf buds are swelling on all the red maples and the honeysuckles are already covered with a cloud of pale green. On the apple tree outside the bedroom window, drops of water hang from the ends of each black twig, daring both gravity and time.

In less than a week, we’re heading to Montreal to live for a month. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a city in my half-century of life. We’re going as a change from the life we’ve led here, from the house we’ve inhabited for more than 25 years, from the rural countryside, from the particular web of responsibilities and patterns we’ve woven. Besides being urban, Montreal is an international city: proudly and gracefully maintaining its French heritage and a broad ethnic and cultural diversity despite its proximity to the United States and the English-speaking provinces of Canada. It is a mere three-and a half-hours from here, and a world apart.

We’ve been thinking of this month as an experiment. After several years of weekend trips and the occasional week-long stay we want to find out what our commitment to this city really is: how much do we really like living there, and what might that mean for our future? This is what I thought the month was going to be about: practical matters, finding out how we felt, considering some changes and potential investments at this gently teetering point of midlife. Strange, then, that on this wet dark morning I felt, for the first time in several years, a strong call to contemplation. Could it be that part of this journey might be a sort of retreat, bizarre though it seems to retreat to a city? And yet I feel the call so clearly, bidding me to use the coming time and change of place not for distraction and escape, or merely for outward life decisions, but to learn something inner and as yet unrevealed.

For those who believe in God and believe, further, that She has a sense of humor, consider the irony of moving a writer -- especially one steeped in the ultimate contemplativeness of rural Vermont life, complete with clapboard-clad house and vegetable garden, and a pervasive silence punctuated only by bird and cricket -- to the bustle and endless distraction of a city of three million souls for the purpose of contemplation. Funny, even preposterous. But that’s what may be happening. I’ve been on this winding, unpredictable, and largely dusty spiritual path for long enough now to recognize the changes and imperatives when they come -- and for the most part, they have come like this, of the blue.

What immediately fits is the fact that contemplative solitude, for me, is actually easier to find in the city. Having lived my entire life in the fishbowls of small towns, where I cannot step outside my door or buy a bag of carrots without running into someone who knows me, the anonymity of the city is a huge relief. It creates a sense of freedom that is impossible for me here. Perhaps because of living so many years in the country, close to nature, solitude -- for me -- is not dependent on silence, but on being removed from the obligation to talk, interact, and plan. And yet, being a social creature and a moderate extrovert, and knowing that my husband (the opposite) likes to take off for long periods of photographic exploration on his own, I’ve been a little worried about having to deal with too much solitude during an entire month of urban living. “Use it,” I hear now. “It’s a gift.”

Books of 2019: eclectic as usual

Boxing Day. Traditionally, this has been a day of curling up on the couch with a new Christmas book, but for the first time I can remember, I didn't receive a single one! I wonder if this is a trend among readers of this blog too. We don't buy or receive as many physical books, and maybe our friends and families are less likely to give them to us. I wonder, and, as a publisher, I worry. No matter -- trends haven't affected my reading patterns very much, except for the change to reading e-books borrowed from the Overdrive service at my library, or purchased on Kindle. I read almost exclusively on my phone, unless I've borrowed a physical book from the library. And though I did buy myself a couple of books about Greece that haven't arrived yet, I'm trying not to acquire too many these days -- the shelves are already overburdened. But read, I do.

I don't have a great deal to say about the books I read this year... there's a definite focus on Portuguese literature, because of traveling there and trying to write about it subsequently (a still-unfinished project). As usual, there are some classics from both ancient literature and the 19th and 20th centuries. After a debate with a friend about "the greatest novels" I decided to reread some of the candidates. Middlemarch was a first-timer for me, and I liked it. War and Peace was a re-reading, but while I had remembered the characters and basic plot, the book affected and impressed me much more now than when I read it before as a much younger person with so much less experience of life -- I think it deserves its status as one of the greatest novels ever written. I finally made it through Ulysses a few years ago, and don't plan to re-read The Brothers Karmazov, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary any time soon; other candidates are lined up for re-reading next year: The Magic Mountain, Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury. But I find I'm more interested in continuing to read books in translation from world literatures that are less known to me. In addition to War and Peace, the "biggest read" was Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, about the city where my mother-in-law spent her youth after leaving Armenia -- a city whose history is virtually disappearing.

Particular favorites this year were Compass by Mathias Enard, and two books by friends: Immigrant, Montana, by Amitava Kumar, and Human Archipelago, by Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole. Among the Lisbon books, I especially loved For Isabel: A Mandala, and Requiem: An Hallucination, both by Antonio Tabucchi, and A History of the Siege of Lisbon, by Jose Saramago. Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney is brilliant and illuminating. I didn't think Pachinko was incredibly well-written, but it was such a great window into a diaspora I knew little about (Koreans living in Japan). Likewise, there's always a Murakami on my list: I liked Killing Commendatore a lot, but didn't think it was in the same league as, say, 1Q84. The Frolic of the Beasts, by Yukio Mishima, is an excellent, extremely disturbing novel by the great Japanese writer.

It might be worth mentioning (since I don't think I have before) that I also regularly read and highly recommend the Canadian (but international) literary magazine Brick. I'd love to have a piece in there someday -- I came close with one this year, according to a kind letter I received from one of their editors, and will try to submit something again in 2020.

Right now I've started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk -- original, unsettling and intriguing so far. I enjoyed Greek to Me, a love letter to Greece and the Greek language by New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, especially because since our recent trip I've been studying modern Greek - half an hour each morning, along with half an hour of French in the afternoon. In her book, Norris mentions visiting the home of the late great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in Kardamyli, Greece, on the Mani peninsula. We were nearby and fascinated by the stoic ruggedness and remoteness of that region, so I've ordered a couple of Fermor's books -- one about the Mani, and the other about northern Greece -- so that will be how 2020 is likely to start out.

Finally, it was a great pleasure to hear and meet one of my literary heroes, Michael Ondaatje, this year at a reading he gave in Montreal.

What about you? Please share your favorites, or entire book list if you keep one, in the comments! I always love hearing from fellow readers at this time of year, and wish you all a happy year of reading ahead!

 

Book List, 2019

Drink Time! In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dolores Payás

Greek to Me, Mary Norris

Electric Light, Seamus Heaney

The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago (rereading)

The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester (audiobook, dnf)

For Isabel: A Mandala, Antonio Tabucchi

The Lives of Things, Jose Saramago

Helen, Euripedes

The Women of Troy, Euripedes

Ion, Euripedes

Falling Upward, Richard Rohr

The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin (bits and pieces, mainly the essay on Tolstoy "The Hedgehog and the Fox")

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading)

Human Archipelago, Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima

O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music, Andrew Gant

4 3 2 1, Paul Auster (DNF)

Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi

Warlight, Michael Ondaatje (second reading, for book club)

Requiem: an Hallucination, Antonio Tabucchi

What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi

The Tiny Journalist, Naomi Shihab Nye

The Lisbon Poets (anthology)

Five-Minute Sketching: Architecture, Liz Steel

The Book of the Red King, Marly Youmans

Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (3rd and 4th books, Mountolive, Clea)

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (First two books: Justine, Balthazar)

The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley (DNF)

Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar

Compass, Mathias Enard

Write!

How is your handwriting these days? Mine has really deteriorated, like any other skill that is seldom used. I didn't even know there was a day set aside as "handwriting day" -- sounds like a marketing ploy -- but, as I wrote recently, I've just ordered some new inks and a new fountain pen. I got my ink today, so it felt like the right time to write a bit, and think about handwriting.

My "normal" handwriting is the fast, right-leaning scrawl you see above. It's embarrassing to me to look at letters written by my mother, my grandmother and her sisters, or my great-grandmother, all of whom had beautiful penmanship, and -- I'm afraid -- more patience than I do when writing a letter or a journal entry. Here's the beginning of one from my grandmother, where she excuses her poor penmanship -- as if! -- because she's writing on her lap.

I miss those letters and those correspondences: the anticipation, the thoughtfulness of composing a reply, the slowness of the exchange. I miss finding a real letter in my mailbox in college, or from a faraway boyfriend or close friend. Here's an envelope from my grandmother, addressed to me in Vermont in 1983. Gosh.

It's so beautiful!

I actually made my living for a while as a calligrapher. Those pages of carefully-formed calligraphic scripts don't resemble my handwriting, and they represent a lot of slowing down and patience and slow breathing. For me, handwriting like the examples above is more like talking, and it moves a lot faster. But when I look at the way I write now, i'm shocked. It feels to me like it's time to do some of those breathing exercises, slow down, and write somebody -- maybe myself! -- a letter.

Not that what we write now, by email or even by text, is any less sincere or thoughtful. I still carry on long correspondences with a number of people, and we don't have the patience or the time to do it by snail mail: those days, I'm quite sure, are long gone. But our brains are connected to our hands, and writing is part of what makes us human. We lose those manual dexterity skills at our peril, I think, and I bet that one day scientists will discover that the near-overnight loss of writing by hand, and related skills, affected our brains in some significant ways. I know some of you keep handwritten journals, or write "morning pages" each day. Others draw or sketch. But the time most of us now spend with a pencil or pen in hand is really minimal - for some of us, it barely exists anymore. Do you think it's important? Do you miss it? What takes its place in your life these days?