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
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
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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
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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.
