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
Thursday, August 05, 2004
MONTREAL and the St. Lawrence river, from the Pont Jacques Cartier.
We've been doing a lot of biking in this ultimately velo-friendly city, and a few days ago rode up onto the Jacques Cartier bridge, which spans the St. Lawrence on the eastern side of the city. The island you see on the left is only partway across the river; the St. Lawrence is huge. I stood on the bridge for what felt like hours as the sun went down over the city, watching the light play on the steel and glass surfaces of the downtown skyscrapers, witnessing the ponderous advance of a giant container ship into the port, and the mosquito-like darting of tiny white cigarette boats below me. All the while the air was filled with the smells of the river and the pungency of hops, appropriately perfuming the city from the Molson plant that dominates the shoreline. It was an extraordinary evening, and there was a steady stream of cyclists and walkers of every age and ethnicity, most of whom - not matter how hip or hurried - paused for a few minutes to look out over their city.
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When meeting bloggers in the flesh, one must expect the unexpected. Wednesday night I attended my first meeting of a Montreal bloggers' group. It takes place on the first Wednesday of every month at a friendly, noisy bar/resto within walking distance of our apartment. The instructions said to come any time between 8:00 and midnight, so we walked over and arrived about 9:30. No sign of the stuffed cow that Patrick had promised, and I had imagined hanging on a wall abover the designated table, so finally we shyly asked the largest group if they were bloggers. "Oui! Yes!" came the bilingual reply, with sounds of chairs being pulled out for us. Several of the bloggers there already knew and read "Cassandra", so there was a warm welcome, but I think it would have been warm anyway; this was a congenial crowd of a dozen or so. "Ou est la vache?" I inquired. "Voila!" said Patrick, holding up a small stuffed cow doll with a rakish grin, perched on the table between the espresso cups and beer glasses.
J. immediately fell into conversation with Martine and Blork. Painter/writer/programmer Maciej was at the second table. Across from me sat a philosopher-blogger who writes under the nom de plume of Zenon. "Pourquoi 'Cassandra'"? he asked, and off we went into a two-hour conversation about metaphysics and religion; he had come to the Plateau earlier that afternoon to browse some of the many good used-book stores and had found a treasure, L'oeil du coeur of Frithjof Schuon , to whose work and thought I was introduced during the evening. At about 11:00 Zenon said good night, and we finished the evening in the excellent company of Martine and Blork, talking about moving, learning French, San Francisco, pizza...in other words, it was a fine night and a happy first meeting.
For a brief overview, see this expanded group from the BBC. The first image is the one we had in our house, and it's one that's often used to illustrated C-B's phrase "the decisive moment".
An in-depth retrospective has been put up on the Magnum site (be patient, the site is slow to load). Magnum was the first organized photographic agency (Cartier-Bresson was one of the founderf) and remains one of the best and most prestigious photojournalistic organizations. the organization was also a pioneer in protecting artistic copyright and raising the level of regard for editorial and journalistic photography as a profession.
A few years ago, we saw a Cartier-Bresson retrospective. I had never seen his photographs from Mexico and China and Russia in a group, and I remember being stunned by the humanity in every shot. There was nothing sensational or grabby in his work, and you never felt like either the subject or the viewer was being manipulated or exploited. They were records of moments in human lives, where the subjects were not judged or labeled or ranked. I can't express it exactly. I simply always felt with Cartier-Bresson, the humanity of each person was elevated by his own humanity, his own anonymity even though, in real life, he was far from anonymous. But when he took his pictures, I am sure there was no sense of personal celebrity, rather an identification with all people and a desire to be an eye, not an ego.
It's necessary to interrupt this travelogue to pay tribute to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died today at age 95. The picture above is from a short article about the photographer, with some images, at the BBC. I was surprised to see the announcement of his death this afternoon because, frankly, I thought he had died a while ago, so great was his reclusiveness.
My husband, J., who is a photographer, always admired Cartier-Bresson. For years a poster with one of his famous images hung in our house, and we have often taken down one of the books of his work and pored over it. J. likes and practices the genre known as "street photography" more than any other. I don't know if Cartier-Bresson, the renowned Magnum photo-journalist, Parisian legend, and photographer of luminaries, could be said to have "invented" street photography but he was certainly a practitioner and his work paved the way for the many fabulous street photographers who followed. He coined the phrase "the decisive moment" and his best work is an illustration of that concept - one which I think a Zen master would recognize.
From what I've read, Cartier-Bresson was still taking photographs at 95, but preferred anonymity to fame. Farewell to one of the truly great artists of the 20th century, from whom I have learned a great deal about creativity and spontaneity underpinned by technique.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004 LUNCH COUNTER, RUTLAND, VERMONT
On Friday, we headed to central New York State to attend a family wedding and visit my parents. We were in Rutland, Vermont around lunchtime, and so we stopped at the Seward Family Restaurant, a favorite of ours, discovered from visits to the Rutland Fair, a true rural fair with vegetable exhibits, livestock judging and ox-pulls.
It's a family-style diner, with tables as well as a lunch counter, and the whole thing has grown up around one of the last working dairies in the state. I think you can still go through the restaurant and through the gift shop which sells maple sugar candy and syrup and Vermont t-shirts and the ubiquitous cards and calendars with autumn leaves and cows and covered bridges, to look in on the actual dairy with its stainless steel tanks and pipes and butter-churns and ice-cream machines. We didn't do that this time, nor did we eat ice cream, just the chowder of the day - corn - and a turkey sandwich. The waitresses were all elderly women, and the people at the next table were a Vermont couple, clearly in their late eighties at least, the woman in a flowered housedress and the man in a cap from a tractor manufacturer. It's the sort of place where men leave their hats on, and kids can, and do, run around from table to table.
That's Mr. Seward, in the framed photograph, taken back in the fifties, when Vermont was really a place where there were more cows than people, and nobody would have argued,as they do now, that the Rutland Fair wasn't important anymore.
