the cassandra pages

Drawing #15, Meditation Space

On the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month, I facilitate a meditation/contemplative prayer group at the cathedral. This particular chapel is normally used for weekday eucharists and the 8:00 service on Sunday mornings; the altar is to the left of this picture, and usually there are about two dozen chairs set up in rows facing it. On Tuesdays I go in early to rearrange the room -- we move the heavy iron kneelers with a hand truck, and put down a plain white cotton carpet, set twelve chairs around it and move the others to the sides, and place a large candle - I bought this one from nuns in Mexico -  on a low table in the center. After the daily office of Evening Prayer is finished at 5:45 pm, we turn down the lights and gather in this room; I usually give a brief talk or a reading or a guided meditation, and then we sit in silence for two periods of 20 minutes, with a brief break so that people who want to sit for a shorter period can leave. At the end we leave in silence, with a few people staying to help me put the room back into its normal configuration.

This week I had a little extra time beforehand, so I sat down and made a sketch, and then added some color later. One thing I'm discovering during this month is that I simply don't enjoy detailed, careful architectural sketching. Catching the feeling of a place is one thing, but I don't have the patience, inclination, or interest to do it perfectly. More power to those who do! (I didn't think I did, but now I know it for sure!) In fact, I'd like to try a charcoal or pastel drawing of this same space, to try to get the dusky ambience of it as the sun is setting.

During our meditation this week we had so many interruptions! There are the inevitable sirens and honking horns and loud voices from the street outside;  the verger mistakenly turned the lights up when they should have been turned down; then there was a businessman, with briefcase and cellphone, who came into the church from the side door opposite us, couldn't get through the passageway to the back that leads to the diocesan offices, and proceeded to make a loud phone call expressing his annoyance and frustration to whoever was on the other end. Apparently he didn't see, or didn't look to see, that people were silently meditating across from him. One of us got up and helped him, gently ushering him outside and pointing him where he needed to go. In spite of all that, this week's gathering had a very good feeling: calm and deep, with a sense of the collective peace that sometimes comes from a group meditating together.

Interruptions are, as the Buddhists would say, "grist for the mill." They are the weeds in our practice, and one learns to be grateful for them, and for what they teach us. When I was beginning my own meditation practice, back in Vermont many years ago, it used to drive me crazy to hear the neighbor's lawn mower, or children's voices playing in the street. Now I'm rather glad that we don't meet in a retreat center set far away from "the world," but rather right in the middle of it, on the busy main street of a major city. Meditating in this sort of place teaches us that we too are part of the world, and the world is part of us. As Thomas Merton wrote: "One does not go into the desert to escape others, but to learn how to find them."

 

A Plea Against Anxiety

Yesterday morning I sat in the waiting room of the clinic where I have my annual medical exams. Something had changed since my last visit: a huge black television monitor occupied one wall, with the channel tuned to CNN.

It was impossible to ignore; the small waiting room had been turned into a screening room, where even patients who didn't want to watch were forced to listen. In the space of just a few minutes, I heard commentators speculate that this might be the day that North Korea decided to launch a missle. I heard reports of a new, deadly strain of bird flu in China, and an outbreak of meningitis among gay men in Los Angeles.  There was discouraging discussion about the gun control bill, and a story that parents in Japan are starting to refuse to allow their children to come to the U.S. for university study, because of a perception that the country is becoming too dangerous.

A white-coated tecnician came into the room to get a cup of coffee just as the meningitis story was playing; the screen showed large electron-micrographs as the journalist's voice intoned the latest statistics. Oh dear, said the man, turning to me with a dismayed look on his face. He stood for a few minutes, riveted to the screen, and then walked out the door to begin his day.

My doctor came to the door and called my name; I was glad to escape. But during the morning I had to come back to the waiting room several times, between visits to the nurse for blood work, an EKG, and various other appointments. Each time, I watched the behavior of the other people in the room, all of whom would turn to face the TV, shaking their heads at each grim, frightening story. Last year, most of them were absorbed in their cell phones. I looked for a magazine or newspaper; unlike former visits, this time there was only one, an old issue of Vanity Fair; instead I pulled a book out of my pack, but it was very difficult to concentrate on the words.

Finally I turned to one of the other women and said, "I'm American, and really, this is part of what I came to Canada to escape."

As it turned out, she was originally American too, from North Carolina, but we had a pretty different take on things. She was conservative, I more liberal. While I objected to being force-fed anxiety by inflammatory stories in the media, she insisted it was "important to be informed." "I'm really worried when I go to the U.S. now," she said. "If I go to a shopping center across the border I really look around me at the people; it seems like anything could happen. Everyone has guns." Well, yes, I agreed, many people do, and I think that's a big problem. But you have to look at the statistics as well; your chance of being killed in a Wal-Mart in Burlington, Vermont, is not extremely high.

We both finished our appointments and went home, where in the afternoon we learned what had happened in Boston, and the cycle of horror, speculation, analysis, and fear began spinning all over again.

I don't want to add yet another voice to that sad and mostly-well-meant cacophony. I've spent many days of my life in Boston, and my heart goes out to the people of that city. If there is something concrete I can do to help, I will do it.

What I've been thinking about is the television in the waiting room, a Canadian waiting room, that once was a quiet place where people read, or talked to a companion, or even simply sat and looked out the window. Its presence seems to me an ominous symbol of something that has gone very wrong in most western societies: our inability to be with ourselves, to cope with the essential human condition of solitude, especially in situations that cause our anxiety to rise. It concerns me that, in our secular, post-liberal-arts, technological, perpetually-connected society, so little effort goes into teaching children how to be alone, showing them the richness and solace of time spent with nature, with the arts and handcrafts, with books and music, with oneself walking in a city or sitting on a bench: eyes open, ears open, mind and heart awake to the dance of life flowing around us.

When I return to the United States, as I did just last week, I'm always struck by the palpable level of general anxiety, so much greater than it is here in Quebec. But is that anxiety, and the corresponding reactiveness -- even in the wake of tragedies such as have been experienced in the past decade -- justified? In today's New York Times, University of Maryland criminologist Gary LaFree states, “I think people are actually surprised when they learn that there’s been a steady decline in terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1970.” Speaking of both domestic and foreign plots, he noted that there were approximately 40 percent fewer attacks in America during the ten years after 9/11 than there had been in the previous decade. (LaFree is director of the highly-regarded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which studies terrorism and keep a Global Terrorism Database. He adds a note that nearly half the worldwide attacks, and 1/3 of those in the U.S., have never been solved.)

However, I think the media bears a large responsibility for fanning the flames of American anxiety.  Supposed neutral channels like CNN feed viewers an endless diet of anxiety-producing stories, while the left and right square off in loud, combative talk shows and news hours, each side trying to out-shout the other. Television is a very powerful medium. Is it any wonder that so many people feel under attack, vulnerable, and constantly anxious, worrying about what is going to happen to them or to their loved ones? It it any wonder that they feel like the entire world is taking sides, at war, that it's us-against-them, myself against the potential unknown assalilant, intruder, terrorist, crazy person lurking in every community? Furthermore, we know that violence begets violence, that copycat crimes proliferate, and that what a lot of perpetrators want the most is publicity.

If the U.S. wants to worry about drugs and terrorism slipping across its porous northern border, then I am concerned about the insidious infiltration of this kind of secular preaching, these incessant sermons of anxiety and fear originating from the south. And much more than that, I wonder if those of us who have chosen to live our lives differently can perhaps be more vocal and intentional about why, and how. The world has always been dangerous for a vast majority of its citizens, but we in the west have been able to ignore that too long. Living positively, with awareness and joy in each day -- in spite of the possibility of death, which can and does happen anywhere, anytime -- is actually possible, as our brothers and sisters in war-torn, poverty-ravaged societies can teach us. And to look closer to home on this sad day: who knows better the fullness of solitude, or the potential triumph of the human spirit, than the long-distance runner?

Colors of the Sun

I made myself a sketchbook to take on our trip. The original plan was to buy one of Stillman & Burns' new Gamma series landscape-format sketchbooks; they're lovely, and the paper is heavy enough to take light washes. But they aren't cheap, nor are they carried anywhere in Montreal, and as a result I left the task of ordering from Toronto undone too long. What to do? Then it occurred to me that I could make my own sketchbook and fill it with whatever combination of papers I wanted! What a revelation! I've made a lot of small notebooksbefore, but never a sketchbook. The other advantage was that I could choose a size that was light and easy to carry. The binding itself is reversible; I can take pages out or add more anytime.

It helps to have a big papercutter and a heavy-duty adjustable binding punch and comb binder; we used to use it for binding reports for our design clients.

I already had these handpainted covers, waiting for a binding, so that part was easy. The next task was to cut up a sheet of a favorite drawing/mixed-media paper, Stonehenge, and another one of Arches 140-lb watercolor paper. It was enough for two books, one slightly larger and longer than this, with plain black covers, and this one. The binding here a flat leather thong; the other book has a black plastic comb binding.

Now I just need to make the time, and pluck up my courage, to do some sketches rather than being on-the-go every minute while we're away. The work of the Urban Sketchers, a growing international movement, both inspires and daunts me, because sketching buildings and urban scenes has never been my forté. What I'm most interested in isn't accuracy, but conveying the feeling of a place or scene.

On the other hand, having this blog, and you, my kind and generous readers, is a great incentive, though I admit that every single time I put pen or brush to paper, a little voice in my head worries about making a disastrous mess! Just do it, I tell myself, as all my teachers have told me too: sketch every day. Some drawings will be a mess, and some will come out all right. No matter what, you'll learn and improve through constant practice.

Funny, isn't it -- after all this time, and all this making-of-things, we are still fragile! I think that this beautiful bright color will help.

¡Hola!

"Taqueria Mexico dans la ville" a few blocks from our studio.

To live in Montreal is to swim in a sea of languages. I came here seven or eight years ago feeling my lack of French fluency very keenly. Gradually, it's improved -- through practice and immersion, helped by friendships and our deliberate choice to live in a French neighborhood -- to the point where I can read very well, manage to express myself in most situations, sustain fairly simple conversations, and converse with people who don't speak English. Best of all, I can finally follow the gist, at least, of most of what I hear. At first I thought being shy about speaking was the most isolating aspect, but I quickly realized, no, it was my failure to understand what was being said around me. In a way, it was like being deaf, and reminded me of my father-in-law's last years, when he so often simply tuned out of conversations he couldn't hear or understand, and as a result felt left out -- and he was, in fact, left out unless one of us acted as "translator" for him. I'm grateful to my bilingual friends here who've done that for me during meetings or other events when I was missing big chunks of important information.

But another aspect of Montreal reality is that many people are not merely bilingual, but trilingual, or even more. There are many immigrants and many blended families; people travel a lot too, and they're interested in other cultures, and want to be able to speak at least a little bit when they arrive; it seems like a cultural tendency, even a hobby, among many people in this city. I always laugh when I go to my dentist: in that office alone there are native speakers of French, Spanish, Romanian, and Farsi, which, when combined with my English, generally leads to a lively exchange rather than confusion, because they all find it fun to do that, and so do I.

Two of our best friends here are completely fluent in English, Spanish, and French, and I've been continually impressed and envious of the easy way they switch back and forth. They've been so generous in including us in family gatherings, sometimes with visitors from South America who speak no French or English. I've often wished I could converse a little in Spanish, a language I've never studied. Last year, when our bathroom was being re-done, the expert tile installer often brought his father, an entremely warm, nice man, to help -- but the older man spoke only Spanish. This sort of encounter happens all the time, and always feel like a missed opportunity when there's no language in common.

If I had been born here, I wonder if languages would have become more of a hobby for me, too. I studied French in school, then ancient Greek and German - but the later two were just for reading; speaking a language is different. I have some aptitude for hearing and repeating the nuances of sound -- maybe being musical helps. My problem, as an adult learner, has mainly been time. How I wish I knew the essential phrases and expressions and basic vocabulary in Arabic, Spanish, Italian, German, Farsi, Russian...not to mention Chinese and Japanese! Another potential avocation for a person with too many already!

Trudging...earlier today.

However, with an upcoming trip to points south, I am finally tackling task #1, and learning some basic Spanish. It's been decades since I seriously studied a language besides French, and I'm finding it fascinating and fun. French turns out to be a help, as well as a confusion - my brain rebels at similarities like "elle" and "ella." (I do feel a little bit like I'm trying to cram new puchases into an already-full closet.) To study and practice, I've been using the online beginner's course offered by "Babbel;" the computer environment offers not only drills in reading and writing, but the benefits of an oral language lab with speech recognition. It keeps track of mistakes and presents an individualized review of my least-internalized material.

I just wish -- as always -- that there were more hours in the day!

The Blue Wall

 

Contrasts

It was easier to avoid the secular world when I lived in the country. All I had to do was go out into my backyard garden, sit at the piano for a few hours, spend an afternoon in my studio...my husband always heard the lawn mowers and leaf-blowers, but I guess I tended -- or pre-tended -- to hear the birds.

The city doesn't allow that. Step out the door, and it opens its maw. The sound of traffic is ever-present, even indoors, as are voices speaking many languages; airplanes and helicopters overhead, police sirens, ambulances and fire trucks; even the birds seem aggressive, competitive, clamouring for their share. Someone is always selling, someone's buying; someone is begging, someone else is showing off.

The city is much more real, much more a reflection of our world, in a human sense, or so it seems to me. The countryside, so much a part of my own identity, has come to rest in some internal space. I visit it in dreams, in memories...but my daily reality has changed. During these weeks of living downtown, on the twentieth floors of hotels, I've been able to watch the city move, watch it wake up, go through its day, go to sleep. Pigeons flutter onto fire escapes; gulls wheel on thermals between the skyscrapers. The trains come and go from Gare Centrale; the taxis swim up Boulevard Rene-Levesque, the hockey fans come to games at Le Centre Bell and stream out far below my eyes. Customers enter Chez Paree and Club LaBoom, which advertise danse contact; next door, Muslims go upstairs to their mosque. Motionless, I stand at the window and look out down, look out - toward the city stretching in all directions, toward the shiny pale blue ribbon of the great river, toward the mountains of Vermont.

This is a new stillness, not requiring silence. An urban stillness I'm learning in the midst of constant motion, crowdedness, squalor and clutter, beauty and glitter; amid things I don't understand and things I understand too well; a stillness in spite of the fact that I myself am moving, changing; a growing solitude that is, paradoxically, full.

Harpa Honeycomb

(for qB)

Because I've been spending more time lately in downtown Montreal, I've been thinking about contemporary architecture, a great love of mine -- and then a friend's post reminded me of honeycomb, and this building in Reykjavik that I visited just about exactly 6 months ago.

It's the city's new concert hall, named Harpa, built amid controversy over whether such an expenditure could be justified in the wake of Iceland's financial crisis. It was designed by the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects and Icelandic architectural firm Batteríið Architects. Our friends there were not wild about the building itself, which sits on the wharf right at the edge of the ocean. As I went through my photographs I realized I didn't have any good pictures of the exterior -- I loved the different facades, but not the extra colors and LED lights which I felt detracted from the building's sculptural quality, especially at night -- but I was completely intrigued by the interior of the building, which I found both unusual and beautiful. The surfaces and lack of color -- all greys and black, except for an occasional touch of bright yellow or purple -- give it a restrained Scandinavian/Germanic ambience, quite different from most of what gets built in North America.

"The building’s name Harpa refers to the musical instrument, the harp. It is also the name of the first month of spring in the Nordic calendar - and for the people of Iceland this means the promise of better times.”
Steinunn Birna Ragnarsdóttir
Musical Director of Harpa

Most astonishing are the glass sides, constructed of steel and glass in a honeycomb-inspired design that seemed at first to be in a regular pattern, but revealed itself to have deliberate irregularities. I couldn't imagine how it had been designed and engineered, let alone built, and our friends told us that Asian construction workers had been hired to actually do the building work, because they were the only ones with experience in this type of construction. The descriptions of the building on the official website, unfortunately, don't include many details about how the design was developed and chosen, or how the engineering challenges were solved, though at the architect's own website, they say that in order to develop these ideas "the team worked with three-dimensional computer models, finite element modelling, various digital visualisation techniques as well as maquettes, models and mock-ups."

However, an article at arcspace.com provided some insight into the design itself. (The photos below are by Nic Lehoux, and Bára Kristinsdóttir respectively, from the gallery of press photos at the Harpa official website.)

The plaza in front of the Concert Hall is designed to generate a unique atmosphere where the dark base, referring to the black Icelandic sand, emphasizes the play of light and colors in the facades. The water pools mirror the facades and provide the plaza with a well-defined expression. Approaching the harbor from the city, the Concert Hall rises from the black base of the front plaza.

Harpa’s multifaceted glass facades are the result of a unique collaboration between renowned artist Olafur Eliasson and Henning Larsen Architects. The design is based on a geometric principle, realized in two and three dimensions. Light and transparency are key elements.

Made of a twelve-sided space-filler of glass and steel called the “quasi brick,” the building appears as a kaleidoscopic play of colors, reflected in the more than 1,000 quasi bricks composing the southern facade. The remaining facades and the roof are made of sectional representations of this geometric system, resulting in two-dimensional flat facades of five and six-sided structural frames. The crystalline structure, created by the geometric figures, captures and reflects the light – promoting the dialogue between the building, city and surrounding landscape.

We weren't able to enter any of the four concert halls, but they all look very beautiful. We did listen to a midday informal jazz concert in the cafe area (3rd picture above) along with many contented Reykjavik residents and visitors. Next time we'll be sure to book tickets to a concert; Harpa is the new home of the Icelandic Symphony, but presents events from theatre and opera to Bjork.

I only had my phone camera that day, but if you'd like to see more photos of the exterior and interior, here's a link to high-quality press photos of the building.

A Little Goth on Sunday

Some shots of Camden Town fashion. I was informed by some younger friends that not all of what's sold or worn here is Goth; some of it is Emo and some heavy metal, death metal, and punk -- and they're all different, plus there are subcultures of each. I looked up the terms on the web and, well, even the Goths don't agree on what makes a Goth. Maybe you know and can tell me!

There were shops selling nothing but corsets and bustiers, leather shops, jewelry shops from "tribal" to "celtic" to "biker." Along Camden High Street, many of the stores have elaborateupper-storey facades like the two shown here, but there was so much going on on the street level that I didnt' even notice them until we'd been there for several days.

Whatever the fashion terminology, I had a great time looking at what people were wearing and what the shops were selling.

Do have a look at the link Andrea posted on my "Regents Canal" post a few days back; it's a photographic look at London street fashion. I'll have a few more of my own shots of the London street in a day or two.

 

Pubs

The Camden Eye.

The Spread Eagle, Camden Town.

The World's End, Camden Town

The Boston.

The Mortimer Arms, Tottenham Court Road.

The Nutshell, billed as "the world's smallest pub," in Bury St. Edmunds

The Rising Sun.

British pubs being the fixture that they are, I could have photographed hundreds. We had a pub lunch and some very good local beer in The Vine, in Kentish Town, which, like many now, has become a "gastro-pub" serving fancy - and even healthy - food instead of the steak-and-kidney pies and Cornish pasties of yore. The pubs labeled "Free House" are "free" because they aren't tied to any particular brewery; so that's where you can often get excellent local beers and ales. I know next-to-nothing about British beers, so I won't say any more about that; just that I very much liked every beer I drank there!

Hors d'oeuvres and Guiness, at The Vine

Two pubs were across from each other close to where we stayed. There's an enforced closing time of 11:00 pm, but it was still extremely noisy and crowded every single evening, and the shouting and arguing often went on well into the night. The drinking scene in London is pretty stunning. Because smoking is banned from pub interiors now, the spilling over of the crowds into the streets is even more extreme than I remember from before. Public drunkenness and rowdy behavior are common, including vomiting and pissing in the streets,  especially among (but not limited to) the young, and don't seem to faze anyone except the naive visitor.

We were staying in a lovely B&B in a real neighborhood of North London, rather than the more sanitized tourist areas of posh, central London we had been in previously. That was partly out of choice, and partly because hotel prices were astronomical. And so we got a real view into everyday (and every night) life. There were huge crowds of young people around the tube station every night, but especially on weekends, and a strong police presence. Apparently this has been a favorite site for drug dealing, and the police were cracking down. I wasn't nervous about my own safety, but I was surprised by the roughness of both sides -- the kids, and the police -- and the chaotic atmosphere which, by Montreal standards, seemed to verge on being out of control. I wondered about the relationship of alcohol to the overall social culture, and how this has affected the youth, but the crowds at the pubs were always mixed in age as well as sex, and the people we'd hear and see outside our windows at night were often older.

Camden Town Station at night (click for larger view)

I'm fond of the pubs myself, and was glad they were still in place. London has changed quite a lot since we were there last, about eleven years ago. We found it less quintessentially British, and more global; noisier and more aggressively competitive in the mold of the largest American cities; full of international franchises but studded with exciting new architecture. The food was an international mix, and uniformly terrific; the transit system is huge and works with amazing efficiency. London has always been crowded and seemed even more so. We sensed a vibrant energy everywhere we went, although everyone spoke about the economic problems and great difficulty for young people to find work.

Some Views of the Park

Sunny afternoon, Park Lafontaine 7/25/11

The past few days, I've been experimenting with different drawing techniques for foliage, searching out a shorthand that captures the rhythm, busyness, and emotional tone of trees and shrubs at different times of the day. I've been thinking about this problem for years, and keep coming back to it, but now I have a bit more time to explore possibilities. These are just some initial sketches done with my Lamy fountain pen, quickly. I'll move on to washes and broader areas of ink and contrast, but I'm curious how far one can go with just a pen.

Early evening, 7/26/11

 

Night, 7/27/11