Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Monday, July 14, 2003
PERGOLA
"I've always wanted a pergola," I said to our hostess last Friday night as we walked from her backdoor to the driveway through a lovely white lattice walkway wound with flowering clematis vines in purple and soft pink.
"Ah, yes! A pergola," she said. "I haven't heard that word for a long time. We had one in the convent."
Pergola Rosita Copioli (Italian, 1948-)
I dreamed I had a pergola
which later became a meadow of weeds,
of twigs of stones. And a few steps in front,
the sea—which had spread
light and sun and infinite cries—turned
gray little by little in the white
northern light, and died out. But from
the broken limbs of the garden to the villa with its
vine-covered pergola and dark
bunches over the marble doors,
from the broken limbs, the sun
outlined my hands on the marble
and let them fall
as itself was falling.
The door jambs, the vine shoots, the small white
chairs shattered in the sun.
And from the villa not
far from the sea, dust rose
with the sun, dust and white seeds,
the wind.
"Rosita Copioli graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy, with a Ph.D. in classical studies with a dissertation on “The Idea of Landscape in Leopardi.”
"Copioli’s work deals mainly with myth and nature. She is interested in the dawn of life, of history, of civilizations. Time and history are often compressed in her work. This compression is distilled in lists: enumerations of winds, of cities, of mythological characters, of minerals and flowers, of geographical places. Her world embraces the Mediterranean sea and the effects of modern civilization on the pristine world of the Greeks and the Romans."
--from thedrunkenboat
"At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." Andy Goldsworthy
I've been following Goldsworthy's work for a couple of years, since seeing a book of photographs of his "sculptures" - for this is, by and large, the only way one can experience these pieces which are made from nature and reclaimed by it. The film, narrated only by an occasional comment from the artist as he is filmed in Nova Scotia and his home in the highlands of Scotland, allows the viewer to be present at the birth, end, and often precipitous collapse of Goldsworthy's amazing and - to me - very moving creations. Some, like his stone cairns, do persist and may be around for a very long time. But others, created of found objects like leaves of graduated color joined into long "paper chains" by thorns and set afloat in a river, or tree leaves "sewn" together with a seemingly endless "thread" of reed, or the incredible stars and ribbons made of ice, confront us with the nature of time itself, and our own place in both its relentlessness and indifferent but heart-melting beauty. This is what preoccupies and motivates Goldsworthy, along with, I think, a desire to have us look more closely at our world.
Goldsworthy works a lot with a dark, rocky river that winds through woods in his property; I think he said that he sees that river as a metaphor for life. The water has worn deep cavities in the rock, and one of his favorite devices is to fill one or two of those cavities with a starting color - hundreds of dandelion petals, for example. In one segment, he pulls a rock out of the river and rubs it hard against another, creating a red powder - there's so much iron in the rock that it crumbles red. He spends a whole day crumbling rock, and uses it to dye one of the pools. And we're shocked - what is it, but our blood, made red by iron too?
For someone who makes almost nothing that can be "sold", Goldsworthy has certainly done well through the photography that he uses to document what he makes, but I love the way his work circumvents and questions the whole art gallery establishment; it is more like dance, fleeting but haunting because it goes to the core of who we are on this planet.
At the very corner of this old map is a country I long for. It is the country of apples, hills, lazy rivers, sour wine, and love. Unfortunately a huge spider has spun its web over it, and with sticky saliva has closed the toll gates of dreams.
It is always like that: an angel with a fiery sword, a spider, and conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
from "Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems", 1999
Arabs in Conversation by the Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924). I rediscovered Morrice's paintings, which I really love, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last week.
This came from a young friend who has just completed a year on a Fulbright in Morocco before starting work on his doctorate in Islamic Studies. He wrote it for his hometown paper in Oregon; this is the first and most personal part of the article.
A Young American Among Arabs
“Don’t they hate us over there? Morocco, Tunisia, YEMEN for one whole year all alone: are you crazy!? Were you in a coma or something on September 11?” One of my favorites, “Do you work for the CIA?” or even better “Why should I believe you if you say no?” There were plenty of questions directed at me before I left to immerse myself in Arabic and complete a US Fulbright Scholarship in Morocco. As you might expect, I also had plenty of questions for myself.
I went there. I encountered my fear. I was not annihilated. To the contrary, even in the roughest of circumstances, I was welcomed warmly as an American and an individual. Indeed, my fears changed into a new understanding of the place I had studied in books and seen on television. After living in the Middle East and North Africa for a year, I distinguished between two Arab worlds. There is the Arab world of blood, uniformity, extremism and fear. This is the world we know through television, tapes by Usama Bin Laden, embedded journalists and commentary by “experts” who don’t speak a word of Arabic. This was the Arab world I was afraid of seeing. It was the Arab world that extremists both in the West and in the East want us to see.
There is another Arab world, the Arab world of life, diversity, welcome and humanity and even humor despite incredible challenges. This was the Arab world I saw. This was the Arab world we need to better understand. Certainly, I had encounters with extremism: on May 16 2003 the suicide bombing in Casablanca, just an hour away from me by train, brutally killed some 40 Moroccans, creating enormous popular movement and protest against Islamist terrorism. In a protest not widely reported in Western media, 2 million Moroccans marched for democracy after the blasts. In Yemen, the media and rumors have led people to believe September 11 was a Jewish plot organized by the Israeli intelligence service. At the same time, I met tribal sheikhs in Yemen who wanted to string up Usama bin Laden for trying to force a Usama bin Laden interpretation of Islam on his tribe.
Yet these rare encounters with fear and rage are not what shaped my experience most profoundly. As an American, I was targeted: not for hate and harassment, but for couscous and sweet cookies. I had to choose between three or four different invitations from families who wanted to invite me for a couscous meal. I saw Nike ball caps and American flag sweatshirts on the beach and streets of Rabat, “Addidas” spelled “addidos”, and the stylish concoction of “western” clothes that look much cooler than the shopping mall variety at home. I listened to an old, Moroccan Jewish woman, a woman my Muslim friends from the Jewish quarter call “jedati”, or “grandma”, who celebrated at the tomb of a Rabbi saint in the Rif mountains the day of the Casablanca blasts on Jewish sites. I sat in the long discussions on a 1000-year-old rampart in Yemen about “Booosh,” “Saddam” and “Amrika”: the opportunities I had to show that Americans too were not all the same.
I remember my best friend Nabil, the rastafarian, dreadlocks, reggae surfing dude who looks like somebody plucked from a San Francisco beach but who also goes to the mosque everyday and followed the Qur’an as strictly as possible, who constantly surprised me with his humanity, care and respect for others. Every Sunday afternoon in Rabat a group of Moroccan friends would come to my house for dancing to music of every style, from Hotel California to Gypsy King to Moroccan music, Samira and Khalid, and even the Can Can. We celebrated youth and life in my medieval home in the center of the Madina.
Yoruba masks illustrating "the uncontrollable passion of romantic relationships". From African Ceremonies by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, via Conscientious.
Ecstasy and Irony
Two contradictory elements meet in poetry: ecstasy and irony. The ecstatic element is tied to an unconditional acceptance of the world, including even what is cruel and absurd. Irony, in contrast, is the artistic representation of thought, criticism, doubt. Ecstasy is ready to accept the entire world; irony, following in the steps of thought, questions everything, asks tendentious questions, doubts the meaning of poetry and even of itself. Irony knows that the world is tragic and sad.
That two such vastly different elements shape poetry is astounding and even compromising. No wonder almost no one reads poems.
Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities, 2002, Univ. of Georgia Press
Last night's reading was...what can I say? Interesting and curious. I had no idea what to expect for a turn-out, since it was a combined recital with a pianist, and our mailing lists don't necessarily overlap, but about 50 people came to hear us at a local Methodist church. David played two sonatinas by a local composer: excellent works but rarely performed. Inbetween those works, I read three essays. When he first called to invite me to join him, I asked David what he had in mind. "I was thinking maybe you would read something about New England," he said. "Prose or poetry?" I asked. "Hmm," he said. "Prose, I think." So that's what I did. I've never read prose formally before, except for being a lector at church, which was actually good preparation for this. It seems harder to me to pull off a convincing prose reading - it just seems awkward, somehow. I decided the only way was to just go for it with conviction and sincerity, so I tried to do that. David's playing was electric, and I think we felt inspired by each other; it was a good fit. Afterwards a lot of people came up and told me their own tree stories - I often get that kind of reaction to my writing, and I like it: that some word of mine may have served as a catalyst and permission for someone to trust and tell their own story. It's better than feeling liked you've forced them to struggle to find something to say about art - I think it's so difficult for most people. They come to support you, but they really have no idea what to say, and are afraid of sounding foolish. So I'm always happy when someone says something specific or concrete from their own perspective. Of the comments I got, I especially liked what Shirin said:
I really enjoyed listening to you reading the pieces last night. I have read other pieces but when you read them it's different. You paint the picture so vivid that it wants to jump out of listeners' head. I especially liked the willow tree's story. It was sad. You gave it a life as a creature with feelings; pain, sorrow, and even happiness and satisfaction. Good for you and barakellah.
The piano was good too. I liked it a lot. It brought out a feeling of revolt and strength. You couldn't sit and listen to it and be passive. It was not romantic though like most Iranian music.
I was also so grateful for this blogging community and realized how much more satisfying it is to have both an audience for one's creative efforts, and some ongoing feedback. It's difficult to be an artist of any sort, and last night I was really struck by the changes in my own attitude, confidence, growth, since my last reading a couple of years ago. I find that putting myself into similar situations (performances, readings, gallery shows, public speaking, presentations) separated by time is the best way to see how I've changed in my inner life as an artist...or person, for that matter...
I changed my calendar today -- I know, it's really late! -- but the reason was that I hated to say goodbye to this image.
Thanks so much to Heather at Soul Food Cafe for including one of my pieces in her "Golden Seed Grove". I'm impressed with what she's doing on her beautiful site to encourage younger writers and to make full use of the internet as a medium for writing - take a look. The essay she chose, "Requiem for a Tree", is one of the ones I'll be reading tonight. It talks about the impossibility, sometimes, of trying to capture the essence of nature in words (although obviously I'm trying, right to the bitter end!) There's an interesting discussion going on about this aspect of "place" writing at the biweekly topic discussion on the Ecotone Wiki..
3:42 PM
|
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Good morning, and thanks to everyone who wrote to welcome me back and respond to the previous post! I'm so glad I got comments working before I left. It makes me very happy to hear from every one of you.
To those who were worried about the lettuces, they're back - I had just removed some pictures to see if the downloads were what were slowing up the site. But the problem simply seems to be that Blogger's servers (some, not all, and at different times) are very slow. It's been working better since the switch to the new Blogger Pro, but I still look forward to changing over to our own domain.
Seems like a good time for some biographical details. I don't take any of the personal photographs on this blog - they're all the work of my husband, who is a professional photographer. We've been partners in our own design/communications business since 1981, and have been together since 1979. We've always worked to maintain some sort of balance between our professional work and our own art/creative work, and as any of you who have similar lives will know, it isn't always easy. When I met J., he was still working primarily as an artist, selling prints and showing in galleries, and just getting into commercial work. I had a graphic design business and was writing and illustrating, mainly in the fields of nature/biology, doing a good deal of calligraphy, getting into the book arts. I was also painting seriously (oil and watercolor). We combined our professional work into a firm in 1981 and have been doing that ever since, always trying to keep on the edge of graphic arts technology - right now we're doing more multimedia work.
Our decision about how to deal with this mix of interests was to work hard in these related design/communications fields, live frugally, save as much as we could, and "buy time" for our own creative work. At the same time, we've tried to integrate the two, so that the line has become increasingly blurred between the work we do for pay and for love, and as our careers have progressed we've been fortunate to be given more and more creative freedom which makes that possible. There has been a lot of dues-paying along the line, though...and many months and years of frustration at not having time to pursue our own work, which continued to be photography for him and moved more and more toward writing for me.
J.'s particular interest is in street photography; in the edges between things: city/country, for example; and in the endless complexity of people in their own private worlds. I keep telling him to start a photoblog or a photo site but until that happens, you'll be seeing his work here occasionally...he's incredibly generous about letting me use work, or taking special pictures for me.
More on Montreal soon. (If the scales are correct, it's a damn good thing we only stayed six days...) I'm giving an informal reading tomorrow night (it's a joint event with a friend who is a pianist) and I haven't made a final decision on the work, so that's my task for today.
10:14 AM
|
Monday, July 07, 2003
Hi. We got back home tonight and I sat down to read e-mail and write a post -- and my site won't open at all. I'd appreciate hearing if people have been having trouble getting the site to load over the past few days, or if it's been particularly slow. Hopefully it's just blogger being blogger, and everything will be running fine in the morning...I promise to move this site before the end of the summer!
9:30 PM
|
Saturday, July 05, 2003
LE JARDIN BOTANIQUE
We spent yesterday at one of our favorite places in the city, the Botanical Garden. It’s really much more than the name implies, because along with the fantastic and lovely perennial, rose, shrub, and demonstration vegetable gardens, and a number of greenhouses filled with exotic collections of palms, orchids, begonias, cacti, bonsai, and textile and food plants of the world, there is a vast arboretum. It’s a large park planted with now-mature trees grouped by genus, and on this very hot day we walked from pool of shade to pool of shade, sinking down onto the grass beneath the trees to drink a little water and survey the scene. The trees are full of birds – and no wonder, when you have groves of mulberries, or viburnum – and the chipmunks and squirrels are virtually tame and approach expectantly, hoping for handouts. Our longest sojourn was under a weeping European birch, which had fine white bark and tresses of delicate, green-leaved branches bending all the way to the ground and moving gently with the breeze.
One of my delights was a bed of the most perfect lettuces I’ve ever seen, planted carefully for contrast in form and color, perhaps 25 varieties wide by 8 heads of each type deep, and every one was similar in size and aspect – a veritable chorus line of lettuce beauty, strutting their ruffled, variegated and most perfectly uniform stuff.
Another haven was the garden “sous-bois”, under the trees; a shade garden that makes you long for more shade in your own (not to mention the little cascading brook, the winding stone paths, the carefully tended standard fuschias, twenty-foot drifts of pink- and rose-plumed astilbe, the impossibly large mounds of blue-green and chartreuse hostas.
And then there is the Japanese garden, a contemplative oasis with low rocky outcrops, trimmed junipers, and a waterfall into ponds that are home to bevies of mother ducks and ducklings, and colored carp as big as your forearm.
The Botanical Garden is right next to the Stade Olympique, a now-dated monument to poured-concrete architecture; the wellknown “Tower of Montreal”, a Concorde-shaped swooping tower of white concrete with a funicula running up its back, rises above the trees of the garden from every angle.
In the evening we took the metro to a new find: “Kamela Couscous”, a tiny restaurant in the Plateau Mont Royal neighborhood, for authentic North African couscous (we had ours with meltingly-tender lamb brochettes) as well as excellent pizza served on lovely Moroccan ceramic plates, and then walked home slowly through the busy Quartier Latin on St.-Denis.
Friday, July 04, 2003 Dreaming of winter (on the July streets on Montreal)
Oooh, very slow this morning after a late night. This city is so quiet compared to most that I know, but at 2:30 am there were still a lot of people on the streets: riding bicycles, talking in groups, one playing a sax on the street corner. The music and voices drifted up to our room as we talked and thought about sleeping. At 3:00 a sparrow started singing, full-throated and determined; our night wound down as its morning began.
A couple of you have wondered why I’m writing and blogging while on “vacation”. Thanks to LH for saying, “what’s not fun about this?”, since that’s the way I feel too. But I wasn’t kidding when I said that I often feel like we live our life in an opposite direction from most people. I think of travel as more of a “change” than a “vacation”; a chance to discover new things but also to look at my own life and self from a different perspective. I’ve spent my entire life trying to carve out time for creative and intellectual work, as well as trying to bring all the different aspects of my life into greater integration, so there isn’t the big gap I used to feel between livelihood and the stuff I really like and want to do. I couldn’t claim that it’s all become seamless, but it’s better than it used to be, and I feel a lot less pressure to escape my “regular life”.
Being an inveterate journal-keeper, I’ve written something almost every day for at least the last two decades. A lot of my journal is personal musing, but a lot of it has always been about what I’m reading, seeing, creating, thinking about, and has to do with drawing lines of connection between them. When I’m away from home, I actually write more; a few of those travel journals got edited afterwards into finished pieces. So blogging fits perfectly into that proclivity. And it’s a challenge to keep it up no matter where I am.
When J. was in Damascus a few years ago he used to stay up very late writing long descriptive letters to me on the laptop. In the morning he’d go to Zoni, one of the only internet places in all of Syria at the time, and send me e-mails on their antiquated equipment. We’d been married for twenty years already, and these were the first letters he’d ever written me. “I’m not verbal,” he’s fond of saying. “That’s your department.” But these letters – averaging a staggering 4,000 words a night – represented the flood of emotions and impressions he was receiving every day as his ancestry unfolded. He couldn’t show me the pictures, so he had to use words.
We were laughing last night, looking at the hundreds of street photographs he’s taken already on this trip. “No wonder Gary Winogrand died with so many rolls of unprinted pictures,” I said. I think every serious journal writer and every documentary photographer, no matter how private their work is at the time, is creating for an eventual audience. I can see why from the outside it might look like an obsession: art and the intellectual life are like that. But for all the inwardness and solitude and personal failings of the artist, the work has an intention that moves outward: hopeful, generous, inviting. I think about Merton’s voluminous journals and how he forbade their publication for 25 years after his death – but the reader is there, always: the unspoken partner on every page, the person in front of the photograph….
Even though I walk every day for exercise, I never cover the miles I do in a city. This morning my hip joints feel like they need to be oiled, but I’m anxious to get out and about again. Yesterday afternoon we took off in different directions; I did my bookstore browsing and a long-distance walk , visiting an art supply store and a favorite ethnic clothing store en route, while J. was in a different part of the city doing street photography. In the late afternoon I stopped in a leafy, cool park, took out the sketchbook I’d bought, and - inspired by the Michel Seuphor quote and my own mentor’s advice forma few days ago - did some quick sketches of people on benches, on the ground, on monuments, squirrels and birds in the grass. Oh, painful recognition! I used to be good at this, and I’m way out of practice. Lumpy people, non-specific rodents! Only the pigeons had potential. So the sketchbook is staying in the backpack, and I will have to take my own advice, and draw something every day until my eyes and hands are re-connected.
One of the things I love most about Montreal, besides the wonderful food, is its ethnic and racial diversity. It truly does seem like a melting pot, with more going into the pot and a far greater real tolerance, even love, of difference than we find below the border. You see all types of people in service positions here, not merely the blacks and Hispanics of so many American cities. It’s also common to see racially-mixed couples, and the fact that I notice at all this tells me something about the racism we take for granted in the States. Another aspect I love is the swirl of languages. Montrealers switch effortlessly between French and English in the course of normal conversation. This is a city filled with immigrants who speak their mother tongues plus, usually, French. That may be one reason why there are so many Middle Eastern and North African immigrants here: many grew up with French as a second language, not English.
Last night we heard a concert by Hamid Baroudi, an Algerian musician who played a fusion of jazz, rock, and traditional North African music. We were part of a crowd of several thousand, and had arrived early enough to be near the front, among what seemed to be the entire North African population of the city. They ranged from an elderly couple, she in full hijab, who sat like impassive dignitaries in canvas folding chairs, to a young Algerian woman who belly-danced through the entire concert while recording it – and the crowd -- on her portable video camera. Next to us, two sisters sang and cheered and danced with their wide-eyed children, while in front, a circle of Arab men of all ages moved slowly counterclockwise, hands raised, dancing from their hips. The music was infectious and terrific, and amplified by the delight and excitement of the dancing, clapping, Arabic-singing crowd, so happy to be together on a beautiful night with a tiny sliver of a Ramadan-like moon overhead, hearing their own music do what art has the power to do – suspend anxiety and transcend difference, war, poverty, and even the wounds of history.
From yesterday's serendipitous bookstore visit:
A Song of Waiting
I am here, waiting by the roadside, my love –
A smile on my lips ending and beginning.
In the clear night lovers are hand in hand,
A word for a word, and an endless smile.
Only my arm trembles in a night of loss.
Will I grow old before my words are heard?
Come to me just once, for the love of heaven,
I’ll light candles for you
And play my guitar.
If you’d let me, love, I’d house you in my ribs,
And if you wearied of my friendship, let you go.
But I would be waiting a lifetime;
I’d leave when the moon appears
And return at dawn,
And in spring I’d be back bearing flowers for you.
In autumn I would disappear under the rain.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
I'm in a copy shop/internet access provider near our hotel, blogging away. Hot, beautiful day here. Below is a post I wrote last night with a shot taken by J.
Nearby is a good used bookstore specializing in literature. I just bought a book of poems by Eric Ormsby, some Paul Tillich, and a book on Modern Arab poets taken off the shelf by Amanda, the clerk who remembered me -- and my interests - from my one and only visit to the shop, "Le Mot", last year. Some excerpts coming soon!
3:39 PM
|
On the street in Montreal
Bon soir! and welcome to Montreal. It’s a beautiful evening on July 1, the national day of Canada, and we’re in our hotel room overlooking a busy street corner in the center of the city. The sounds of the jazz festival are bouncing off the tall buildings around us – it’s a Cuban band right now, full of high-energy Latin rhythm – and we’ve just finished a picnic dinner of fresh French bread, salami, tomatoes, lettuce, olives (little wrinkled Moroccan ones, big green cracked Sicilians), clementines, and a few Medjool dates – with a glass of thick, iced Stolichnaya.
The street outside is quite a contrast to the picture from home I posted yesterday. When you spend your life in a largely meditative environment, as we do, “getting away” means going where there’s a pulse. I often feel that we travel in the opposite direction from many other people, both figuratively and literally: we are the ones heading into the city on a Friday night or holiday weekend, and driving back to the mountains as the campers and boat-trailers make their way back to the city and suburbs. We find that we crave the energizing quality of congregated humans, of steel and glass and concrete built audaciously high, of art concentrated into museums and galleries and theaters, and people of all colors and types animating the sidewalks with their vibrant, unlimited vitality.
Tonight I love being faced with endless choices of where to go and what to do, but I also love the pink and gold sunset in the window, splashing gilded light on the brick facades of high-rise apartments and shining the street, wet with a late afternoon rain. We both lean on the casement, mesmerized; contemplation seems to have hitched a ride with us anyway.
ECOTONE TOPIC for 7/01/03: How are we defined and shaped by the place we live?
The first twenty-five years of my life were spent in the rural, dairy country of central New York State. For the second twenty-five I’ve lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, also in fairly rural areas, but ones that had different landscapes and social personalities from rural New York. That was true when I moved here, but today this place has become far more influenced and pressured by urban sensibilities than the one where I grew up. I’ve taken on some of the characteristics of my adopted home, but I think I remain, at my core, a product of the place I was born and an alien here – well-adapted and content, but alien all the same.
Everybody comments – or used to, when it was more homogeneous – on the laconic nature of New Englanders: there are hundreds of jokes about the “aye-yup” that’s all you get for a positive response when doing your best to start a conversation, or the way new neighbors up here don’t say much, or drop by, or even ask you over – although they’ll always show up in an emergency. Coming from a place that is far more Midwestern in hospitality and open friendliness, I remember being shocked at first when my naturally friendly overtures got so little response. After a while, when the natives figure out that you’re staying, there’s a thaw leading to acceptance and affection, but even after living here half my lifetime I know I’ll never feel native – despite the fact that my ancestors came from here back in the late 1700s!
I’ve been wondering about how the land shapes its overlying social fabric. Life was certainly no less hard for the early colonists of New England than for the folks who traveled a few hundred miles west. People needed each other just as much. But the land here is so different: the valleys narrower; the mountains higher and more difficult to cross; the rivers wide and filled with difficult falls; the climate harsher; the earth rockier; wells harder to dig; and the growing season considerably shorter.
On a macro-level, travel and (practically everything else) was difficult. So was building an infrastructure. Actually, there are a lot of dirt roads here still, and many of them aren’t maintained or passable in the winter. Paved roads suffer a lot of damage every year from frost heaves, so it’s understandable why they aren’t built unless absolutely necessary.
On a micro-level, it’s even difficult to see your neighbors here, except of course if you live in town. The way the land is shaped, you don’t always get clear sightlines across a broad open field to your neighbor’s house or barn; there are always woods in-between, and hills, and rocks. Nothing is flat, or even rolling, especially, and the bony skeleton of the earth is always sticking up a shoulder or elbow right in your way. So while there’s a long tradition here of cooperative barn-raisings and town meetings, I think the land had a lot to do with forcing people into self-sufficiency and a private pride that shaped speech patterns and social interaction.
Back in central New York, there aren’t mountains. The sky is bigger, travel easier, and you can’t help but see your neighbors. My great-aunt and grandmother told of constant “visiting” between members of the extended family, spread over the same hills and valley, and they knew every neighbor – and every neighbor’s idiosyncrasies, as well as their horses and dogs.
Things haven’t changed that much back there. People drop in constantly, and you know everybody’s business because people talk to each other, and because social life is central in a place where people tend to stay put. But also, I think, you can see what people are up to. As a result, excessive desire for personal privacy or unwillingness to “be social” is seen as aloofness or quirkiness. Instead being left alone, people like that tend to be coaxed or teased into interaction. Likewise, there’s almost no tolerance for dishonesty, secrecy, or phoniness because it’s quickly discovered and exposed.
In the case of central New York, not many people move in or out. Those who come do so because they want that kind of environment – or they quickly leave when they find out they’ve moved to a fish bowl where joining the “school” is a lot more important and acceptable than being a big fish. But up here in northern New England, the tradition of privacy is now attracting a certain kind of wealthy person who is escaping urban life. They already feel separate and, often, superior, so why should they want to enter into a community – especially one which seems diffuse and hard to understand? They want their big house on top of the hill, or at the end of a long winding driveway. The land offers them what they want, and they have the money to buy its beauty and the privacy it affords; if it costs a small fortune to drill a well through ledge, or construct a half-mile driveway up a mountain, that’s simply not a problem.
For a decade or two, these immigrants to New England have been a minority, lacking power in local politics and eventually retreating into isolation or adapting to the underlying culture. But now it’s changing. The influx of so many suburban and urban escapees into certain areas is creating demand for sophisticated services and products: a transplantation of urban amenities. The best valley farmland is now worth far more as condominiums and office complexes; box stores with national franchises fill sprawling malls and empty the traditional downtowns; and growers, bakers, and crafters bring their products to fancy “farmers’ markets” on Saturdays – a favorite “quaint” place for the new residents to bring family and friends visiting from the city.
New residents often come here for good jobs in technology, medicine, and education in a place that’s beautiful but not uncomfortably far from major East coast cities. Like so many Americans, they don’t grow roots and stay a lifetime. In our area, the average stay for these migratory residents is seven years. I doubt if they are comforted, really, by the natural landscape, although they may admire it. For so many, what seems to be comforting and grounding is the created landscape of malls and interior spaces that look, feel, taste and sound alike everywhere.
Yesterday we drove in back of yet another giant concrete box, going up in a field above the river. I used to watch great blue herons there, and once a bald eagle – now it’s an asphalt desert, and a memory.
The land used to shape and define us. Now we’re shaping the land.
Please read worldwide thoughts on this topic at the Ecotone Wiki for July 1, 2003 9:36 PM
|
Sunday, June 29, 2003
AN IRANIAN BREAKFAST
The four of us sat in the backyard at a glass table under a canopy. There were delicious eggs with tomatoes, onions, and red peppers; small apple muffins; warm barbari bread and a platter of fresh sabzi (green herbs), the best Bulgarian feta, and walnuts that had been soaked overnight to make them taste like fresh ones. And of course, tea.
The fountain gurgled in Shirin’s new little pool, and every now and then the neighborhood cat, yellow and white, came over and sat among the flowers, staring at the two goldfish swimming in the water.
We talked about the anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and the differences between the Islamic revolution and the current crisis, and whether the injunction for Shi’ia not to hold Friday prayers when the ruler is corrupt should apply as much now as it did in the time of the Shah. And when we grew tired and sad thinking about this, we drank more tea and talked about whether the initial loop on the character mim should be made clockwise or counter-clockwise. Then the world came back to something that felt flower-filled, and of a size you could hold in your hand, like a piece of warm bread with herbs and cheese.
Saturday, June 28, 2003 MAX BECKMANN, Odysseus and Calypso, 1943
"but now he lies away on an island suffering strong pains
in the palace of the nymph Kalypso, and she detains him
by constraint, and he cannot make his way back to his country,
for he has not any ships by him, nor any companions
who can convey him back across the seas's wide ridges." The Odyssey, Book V: 13-17 (Lattimore, transl.)
More on Beckmann:
A page of thumbnails of Beckmann's paintings, with larger versions upon clicking. Includes several self-portraits and lesser-known works. Particualr favorites of mine: "Still Life with Saxophone", "Girl with Mandolin", "Still Life with Sea Gulls", "Quappi with Fur", and "Odysseus and Calypso".
A good biography by Matthew Drutt, from the introduction to the catalog, "Max Beckmann in Exile". Also includes a Beckman bibliography.
And a quote from the artist himself:
"The greatest mystery of all is reality."
I’ve always admired German Expressionism, especially the graphic works and woodcuts in particular. A new show of the paintings and graphics of Max Beckmann (1884-1950) has opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City, Queens, and I imagine it is quite an experience.
In the catalog the artist Leon Golub calls him a "suave brute," adding: "You never know with types like Beckmann whether they are playing it straight or manipulating you. I suspect that he didn't intend these images of the bourgeois world to be seen just as grotesques. He must have been laughing, stepping back and observing the context that he was painting with a sardonic eye, and observing himself in that context with the same eye." "Max Beckmann: Chuckling Darkly at Disaster", NYT
In browsing through 10 pages of Beckmann’s graphic works in the exhaustive LACA collection of German Expressionism, I found the more familiar portraits (he did a brooding etching of Dostoyevsky, for example), self-portraits, and scenes of the bourgeois life, but was surprised to also discover a number of scenes from the life of Christ, and an entire series of illustrations for the Book of Revelations. This was an artist who had been affected enormously by the events of his time, and there was a great deal more to him than “suave brutality”.
(The LACA site is excellent and vast but frame-based; use the above link, then “Browse by Department” to “German Expressionism”, then search by artist to find Beckmann.)
2:34 PM
|
Comments, maybe! I'm doing a test run with HaloScan comments, so if you feel moved to leave a comment over the next few days, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
2:25 PM
|
I always find interesting things at Payvand. Billed as "News, Directory, and Bazaar", this site contains the latest news about Iran gleaned from the world press, as well as books, essays, film reviews from and about Iran...you name it. The book listings alone could keep me busy reading for the rest of my life.
I've been thinking about Michel Seuphor's advice to "make something every day" and remembering a mentor I had when I was starting out as an artist. "Draw every day!" he told me. "Keep a sketchbook with you, and draw something, anything, but do it every day. It doesn't matter what you choose - it can be the doorknob. But keep drawing, make it a habit." This man was a gifted wildlife illustrator who could capture the fleeting pose of any bird or animal. When I asked him how he learned to do this, he told me he used to take his sketchbook and go to a skating rink. He skated in the opposite direction from the circling skaters, and sketched their poses and faces in the brief moments as they passed each other - that was how he trained his eye and mental memory.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
FAITES QUELQUE CHOSE CHAQUE JOUR
The Creation from the Book of Enoch. Limited edition artist's book by Natalie d'Arbeloff
I've recently discovered Blaugustine, the wondrous blog world of Natalie d'Arbeloff. She is a London artist and teacher, of Russian and French descent, who is, for one thing, the creator of extraordinary artist's books. (Facing pages from one are shown above.) She also creates beautifully-drawn and quite funny comics featuring her alter-ego, Augustine, and her adventurous encounters with politics, art, and self.
In addition to being tremendously inventive and gifted, Natalie is also a teacher of art who believes in every person's creative potential. Read Natalie's Bike Ride to Clarity for an unconventional explanation of her philosophy. I'll leave you with a quote on nurturing the creative process from her friend and mentor, Michel Seuphor:
Make something, produce something, anything, but something each day.
Put aside. Don’t judge. Make even if you repeat the same thing day after day.
To build one’s nest twig by twig.
("Faites quelque chose, produisez quelque chose, n'importe quoi, mais chaque jour quelque chose. Mettez de coté, ne jugez pas, mais faites. Même en répètant la même chose plusieurs jours de suite. Faire son nid, petit brin par petit brin.")
Briefly noted:
Affirmative Action Maureen Dowd's scathing editorial in The New York Times, on Clarence Thomas and yesterday's topic --affirmative action -- is well worth a read.
Will the West ever learn? Why were British troops attacked and killed by villagers in Iraq? Although it has taken a while for the media to report it, the story seems to be that the troops used dogs to search people's homes for weapons, and that they also entered the women's private quarters.
Perhaps we can begin to see that traditional Muslims have a different attitude than we do about "public" and "private" spaces, especially those occupied by women who may not be prepared for a visit by unrelated men. But it's hard for me to understand how clueless the British troops were in their use of dogs. The horror and disgust that a Muslim feels when they are touched by a dog, or when their yard - let alone their home - is entered by a dog, may be foreign to most of us, but it is very real to Muslims. Dogs are haram - forbidden and unclean - according to the Qu'ran. If a practicing Muslim is licked by a dog, or their clothing touched, they will almost certainly have to bathe and change all their clothing. I can't even imagine what it would feel like for them to have their home violated by foreigners with sniffing dogs. This is a basic cultural fact; what a way to learn it, and what a way to reinforce the Iraqis' growing belief that this is an occupying army of foreigners disrespectful to Islam.
Today's affirmative action ruling and a thoughtful post on the subject from mysterium got me thinking about racial inequities in our educational system, and how conditioned we are to glossing over them or looking to solutions like affirmative action, when actually the problem is far more complex.
I had a conversation recently about "diversity" with a black graduate of an Ivy League masters degree program. He said he'd like to "dissect the term diversity" for me, and proceeded to explain that of the four black graduates of the program that year, three were essentially high-income immigrants who had received their undergraduate educations at top-flight American institutions - Penn, Harvard, and Berkeley - and had nothing in common with the inner city Black American experience. Only he had come from the ghetto to a small, historically black college (which I admitted I had never heard of); excelled; and won admittance to the prestigious program. And yet this university, like many others, prides itself on its "diverse" student body, and its success in "minority recruitment".
"You have to look under the surface," my young friend cautioned. "Many students are black, it's true. But where did they really come from? Are these the descendents of slavery? Are these students, like me, who couldn't afford to go anywhere but the "historically black college"? And are these the people who, like me, are going to go back to their communties and teach, or be doctors, serve as models for other youths who see drug-dealing or ball or rap as better ways out of their situation? You have to ask, what is the real goal of the educational system?
So these are critical questions to ask, while from the outside we see something that looks like equality of opportunity. Universities also know that children of middle-class black families - families who have left the ghetto a generation or two ago - are a better bet for success than children of poverty and disadvantage. The worst injustices in education may not be being perpetrated at the university level, but in elementary and secondary schools across our country, where the racial and poverty divide is so enormous as to cut off opportunity before a child has learned to read. If you want to know what's really happening in public school education in our nation's cities, read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequities (1992):
In Central Harlem, notes the New York Times, the infant death rate is the same as in Malaysia. Among black children in East Harlem, it is even higher: 42 per thousand, which would be considered high in many Third World nations. "A child's chance of surviving to age five," notes New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, "are better in Bangladesh than in East Harlem." In the South Bronx, says the author of a recent study by the nonprofit United Hospital Fund of New York City, 531 infants out of 1,000 require neonatal hospitalization-a remarkable statistic that portends high rates of retardation and brain damage. In Riverdale, by contrast, only 69 infants in 1,000 call for such attention.
What is promised these poor children and their parents, says Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University, is "an essential level" of care as "distinct from optimal." Equity, he states, is "out of the question." In a similar way, the New York Times observes, a lower quality of education for poor children in New York, as elsewhere in America, is "accepted as a fact." Inequality, whether in hospitals or schools, is simply not contested. Any suggestion that poor people in New York will get the same good health care as the rich or middle class, says Dr. Ginzberg, is "inherently nonsensical."
"Out-and-out racism, which in our city and our society, is institutionalized," said David Dinkins in 1987, a year before he was elected mayor, "has allowed this to go on for years."
Excerpt from Savage Inequities (1992) by Jonathan Kozol (other excerpts available on the web discuss racially-inequitable education in Camden, NJ; East St. Louis; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago.)
7:57 PM
|
Monday, June 23, 2003
A friend writes;
We went to dinner on Saturday at a beautiful home in Lidingoe, an island on the Baltic archipelego. That was on midsummer night, in Stockholm a major holiday where the sun just dips below the horizon all night and it never gets dark, and the sun rises again around 3:45 a.m. It is on the same latitude as St. Petersburg, and so these are in fact ''white nights'' right now. My friends there are all castaway eastern Europeans (plus a handful of Swedes) who had ended up in Stockholm as the iron curtain was raised or their countries just got too chaotic to stay there, they are Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Poles, Russians.
A MEADOW
It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest,
On an immaculate day in the sun of June.
I searched for it, found it, recognized it.
Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.
With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.
Georg Gudni (Iceland), GG #42, oil on canvas, 244 x 208 cm
..."Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? When I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped'? "
"Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this." The Book of Job 38:1
This morning I had the privilege of singing Mozart's Missa Brevis in Bb, for organ, choir, and a small group of strings, at church. What a glorious way to inaugurate summer and end our rather grueling but enjoyable choir season until fall.
The Old Testament lesson was from the great Biblical argument between God and Job, with God speaking to Job "out of the whirlwind". The sermon was about discipleship being "the ship in the storm" - that idea that true Christianity involves leaving one's safe harbor of complacent predictability, and entering the storm of the world's suffering, injustice, and chaos. The rector illustrated his point with the recent "storm" generated by the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire's selection of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man in a committed relationship, as Bishop-elect.
I happen to know Gene a little, and have worked with him on a few occasions. He is a remarkable person who will be a fine Bishop - and he will certainly not be the first gay Bishop in the Anglican church - only the first one to admit it. As the Rector remarked, what is different about Gene is that he is a person who is called "to honesty". Thus he has become a symbol, and New Hampshire has become a whirlwind within the Anglican Church worldwide over this issue.
Afterwards I was talking to an Icelandic friend (who had come to hear the music) about the huge flap this appointment has created in Britain. There are large numbers of gay clergy in England - some have said that if all the gays were asked to resign, England would lose 30% of its clergy - but British society has an unwritten rule of "don't ask, don't tell" that keeps people in the closet. I can hear them now, exclaiming, "Those Americans have done it again, with their damn openness!" Of course what we hear in official objections are conservative theological arguments; "Scripture forbids homosexuality", and so forth. But I think the real fear is not of making decisions that conservatives say are "an abomination to God", but of breaking the taboo on honesty: if this Bishop openly admits he is gay, then where will the truth-telling stop? And what is the cost -- to me?
My friend had an interesting cultural take on this. He said, "I think it's partly due to an 'island mentality'. "In Iceland we have it, for sure, and Ireland does, and I would guess that England does too. It's a collective decision by the inhabitants of an island to form a behavioral pact: this is how we are going to deal with such-and-such an issue, and everybody tacitly signs on to it. When someone breaks that pact, it's as if you're betraying all the inhabitants of the island, so people get very upset."
Needless to say, I had never thought of this, or how deeply imbedded such an unspoken cultural "rule" might be in a society and its institutions.
For a completely different inside take on cultural differences, read Joerg's comments at Conscientious on how he views his native German culture after several years of living in the U.S. Joerg insists he 's not a good writer, and Ok, maybe he doesn't have a polished style - English, after all, is not his first language. But he has something a lot of writers lack and can't make up for with "style" - content. Take a look.
7:43 PM
|
Saturday, June 21, 2003 Pica and Cassandra dual-blogging at the Ecotone Wiki
On Friday, it was a great treat to welcome Pica from Feathers of Hope to our house and garden. Although we both had created entirely different mental images of each other (she had imagined me with long, straight, dark hair) we felt an instant bond and the afternoon flew by much too rapidly. Pica, a lover of calligraphy and the book arts, is the only person in recent memory to have exclaimed over the pen collection in my office, or who's wanted to see my calligraphy and book binding. But she is also a birder par excellence; over lunch in the back yard she stopped and remarked, "Ah, a Carolina wren!" just by hearing the bird's call. I know plants, but I don't know many birds by sound alone. In the photo above, we're making a dual post on the Ecotone Wiki in my office; that's Pica on the left and me on the right. Visit Feathers of Hope for Pica's take on the day.
Today we had an entirely different visit, from an old photographer friend we hadn't seen in twenty years. I don't think I would have recognized him by sight. It wasn't until I got up and was rummaging around in the kitchen, overhearing snatches of conversation about cameras and technical photographic matters between him and my husband, in voices that were entirely unchanged, that I sensed the time warp.
8:56 PM
|
An endless rain is just beginning.
Into the ark, for where else can you go,
you poems for a single voice,
private exultations,
unnecessary talents,
surplus curiosity,
short-range sorrows and fears,
eagerness to see all things from all six sides.
Rivers are swelling and bursting their banks.
Into the ark, all you chiaroscuros and half-tones,
you details, ornaments, and whims,
silly exceptions,
forgotten signs,
countless shades of the color gray,
play for play's sake,
and tears of mirth.
As far as the eye can see, there's water and hazy horizon.
Into the ark, plans for the distant future,
joy in difference,
admiration for the better man,
choice not narrowed down to one of two,
outworn scruples,
time to think it over,
and the belief that all this
will still come in handy someday.
For the sake of the children
that we still are,
fairy tales have happy endings.
That's the only finale that will do here, too.
The rain will stop,
the waves will subside,
the clouds will part
in the cleared-up sky,
and they'll be once more
what clouds overhead ought to be:
lofty and rather lighthearted
in their likeness to things
drying in the sun -
isles of bliss,
lambs,
cauliflowers,
diapers.
Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Personal journal, Japanese side-sewn binding with hand-painted/hand-printed cover papers, 1994
I'm psyched - tomorrow, Pica from Feathers of Hope is coming by for a visit. We've never met, so we're both looking forward to matching reality with our digital impressions of one another. She's out on the east coast visiting family and friends, and taking a swing through our region. Exciting! Bloggers meet in real life! Pica and I are both designers and lovers of the book arts; we recently shared notes about skivving* leather for bookbinding...definite esoterica, but frustrating as hell if you've ever tried to do it without a master bookbinder standing over your shoulder.
The book above has a Japanese sewn binding that uses cloth and thread rather than leather and glue. In this kind of binding, the trick is to avoid stabbing yourself with the stiff sewing needle and getting blood all over your pages during the final operation - I never got very good at it, but enjoyed the process a great deal, and have been thinking lately about doing some more. (I must have surgery on the brain today, after spending part of the day waiting for my husband in the dental office while he had a molar extracted -- yowch!)
(*Skivving is the process of thinning the edges of the "wrong side" of the leather used to make a book's spine. You must use a very sharp, special knife. If you go too far, you'll tear or rip the leather. Not far enough, and the exposed edge will be unsightly and thick.)
"The writer is something of a shape-changer and trickster, someone a little more treacherous, eccentric, and unpredictable than she at first appears, because she is continually buffeted and transformed by an inner life invisible from the outside. She may speak to you in complete sentences about what her day was like, but inside another life is being lived, one full of beauties and monstrosities, upheavals and transgressions." Eric Maisel
via whiskey river
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
I wish I could have shared this glorious summer day in New England with all of you. It was dry, perfectly temperate, and except for a fine dust of tree pollen in the air, absolutely clear. Blowsy white clouds drifted overhead in a cerulean sky, and in the garden, orange Oriental poppies held court in front of deep purple lupine. The peonies, Siberian iris and highbush cranberries are in full bloom, and the budded roses just beginning to show color. Wait a few weeks, and we'll be sweltering in humid 90-degree days, unable to sleep and taking three showers a day. But today -- today was perfection.
Weeding in the back of the garden, I somehow worked myself underneath a thick stand of hollyhocks so that my head and shoulders were actually inside a small chamber formed between their stalks. And suddenly I remembered myself as a little girl, in the hiding spot I used to play in under my grandmother's snowberry bushes and honeysuckles. What was it? I wondered. Surely not the size of things - here I was, like Alice, all grown up and far too big to fit into this child- or cat-size space. But the memory was intense and persistent, so much so that I relaxed and tried to stay in my cramped spot as long as I could. Finally it came to me: it was the silent, cool smell of the damp, rooty earth, in contrast to the fragrant, pollen-rich, smell of summer air, sun-baked leaves and warm soil -- a smell secret and unusual enough to have triggered a certain synapse, and unlocked a door of memory.
9:25 PM
|
Monday, June 16, 2003
A little housekeeping this evening. I've deleted links to some political blogs I'm not reading, and added three new favorites. Beneath Buddha's Eyes is the personal journal of writer/photojournalist Tony Anthony; it is written with great honesty from the heart, doesn't shy away from difficult subjects, and is visually stunning. Mysterium talks about culture, especially in New York City, with excellent links and includes some good poetry by the author himself. And Whiskey River is a daily compendium of quotes and clippings; many recent ones have been about the art, craft, and agony of writing and have been much appreciated by this reader. All are worth your time...
I'll be adding some additional place blogs over the next day or two. The first collective Ecotone blog was terrific and contributors wrote some remarkable and diverse posts; check it out at the Ecotone Wiki.
9:13 PM
|
Today some of us are writing collective blogs on the topic “How I started thinking about place – and why I started writing about it”. You can read others at the Ecotone Wiki, and I encourage you to do that; there are some fine writers and thoughtful place bloggers out there – not just from America, I might add - and this is our first effort to blog collectively.
Wally with Diamond, Beaver Meadow, N.Y., c. 1900
Somewhere in the family photo archives, there’s a picture of my grandmother, my great aunts Inez and Minerva, my mother, and me - as a little girl - prowling through the underbrush near a small creek. It was taken during a family picnic in Beaver Meadow, New York, in the mid 1950s.
The photograph above was taken half a century before, in the same place. That’s my great-grandfather with his horse, Diamond. On the back of this photograph of her father, Inez wrote, “I read Dickens’ History of England under the tree at the far right, and under the tall elm, my cousin and I had our wilderness camp in ‘Indian country’.”
Beaver Meadow is a tiny hamlet in the hills of central New York. It hardly exists anymore, except as a crossroads, but that’s where some of my ancestors settled. The picnic I vaguely remember must have been one of the last times we visited the family farm. My grandmother reluctantly sold it not long afterwards – the family had moved “into town” years before, and her parents had died. But all my childhood I heard about that farm, and Beaver Meadow, from people whose lives had been shaped by that particular place with its trees and hills, the rhythm of the farm and the seasons, the neighbors, the pets and livestock, the secret hiding places of children. It was simply their way of thinking about identity – that you belonged to the place where you lived and knew it intimately, because it was worthy of your attention, study, care, love, and memory.
This older generation passed their love of place on to me, even though their notion of “place” become larger after they moved down into the broad valley of the Chenango River, exchanged horses for automobiles, began to travel, and saw the world expand through two world wars. “Place” was a fluidly expanding and contracting concept: it might mean the America written about by Willa Cather – the Plains where one great-great uncle had gone to settle - or the southern cities of Tennessee Williams that my grandparents visited on their road trips. A different kind of “place” also existed vividly for all of us in far-flung books and in imagination: thus my great aunt’s History of England, read under a tree in the pasture, and her imaginary childhood “Indian country” beyond. But just as easily, it could turn into my little patch of mint under the grape arbor behind the barn, where a wolf spider lived; or the fur-lined rabbit nest in the perennial bed, carefully protected by my grandfather.
When I was twelve, my great aunt Inez, who was a history teacher without children or grandchildren of her own, gave me a book of stories she had written about her childhood back in Beaver Meadow. Even at twelve, I understood that this was more than another installment in the collection of American history books she had already given me. Of course I didn’t appreciate what she had done until much later, when I had moved pretty far away myself and was starting to think about my own identity and where it had come from. When I re-read her stories and journals after her death at 88, I also found a long, evocative description of life on the family farm in the 1880s, written by her mother. My own grandmother, who wrote me letters about her garden until she was 90 years old, and my mother, who just sent me an email about finding gooseberry bushes in the woods across the road and with whom I’ve prowled countless woods and shorelines, also conveyed the same messages about the importance of place in the midst of chaos, confusion, and change.
It’s taken me a while to begin the grasp the nature of the torch I’d been handed at age twelve. I eventually discovered that the point was not to go back to Beaver Meadow and retrace my heritage, or even to write in the same descriptive vein about my adopted home in New England. It was to enter as seriously into relationship with my particular place in time and space as these women had, to learn from it, and to find my own ways of passing it on. What they had done was to capture the beauty of lives lived simply and attentively, and in doing that to tell me, “Here is something that will see you through”.
I write about place, in both a particular and a broad sense, because I’ve realized that I was given something precious that most people in our culture simply don’t have. A sense of deep connection and belonging -- to nature, to place, to the mystery of existence and creation: these are our birthright as human beings. There is no greater evidence for me of the alienation of modern life than the fear most people have of nature, co-existing with an equally intense sense of hunger, longing, and homelessness. As we’ve paved over our meadows and plastic-wrapped our foods, we’ve obliterated the paths designed to take us back to our origins and the truth about ourselves; we’ve encapsulated our souls. The enormous sense of loss I feel, observing the changes in attitudes and destruction of the environment that have taken place since my family left the farm in Beaver Meadow, is nothing compared to the collective loss I feel for the souls of humanity.
And so I write about place in the hope of awakening that inborn spark of recognition; of de-mystifying the web of connectedness between 21st century humans and the living earth; and of perhaps offering a safe passage, comfortably cushioned with words, into silence, wonder, and love. Without those, I don’t think there is much hope of awakening a sense of responsibility toward this fragile earth.
