the cassandra pages

Looking back on April: Experiments with Poems and Social Networks

 

Primary Colors: Place des Arts, under construction, April 20, 2010

Well, we finally have a sunny, slightly warmer day here. The snow is gone, and most of the flowers and unfurling leaves don't look much the worse for their brief ice-bath. Back on our bikes, we rode to the studio this morning against a stiff wind, and halfway here I got a flat tire. There's a lot of glass on the roads and though we try to avoid it, you can't always: when we took the tube out of the tire there was a clear puncture, and a hole sliced right through the tire itself. It's just one of the dangers of spring on these streets, and we keep spare tubes on hand because we know we're going to get flats. I'm happy the slush is gone, and that I can be back on my bike.

So it looks like this roller-coaster month of April will exit calmly, after all. It's been an experimental month for me in two ways: the commitment to NaPoWriMo and writing a micropoem every day, and a month-long more-serious engagement with social networking, posting my poems on Identica and Twitter, and trying to give Facebook more of a chance. It's also been a very busy time because of managing the qarrtsiluni chapbook contest, with a lot of responsibilities around the closing deadline of April 15.

My general feeling is that I'll be glad to see April go! I've enjoyed writing the poems, and think that together they form a pretty interesting condensation of my impressions during one month of my life. I'll continue, as I did throughout last year, but loosely. My feelings about the social networks are a lot more complex.

I use Identica and Twitter mostly as places to post poems or short observations; in other words, creatively.  I think they offer a lot of possibilities that way, and that few of us are exploiting them fully. But in order to do that you have to be very engaged with the medium and willing to post a number of times per day, and I just can't do that; I do the minimum, to keep my hand in, and to be able to notice what the people I follow are doing.

Facebook is different, and while my instinctive dislike of it has softened during this past month, I still have really big problems with it. At its worst, it reminds me of high school: I've got absolutely no desire to go back to the unhappiest time of my life, when everyone was collecting friends and striving to be noticed while basically swimming in a sea of superficiality. At its best, FB is clearly a fantastic networking tool for organizations, artists, groups and individuals; it's been great for Phoenicia Publishing, and is important for me as an editor at qarrtsiluni too; I've been able to be visible and connected in new ways with our contributors and with other writers, and that's all good.

It's also clearly a way to reach out of one's solitude or boredom during the day and connect with people, or at least feel like other people exist. But I'm not sure how much actual friendship or genuine interest really occurs in these postings and responses; my number of "friends" has approximately tripled during April, but most of these are people I don't know at all, and probably never will. If I made the same kind of effort many people apparently do, I could probably accumulate a thousand FB "friends" - but what would this mean? Of course I'm glad to hear from real friends and make new ones, to read what they're doing and be able to respond, but it's all so fast, and the interaction as slight and fleeting as the hint of breeze on a hot summer day: briefly the skin cools and feels refreshed, but the next moment the discomfort and heat are back again.

What I perceive as the force driving social networking is the basic and universal human hunger for recognition, connection, affirmation, and relief from loneliness. Blogging was/is that way too, but it requires a different level of time commitment and focus. For me, interacting on social networks does very little to address those needs, and actually distracts me from the sort of activity that does make me feel fulfilled -- like trying to write a thoughtful blog post, practicing the piano, making something in the studio, writing a letter to a friend, having someone over for dinner, reading a book, taking a walk, talking to people. I'm sad, actually, that social networking has replaced blogging for so many of us, but I understand why that is. There's only so much time in a day, and everyone calculates their own time-benefit ratio to determine how to use it.

I get a lot less creative or serious work done when I'm active on Facebook or Twitter, and at the end of the day I realize I feel worse, not better. On the other hand, social networking is obviously here to stay, it works for a lot of people, for many it's become their preferred method of communication. I want and need to maintain a presence there, but I also know now that I need to limit my exposure. The privacy issues are another whole subject, and I think they're pretty significant.

So, I'll think I'll continue to post occasional micropoems online, and use FB and Twitter and Identica to help Phoenicia and qarrtsiluni, and check once or twice a day to see what other people are up to, but that's it. I need to focus on my work and on the friendships I already have, and actually to go deeper into my own solitude, both because running from it does no good, and because it's one of my creative and spiritual wells.

What I've said here is personal and not intended to judge anybody else's engagement with different forms of online media. I'd love to hear what you think about this subject.

Flattened

It's OK. It's melting, and tomorrow is supposed to be in the 60s. We're tough up here.

 

Gak.

It's snowing.

Looking ahead

Well, yesterday I got a call from the president of the gardening association, saying there would be a meeting at the gardens on Saturday morning, and at that time we'd get our plots and keys to the padlocked fence and learn the rules. OK, I'll be there. Today I walked over to the gardens in the late afternoon to have a look, and see if there was anyone working there who I could talk to. As it turned out, there was - a nice man in a beat-up flannel shirt conferring about some emerging plants with an older fellow in blue denim. They came over to the gate and talked to me. I found out that there were only two plots available this season (I was sooo lucky!) and that we're allowed to grow vegetables in 25% of the terrain if we use containers or a plastic barrier - great news, because if my plot has enough sun, that will mean I can grow a couple of tomatoes and some herbs or lettuce in a large pot. Some of the gardeners have raised their beds, probably with a plastic barrier beneath them, but that looks like way too much trouble to me for a mostly-flower garden. I asked about the nature of the contaminants; it's typical industrial stuff -- metals, oil, lead. Great. But better to know than not. Practically every park here is built on a former landfill.

In the existing gardens, you'd never know what was in the ground underneath: bulbs are blooming, peony leaves unfurling, daylilies sending up strong spiky leaves. The walk or bike ride there will be pleasant; I found a way through neighborhood streets that avoids traffic, and there's even a pretty good grocery store on the way back. As the trees begin to leaf out here and shrubs start blooming, I'm plagued by my usual spring allergies and headaches, but can feel myself starting to be more cheerful. Talking to these other gardeners today helped. As much as I like and need some solitude, I'm a social person and need contact and conversation; I've missed having neighbors and daily post-office conversations in this place where everyone is so careful about giving other people their privacy. Montrealers don't say hi on the street; they don't even look at you. It isn't unfriendliness, because if anything happens everyone laughs or helps or whatever -- it's an unspoken code of privacy. But it's hard for me, even without the language issues - it goes against my upstate NY/midwestern values not to say hello or smile at just about everyone, let alone not start a conversation when standing in line or sitting next to someone. I know this is something that's increased my sense of isolation and been a difficult adjustment after moving here. Doing things in common is a way to break that down; I expect the other gardeners will be quiet and private too, but that over time we'll get to know each other, just as has happened in our building and in the choir.

Next spring there will be

hands full of tulips, trowels

in a bicycle basket

earth beneath my fingernails.

From Drawing to Print

Before I forget and we get very far away from the season, I wanted to post these two images from a recent project. During Lent, our cathedral asked artists in the congregation to create new "stations of the cross" - a primarily Catholic tradition of illustrating the steps on Jesus' journey from his betrayal and arrest to his crucifixion, as an aid to meditation and prayer during Lent and Holy Week. I volunteered to do one, and was given the second station - the betrayal by Judas in the garden of Gethsemane where Jesus had spent the night praying (and the disciples had slept - failing to "watch with him even one hour." The idea was that the creation of the work would also be an opportunity for reflection by the artists.

So I gradually worked out the composition to its final form shown in the drawing above, and then had to decide what medium to use for the final image. In the end I didn't have time to do a painting, but also wanted to force myself away from the prettiness and fluidity of the drawn lines; I wanted to do something rougher, more immediate, and hopefully more emotional. So I made a lino print. It has some problems, due to my lack of experience with the medium and the fact that there's no good way to correct mistakes, but considering all of that, I'm pretty happy with it. (It's about 6 x 4 inches.)

As for the meditation -- in historical treatments of this same scene, the event is shown literally, like a scene in a play: Judas is almost always shown with a retinue of soldiers; he comes up to Jesus and kisses him (the signal he had chosen to give to the high priests and soldiers) and the two men are depicted facing one another at the center of a crowd of other figures. I also looked at photographs of the garden of Gethsemane and other source material showing olive trees and cedars, which were the plants I decided to use because of their contrasting forms, and the way the twisted growth of olive trees adds some emotional and even anthropomorphic turmoil to a fairly static composition. But I was also sure I didn't want to show Judas in the traditional way. I felt Jesus should be impassive and in some way acquiescent. Side views of the kiss weren't satisfying me; I liked my sketches where Judas, somehow, kept appearing in back of Jesus, almost as if he were materializing out of him. After a while I realized that presenting the two figures this way reflected what I was feeling. I was interested in how both Jesus and Judas might represent aspects of human nature that are present in most of us, rather than seeing them as opposed extremes.

What do you think? I'm curious about the differences in the ways the two mediums above come across, too.

Recent crop of micropoems

In case you missed them on Twitter , Identica, or Facebook:

17.

Stranded halfway to Moscow

the weary composer shuts his eyes

imagining volcanic symphonies

orders single malt instead of vodka.

18.

Shawarma for lunch

"all dressed?" he asks

our guest, confused,

gets "the works:"

tahini, garlic sauce, turnip pickles, lettuce

totally delicious.

19.

Park forsythia

is like gold I cannot touch

I miss my garden

20.

Forsythia reflected

in the skating lake

gold flashes replace silver

21.

I bring home berries

chocolate cake --

but he's brought me roses.

22.

I stare at the locked garden fence

a child at a pet shop window

but miraculously it opens to me

like an unknown bloom.

23.

Spicy grilled salmon

fragrant, nut-filled rice pilaf

parsley in my teeth!

24.

Unexpected reveille

a cardinal’s mating call--

white city bed

imagined red

Providence

(I just noticed the cross on the stylized mountain in the sign in the photo above: that's Montreal, all right.)

Sometimes I really have to sit back and wonder.

Today I called the office in my arrondisement that handles the waiting list for community gardens, to ask how far down the list my name actually was. Céline, the woman in charge, answered the phone; I knew she was the same person I had talked to the last time, over a year ago, because she has a strong Quebec accent and speaks no English at all. "OK," I said in French, "I'll do my best." By the time we finished our conversation we were both laughing. She told me there were "soixante-deux" people ahead of me on the list - and I had called well over a year ago.

"Comprenez-vous?" she asked.

"Oui," I said. "Sixty-two. How many years is that?"

"Three to five," she told me.

I sighed and was about to say thank youa dn goodbye when something made me ask, "I saw last year you were offering some little gardens just for flowers..."

"Yes," she said. "Are you interested?"

"Yes!!" I said, startled; this hadn't even seemed like a remote possibility.

"OK, you'll just need to come in and sign up, or we can do it by mail. What would you like to do?"

"I can come by this afternoon at 2:00 pm, is that OK?"

"Parfait. Just come in and go up to the first floor and ask for Céline."

So at the appointed hour I went to the office, with a proof of residency in my hand (a tax bill - all the public services in Montreal require this; an electric bill would do as well), and went up to Céline's office. She was as friendly as she'd been on the phone, and had the papers all ready for me; all I had to do was sign them and let her make a copy of the address portion of the bill. I pulled out my wallet to pay the fee, and she said, "Oh, no, c'est gratuit." - it's free.

"Really?" I said; this was all seeming too good to be true.

"Yes," she explained, these were originally community vegetable gardens but they discovered the soil was contaminated (that happened in several places in the city) and made them into flower gardens instead; it's OK because you aren't going to eat them. OK, I thought, that's fine with me, though I'll be sure to find out what the contamination was. She took the papers away and didn't give me a receipt. "The way it works is that I will call the president of the garden association, and she will call you."

"OK," I said. "When do the gardens open?"

"Around May 1st." I thanked her and stood up; in typical Quebec fashion she got up out of her chair, walked me out of the office, smiled, and shook my hand. "Bonne saison!" she said, looking pleased.

I got on my bike and rode down to the gardens a few blocks to the south;  I'd never really looked at these before. The gate was locked with a padlock but a woman was working inside the fence, way in the back; there were tulips in bloom and perennials starting to put out leaves. I peered through the fence trying to see the size of these "jardinets" as they were called; I figured they would be small, maybe 4 feet square. To my astonishment, the plots looked huge - more like 3 x 4 meters at least. There were plastic chairs, picnic tables, what looked like a water source, a tool shed, and a big pile of compost near the fence. I couldn't tell which plots were available, or how much sun the ones near the park trees would get, but I walked around the periphery slowly, pretty much stupefied at what had just happened. I'd wanted a garden, and suddenly I'd been given one, for free. 

You'll be the first to know how this new adventure unfolds.

Balance

Balance in life is always challenging, isn't it? And when you're someone who does (and loves) many different things it's easy to feel out of whack, especially when something that's been a big part of your life isn't there in the same way anymore.

When does acknowledgment of discomfort (healthy) become pointless bitching and moaning (unhealthy)? Maybe because I tend to be so verbal, I sometimes just need to *say* it - to name the emptiness, the fear, the anger or whatever is causing the emotion - and then it becomes much less formless, more easily grasped and dealt with. Before blogging, I used my journal this way, and when things are too private for the blog, I still do.

After writing yesterday's post I realized that the perceived lack of wild nature and of a garden in the city are things I can examine and see as creative challenges. Looking a bit deeper, I'm well aware that I live in a neighborhood full of trees, near a big park, a beautiful botanical garden, a huge wild river, and with wilderness that I know nothing about, really, within a few hours' drive. I have a lovely terrace and am on the waiting list (3 years long, but still!) for a community garden plot. All of that's true, so it's more a question of asking what exactly feels missing. I wonder, actually, if it isn't solitude in a wilder form of nature than one encounters in the parks and city that I miss: the sense of the freedom to be alone (and yet in relationship) with the birds and plants and animals; the freedom to not merely see but grow and pick blossoms and bring them indoors. I felt this in my backyard more because of its diversity than its ruralness - our village had become pretty suburban by the time we left; there was almost always a lawn mower or voices or traffic. But when I wanted something wilder, there was a mountainside preserve owned by the town but rarely visited, with trails through deciduous woods, a pond, and unspoiled streams, just a mile or two away. I often went there for an afternoon walk, and always returned refreshed, having seen at most one or two other people as I walked up the hills or sat quietly on a log.

For a girl who grew up being unafraid, safe, and always able to go off into the woods, up in a tree, alongside a river or stream within minutes of my home, living in a big city is a definite adjustment and I find I feel it in my body; there's a kind of armoring sometimes against the concrete, the ugliness, and the crowding - most people here have very little space for their lives. It's also good for me to experience and live this and see, first-hand, how profligate we tend to be in America about space and resources; how much we value "bigger" and "more" being "better." I understand better than ever the impulse that led underprivileged neighborhood kids to "steal" flowers from my garden -- though I always let them pick if they asked me. Beauty should be free and available to everyone; human beings starve for it, and yet my life, for some inexplicable reason, has been full of beauty.

There are, of course, huge advantages to being in the city, such as being able to be involved in music on a level much higher than I've ever known before, and getting to know a whole range of people whose life experiences are so different from my own. My life is full and I'm extremely fortunate - I know this. Sometimes we need a kick in the pants and a voice in our ear that says, "brace up!" and I asked myself yesterday if this was one of those times.

But when we're sensitive, I think it's damaging to carry that kind of thinking all the way down the road to guilt and repression. I was taught not to be emotional, to have a typical British stiff upper lip and "rise above it" -- as I was told over and over again -- and I can do that when I need to. But it isn't all of who I am. Strong emotions are there to tell us something; they're grist for the mill, but we have to do the grinding. I tried hard during Lent to look closely at some of my less savory attitudes, see the sources of some negative thinking, and discover what I might do to change that. Over the past ten or fifteen years I've learned that when I'm able to name and open up to what is - the most difficult emotions, the confusions and dis-comforts that inevitably surface in life -  there's often a softening and spaciousness that can lead to greater understanding in dealing with them; emotions feel manageable, humor returns, creative solutions arise. People come along, too, with their kindness and their own experiences, while closing off, either from myself or others, never seems to have a very positive effect.

Apologia: Haibun

There's a great deal to write: about the butterflies; the attenuated spring; my altogether unexpected urban grief at not having a garden or shrubs or wildflowers to pick for the first time in my life, and terrace-planting still a month away; the writing I want to do and am not doing; the discoveries I'm making through the writing I am doing during this month of poetry. But I've had almost no time to blog. This afternoon, after many days of professional work, taxes, and administration for the qarrtsiluni chapbook contest, we took some time off and went to the architecture museum (which turned out to be closed), to the movie theater (where there were no movies we wanted to see), to the contemporary art museum where we did see two shows, both of which were (in my opinion) absolutely dreadful, and gave up in humor and annoyance, cycled home where I drank a shot of bourbon and then made an Iranian-style dinner of chicken and eggplant khoresh with rice and yogurt which made us both feel better. Tomorrow or the next day I will go to the garden center and buy some new houseplants for both the apartment and studio: green therapy for a still-grey and dirty city, just beginning to raise its head above winter.

Park forsythia

is like gold I cannot touch

I miss my garden

Letter from Reykjavik

 

(from a portfolio by Vilhelm Gunnarsson in the Icelandic press; see all here. )

As longtime readers may remember, during the last five or six years we lived in Vermont, our next-door neighbors were from Iceland. H. and E., and eventually their little daughter h., who came along in the middle of that time, became some of our closest and dearest friends.They've gone back home now, and are living in Reykjavik. We would have followed the news about Iceland's financial meltdown, and the astonishing eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, in any case. But knowing our friends on their small beloved island are trying to live, and bring up their daughter, with a sense of happiness, security, and normalcy in the midst of so much turmoil has given these events a much more personal and immediate dimension. Yesterday I asked H. if he'd write something about how things look in Iceland right now, from his perspective. Here is what he wrote, along with a link that he sent to these ominous and extraordinary photographs.

it's strange, we're in the middle of one disaster and another one strikes
but there is this huge difference
we know this one
we've been through it so many times before
we know all the rules
the mortal dangers
the stakes
the plot
we know it might go really really badly
but that most likely it will be over within weeks
and this we can handle
meanwhile
that other disaster keeps befuddling us
there was nothing natural about that one
how could our banks fail like that, all three?
it must have been that those running them caused it by acting criminally
they must have taken all the money and made away with it, somehow
money doesn't just disappear into thin air
and how did all the rules change so suddenly, literally overnight?
we had a banking system, privately owned, competing cut-throat with foreign banks, also privately owned
then all of a sudden, all these big, foreign banks had been usurped by their governments, their treasuries
and our huge banks turned around too crawl under the skirt of our little state treasury
was this supposed to be a competition on a "free" market?
our politicians should have seen all of this coming, somehow
they should have known the unwritten rules, somehow
so we made them all resign, and now we're going to prosecute them
that will keep at bay the ugly truth in the matter, at least for a while
it's musical chairs, and we're among those caught standing
because we did not know this one
our banks had only recently been privatized
they had never ventured abroad before
we did not know the unspoken rules
the mortal dangers
the stakes
the plot
we knew not that it might go really really badly
and we know not when it will be over
and this keeps us confounded

Note: please read the comments for some questions from readers and responses from H. In an email, E. also adds:

"It is like you said, we have been down-wind from the volcano, so our view has been the same as yours, on TV and in the media - although perhaps with more emotional involvement! it is weird to watch part of your country covered in ash, and see farms and animals under the black clouds, and watch the floods strip away roads like they were toys. The power of nature, of earth, is so breathtaking and makes you feel so small and insignificant. If this island cared, it could shrug us all off in one big blast. Once things calm down, we are hoping to take a trip out there, we will be sure to report back to you!"