the cassandra pages

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?

 

Why the hell are we still blogging?

My good friend Rachel Barenblat of The Velveteen Rabbi wrote recently, saying she was celebrating (like several of us) fifteen years of blogging, and wondering if we might like to do some sort of collaborative observance. She also invited Dave Bonta of Via Negativa, Lorianne DiSabato of Hoarded Ordinaries, Dale Favier of Mole, and Natalie d'Arbeloff of Blaugustine. We all met way back then, and have been good friends and readers and supporters of each other's work ever since -- so of course everybody said "yes." Here are some excerpts from the first installment, which was in answer to the question posed in the subject line of this post.  After you've had a look, I'd like to turn the question around and ask you: Why are you still reading blogs?

Buried Temple, by Natalie D'Arbeloff. Acrylic on paper, 37cm x 37 cm.

Why the hell are we still blogging?

Rachel: Writing is one of the fundamental ways I experience and explore the world, both the external world and my own internal world. I think it was EM Forster who wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Blogging as I’ve come to understand it is living one’s life in the open, with spiritual authenticity and intellectual curiosity, ideally in conversation or relationship with others who are doing the same.

Dave: At some level, it's easier to keep blogging at Via Negativa, the Morning Porch, and Moving Poems than it is to stop. Basically I'm an addict. Writing poetry is fun for me — entering that meditative head-space required for immersion in writing. As for the social aspect, I've been in, or on the periphery of, several distinct blogging communities over the years, and at one time, we all commented on each other's sites, but with the rise of social media, most blog commenting went away — and I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. Writing and responding to comments did take up a lot of my time ten years ago, and now that I can scratch that conversational itch on Twitter, or in real life with my partner, I'm OK with most interactions on my blogs being limited to pings. But I must immediately qualify that and admit that Via Negativa is a special case, because for well over half its existence now I've enjoyed the virtual companionship of a co-blogger, the brilliant and prolific poet Luisa Igloria, and a small number of occasional guest bloggers as well. I wouldn't say I'm competitive, but Luisa's commitment to a daily poetry practice has definitely forced me to up my game. Then there's Mr. Pepys. My Pepys Diary erasure project grew directly from sociability: my partner and I wanted to read the online version of the diary together, and I worried I might eventually get bored with it if I weren't mining it for blog fodder. 

Lorianne: I am not attached to the medium, but I am attached to the message, and the process of creating/sharing that message.  There has been a lot of hand-wringing among bloggers over the “death of the blog,” with long-time (and former) bloggers worried about attention divides between blogs and social media.  Where do “I” live if I post in multiple places: on blog, in a paper notebook, on social media? For those of us who do all three, the result can be confusing, distracting, and frazzling...or it can be creative, collaborative, and synergistic.

Dale: I didn’t really expect ever to have readers, so in a way, having readership dwindle is a return to the early days... I’ve outlived some of my personas -- I’m no longer recognizeably very Buddhist, and my politics have morphed in some odd ways. I don’t think I’m as salable an item as I used to be :-) But the inertia, as Dave said. When I do have something to say and my censor doesn’t step in, the blog is still where I go. It’s been home for fifteen years: my strand of the web… The community that was established way back when is still important to me, and still a large part of my life. And there’s still a lot of value in having a public space. The act of making something public changes it, changes how I look at. I become the viewers and the potential viewers. It helps me get out of myself. It helps me work through my favorite game of “what if I’m wrong about all these things?”

Natalie: Why the hell still blogging? Not sure I am still blogging. I put something up on Facebook whenever I feel like saying hey, listen, or hey, look at this. Then I copy/paste the post to Blogger where I keep Blaugustine going, mainly out of a sense of imaginary duty. The idea that there are some real people out there who may be actually interested in some of my thoughts and/or artwork is undoubtedly attractive, even necessary. I live a mostly hermit life and don’t get much feedback of any kind. But my interior life is very active, all the time, and having a tiny public platform online where I can put stuff is really helpful. To be perfectly honest I think that’s about it for me and blogging at present. I don’t do any other social media, it would all take too much time which I’d rather devote to artwork.

Beth: I think a lot of it has to do with a sense of place. My blog is like a garden or a living room that I’ve put energy and thought and care into as a place that’s a reflection of myself and is hopefully welcoming for others.. The discipline of gathering work and talking about it coherently has been extremely good for me and for my art practice. And I’ve also really appreciated and been inspired by other people who do the same, whatever their means of expression. There’s something deeply meaningful about following someone’s body of work, and their struggles, over not just months but years. In today’s climate of too-muchness and attention-seeking and short attention spans, I feel so encouraged and supported by the quiet, serious doggedness of other people like me!

So...why are you still reading blogs? Are you a writer or artist who's still blogging yourself?

The Silencing of Thoughtfulness

Last night, I read an interview in El Pais with the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who is now almost 89. It's well worth reading. I don't read a lot of pure philosophy, and I don't know Habermas' work, but I was interested in what he was saying about journalism, writing, reading, and the media. "There's a cacophony that fills me with despair," he said. Yes. Me too.

Lest we get off on the wrong foot here, Habermas doesn't dismiss contemporary media, or specifically the internet and social media. He brings up and praises many aspects of new media that have helped humankind already, from the ability to organize from the grassroots to creating connections for support and research among people with rare diseases, saying that there are "many niches where trustworthy information and sounds opinions are exchanged." He's not a Luddite, and he doesn't seem to have a fear of technology or change. What he's concerned about is the same trend that concerns me.

He states the problem succinctly: "You can't have committed intellectuals if you don't have the readers to address the ideas to."

This is exactly what bothers me, as a thoughtful person who likes to write seriously about various topics. For about a decade, there were writers like me -- I wouldn't go so far as to call myself "a committed intellectual," but you know what I mean -- who used blogging for this purpose, and found a wide community of like-minded readers and other writers. Because our attention wasn't nearly as fragmented as it is now, we also had time to read newspapers and journals, and to read longer pieces on the web.  Because the world didn't seem as frightening or chaotic, I think we didn't feel the need to escape into superficiality as much, and substantive conversations were welcomed. I still find this among certain groups of friends, but I'm dismayed by "the cacophony" which seems to drown out most everything, and has pretty much destroyed what we used to call journalism.

Habemas describes this in his own words: at base, you need to have an infrastructure of "alert journalism, with newspapers of reference and mass media capable of directing the interest of the majority toward topics that are relevant to the formation of public opinion, and also the existence of a reading population that is interested in politics, educated, accustomed to the conflictive process of forming opinions, and which takes the time to read quality, independent press."

"That infrastructure is no longer intact in most places," he says -- and of course we all know this. What he calls "the splintering effect of internet" has changed the role of traditional media and "triggered the disintegration of the public sphere." However, what he's even more concerned about is "a much more insidious model of commercialization in which the goal is not explicitly the consumer's attention, but the economic exploitation of the user's private profile."

But it's not just the top-down manipulation that worries him, it's what's happening to us.

"From the time the printed page was invented, turning everyone into a potential reader, it took centuries until the entire population could read. The Internet is turning us all into potential authors and it's only a couple of decades old. Perhaps with time we will learn to manage the social networks in a civilized manner...I am too old to judge the cultural impulse that the new media is giving birth to. But it annoys me that it's the first media revolution in the history mankind to first and foremost serve economic rather than cultural ends."

He agreed with the interviewer that the internet is being used aggressively to encourage a new kind of illiteracy, especially by Trump, and especially in America. Hebemas goes on to talk about his own politics, Europe, the migration crisis and economics, compassion, government, religion. It's well worth reading.

But I'm mainly concerned about the silencing effect this overall trend has on thoughtful people: myself, and many of my friends. Who wants to shout into a whirlwind? For that matter, who wants to shout at all?

Fifteen Years

A post 9/11 tile from lower Manhattan, June 2004

Fifteen years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq, and I started this blog. I just re-read what I wrote on March 20, 2003 (link here, scroll down to the last entry on the page), under my then-new moniker of "Cassandra," after the Trojan princess and prophetess who was cursed to be always right, but disbelieved. Those words from 2003 still sound like me, and I still think what I wrote then is true: that we're witnessing the death-throes of patriarchy and, especially, white male domination of the world and its systems, and that ultimately we'll see a world with greater justice and equality for all of its people -- though the fate of the natural world is not at all secure. In 2003 I tried to take a long view., and still do. But even I would not have prophesied that things would go from bad to so very much worse in the space of this decade and a half, with so much suffering for so many.

Ice fishing shacks on Lake Champlain, winter 2004, and Canadian cornfields

 

On the personal side, we did make some major decisions: we moved. 40% of my tax dollars are no longer being spent on the military, but on a mix of social services such as universal healthcare, prescription drug coverage, affordable daycare for children. I live further north, in a province which is the most progressive in North America, among many people who have a world view and values similar to my own. But though that may make my everyday life more consonant with my beliefs -- and the tax thing was a major moral issue for me -- I think resistance is imperative no matter where we live. As social media data becomes "harvested" for ill purposes, we are all complicit in these larger systems, unconfined by borders and unregulated by government. As migration due to violence, oppression, and hunger affects more and more of the world, are we really going to allow ourselves to be divided into two warring camps: people who have compassion for their neighbors as for themselves, and are willing to share, and those who will do whatever they can to protect what they have from the undeserving, fearful, and inferior "other?"

At a blogger meet-up in Montreal, in spring 2006l: Tom Montag, Lucy Boyce, and Dave Bonta

But, also on the personal side, my life changed because of this blog. In addition to the extremely valuable practice of near-daily writing, it has given me some of the best friends of my life, and relationships and conversations that continue to this day. In recent years it's given me a forum for sharing not just my thoughts in words and photographs, but my art, and all three of those personal pursuits have improved hugely as a result. In turn, I've been privileged to read your words and see your bodies of work develop and change. Out of those relationships have come several collaborative efforts, including a literary magazine, qarrtsiluni, and my own publishing venture, Phoenicia. And this blog also functions for me like the diaries I kept before: as a personal record of my life and thoughts that would now fill a small shelf of books. So I can't even find words for how significant blogging has been for me, but I'm extremely grateful.

An earlier version of us, in Montreal, 2006

For some of us who've hung in here for a long time, there's another factor that bears consideration. We've seen the rise of social media, and the exodus from blogging as a result -- and I understand why that has happened, both in terms of the ease of communication afforded by social media, and the decline in blog readership and commenting that many of us have found discouraging. I often wonder who is still reading here, beyond those who tell me so. But, just like the demise of the book, the prediction of the death of serious longer-form personal writing on the web seems to have been not only premature but wrong. I see the pendulum swinging back somewhat; for instance, this January, poets Donna Vorreyer and Kelli Russell Agodon suggested that writer-bloggers resolve to post on their blogs once a week, and the list who signed on became huge. My friend Dave Bonta has been making a weekly compendium of some of the best of those posts in his Poet Bloggers Revival Digest. Quite a few of us have gained readers through posting links to our blog from Instagram or Facebook; others use long-form platforms such as Medium.

In my studio, with a young Manon, and art inspired by Iceland, 2008.

But as we see the more nefarious side of social media, questions do (and should) arise about our own participation. I want to own my own content, and I want to control my own presence on the web -- the only way to do that is to maintain my own sites, and limit my use of social media. The incursions into  privacy that have happened over these fifteen years are way beyond anything I would have envisioned, and millions of us have rolled over and done exactly what the mega-corporations have wanted us to do, becoming unwitting pawns for financial gain and political exploitation. I'm going to be looking hard at this, and hope you will too.

 

A book and its cover

This week at Phoenicia Publishing we've announced the pre-orders for this new book of poems by Luisa A. Igloria. As I wrote the posts for social media and the Phoenicia newsletter and blog, I thought back to when I first "met" Luisa, ten years ago -- she had submitted a poem to qarrtsiluni, which Dave Bonta and I were editing at the time, that blew us both away. Later Luisa edited an issue for us, and in November of 2010 she began writing a poem every day for Dave's Via Negativa site -- a practice she's continued to this day. It's an amazing and inspiring achievement, and I'm proud to consider her a friend, and to have published not one but two of her books at Phoenicia. The other, Night Willow, came out in 2009 and the title poem was inspired by an essay and watercolor that appeared on this blog.

The "Buddha poems" collected in this edition appeared in earlier forms on Via Negativa in 2016. They're humorous, poignant, down-to-earth, and both startling and revealing just as the best Buddhist stories are: they make us see our everyday world and our everyday selves in new ways. I've happy that Ivy Alvarez and Satya Robyn, both also longtime blog-friends of mine and Luisa's, are among the writers who have written blurbs for this book. I hope you'll buy a copy and support Luisa, but you can also enter to win one of two copies we'll be giving away on publication day in mid-March, by signing up for the Phoenicia email newsletter.

As part of the design process, I've been working hard on the cover art, using hand-painted paper, cut and glued onto a painted background as collage. I used a combination of gouache and acrylic for the color, and tried several papers before I was satisfied -- the background needs to be heavy enough not to curl, and the painted papers need to be substantial enough to hold the paint, but thin enough so that there is no shadow from their edges when they are pasted. It's a great technique closely related to some of my expressive calligraphies -- I love the rather enchanted feeling that results -- but it's very time-consuming and picky. Probably good for a Virgo like myself! Here's an earlier version that led, eventually, to the final one.

Making art is sometimes a lonely process, filled with doubts, but at other times, there's inspiration and collaboration. This design was my favorite of four I presented to Luisa, but at first she chose a different one. We took some time, and the next day she wrote to talk about this one with the brambles. Luisa told me what she liked here (the brambles and the ladyslipper) and said she'd like to see a bird rather than an eye. I also knew from her previous responses that she liked bright colors. Putting all of that together, and looking at some photographs of lady-slippers in their natural habitat filled with ferns and grasses in a woodland clearing, I was able to make the adjustments and changes that led to the final cover, which took several days of painting and cutting and gluing to complete because this is a new technique for me.

Thinking with Merton about America's Predicament

The Orange Line has fancy new cars, and whenever I get on one of these shiny trains, I feel like I must be one of the first passengers. That's why when I sat down early yesterday morning, it was a surprise that the empty seat was warm. I hadn't seen anyone exit, so they must have gotten off at a previous station. Of course, I told myself, thousands of people have already taken this train, it is no longer brand new. But the strange feeling of someone else's presence persisted, along with my musings about the places our bodies temporarily occupy in an urban environment, only to be replaced by another anonymous body, and another.

When I am on the train, I'm often going downtown to sing, or returning from singing, and though I seldom wear earphones or use my phone, bits of music play repetitively in my head. Yesterday I was going to the cathedral to sing a complex modern Mass in the morning, and later, music by Orlando Lassus, and I have noticed that this awareness sometimes makes me feel special. But the warmth of the empty seat, and the presence of the other passengers, reminded me that no one is any more special than anyone else, or, rather, that we are all equally special, even though I may have been the only person on the train who was thinking that.

The Montreal metro platforms aren't crowded on Sunday mornings, but as the trains arrive, they make me think of Mexico City, where the opening and closing mouths of each train disgorge and swallow up vast quantities of human beings. There, too, I often remember Thomas Merton's words: "What if everyone knew that they were going around shining like the sun?"

Merton wrote those words after having a spiritual experience -- a revelation of oneness -- on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky, one day when he had left his monastery of Gethsemanii for a medical appointment or some similar reason. I had a similar revelation while waiting at a deli counter in a grocery store in Hanover, New Hampshire, nearly twenty-five years ago, and from that point on I have known that I am connected to every other being; that we all possess, at our core, the same divine spark (Merton called it "the eternal diamond"); and at the same time, that we are each entirely unique, special, precious, beloved. It's not explainable in words, and so I will not try; it's better (while still being impossible) to try to live out of that awareness in all of one's relationships. But it is also clear to me, as it was to Merton, that most of humanity goes around unaware of who they actually are, and of the potential for love, compassion, harmony, beauty and joy for which we are made. Babies come into the world open and trusting and full of potential -- but then other people and the world begin to impinge, and the separation, alienation, and undermining begin, accompanied by a gnawing hunger for love and for something ineffable that we sense is out there. All our lives, we remember the grandmother or father, the teacher, the friend who saw the spark within us when we were young, who saw us as we really were, who recognized and tried to nurture the best in us. And all our lives we suffer because of those who did, and do, the opposite. Under good circumstances, or sometimes against all odds, some people find their way and manage to live lovingly toward others and toward themselves, in spite of setbacks. Most struggle. And a few slip into the darkness and become capable of terrible things.

--

We can blame society, parents, religious institutions, educational and justice systems, the economic situation into which we were born, racism, homophobia, misogyny: all are part of the systems that maim and destroy people. Today I read a number or articles about guns in America that sought to prove that gun control was the answer to that country's epidemic of violence. But until a society looks beyond the gun to the hand that holds it, into the mind that picked it up and felt the need to buy it, and beyond that mind into the forces that not only made the gun easily available but created the desire to be prepared to shoot and kill, there is absolutely no hope for change.

Let's be clear. This is a country that fought a devastating, bloody, and still unresolved civil war war over the right of certain human beings to own and enslave other human beings. It is a country that committed genocide on the native peoples. It is a country that has treated all its "enemies" who were not white and European as sub-human and unequal, and still does -- and steadfastly refuses to discuss any of this history or to acknowledge the legacy of violence, injustice, and inequality that is interwoven and perpetuated in its national narrative. America definitely needs gun control. But what it needs more is a gigantic mirror.

Thomas Merton's life and thinking were profoundly influenced by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race, which he saw as potentially the most terrible development in human history, not just because of its ability to create Armageddon, but because of what the existence of such weapons does to the human psyche. Merton was born in 1915 and died, accidentally, at age 53 in 1968. I was a teenager then, certainly influenced by growing up just after WWII, by the Cuban Missile crisis and the continuation of the nuclear arms race, then by the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of those times. My life has already been a decade longer than Merton's. I've seen the failure of the anti-war movement to significantly endure past the mid 1970s, and have been dismayed by the rise of corporate power, the increasing disparity of wealth and opportunity, the militarization of American society, the persistent threat of nuclear war, and the incredible lack of compassion for immigrants and anyone who is "other", as well as our own poor and disenfranchised. The wrong turn after 9/11 has plunged the world into much greater instability and fear, and gravely altered American society: much of what we are seeing today has felt predictable to me for a very long time.

And yet, the sense persists that humanity evolves on a time frame that I cannot see or comprehend. I've just been reading some ancient history, about Greek and Roman city-states in other parts of the Mediterranean. The cruelty of the tyrants and states in those days was on a scale that we can barely imagine. When a city was conquered, its entire population was often destroyed, or sold into slavery. And these were not uncivilized or unsophisticated people, they were often, as the writer put it, "educated people who spoke Greek and simply ran afoul of the massive inferiority complex of the Romans toward the Greek world." We don't physically enslave entire populations now, or crucify 6,000 slaves along the nation's most prominent highway, as the Romans did after a rebellion. We do other things that, on the surface, at least, seem less devastating and less cruel. 2,000 years of history have not taught a majority of human beings to share, or to lose, or to resolve difficulties without resorting to violence in our words or actions toward others, or by turning that energy against ourselves in destructive ways we don't even recognize.

--

So I am not particularly optimistic about humanity in general in the short term, but individuals can actually live differently if we are willing to keep our eyes and hearts open, and resist the temptation of following the herd. We can do a great deal for one another to make these times more bearable, especially if our relationships go deeper than the general discourse on social media. We can find strength as well as solace in the arts, in our work, in the natural world, in learning, in openness to difference and ways and people we do not know. We can learn to see and refuse the violence in our own selves, nipping it before it flowers into malevolence that affects our own spirit and those around us. We can try to be the people who see the best in each other, and encourage that, especially in the young.

There is so much work to do. Please, let's get on with it.

Persistence

Knitting, while listening to music, has been my relaxation in the evenings after long days of writing and editing. I finished my green Gansey sweater a week ago, and started knitting a Brora shawl (it's a Brooklyn Tweed pattern) from a lovely fingering-weight wool. It's been going pretty well, or so I thought, until I looked closely under the light last night and saw a fairly significant mistake, oh, maybe 18 rows back. (I took the picture above several nights ago-- the mistake was already there but I didn't see it.) Dammit. I put the work away for an hour, read a book, and then, before bed, ripped out the last two nights-worth of knitting, back to the problem row, corrected it, and went to sleep.

Yesterday I had felt like I was nearly done with the manuscript, but after lying in bed for a while this morning, thinking about it, I've realized I need to make some additional changes, and they may take quite a while. I was ok with that, in fact, anxious to come up to the studio and get going.

This wasn't always the case. I've changed from a more slap-dash person to the way I am now, not in a flurry of flying yarn, but over time. Maybe it's often that way in people who have a certain innate facility: people who can "get by" without a lot of studying, or practicing, or editing, or wiping out the paint from the day before, and still end up with a pretty good result. But at some point, you either stay that way, or you realize you have to ramp it up, with a combination of patience, determination, self-observation and self-discipline.

Last night I thought about my father, who is fond of saying "a thing worth doing at all is worth doing well," my online friend Frances who just frogged thirty rows of a complicated cabled sweater because of a mistake; the top musicians who practice the same passage over and over for days and weeks; the authors I most admire who simply don't stop writing until they are sure they have done the best they possibly can. I don't think what I am talking about here is perfectionism, exactly, because there is no such thing as "perfect" in the arts, and perfection alone is not necessarily what we're after. It's not really obsessive behavior, either -- in the sense of compulsive repetition -- though I'm sure some people see it that way. I admire persistence: people who want to do their best, and don't lie to themselves about what is "good enough" when they know that with more effort, they can do better. You do it more for yourself than for anyone else. It's a quiet, inner feeling, not some sort of ego-centered, outward push -- because after a while you realize that that sort of effort doesn't get you to the same place.

The "Terra" shawl. This has a mistake in the garter rows, too, but I discovered it so late that I decided to forget about it.

I think I learned this lesson of going further in two ways: from having a business, and taking piano lessons as an adult. Somewhere along the line, I accepted as truth the criticism I had defended against: that I wasn't taking my design work as far as it needed to go. It was good enough, but it could be better. Instead of fighting and resisting, I started to just buckle down and listen to the inner voice that said, "It's not quite done," and not stop until I had found a solution or an answer to whatever wasn't fully resolved. Satisfying the client was easier than satisfying myself, and I had to do the latter.

And, in my late thirties, I listened soberly to my wise, older piano teacher who said one day, "When you first came to me, I thought you just wanted to play fast and learn a lot of music, but you didn't want to put in the work to really get all the notes."  I couldn't argue; she was absolutely right, and it had always been the way I had approached music. I liked to practice, because it was fun and relaxing, but I had always worked just enough to be able to fix the difficulties noted in the previous lesson and make a little more progress; when I was young, that was enough, it was pretty easy for me. But now, twenty years later, why was I there? My teacher waited until she thought I'd be receptive to hearing what she had to say, and then she dropped that one sentence in my lap, like a little subversive bomb. She didn't need to say any more. Was it worth it to me to work harder? It turned out that it was. I was never going to become a really excellent pianist, with fantastic technique -- I was too old, and didn't have the time or desire to devote myself to such a goal anyway -- but I became a better musician. I improved a lot, taking the time to figure out exactly what was on the page and how to play it.  With better technique and more accuracy, we could turn to the questions of interpretation that I found more interesting; in other words, it was possible to go both wider and deeper. My teacher held me to a higher standard than before, helping me with greater engagement and interest, and I found much greater satisfaction in my practice and my playing -- but her lesson reverberated far beyond music in my life.

That question, "what am I doing here?" is important. I'm never going to be a master artist-knitter like my friends Alison or Rachel or Judith, capable of creating incredible, intricate lace shawls -- and it's only recently that I got more careful about correcting mistakes and tried to improve my skills by choosing harder patterns. But I have no aspirations or illusions about myself as a knitter, whereas art and writing are the areas to which I'm really dedicated.

I'm the first one to say that everybody has talent, regardless of what we were told as children, and to encourage people who once drew or dreamed of playing an instrument to begin again. Any art form is primarily about creativity, and satisfaction in the doing/making -- if it isn't fun and joyful, then why do it? The thing is, that once you get over the initial hurdles that kept you from starting, and you gain some facility, then you have to decide how serious you're going to be. For an amateur, it may simply be about pleasure and satisfaction in the doing, and knowing you are making progress. As a professional, I've had to ask myself that question, at different levels, all my life, and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. I don't think I'm going to "retire" as an artist or writer.

People tend to think art is all about talent, but frankly, talent only goes so far. It's like a seed that has been planted; all it represents is potential. Some artists who have early success treat it as a destination, and for the rest of their lives they coast; some become bored. Others, equally talented, never find the same level of success, but they work at their art with dedication and joy all their lives. The best musicians I know, people in their forties and fifties and beyond, still practice for as long as it takes for them to perform confidently, at their peak, and they constantly challenge themselves with new repertoire that stretches their abilities and their understanding. Talent certainly plays a part, but without about a huge amount of hard work, you're balanced on a pinhead -- maybe there's a stretch of days when you dance brilliantly and everybody's dazzled, but sooner or later you're going to fall off. What's required is some sort of crazy combination of stubbornness and passion for the art form itself, driven by an inner search rather than "success" or praise from the outside, that propel you through the painful days of showing up and doing the work, the days when you struggle with doubt, fears and loneliness, the days when you wish you were a "normal" kind of person -- until the work starts to shine with an inner light that you aren't even sure you put there yourself. And when it's finished, you get up and start all over again.

Scarce

 

Block Island

Yes, I've been scarce around here, and there is a good reason: I've been keeping my little nose to the writing grindstone, and not allowing myself to deviate too much. It's been surprisingly difficult not to draw or paint, because I had gotten in the habit of doing it regularly. I've been pretty disciplined about the usual distractions of social media, surfing, chatting with friends, and posting to the blog and to Instagram. The result, though, has been a productive stretch of writing and editing. There isn't really any other way around it, regardless of the art form or the medium: in the end you just have to show up, close the door, stay at your desk and do the work. It's kind of like these rocks, the ocean reminded me: they didn't become rounded and smooth overnight.

So what is that schedule? We arrive at the studio around 8:30 in the morning, break for a half-hour lunch at noon, and leave around 5:30. Of that time, I've been writing and editing for four or five hours every day. Then I usually make dinner, and after we're done eating might knit or read, plus doing whatever bathing or laundry is necessary, before bed at 10:30 or 11:00. I try hard to get seven hours of sleep. In recent weeks I've nearly finished my green Gansey sweater (it was missing one sleeve and the collar), and have been fooling around with a lace pattern that has taken me three tries to figure out. Reading has been more consistent: in recent weeks I've re-read Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the fourth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, and am halfway through Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett -- have any of you read that? It is strange, brilliant, unique. I've also been catching up on past issues of Brick, an excellent Canadian literary magazine.

Scavenging on the beach -- that's a dead seagull I'm poking at, hoping for bones. (photo by J., of course)

Nevertheless, I haven't felt I had much to show here, and now there is an additional problem -- my phone died and that's where all my photos are. J. is working on it with tech support today, so I'm hoping to be back up and running soon.

Friends.

In the meantime, September has arrived, and with it, cool weather, right on schedule. I've had a good summer, with plenty of outdoors time, a number of visitors as well as visits to friends, and days outside the city, so I am not going to utter one peep of complaint, especially when so many worldwide are experiencing devastating weather.

Where we bought fish.

I'll leave you with these photographs from our August weekend on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, where we visited friends and enjoyed the ocean's changing temperament, and the vast starry nighttime sky. I foundd those days near the ocean extremely peaceful, and I hope that feeling with continue to stay with me as we embark on la rentrée, as the September "back-to-school" season is called here in Quebec. For me, that means a return to the regular choir schedule, to Phoenicia Publishing, to preparing a talk I'll be giving later this month, a condo committee, the music committee at the cathedral...the list goes on. I'm glad I worked hard this summer, because now my time will be much more divided.

 

A Deficit of Consonants

I've been re-reading some of the Cassandra Pages archive. Here is a post from May 26, 2011.

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Poems - a lot of poems - come across this virtual desk. Some I need to read with extreme attention, because my advice or input or decision is needed; some, often written by friends, feel like gifts during my day. Others - the majority - are part of the large volume of words that pass in front of my eyes, sifting and tossing but eventually falling like bits of colored paper drifting from skyscraper windows during a parade. My words, too, are part of that constant fluttering: some catching the light for a brief moment before coming to their own rest, lost among so many others.

Today, unaware, I read a poem that utterly devastated me. It wasn't a good poem. It simply sliced me, the way a sheet of paper turns into a thin, efficient blade and cuts the side of a finger.

A friend quotes W.S. Merwin, in conversation with Bill Moyers:

"I think poetry's about what can't be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said. Out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. Probably grief. Maybe something else. You know, you see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman whose husband or son or brother has just been killed by an explosion. And you know that if you could hear, you would be hearing one long vowel of grief. Just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that's the beginning of language right there.

Inexpressible sound. And it's antisocial. It's destructive. It's utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. And I think that's how language emerged."

Poetry is about what's can't be said: yes, often true. And we need poetry, art, music to try to express the rawness of our pain more often, I think, than our joy. We enter the realm of art full of emotion, need, and desire, wanting to say something about ourselves, about existence, about what has happened to us or what we've seen happening to others.

But if poetry is the language that emerges from inexpressible sound, we must learn that handling words is like handling knives. Becoming masterful often means saying less, or coming at the subject obliquely: the slant light of late afternoon picking out one falling shred of paper and setting it aflame during its flight to earth. Becoming a master of oneself as well as the words.

The amateur and the egotist, however, say everything. Their work has the capacity - perhaps even the intent - to violate rather than move us, like the graphic news photograph on the front page that can now never be erased from our mind.

It was safer, perhaps, before the internet gave everyone a platform from which to dump their buckets of vowels.

Re-centering

Here it is, the second week in February already, and because of political events I haven't accomplished half of what I had hoped so far this year. Maybe you're the same. At first I was merely depressed by the prospect of the upcoming inauguration, then very quickly derailed by the new administration's first week, the marches, the mosque shooting here in Quebec, and my own need to focus upon and write about these things, as well as touching in with a wide circle of friends and family. Phoenicia brought out Dave Bonta's new book, and there's been quite a bit of work associated with that. I've been singing, seeing people, reading, making meals...but it has all felt like I'm distracted, not only from what is going on, but from myself. What happened to drawing, printmaking, painting? What happened to my own writing? I've been off-center, and needed to get back home.

This week I've felt like I'm finally regaining some ability to focus. I haven't done any particularly good drawings, but at least I've taken up my pen. And I'm working hard on a writing project that is now going well.

Unfortunately, these times reminds me of what it feels like when we, or someone close to us, gets an unwelcome diagnosis. For a while, you can't think about much else. But eventually, you see that life goes on, even though you have to deal with the new situation, and it remains in the back of your mind. A life that, for a while, felt simpler just got more complicated. But the clarity of passing time shows us that we not only need to multi-task, we can do it. I'm glad to see that most people who have decided to resist have not lost their determination, but we've also settled down into the mindset where we realize this is going to be a long haul. So I'm taking action, staying informed, and trying to take good care of myself and those around me -- but I'm also doing my own things, because they're also important. I hope you are too.

So, I'm curious -- how are you coping with the reality of the moment in which we find ourselves? Have you been able to find a balance? And what role does social media play in your day -- have you been using it more, or less? Do you think it's helpful, or not?