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, January 31, 2004
Left the computer and writing assignments for a walk in the woods this afternoon. Nearly froze, but it was beautiful. Creaking and groaning overhead: a constant conversation among the trees. I had never heard this before. It must have been the cold. I stopped on the path, which was fishtail-imprinted with snowshoe tracks, and listened, looking up. The trees - tall white pines, cherries, beech, maples, hemlocks - moved heavily in the wind. Branches creaked against one another, and there were cracks and groans almost like the moaning protestations of lake ice; I wondered, for a moment, if one of the trees would come down. But nothing happened except the swaying, and the talking of the trees, and finally I turned my back on the conversation and went on uphill through the woods, panting and stopping evry now and then to wipe the ice off my glasses when my breath, caught by the scarf wrapped over my nose, rose upward, condensed, and froze.
8:19 PM
|
Friday, January 30, 2004
We met a friend, a graduate student at McGill, for brunch on Sunday at the mysterious cafe I wrote about for the Ecotone Cafe as Place topic a few months ago. Accompanied as I was by two men (one Asian, and one who passes for Muslim quite often, with his Middle Eastern good looks and beard) the proprietor was friendlier to me, and I kept my interaction to a "salaam" and a brief nod as we came in, and a "shukrun" as we left. J. did the ordering - cups of fine, dark, foamy coffee; croissants; fresh-baked fragrant za'atar bread, glistening green with spices and oil; a filo-wrapped spinach and onion pie, and a platter of delicious salads: lentil, couscous and tomato, and taboulleh made the authentic way, using little else but parsley and a bit of perfectly cooked bulgar.
We were sitting in the bright sunlight streaming in the window that separated us from the 10-degree-below zero day, when a van pulled up outside. Two Muslim women in headscarves got out, unloaded several cardboard boxes of prepared food and canned goods, and came into the cafe along with another man and a small child. "Ah," I thought. "A few more mysteries are about to be solved." The young woman I had already met; she was the proprietor's wife. But here was a mother - his, most likely, and the probable source of most of the wonderful food we were eating - and a beautiful child who immediately began playing a shy game of hide-and-seek with me behind the cafe chairs. After unloading the food, the mother and wife sat down and had something to drink while the two men set about making pizza.
I felt better, watching the calmness of this small family, and knowing that the loneliness I had feared for the young wife was probably not a reality. I was glad that they are in Quebec and not in France, where the appalling and short-sighted ban on headscarves would cause them so much pain. And if we hadn't had a guest I would have gone over and tried to speak to the two women, for that, I've learned, is how Muslim culture works: women forming relationships with women, sitting over food and its preparation, caring for the small children, talking. It surprised me to realize that in three or so years I've gained enough confidence to even consider trying to bridge the huge gaps between strangers separated by culture, location, religion and even language. What language could we communicate in? French perhaps; I still don't know where this family is from, but I think they are Turkish. Next time I want to tell the mother how delicious her food is, and tell her I also make this kind of taboulleh, which I learned from my own mother-in-law. We have a lot in common, really, all that we need for a conversation: we are women, and we've spent our lives making food for those we love, and for hungry strangers.
Today I opened the attic door to take some unused dishes upstairs and store them. On the bottom step I saw a small brown furry shape. A bat, I thought. Is it dead? We know there are bats in the attic, in summer, but this is the middle of winter. What to do? I shut the door, put down the dishes. Opened the door. Holding a magazine or a paper towel, some sort of paper, i can't remember, in my hand I poked very gently at the fuzzy brown ball. It moved, sleepily, shifting its legs and folded wings and curling back up again. I shut the door, and felt a wave of sympathy. It's cold, I thought. Freezing. So it has come down the stairs to huddle on the other side of this door that leads to heat. I can't very well invite it in, but I can leave it alone. J. came upstairs for dinner an hour later. We have a bat, I said, and opened the door a crack. Oh, it's gone. No there it is, crawling up the inside of the door frame. It looked at us with one tiny, beady black eye.
Another thing I like about the Basilica Notre Dame is that many of the stained glass windows depict local, historical scenes that had a religious focus. Nearly every place in Montreal and Quebec is named after Saint Someone, or important historical and political figures - most of whom were French and Catholic to the core. Thus, in the cathedral, you get a picture of Jeanne Mance, an early settler who was a Florence Nightingale figure, now considered a sort of patron saint of the city, caring for the poor and sick; or a painting of a nun sitting with two Indian women dressed in fringed deerskin to whom she has given food.
Montreal is watched over by "Mont Royal", a smallish but predominant mountain that rises above what is now the McGill university campus. There's a huge cross up on the mountain, and despite the great ethnic and religious diversity of this city, I doubt that anyone could pass a law ordering it taken down. In the stained glass window shown here, Maisonneuve carries the first cross to the top of Mont Royal in the snow.
From Frommer's History of Quebec and Montreal: The Founding Of Montreal--Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve arrived in 1642 to establish a colony and to plant a crucifix atop the hill he called Mont-Royal. He and his band of settlers came ashore and founded Ville-Marie, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, at the spot now marked by Place Royale. They built a fort, a chapel, stores, and houses, and the energetic Jeanne Mance made her indelible mark by founding the hospital named Hotel-Dieu-de-Montréal, which still exists today.
Life was not easy. Unlike the friendly Algonquins who lived in nearby regions, the Iroquois in Montréal had no intention of living in peace with the new settlers. Fierce battles raged for years, and the settlers were lucky that their numbers included such undauntable souls as la Salle, du Luth, de la Mothe Cadillac, and the brothers Lemoyne.
At Place d'Armes stands a statue of de Maisonneuve, marking the spot where the settlers defeated the Iroquois in bloody hand-to-hand fighting, with de Maisonneuve himself locked in mortal combat with the Iroquois chief. De Maisonneuve won.
From that time the settlement prospered, though in 1760 it fell to the British, the year after Wolfe defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in Québec. Until the 1800s the city was contained in the area known today as Vieux-Montréal. Its ancient walls no longer stand, but its long and colorful past is preserved in the streets, houses, and churches of the Old City.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004 La basilique Notre Dame de Montreal
The cathedral of Notre Dame sits in an urban neighborhood of Montreal, facing north, with the river and the Old City below and at its back. When I go to church in Montreal, which is not often, I go to Christ Church Cathedral, the Anglican church in the center of downtown, on the western side of the city, beyond the north-south dividing line that historically separated the English Protestant side of the city from the French Catholic one. But I've gotten in a habit of going to Notre Dame to sit and pray, light a candle, listen to the organ, walk up and down the side aisles past the polychromed saints and the banks of lamps and candles. I like cathedrals anyway; I like abandoning my Protestant reserve for a little while and giving myself over to the ritual of lighting a candle with a long wooden straw, and listening to the sound of my coin as it drops into the brass offertory box, even though I vigorously resist the idea that I'm paying for prayers. I like to stare at the carved wooden confessionals, dark and empty during the daytime, and the wheelchair ramp leading up to a secret room into which people disappear and where, I suppose, a priest does await them. Sometimes I toy with the idea of going there myself - what would I say? "Bless me Father, for I have sinned, I'm an Episcopalian from New Hampshire and I write about Gene Robinson?" So far my curiosityhas stopped short of such an experiment.
I like Notre Dame because it is mostly quiet, except for the faint strains of organ music or a singer practicing in a far room, and the murmur of visitors. I like it because it is so unabashedly Catholic, filled with statues of saints and figures of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I like the basin of holy water at the entrance, the other-worldly blue lights behind the altar and the way that every inch of wood has been painted and decorated and gilded; it is so French, so over-the-top. And I suppose I like suspending my Protestantism and intellectualism enough to be small, and awed, and one of many.
There is something enormously powerful about ritual, whether it is the piling of stones in a cairn on a Tibetan mountain, or lighting a yak-butter lamp, or bowing before an altar. I don't pretend to understand it, and I don't often give myself to it fully, or without somehow apologizing simultaneously to my rational mind, which almost certainly defeats the purpose. But sometimes it happens, in a spontaneous gesture that springs from somewhere beyond the reach of that mind. In those rare moments I feel a connection to a deeper, ageless self, and to the millions of humans who are simpler souls, less burdened by the intellectual baggage and self-consciousness of western civilization and the legacy of the enlightenment.
8:35 PM
|
I hope everyone has checked out Natalie's brilliant, illustrated list of THOUGHTS at blaugustine.
8:21 PM
|
Tuesday, January 27, 2004 THE DANCE OF THE ICE-SHANTIES
On our way to Canada this time, we got off the highway and drove across the flat, wind-scoured floodplain of the Richelieu River. We drove past farmhouses, barns, and grain silos, set like scattered oases in a white desert that stretches to the horizon. Snow lies in the frozen furrows, punctuated only by rows of stiff, cut cornstalks, and the wind carries any loose snow and remnants of dusty soil across the fields from west to east, where they pile in huge drifts against any obstacle - usually a house, silo, or barn. It's hard to imagine living in such an inhospitable landscape, or to imagine the fertile crops of corn, wheat, and even strawberries that will grow here in half a year.
The road took us along the very top of Lake Champlain, the 120-mile-long lake that runs down from Canada and divides Vermont and upper New York State. The lake was both an historical waterway and site of many battles during the French and Indian War and the Revolution; it's also very beautiful, with the Green Mountains of Vermont visible on the eastern side, and the Adirondacks on the west. In the picture at the top of this post are ice fishing shacks for rent along the shoreline. Don't they look like they might rise up on legs (in striped stockings, maybe) and dance? In the distance is Jay Peak, one of the largest and northernmost peaks of Vermont's Green Mountains. We walked out onto the ice to look around and discovered that there was a "road" out onto the lake and trucks and cars moving out there -- so we drove out. The second photo was taken half a mile out; there were two "chemins" (roads) with whimsical signs and arrows, and ice fishing shacks, complete with chimneys puffing smoke, arrayed along them, as far as we could see into the distance. The ice itself was glassy and, mercifully, thick.
Every summer there are sightings in Champlain of a Loch Ness-like creature, well known to the locals and nicknamed "Champ". I think most northern New Englanders believe there's something in the lake; there have just been too many sightings and photos to dismiss but never anything conclusive. And besides, people want to believe in such things. The front of this restaurant at the top of the lake was drifted full of snow, but I liked its spirit.
A few miles further on, we crossed the Richelieu, which runs out of the lake to St. Lawrence. We stopped in the center of a town to take pictures of an aluminum-steepled Catholic church and its graveyard, the tombstones with their crosses and French names barely visible above the drifted snow. On the road outside that town, along the river, we passed a marina where big sailing boats were wrapped for the winter in blue shrink-wrap plastic covers, and slowed to pass a huge, bright yellow, snow-eating machine, with a frontal screw-like mechanism inside a plowblade. It cut a clean swath through the packed drifts, and sent the plowed snow up into a chute that blew the snow into a huge arc, across the highway, over the tops of passing cars and trucks.
4:44 PM
|
Monday, January 26, 2004 Book Browsing at Indigo, downtown Montreal.
Back home, in a warm house. Ahhh. I've rarely been out in weather as cold as the past few days in Montreal, but it was exhilarating. My gratitude for high-tech wind-blocking outerwear and fleece and wool has never been greater; when bundled up properly the only parts of my body that felt cold were the exposed bits of skin on my cheeks and around my eyes, and perhaps the backs of my legs where the wind whipped against them. We walked long blocks between destinations, ducking into the often-unmarked hobbit-holes that lead to the Metro and Montreal's famous "underground city" of shops and restaurants, or arriving at a movie theater, shop, restaurant or cafe to relish the rush of warm air and begin the unpeeling of parkas, fleece jackets, vests, hats, scarves and balaclavas so that we could sit and eat or watch or wander in comfort until the next brave foray out into the elements. I'll write more about the trip over the next few days; we did a lot in a short time and it was a good break before some very concentrated work that's coming up.
