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My friend Teju Cole and I spent Saturday afternoon at the site of the Montreal Olympics, some of which is still used and some of which has fallen into that moody decay particular to poured concrete landscapes. As we wandered around and took photos, hoping to go from there to the botanical gardens, huge storm clouds gathered overhead and the sky got darker and darker. We ended up getting soaked and waiting out the first of several passing thunderstorms, complete with driving winds, in a bus shelter along with six Muslim women who had to put up with being packed into one corner, away from the rain-hurtling wind, with a man as part of the group. The sky then turned blue and clear; Teju went off on the metro and I retrieved my bike and cycled home, only to get caught in the next storm; I got completely drenched but after all the heat we've had, it felt terrific and I rode home soaked but grinning.

You can click on any of these images for a larger version.

First of July

My morning porch is a terrace, open to the street but semi-hidden behind a hedge, shadowed but adorned with begonias, lantana, coleus. Out here early with my coffee and the baby spiders swaying on their strands of silk, I watch the sun struggling through clouds that split and rise from the St. Lawrence, casting the first bright rays of light through the trees. Morning comes with an effort, like our summer that's barely begun. The sounds of the city build slowly too: the traffic coming off Pont Jacques Cartier, the clank of bike locks against metal frames passing over bumps, the feet of a runner, crows shouting over the incessant chirps of sparrows. Three-quarters of an hour ago, when I first came out, the birds dominated but now it's wheels, and the occasional murmur of human voices.

J. rose early and went off to take photographs in the Old City and port. I stayed in bed a little while longer, and then got up, lit a candle, did a bit of meditation, took my calcium and vitamins, made my coffee and some oatmeal. I love the mornings when I can unfold slowly, like the day itself, and just watch, just listen.

It's Canada Day today, and also Moving Day, when leases are up and people change apartments. Just now a small local moving van has pulled up outside, and if I went down any of the nearby streets the scene would be repeated: men in white t-shirts rolling up the back doors of the vans, taking out blankets, standing together staring at large objects before the collective heft. Yesterday we watched three men wrestling a full-size refrigerator three flights up one of the city's outdoor, metal spiral staircases. Terrible, and typical. Before the light changed and we moved on, we saw the man carrying the most weight move to the outside of the railing, and three more men - strangers - gathering below, hands lifted helplessly into the air.

Last year at this time, we were moving too, and I find myself reluctant to think back over the experience. It's over, thank God, and here I am in Canada on Canada Day, wondering what that means, or if it even means anything. I've crossed a border, ever more fortified and regulated, so many times I can't count, and yet I've felt more and more free, less burdened by material things, and by concepts of myself that weighed even more. I used to know who I was, if you had asked me. Now I know both more and less. I can tell you that the leaves on the poplars, way up there, are dancing in the wind like sequins, each one sewn on by a thin green thread.

Sad but not Despairing

I'm not going to write about the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla because I don't want to turn this space into a mini-warzone. Suffice it to say that I am deeply sad today. And heading out to draw. I refuse to allow the brutality of the world to suffocate my own soul.

And as for breathing: like thousands of other Montrealers, we woke in the night to the smell of smoke, blown into the city from the forest fires raging over thousands of hectares to the north, and today a smog alert has been declared as far south as Boston. So many of the earth's living things  struggling for the basic elements they need in order to live... may we all come to our senses while we still have them.

Riding for a Good Cause

 
A detail of yesterday's sketch

Yesterday afternoon we went out to St. Lazare, west of the city, to a benefit horse show. J. used to ride; I've been on a horse only twice in my life and never attended a horse show or competition, but I like horses very much and love to watch them move. It was a gorgeous day to be in the country, and a good opportunity for sketching, too - though you won't see any attempts at horses-on-the-move here; I'm not familiar enough with horse anatomy to even try.

We'd been invited by a friend who is a breast cancer survivor and who was riding, with five or six other women, in the "Jump for Hope" demonstration in the midafternoon - small jumps by relatively inexperienced riders who were all women who've had or are still in treatment for this disease and who are riding as an affirmation of life and courage. I hadn't expected to be as moved as I was, but when I saw my friend come into the ring, dressed like the others in a beautiful pink riding coat, sitting proudly and elegantly on her horse, and smiling from ear to ear, the tears came quickly. I was so proud of her, and so pleased to be there.

Earlier in the afternoon we'd seen the finals of the Grand Prix jumping competition - very big jumps indeed, taken by remarkable riders on huge, gorgeous thoroughbreds. After that came the "Jump for Hope" demonstration, and then the famous "Musical Ride" -- a precision, synchronized riding demonstration set to music, by the touring riding team of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: 32 riders and matched horses. I'd never seen such a thing in my life and it was quite something.

Afterward, the horses and riders spread out all around the ring and for half an hour you could pet the horses and talk to the Mounties about what it's like to be in this touring group, which does some 180 performances per year across Canada and in the U.S., mostly for the benefit of local charities. We talked to this young woman, who told us she had been one of 16 riders chosen each year from 800 prospective applicants from the RCMP. The first year is a training year, then it's a two year touring commitment; after that the riders go back to regular police duties. But isn't she perfect?  They all were. Real Mounties,  all with wholesome rosy cheeks, friendly, polite! Red coats! Beautiful black horses! My God, I almost felt Canadian!

Dashed Hopes on a Hot Day in May

 

I kept waiting for the right group, preferably with a dog, to put into that blank spot on the lawn, but they haven't come along yet! Good thing the sketch is in pencil, because I can add them later and get rid of some foliage behind them.

--

Montreal is a sad city today: the beloved Habs lost their hockey game last night, so they're out of contention to win the Stanley Cup. I loved Adam Gopnik's little essay about the loss in The New Yorker - and had no idea he'd grown up here:

I had allowed myself to hope—that the old orderly springs of my youth, when I had seen five Stanley Cup parades down St. Catherine Street by the time I was twenty, would return, and restore with it not just the circumstances of my own younger years but also restore my connection to the city, and in a way, the city’s connection to itself...

As for me, hockey is a game I once attended faithfully through an entire season, when I was a sophomore at Cornell; in those years our team was always in contention for national titles. All but one of our players were from Canada (Ken Dryden had just graduated) and after singing the American national anthem before the game we always sang "O Canada!" -- I thought the songs should have been in the reverse order. Tickets were in such demand that you had to line up and sleep overnight in Barton Hall to get them; it was a kind of rite of passage to show up there, with your pillow and bedroll and boyfriend, and spend the night in order to watch a legend in the making.

Suddenly, Summer

All of a sudden, the météo shows yellow suns every day this week and the air outside confirms the forecast: it's hot! Seeds are up; clothes are peeling off. I took a walk this afternoon and sat in the park - a little one near our studio - and drew a bit. There was a young couple at a picnic table having a quiet but intense argument, watched by a bemused elderly woman alone on a bench; seated on a blanket with a cooler full of beer, three young people talked about circus tricks, jumping up now and then to demonstrate a stance or pose. Little girls in sunhats and dresses eating popsicles. Panting dogs. Mothers sitting and talking, their baby strollers parked head to tail like horses in a field.

Outside the little neighborhood fruiterie, rows of potted herbs on the window ledge - basil, rosemary, mint, chives, chervil - and on the pavement, ten sturdy tomato plants in black plastic buckets. Tomorrow, maybe, I'll go on a plant-shopping expedition, confident that at least it won't snow again (hah!) There's a reason, said my friend this weekend, that May 20 is the traditional safe planting day in Quebec.

Dreaming.

10:00 am, and the bells are ringing at Immaculée Conception. Joggers go by with their golden retrievers, the old neighborhood women with their fluffy little dogs. Everything seems normal for a Sunday morning in May except for the snow that calmly falls, turning the window and my unbelieving mind into a blank television screen of fifty years ago.

Last night we watched a video about the frozen seas of the arctic and antarctic. Thousands of penguins riding waves that fling them onto the cliffs where they'll lay their eggs. The curved white backs of beluga trapped between ice-floes, rising to breathe in a small hole and diving again, as rhythmic as the turning gears of a giant clock, their backs scarred from the claws of hungry polar bears who wait at the edges of the hole. The underwater dance of fur seals feeding on a mass of pink, transparent krill. The bloodied muzzle of an arctic fox as she tears at the remains of a beluga carcass left by the bear.

I've moved north, and it's snowing in May.

Last night I dreamt of water, too. I was at the lake with my mother, and after talking to her inside the house I went out along the shore. It was the way it used to be, the water full of frogs and minnows that scattered and splashed at my approach, reeds and aquatic plants growing undisturbed. A frog with moth-wings attached to its back crawled out of the water, and I stooped for a closer look, finding myself on a pebbly shore beneath an eye-level, rocky wall where I tried to get a hand-hold, all the while looking at the plants growing in the crevices. I looked down at my feet; my leather hiking boots filled with water, but it wasn't cold, and suddenly I didn't care and let myself fall backwards into the shallow water, laughing, my jeans and white shirt soaking wet. Then I was walking back up the hill to the house to tell my mother to come down and see, but it wasn't her I found inside, but my father-in-law, lying on his bed under a blue sheet. He suddenly leapt out of bed, as nimble as a young boy, and quickly hopped back in again, a sly smile on his face as if to say, "You didn't see me do that!"

This morning I watch the snow falling and think of them, but mostly I see the moth-wings, patterned like old brown calico with a light blue eye, walking along the shore on the back of a frog, and a thin green stalk rising out of the water, bearing a flower like a white rose, that my mother needed to see.

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!"

Haiku

 

All from my afternoon at the botanical garden last Saturday. The Japanese maple above is just about exactly the same age I am.

Holy Hypocrisy

We're about to enter into Holy Week, as Catholics worldwide watch the Vatican's latest charade. The most retrograde Pope in decades offers nothing to Catholics reeling in Ireland, and the Church refuses to defrock a Wisconsin priest who abused over 200 boys.

Here in Quebec, where thousands of children were abused by priests and families across the countryside were kept poor and uneducated for centuries by a Church hierarchy in league with the wealthy English and Scots and seeking to consolidate and perpetuate its own power, churches will remain largely empty during the holiest days of the Christian calendar. Quebec's Catholics finally threw off the yoke of a hypocritical and oppressive institution during the Quiet Revolution; today the Catholics who still go to mass in this city are mostly elderly Quebecois or immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Does this mean the rest of the population are unbelievers, or even that they don't self-identify as Catholic? Not in the least. What they have done is to refuse to accept the authority of a discredited, hypocritical institution and refused to allow it to be in charge of educating their children. Few Quebecois marry in the church, and many don't have their children baptized.

Fifty years ago the streets of Montreal teemed with priests and nuns and its huge stone seminaries, convents and monasteries were full. The province of Quebec was one of the most conservative, observant and obedient Catholic societies in the world. Today it is one of the most secular. In making these sweeping social changes, but writing their deep convictions about justice and shared social responsibility into their civil code, this society has affirmed, in solidarity, a general belief that priests are not necessary as intermediaries between an individual and God, regardless of the teaching of the Church, and that a secular society and its families and individuals have not only the right but the ability to make moral decisions for themselves.

Last night, J. pointed out this letter by Sinead O'Connor which appeared in The Washington Post. She describes a country which could have been Quebec, forty years ago, and speaks with great personal conviction about the emptiness of Pope Benedict's feeble apology, while affirming her own Catholicism and faith. I hope you'll take a moment and read the whole letter; on the Post's website; there is much more nuance here than most non-Catholics may think.

"To Irish Catholics, Benedict's implication -- Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem -- is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn't believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That's how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.

Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics -- even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore -- should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.

Almost 18 years ago, I tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on an episode of "Saturday Night Live." Many people did not understand the protest -- the next week, the show's guest host, actor Joe Pesci, commented that, had he been there, "I would have gave her such a smack." I knew my action would cause trouble, but I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one; that is part of being an artist. All I regretted was that people assumed I didn't believe in God. That's not the case at all. I'm Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation.

As Ireland withstands Rome's offensive apology while an Irish bishop resigns, I ask Americans to understand why an Irish Catholic woman who survived child abuse would want to rip up the pope's picture. And whether Irish Catholics, because we daren't say "we deserve better," should be treated as though we deserve less.