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
Friday, July 09, 2004
We’re parked on Av. Peel at 10:30 on a foggy morning; J. has gone to the bank to pick up the certified check for the apartment and I’m staying in the car with our things. It is the city: people on bicycles; people with coffee; a big construction site right here next to the car with two orange cranes towering above the concrete, and construction workers with their hard hats and cigarettes amid piles of steel beneath a huge architect’s rendering of the eventual finished luxury apartments and retail shops.
Driving across the St. Lawrence on Pont Champlain this morning, the city grey on the far shore in its veil of fog, it would have been hard to encapsulate my feelings. I’m excited and nervous, but at center, relatively calm. I know this is a big step for us, and a major event in our lives – the beginning of something I can’t predict. We have set something in motion, and agreed to ride it without a sure destination. My calmness, I think, comes from knowing J. well enough, and myself well enough, to realize it’s not an irreversible decision. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll find something that does. I’m calm in the knowledge that I do love this place and am ready for a change and an adventure, which it will surely be – dealing with the language alone will be that.
What I found myself pondering as we crossed the wide, wide river, with the Stade Olympique in the distance and Maisonneuve’s “royal mountain” and cross ahead of us, is what will happen to me – to us – in this place. Will we continue to pass in and out of it, or eventually live here most of the time? How will it change me as a writer, and as a person? Who will we meet here? How will the city shape our work, our spirits? What can we contribute to its already-rich life? And how will it figure in the trajectory of these two human lives: will we someday grow old and die here, or will it be a place we live and leave, a stepping-stone on our journey through life? On this humid summer morning there are no answers, just the dampness curling the hair on my neck; the sound of metal clanging on metal; the workers’ appreciative glances at a passing woman’s derriere, and my amused appreciation of theirs; the traffic; the Tudor-style building on the corner with French signs – “á louer” “for rent” – on its black-and-white timber-frame façade. Bienvenue á Montreal.
Have others had trouble lately accessing this site? One commenter says she has. I doubt I can do anything about it; I've had trouble accessing other Blogger sites this past week too, and it has taken ages to "publish" each post. One thing you can try if the page doesn't load and you get an error message - hit "GO". Sometimes the page will then come up. But please let me know if you've been having trouble.
11:17 AM
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004
HOUSEKEEPING
We are packing the car to go to Montreal tomorrow, and will be closing on our new apartment on Thursday. One of the first things we'll be doing is installing a network in the new place, but please don't expect much blogging for the rest of the week. If my stats over the last few days are any indication, everyone's on vacation anyway!
We became very interested in the recent Canadian election when the posters for the candidates went up during our stay there, about six weeks before the vote. I was so surprised to see posters for so many candidates with ethnic names - Indian, Arab, Greek, Asian and many others, in addition to the expected French-Canadian and English names. "How wonderful," I thought, "and how sad to notice the level of my surprise." We followed the election avidly, not knowing much of anything about how Canadian politics works or who the parties are. I still don't know enough to say anything about it, except that it was refreshing to see a multi-party system in action, and to hear national debate about both the electoral system and major issues that effect people's lives.
One of these days I will update my blgoroll to more accurately reflect what I'm reading. In the meantime, I'd like to recommend a few Canadian blogs that I enjoy. All of these blogs have eclectic, well-written, intelligent content, ranging from art to politics to international culture.
Marja-Leena, who I have mentioned before, is a talented Finnish-Canadian printmaker. She writes about art, culture, politics...and regularly posts some of her work, which is beautiful.
chandrasutra may be known to those of you in Buddhist circles, but the blog includes extremely thoughtful, intelligent commentary on Canadian politics and societal trends as well. Her recent posts on "Deep Integration" and on the Canadian elections should be interesting to anyone.
Flaschenpost is written by a German/Canadian woman in Vancouver. I've especially enjoyed her comparisons of German and Canadian politics and culture.
And Idle Words, by painter/programmer Maciej Ceglowski, is another take on a recent move to Montreal by someone who was living previously in Vermont. He's an excellent writer and observer, and often quite funny; take a look.
As for me, I'll see you all in a few days.
3:58 PM
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Sunday, July 04, 2004
A PARTY
Yesterday we attended the 50th birthday party of a good friend who is a sculptor and jeweler. The party was a potluck barbeque held in a rustic pavilion at a large dam and public park, out in the country, which used to be a popular skinny-dipping site back in the hippie days around here. Now that the Army Corps of Engineers is in charge, you have to reserve the pavilion months in advance, promise not to consume alcohol on the premises (although there were margaritas in the lemonade containers), and keep your bathing suit on. By the time we arrived, the park ranger had already cruised by twice.
Most of the people who came were also involved in the arts in some way, and they hailed from Vermont and Manhattan, the two places our friend has lived. There were people we've known forever, and a lot of new faces, and since it was a pretty hot day, we all ended up sitting on picnic tables under the open pavilion, talking and eating grilled chicken and hamburgers and sausages, salads of every description, roasted corn, blueberry coffee cake and platters of brownies until the sun went down.
The talk was, not surprisingly, heavily political. This was a liberal crowd, many of whom had seen Michael Moore's film and wanted to talk about it, and there was a lot of speculation - and anxiety - about what would happen in the election. The New Yorkers wanted to know what attitudes were here, and vice versa. There was also plenty of typical artist chit-chat: "what are you working on, have you had a show recently, how is it going, I think I last saw your work five years ago..." with the most buzz about a young local sculptor who had had his first New York group show and immediately sold several works and been mentioned in a NY Times article. One of my old friends has just started a new commercial jewelry venture with a partner from Martha's Vineyard, so we heard about that and examined one of the prototypes, on her wrist; another has recently opened a fancy shoe store; and two Buddhists who have been together for eons told us that they had recently been quietly married. And as is always the case when Manhattanites are present, there was talk of inflated real estate prices in the city, and horror stories about trying to find apartments and studio space, and the usual, cathartic listing of advantages and disadvantages of living here (Vermont) and there (Manhattan) with the New Yorkers ending up satisfied that they were going back to where they wanted to be, and the Vermonters shaking their heads at the idea that it costs as much to keep a car in the city as some people live on up here.
I spent a long time talking to an elderly couple who I've known tangentially because they are film buffs who we often see at the movie theaters. The man, a former professor of creative writing, and I compared notes on films we'd seen recently. He's a typical local older person for here: crusty, amusingly dour, both self-deprecating and self-absorbed, a bit weather-beaten around his European features; he was attired in shorts, a worn polo shirt and an old khaki sunhat. I speared marinated green beans and roasted peppers from my plate of salad, eating standing up, and he talked.
Eventually the birthday girl came over and asked if we had everything we needed. Yes, we did, all except being fifty again, he said. She smiled and gave him a hug. "You're looking very pink today," she said. "Ruddy. Healthy."
"Well, you know what Emily Dickinson had to say about pink," he said, and recited in a clear, strong voice:
Oh give it Motion -- deck it sweet With Artery and Vein -- Upon its fastened Lips lay words -- Affiance it again To that Pink stranger we call Dust -- Acquainted more with that Than with this horizontal one That will not lift its Hat --
"She wrote that after studying a corpse," he said, turning to me. The birthday girl smiled politely and fled. "Every morning when I'm looking at my face in the mirror, shaving, I can't help but think of those lines."
Around seven people began to drift away, and we gathered our plastic containers, said our goodbyes, and drove home through the bucolic Vermont evening. When we first lived here, this outlying area was rural, still farmed, and the houses had often been owned by one family for generations. Now every one of these white clapboarded wooden buildings is worth at least three or four hundred thousand dollars, and owned by a doctor, or professor, or independently wealthy retiree. There's been an enormous amount of subdivision of former farmland, and construction of new, expensive homes.
But the land is beautiful, silent, inscrutable. Stone walls still wend their way through dark woods as if extending directly from the stone outcrops, covered with moss and limestone-loving ferns; above the fields and woods the mountains reign purple and blue in the distance, and wooly sheep still graze in the ditches beside the road.
9:32 PM
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