the cassandra pages

Winter Sketching, Inside

I recently installed a new photo organizer on my computer, and when looking through the pictures from the last year, I realized I hadn't posted a number of interior drawings because I've been so focused on Mediterranean landscapes. So here's a catch-up post with some of those, appropriate, maybe, for the frigid days we're having here in Montreal that are keeping me mostly inside.

The watercolor and ink sketch, above, was an online gift for a friend who deserved a bouquet. The flowers were the last begonias from our terrace, and at right is my mother-in-law's porcelain salad bowl, with a pineapple pattern that's just about impossible to draw, so all you can do is suggest it.

I'm inordinately fond of the little ribbed-glass salt dish in the lower right of that pictures: it came from my grandfather, and I think it has a personality, as well as almost always being somewhere on our table. Here it is again in a drawing of a late fall bouquet, some dahlias I picked just before the first frost. That's my father-in-law's Egyptian camel-bone tambourine on a shelf in the right center back of the room.

Another late fall still life, below, with gourds that were a present from our friends S. and G.

Before going away this past fall, I did a number of sketches with ink and gouache on toned paper, while deciding which sketchbooks to take. Here are two of the same subject - one just in ink, done with a bent-nib fude pen, and the other with some added gouache and watercolor.

and a detail:

and here's the one with some color. I like the sketchbook page with all the scribbles and pen tests at the top.

Finally, here's a gouache still life done not at home, but at the studio, of objects sitting on my desk there. Driftwood, stones, shells, bones, old glass, two jugs that used to hold my mother's paintbrushes...

and another detail:

Which of these resonate the most with you?

A Byzantine angel, and where she came from

Hosios Loukas Monastery

During the past two years, we've visited several very old Orthodox monasteries in Greece. The most famous of them all, Mt Athos, is closed to women, so that was not a possibility, but we went to the mind-blowing clifftop monasteries at Meteora, which I'll write about here someday, and the Vlatadon monastery in Thessaloniki, founded on the site where St. Paul is thought to have preached. During this past trip, we visited the abandoned Byzantine city of Mystras in the Peleponnese, near Sparta, which contains a number of no-longer-used churches and monasteries, and the still-viable 10th century walled monastery of Hosios Loukas, located not far from Delphi on a remote mountainside north of the Gulf of Corinth. Our interest is not only in Byzantine art, but the fact that much of it was made during a brief but extraordinary period of cross-cultural flowering, when Greeks, Arabs, Italians and Normans co-mingled in this part of the Mediterranean. Much of Greece feels like it is still looking east, toward Constantinople and the early seat of the Eastern Church. Arab craftsmen often built parts of these structures, and it's not unusual to see Arabic calligraphy alongside Christian mosaics, or eastern domes, vaults, and arches, pierced-stone windows and elaborate tilework in Christian sanctuaries.

That's Peter on the left, and Paul on the right. Where the mosaics come alive the most is in portraiture -- saints, apostles, martyrs, monks, abbots, and church benefactors are shown in roundels or full-length portraits, with unique faces: you can always identify Peter, or Paul, for instance. The most dramatic portrait in many churches is the immense Christ Pantocrator, usually in the central dome or the half-dome over the apse: a depiction of Christ "the All-powerful" in a particular gesture and attitude that, in the most compelling renditions, appears to be looking straight into your soul. This one is on a wall and seems less striking.

My Christmas print this year was inspired by a mosaic from this monastery. That mosaic (upper picture, top right) was golden and glittery, but I was taken by the archangel's hairstyle and the clever way the artist had fit the portrait into the circle, and thought it could be simplified for a linocut. I gave the angel a longer face and made her gender definitely female, changed the staff into more of a wand with stars, and added floral corner motifs inspired by another ceiling, shown below.

The amount of decoration in these Byzantine monasteries and churches defies description. Every surface is decorated in some way, giving the visitor and monk alike endless things to look at, but somehow a harmonious whole is often created. In this church we were intrigued by the amount of faux painting, imitating patterned marble blocks of alternating color -- maybe a Medieval cost-saving measure.

A mosaic floor.

More faux painting, with very free, almost calligraphic brushwork.

I've come to appreciate the tilework on the floors, the painted, inlaid, or carved decorations on walls and pillars, the stylized, often naive depictions of scenes from the Old Testament and the lives of Christ and the apostles, and the technical achievement of creating these stories in the medium of mosaic.

I was quite taken with the one above, showing Jesus being baptized by John in the Jordan River. Isn't the water great? The inscription above reads "H βαπτη", "the Baptist".

And here's Jesus washing Peter's feet at the Last Supper.

These churches are filled with the smell of beeswax from the long handmade tapers that are always burning, and available in graduated sizes for you to light and place in large bowls or trays of fine sand, and the scent of myrrh, the holiest of incenses, which is burned in copious amounts, but also said to exude from the bodies of buried martyrs and saints, or from the springs of water that flow near them. And the churches always have martyrs and founding saints buried in them, their skulls often removed and placed in silver reliquaries, and devout worshippers kneeling in prayer beside the tombs, or affectionately brushing them with their fingers as they pass by, crossing themselves. Ancient icons behind glass or plexi show the marks of thousands of kisses by the faithful, who make the rounds of each sanctuary, kissing and praying before each icon in turn, as a cantor intones hours of chant.

The tomb of the monastery's founder, Luke (not the evangelist), was originally in the crypt, but his bones now lie in the tiny glass-topped coffin shown above, in a passage between the two churches on the site. Luke, known as a great healer, levitator, and worker of miracles, died in February 953, and for centuries afterward, pilgrims came to be healed by "incubation," which meant that they slept in the main church building (katholikon) or in the crypt near his tomb, breathing the scent of the myrrh, being exposed to the oil from the lamp above, and experiencing dreams in which the saint would appear and tell them what they needed to do to be healed. I found this practice particularly fascinating, because earlier in the trip we had also been to the 5th century BC Shrine of Asclepias at Epidaurus, where pilgrims did pretty much the same thing -- sleeping in the katholikon, among holy snakes that slithered on the floor, and experiencing dreams whose healing instructions were interpreted by pagan priests.

Most of the monasteries are much quieter than the Orthodox churches in the cities; in order to stay viable, they are open a few days per week to tourists, but the monks stay mostly out of sight. It's possible to see into their lives a bit, though -- there are herb and vegetable gardens and pens where chickens cluck and peacocks cry; goats and other small animals like rabbits; fruit trees; grape arbors, and, of course, a large grove or even a hillside of olive trees. The monk's cells are located in a particular building, along with a refectory (dining area) that can sometimes be glimpsed and more often not. In a corridor or cloistered walkway, there is usually a rustic iron gong or bell that summons the monks to prayer. Here we entered a former stable (now an art gallery), saw the ancient cider- and wine-presses, and a cemetery with the tombs of recent abbots. In the small shop visitors can buy food products made by the monks as well as icons, candles, incense, local herbs and ointments.

And everywhere we went, there were cats. As Hosias Loukas, near the ancient cider press, these yellow feral cats hid under a pomegranate tree, but were curious enough to let me take their picture. I sometimes felt like the ever-present cats, which seems quite well-fed, contented, and used to humans, were stand-ins for the invisible monks, showing us that daily life continues among these ancient stones.

Thoughts for the New Year

In November, I walked through the ancient agora of Athens, the "birthplace of democracy", and tried to imagine the thinkers and politicians, playwrights and artists, and countless ordinary people -- citizens and slaves, Greeks and foreigners -- whose feet had walked these same paths, and seen the same vistas.

Of course, that was 2,500 years ago; it's now a ruin. Athenian democracy fell, but its ideals and principles were taken up again in the Enlightenment, forming the basis for its modern form. Yet, on the cusp of 2020, many of us are wondering where our so-called democracies are headed. No political system lasts forever. Most of us were taught that it was the defeat of Athens by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars (404 BC) that caused the end of Athenian democracy. Cambridge classical historian Dr. Michael Scott disagreed; he wrote that Athens actually recovered from that defeat, but that democratic ideals irrevocably crumbled later, during the 4th century BC. He says that Athenian democracy fell because of an economic downturn, unpopular foreign wars, and a surge in immigration - a situation very similar to what western democracies face today.

In an effort to remain a major player in world affairs, it abandoned its ideology and values to ditch past allies while maintaining special relationships with emerging powers like Macedonia and supporting old enemies like the Persian King. This "slippery-fish diplomacy" helped it survive military defeats and widespread political turbulence, but at the expense of its political system. At the start of the century Athens, contrary to traditional reports, was a flourishing democracy. By the end, it was hailing its latest ruler, Demetrius, as both a king and a living God.

When people are afraid, they put their faith in demagogues: it's been true forever.

And when the economy is bad, they sell their most valuable assets to foreign investors. (In 2019, Greece concluded a longterm rental of its port, Piraeus, to China, thereby giving Chinese goods a valuable, nearly permanent entry point into the EU. But this is far from the only example.)

Ultimately, the city was to respond positively to some of these challenges. Many of its economic problems were gradually solved by attracting wealthy immigrants to Athens - which as a name still carried considerable prestige.

Democracy itself, however, buckled under the strain. Persuasive speakers who seemed to offer solutions - such as Demosthenes - came to the fore but ultimately took it closer to military defeat and submission to Macedonia. Critically, the emphasis on "people power" saw a revolving door of political leaders impeached, exiled and even executed as the inconstant international climate forced a tetchy political assembly into multiple changes in policy direction.

Well. I hear Cassandra's voice again. But rather than make pessimistic predictions about the future of our governmental institutions, two questions have been foremost in my mind as I look ahead, concerning things over which I actually have some control:

First,"What can I do to make people less afraid?" and second, "How can I give hope?"

We're living in an Age of Anxiety. Some of the causes are absolutely real, and some are greatly exaggerated. Our fears and anxieties are fueled by the media of all kinds, and, as a result, these emotions keep a great many people in a perpetual state of helplessness and despair. It's easy to forget that we all have choices about how much we expose ourselves to the relentless bad news and anxiety-mongering in the mainstream media, and the fraught (or utterly superficial) conversations on social media. Real life still exists, with all of its joys, sorrows, and fascinations, and its persistent call to us to engage fully, and live fully.

I think it's incumbent on all of us in any sort of leadership position to confront, understand, and manage our own anxiety, or we cannot be effective leaders for positive change, so that is one place to start. We need to form groups, both informal and formal, for discussion and action toward positive change in our institutions and communities -- the places where we can make a difference. When we are actually doing something, instead feeling helpless, isolated, and afraid, life begins again, creativity begins again, renewal happens, hope is created, and people are attracted to join us.

And surely, there is a lot that urgently needs to be done and can be done by ordinary people, without the aid or interference of governments.

When I was traveling in Greece, I kept overhearing people at ancient sites saying things like, "Well, my friend likes this, but to me, it's just a pile of rocks," while others were avidly exploring and trying to understand what they were seeing. Life is always like that, I think. We can look out at the ancient agora -- real or metaphoric -- and see ruins built by dead people that are a mere backdrop for yet another selfie, or we can use our imaginations and see beauty, lessons from the past, and potential for the future, which is -- I am quite certain -- the desired legacy of the thinkers and creative people of previous, equally fraught times, who were human beings very much like ourselves.

What inspires you? What fills you with awe? What do you want to see preserved for the future? Where can you give hope, or lend a hand? Where do you need hope and encouragement yourself? How can we help each other in the coming year?

Books of 2019: eclectic as usual

Boxing Day. Traditionally, this has been a day of curling up on the couch with a new Christmas book, but for the first time I can remember, I didn't receive a single one! I wonder if this is a trend among readers of this blog too. We don't buy or receive as many physical books, and maybe our friends and families are less likely to give them to us. I wonder, and, as a publisher, I worry. No matter -- trends haven't affected my reading patterns very much, except for the change to reading e-books borrowed from the Overdrive service at my library, or purchased on Kindle. I read almost exclusively on my phone, unless I've borrowed a physical book from the library. And though I did buy myself a couple of books about Greece that haven't arrived yet, I'm trying not to acquire too many these days -- the shelves are already overburdened. But read, I do.

I don't have a great deal to say about the books I read this year... there's a definite focus on Portuguese literature, because of traveling there and trying to write about it subsequently (a still-unfinished project). As usual, there are some classics from both ancient literature and the 19th and 20th centuries. After a debate with a friend about "the greatest novels" I decided to reread some of the candidates. Middlemarch was a first-timer for me, and I liked it. War and Peace was a re-reading, but while I had remembered the characters and basic plot, the book affected and impressed me much more now than when I read it before as a much younger person with so much less experience of life -- I think it deserves its status as one of the greatest novels ever written. I finally made it through Ulysses a few years ago, and don't plan to re-read The Brothers Karmazov, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary any time soon; other candidates are lined up for re-reading next year: The Magic Mountain, Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury. But I find I'm more interested in continuing to read books in translation from world literatures that are less known to me. In addition to War and Peace, the "biggest read" was Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, about the city where my mother-in-law spent her youth after leaving Armenia -- a city whose history is virtually disappearing.

Particular favorites this year were Compass by Mathias Enard, and two books by friends: Immigrant, Montana, by Amitava Kumar, and Human Archipelago, by Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole. Among the Lisbon books, I especially loved For Isabel: A Mandala, and Requiem: An Hallucination, both by Antonio Tabucchi, and A History of the Siege of Lisbon, by Jose Saramago. Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney is brilliant and illuminating. I didn't think Pachinko was incredibly well-written, but it was such a great window into a diaspora I knew little about (Koreans living in Japan). Likewise, there's always a Murakami on my list: I liked Killing Commendatore a lot, but didn't think it was in the same league as, say, 1Q84. The Frolic of the Beasts, by Yukio Mishima, is an excellent, extremely disturbing novel by the great Japanese writer.

It might be worth mentioning (since I don't think I have before) that I also regularly read and highly recommend the Canadian (but international) literary magazine Brick. I'd love to have a piece in there someday -- I came close with one this year, according to a kind letter I received from one of their editors, and will try to submit something again in 2020.

Right now I've started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk -- original, unsettling and intriguing so far. I enjoyed Greek to Me, a love letter to Greece and the Greek language by New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, especially because since our recent trip I've been studying modern Greek - half an hour each morning, along with half an hour of French in the afternoon. In her book, Norris mentions visiting the home of the late great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in Kardamyli, Greece, on the Mani peninsula. We were nearby and fascinated by the stoic ruggedness and remoteness of that region, so I've ordered a couple of Fermor's books -- one about the Mani, and the other about northern Greece -- so that will be how 2020 is likely to start out.

Finally, it was a great pleasure to hear and meet one of my literary heroes, Michael Ondaatje, this year at a reading he gave in Montreal.

What about you? Please share your favorites, or entire book list if you keep one, in the comments! I always love hearing from fellow readers at this time of year, and wish you all a happy year of reading ahead!

 

Book List, 2019

Drink Time! In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dolores Payás

Greek to Me, Mary Norris

Electric Light, Seamus Heaney

The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago (rereading)

The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester (audiobook, dnf)

For Isabel: A Mandala, Antonio Tabucchi

The Lives of Things, Jose Saramago

Helen, Euripedes

The Women of Troy, Euripedes

Ion, Euripedes

Falling Upward, Richard Rohr

The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin (bits and pieces, mainly the essay on Tolstoy "The Hedgehog and the Fox")

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading)

Human Archipelago, Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima

O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music, Andrew Gant

4 3 2 1, Paul Auster (DNF)

Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi

Warlight, Michael Ondaatje (second reading, for book club)

Requiem: an Hallucination, Antonio Tabucchi

What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi

The Tiny Journalist, Naomi Shihab Nye

The Lisbon Poets (anthology)

Five-Minute Sketching: Architecture, Liz Steel

The Book of the Red King, Marly Youmans

Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (3rd and 4th books, Mountolive, Clea)

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (First two books: Justine, Balthazar)

The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley (DNF)

Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar

Compass, Mathias Enard

A Bronze-Age Path to Self-Discovery

The "Warrior Vase", 12th c. BC, is so famous that the building in which it was discovered at Mycenae is called "The House of the Warrior Vase." I was completely crazy about this object when I first studied it: it felt to me like a sketch of Agamemnon's actual warriors going off from Mycenae to fight at Troy, while a woman, at far left, raises her hand in farewell. Agamemnon and the Trojan War are considered legendary, but the archaeological evidence from both Mycenae and Troy indicate beyond a doubt that advanced societies lived there in the Bronze Age, at least 400 years before the Homeric epics were composed, ruled by kings of great wealth and power, who traded and were in contact with other city-states and cultures in the Aegean, Egypt and North Africa, and the Middle and Near East.

I had just turned nineteen when I took my first course in Greek art: it was called "Greece in the Bronze Age", and was taught by John Coleman at Cornell University. Since childhood, I had been captivated by the Iliad and Odyssey, the Greek gods and the myths: this felt like a way to get closer. I still remember the day when John brought shards of impossibly ancient pottery into the classroom, and the first one was passed into my hands. How do we describe those moments of wonder that quickly move into some sort of inexplicable connection, and a passionate longing to plunge in deeply? By the end of that semester, after being immersed in the early cultures of Mycenae and Tiryns, the Cyclades, and the Minoan civilization in Crete, I knew for sure that this was what I wanted to study, and changed my major from biology to classics, with a focus on archaeology and ancient Greek art.

Head from a marble statue from the Cyclades, 2800-2300 BC. This sculpture originally had painted eyes and red striations on the cheek. You can see where Brancusi found inspiration. I've always loved Cycladic art because of its elemental simplicity: this particular head was chosen by the museum as one of its featured objects.

It wasn't easy; I was already a semester behind the students who had declared their decision earlier, so I had to catch up in the Greek language classes, as well as qualifying in French and German, and fit the required courses and my chosen electives into the remaining two-and-a-half years. Nevertheless, it was of the best decisions I ever made. Even though, at the end, I didn't want to pursue the academic route and become a professor, what I learned during those years studying with John, his colleagues Will Cummer, Will Provine, and Andrew Ramage, and brilliant Greek professors like Pierro Pucci, Fred Ahl, and Michael Stokes, completely changed my life. I learned how to be a scholar and my writing improved a great deal; I gained confidence in my ability to think and to express those thoughts with clarity; my interest in history, literature, and human culture deepened; I became more disciplined, and more confident about my own ability as an artist, because John encouraged me to illustrate my papers and honors thesis. I discovered, through the Greeks, my own passion for graphic design, and the use of positive and negative space, that formed the basis for my own eventual career in that field.

Flying fish swimming among fish-eggs and sea sponges, 16th century BC -- a fresco from Phylakopi on the Cycladic island of Melos. I had never seen this fragment before, and was delighted by it.

A tiny Mycenaean hedgehog.

And a huge Mycenaean octopus, amid fragments of seaweed, clearly showing the influence of Minoan art, which this vase-artist must have seen. 16th c. BC.

Through a series of unfortunate political events, my own lack of experience in traveling alone, and limited money, I never made it to Greece when I was young, even though I won a scholarship for a summer of archaeology there. Though I was considering studying the conservation of antiquities, my life took a different turn. Over the years, I would visit the famous Greek and Roman art collections in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, including the Greek vases I loved, but many of the Bronze Age treasures that had first captivated me remained as pictures in books, or memories from classroom slideshows. Unlike the Parthenon sculptures and many of the finest Greek vases and sculptures, which had been taken from Greece long before by wealthy collectors or government-sanctioned archaeology expeditions -- stolen is the correct word -- many of the primary Bronze Age objects had stayed there, some because they were discovered later, or perhaps because fewer people prized them, and partly because some of the archaeologists who discovered them, like Heinrich Schliemann, had insisted that they remain in Greece.

The so-called "mask of Agamemnon" - a lifesize gold death mask of an unidentified Mycenaean king discovered by Heinrich Schliemann; this is one of several such gold death masks that he found.

Just one of many cases of Mycenaean gold of astonishing workmanship and detail.

A few weeks ago, I finally got to see these objects and visit some of the places where they were found. As I stood in front of the cases of Mycenaean and Cycladic art in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, I felt the years collapse: once again I was that young woman, seeing these things for the first time, feeling my heart leap with delight and fascination. How grateful, and how fortunate I felt, to be there at last!

Late in that long day of museum-looking, I went back through the galleries and made the two drawings shown here. It wasn't because I thought that my drawings would have any more value or beauty than my photographs of the objects, nor because I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back to Athens -- I certainly hope to, but one never knows about the future. All drawings aren't done for the same reasons. In this case I wanted to take the time to do this, because choosing these particular objects out of so many, and standing in front of them with the intent focus that a drawing requires, felt like a ritual act imbued with personal significance. It was a testament to relationship: not only with the objects and their anonymous makers, but with myself over time. I wanted to honor that, and so I drew.

Another view of the Athens Polytechnic, looking north

I did another drawing, this time in pen. It's 12" x 9", done with a Sailor fude-nib pen, and Noodler's Lexington Grey ink, in a Stillman & Birn Gamma series sketchbook.

Here's a close-up. As I wrote on Instagram yesterday, I'm tempted to add color to this drawing, but think I'll resist. I've got a good start on a suite of drawings of Athens and Greece in this style, and feel like I'm gradually getting better at capturing the feeling of a visually complicated cityscape. The perspective and scale are relatively accurate, without being "architectural drawings" - which is what I'm aiming for: a fairly loose, artistic sketch. There are good reasons to keep these as a group, and frankly we seldom see monochromatic drawings these days, so that's a good reason to do them. But maybe I'll also do some color ones separately. Any comments/preferences?

Athens: Anarchists and Antigone

The Polytechnic University of Athens, on a bright day.

The first apartment we stayed in was located north of the center of the city, near the National Museum of Archaeology and the Polytechnic University. Last year we stayed in a tiny room in a less-than-stellar hotel in the touristic center near the Acropolis - a great location, with good breakfasts, but we could barely turn around in either the bedroom or the bath, and we heard loud guests at every hour of the day or night. This time we wanted a larger, quieter place where we could cook, and learn about another part of the city. The apartment we rented turned out to be perfect. It was on the seventh floor, with a wide balcony that looked out over the buildings and courtyard of the Technical University, site of historic resistance by students against the military junta that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. On November 17, 1973, after several days of escalating student demonstrations, armed police crashed through the university gates with a tank. 24 civilians, including students and a young boy, were killed, and hundreds injured, though the official government inquiry disputed these deaths. Nevertheless, this catastrophe triggered events that led to the fall of the government the following July.

After that, a law was passed making university campuses safe zones, where the police cannot enter. The Polytechnic became the main site of resistance movements, and the home of the contemporary Greek anarchist movement. The neighborhood around the campus is called Exarchia, and is controlled by anarchist groups, but we didn't feel any threat from them -- rather than being against authority in all forms, their philosophy seems to be a bit more subtle: they're against the police, capitalism, globalization, and fascism, supportive of immigrants and refugees who they see as victims of capitalistic military actions and policies.

A poster in the neighborhood. The headline at the top reads "οχι αλλοι νεκροι, οχι αλλα στρατοπεδα συγκεντρωσης", "No more dead, no more concentration camps."

Our apartment host explained that the main university building was now occupied by students, and while the area was safe, she was glad we wouldn't be there on the 17th, because that was an annual day of demonstrations, when the anarchists and police always clashed, sometimes violently, with some danger from tear gas, Molotov cocktails and the like. While we were in residence, we watched the students coming and going, as well as faculty -- apparently classes were still going on in some of the other buildings. Graffiti, posters, and large homemade banners in a several-block radius indicated the presence of active resistance by these anarchists, with messages of solidarity with refugees and migrants -- of which Greece has a disproportionate number, many in controversial detention camps -- and anti-capitalist slogans. One weekend night, there was a demonstration that went on into the wee hours, with speeches followed by live music; we had a ringside seat, but couldn't tell what was really going on.

A pencil sketch from our balcony, looking toward the courtyard of the Archaeology Museum.

The buildings of the Polytechnic University are gorgeous examples of neo-classical architecture, designed by the architect Lysandros Kaftantzoglou (1811–1885) who would not be happy to see their current condition. From our balcony we looked down over the tiled roofs of two open, colonnaded buildings modeled after the classical stoa, or marketplace with columns, common to all public agoras in ancient times, and the beautifully-proportioned main building, with its pediment and Ionic columns flanked by staircases. Part of the roof of this building has fallen in. There's a courtyard and garden filled with flowering plants and trees, and, closer to the street, monuments to the fallen students as well as the remains of the gate that was smashed by the tank back in 1973.

Socrates (right) and Plato (left) presiding over the entrance to the Academy of Athens -- the name harkening back to Plato's Academy --which is the country's national academy and highest research institution, where work is divided into three orders: Natural Sciences, Letters and Arts, Moral and Political Sciences.

Anarchistic thought has a long history in Greece, going all the way back to Socrates, who, if not being an out-and-out anarchist in a modern sense, taught his students to continually question authority, and value above all one's right to a free will. He was tried and put to death because of his criticism of the political authority and direction of the Athenian state at the time. (As a political concept, Αναρχια, "anarchy," is a Greek word that first appears in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles around the same time, in the fifth C. BC.)

A copy of Sophocles' Antigone in modern Greek that I bought in an Athenian used bookstore. I can read the Greek alphabet and had three years of university-level ancient Greek, but don't know the modern language at all. I can only decipher it with difficulty and the help of translation programs. I've forgotten most of the ancient Greek I once knew, but I thought I might compare this text to the original and learn something: intellectual folly, probably, but it was one of those things you see when traveling, and just want to have.

As one article I read pointed out, Sophocles' play Antigone is centered on the anarchist question of whether the young protagonist, Antigone, is right to exercise her free will against both family and the authorities -- to choose to properly bury her brother against the advice of her sister, and the express decree of the king, who has forbidden the burial because her brother had died fighting against that state.

Posters for (I think) current theater productions in Athens. Sophocles' Antigone on the left, a play titled The Building" on the right.

These are human questions that have persisted throughout recorded time. It's not surprising to me that this Greek play not only continues to be performed, 2500 years after it was written, but has also inspired a number of recent works, such as Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire, in which a young British woman rejects her sister's (and the state's) prohibitions by trying to aid, and then bury, her brother who left Britain to fight for ISIS, then regrets his decision and tries to return home. We still have a very difficult time deciding which is the highest "right": following the authority and wishes of one's family or one's country, or doing what an individual feels to be right and just, according to their own conscience or spiritual convictions, even if the penalty is ostracism, exile, or death. Jesus' difficult and hotly-debated parable in Luke 14:26, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple," speaks to much the same issue.

Here in Quebec, we also have a new film titled Antigone. The writer/director Sophie Deraspe said she was inspired by her reading of the play many years before, and by the story of Fredy Villaneuva, who was killed by a Montreal police officer in 2008 after an illegal game of dice in Henri-Bourassa park escalated into a physical confrontation with police. The film is about a girl in a Montreal refugee family whose brother is shot and killed by police. Against the wishes of her family, she tries to save her remaining brother, who has been arrested and faces deportation, and then runs afoul of the law herself. 

Socrates would be right at home.

Return

A sketch of the Acropolis done at home, back in October, shown here in three stages. Drawn with a Sailor fude nib pen on toned paper, with some added gouache in the other two stages below.

Apologies for my long absence here -- I've just come back from 2 1/2 weeks in Greece, and the month before was a bit crazy because J. had a show for the launch of his new book two days before we left. I don't like to post much online when I'm away; maybe it's paranoia, but it doesn't seem smart to telegraph to the world that you're not at your home or workplace for an extended period. Anyway, we're back. On Friday it was 20 degrees Celsius in Athens. Today it's -4 C. here in Montreal, and there's snow and ice on the ground and sidewalks. We were forewarned, and to be honest, it wasn't that big a shock when we stepped out of the Trudeau airport terminal  into air temperature and wind I could only describe as "bracing" and a complete change of seasons from when we left. As lifelong northerners, winter feels normal to us, and we had packed extra layers in case, so we opened our suitcases near the baggage counter (like a lot of other Montrealers were doing) pulled out the hats and gloves and parkas, and stepped off into home territory. Still, the next morning we couldn't help remarking about the bougainvillea and lantana that had been blooming around us the day before, or the taste of beautifully heavy, ripe tomatoes, or the oranges, limes and lemons just getting ripe on the trees that grow along Greek streets and in gardens. As I described to a friendly barista in a favorite Athenian cafe, in Canada it really is like the tale of Persephone, where she ate six pomegranate seeds in Hades and the earth was plunged into winter for as many months. At least, that's what how Roman writers like Ovid told the tale. For the earlier Greeks, Persephone's punishment for eating food in the underworld only required that she spend a third of the year there -- a more accurate reflection of Greek seasons. Winter, even in the mountains in Greece, doesn't seem to last much more than four months.

November is the time of the olive harvest, and of pruning and burning in vineyards and olive orchards. We also saw people pruning shrubs, like overgrown laurels, and pollarding their trees, especially in villages.  Their fall has been unseasonably hot -- it was certainly cooler when we visited last year -- and everyone remarked on this. Last year there was snow on Mt Parnassus and skiers already on the slopes; this year people were still swimming in the sea. But further north in Europe and in northeastern North America, the cold has been much earlier than usual, and the storms more violent. When we passed through Paris on our way home, there was snow on the ground and our flight was delayed for de-icing. I don't see how anyone can possibly deny that climate change is real.

Last year we were in Athens for a shorter time, about a week, and drove through parts of northern Greece, visiting Meteora, Thessaloniki, Vergina, and Delphi before returning to Athens. This year we spent longer in the city, on both sides of a road trip to the Peloponnese: Napflio and Epidaurus, Mycenae, Sparta and Mystras, an amazing drive over the mountains through the Langada Pass to Kalamata, down into the remote Mani Peninsula, and then back past Tripoli and Corinth, stopping for a night on the sea at Kineta, and driving above the Gulf of Corinth to visit the Osios Lukas monastery and then drive past Thebes before heading back to Athens. Along the way we met and talked to a lot of different people, and while we had planned the basic shape of the trip beforehand, a lot happened that was unexpected, which is one reason why we like traveling this way. It was such an epic trip that in some ways it doesn't seem real. It's hard for me to process all that we saw and experienced, let alone formulate words to describe it -- which is also what happened last year: I started to try, and gave up.

But I did draw quite a lot, throughout the two and a half weeks, trying to keep to my goal of doing at least one drawing a day. The only sketch I did in color was the very first one, of a baked-goods and candy seller in Syntagma Square while J. was buying SIM cards for our phones. After that I switched from the toned paper sketchbook I had made to my usual Stillman & Birn hardcover, and sketched in pencil or ink only. Whether these drawings will form the basis for other work now remains to be seen, but I'm happy that I was able to keep up the sketching practice, even sometimes in the car as we drove through changing landscapes, and to work quickly. I was very aware of being helped by all the drawing I've done in the past -- it's like playing scales on the piano; you do get better, and more confident about tackling difficult or complicated subjects. This awareness also helped to keep me from being discouraged by the inevitable, less-satisfactory drawings. It's all a process, and these are sketches after all: a very personal way for me to record places or experiences that, for various reasons, I wanted to remember as important. Sitting down with the sketchbook for half an hour in a place that has touched me is an experience in itself that is forever linked to that drawing -- I remember the calls of the birds, people's voices, the sound of the wind, the feeling of the earth or rock or bench on which I was sitting, what I was thinking as I worked.

After two trips to Greece and one each to Sicily, Lisbon, and Rome, I know that the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, have gotten under my skin. Actually, I suspect that they touch something that was there all along, even from childhood. I'll be exploring that in more depth over the next weeks. For now, it's good to be home, and back with this far-flung community of online friends.

The Navel of the World

Some of you may remember that last winter I was working on a series of sketches of the landscape at Delphi, Greece. The one above remains my favorite - I even made it the screen image on my phone.

A few weeks ago I did another one, this time in oil pastel, following up on the oil pastels of Sicily. I thought maybe that medium would lend itself to this subject. Here's the full painting:

There's a lot that I like about it, and a lot I don't. My handling of the medium has gotten more confident. The color palette here works well, even though it's mostly imaginary. What doesn't work for me is the composition. It's fine for a "pretty painting" of a scene, but that's not what I'm after -- I've got photographs that serve that purpose. The circular, central lawn-like area is boring, and it makes the entire left side of the painting boring too, even though there are some interesting passages in the trees. Furthermore, the ruins in the foreground feel too literal and too prominent, even though I tried to subdue them. The result is that there are too many places for the eye to look, and this distracts from what drew me to this view in the first place. Why is it so hard to remember that, I wonder?

The picture is in this area:

Which is, not surprisingly, much like the gouache. Here it is again:

What makes this compositions work is the combination of strong simple shapes with intersecting angles that create tension and interest. In the gouache, which is really pared down to essentials, both in shape and in color, these elements create a locked-together composition of dark, slightly-triangular verticals held within the picture frame by the intersecting diagonals. Because the viewer isn't overwhelmed with details, and because the palette is so limited, the more abstract picture is able to create an emotional response that, for me anyway, is much closer to what I actually "felt" when standing there, and what I hoped to take away.

With the oil pastels and the picture cropped this way, I really like the strong cobalt blue with the lavender and dull green of the mountain. The foreground is missing in this crop, but the gouache helps me see better what to do with it. In addition to the beautiful, iconic trees, one of the most striking aspects of this landscape was the circular pattern of rocks and scrubby growth of the mountain behind the cedars. I like how the oil pastels have worked to capture that -- it's subtle, not detailed, but effective. Now I'm thinking about making a larger painting, in oils, based on what I've discovered by analyzing these pictures. The main message is simplify.

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While I was working on this piece, I found a suite of poems by Seamus Heaney that he had written in Greece. One of them is set in Delphi, and it speaks of Heaney's desire to drink from the spring where all visitors to Delphi who came to consult the oracle stopped to wash and drink; the same spring was used by the Pythia and the priests for a ritual cleansing before giving an oracular pronouncement or interpreting an oracle.

The Greeks believed that the spring was located at the center of the earth. Zeus, king of the gods, had loosed two eagles from opposite ends of the world, and, flying at the same speed, they crossed paths above Delphi. Zeus let a stone fall from the air where they crossed, and where it fell became the sacred site, marked by a stone called the omphalos, or navel of the world. Under the omphalos was buried the mythological monster called Python, which had guarded the sacred spring, until it was killed by the god Apollo, to whom Delphi and the Oracle became sacred. We saw a Roman copy of this large carved stone in the museum in Delphi. The carved pattern represents a woolen net that was once thought to cover the stone.

If you've been to Delphi, you would have thought, as I did, what a long, difficult journey it must have been to get there from any of the major city-states of Greece, and then to have to add the arduous climb up the side of Mt Parnassus. I wish I had known that the spring still exists, and that there's a modern fountain by the side of the road for modern travelers, but I had no idea! Heaney, visiting in the 1960s, did know this, and of course -- as a poet who had been steeped in the Greek classics, translated some, and used so many references and stories in his own poems and plays -- he was determined to drink from it himself. The poem speaks of his frustration and its resolution, and it's an image that has now been added to my own thoughts about Delphi.

Castalian Spring

Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—
But the inner water sanctum was roped off
When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,
And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!
So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,
The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,
Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless
Anger draining away, on terraces
Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.

--Seamus Heaney

Montreal Welcomes a Modern-Day Prophet

Text by Beth Adams, all photographs (c)2019 by Jonathan Sa'adah

 

I participated in the climate march last Friday, along with more than half a million other Montrealers. We had a good-sized contingent from Christ Church Anglican Cathedral, and we all met up there, and walked to the starting point together. My husband, who's a professional photographer, roamed around the route of the march, and ended up just behind the official press area at the stage where Greta Thunberg eventually spoke. 

One of the young people who was marching with us said that this was her very first protest march - she grew up in the Midwestern U.S., and has just started graduate work at Montreal Diocesan Theological College. Several of us, who've already done this for a lifetime, talked to her about how she was feeling -- she was excited -- and she asked about the most recent, or most memorable, marches we'd gone to. 

Students climb up the Sir George Etienne Cartier monument, for a good view at the start of the march.

There were a lot of great signs in both French and English -- I thought the large poster of Greta as Joan of Arc, in armor and dark bangs, was pretty clever, and very French, but certainly hope she doesn't meet such an awful fate.

Who could not be impressed, buoyed, and encouraged by the spirit of this preponderantly-youthful crowd, who seemed determined and mostly cheerful in spite of the dire warnings on their signs? But I noticed that the faces of many of the older people looked much more solemn: we know the stakes and the opponents now, we've been here before: against war, against nuclear power, against apartheid, for the rights of refugees, the rights of women, blacks, the disabled, those who are LGBTQ+. We're worried that this movement, as large as it is, and as absolutely right as it is, will have great difficulty prevailing over the forces arrayed against it. Nevertheless, it was a great day, and I was proud of my city and every person who had come out to march.

We had a long time to wait before getting started, and the crowd was enormous. I never made it to the end because I had another obligation, and my feet were killing me, so I bailed out in mid-afternoon and walked back home; Jonathan didn't get home for several more hours. In spite of the city making the metro free for the day, it was still very crowded, and some of the stations had been made entrance- or exit-only to try to alleviate the congestion. I was impressed, too, with the orderliness and camaraderie of the marchers, and the benign, friendly attitude of all the police. A day later, when my husband and I walked around the area where the march had ended, there was not a trace of debris or destruction from those 500,000+ people.

The Rev. Jesse Zink, Principal of the Montreal Diocesan Theological College, wrote an essay titled "Thus saith Greta", likening Greta Thunberg to an Old Testament prophet. That wasn't a comparison that had occurred to me, and it really struck hpme, especially when I saw the photographs Jonathan had taken. She stands alone and vulnerable, a child, looking even younger than her 16 years, and she yet she has the courage to speak truth to power. Rev. Zink writes:

"Like many other prophets throughout history, her ministry has imposed a cost on her: she has given up school, she has changed her life, she has been subject to accusation, slander, and attack...

In both her UN address and her Montreal speech, Thunberg leveled a straightforward generational challenge: 'You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.' One of the reasons climate change is such an intractable problem is precisely its inter-generational nature: the actions of one generation are largely felt in another..."

Zink speaks of the Biblical covenant between humans and God that Moses revealed as being specifically inter-generational -- in fact, "down to the thousandth generation" - in other words, forever. Other cultures and religions have similar stories that pass down the idea of stewardship for the earth to subsequent generations. Part of why human-caused climate change is so malevolent is that it violates this long inter-generational responsibility, and, I might add, destroys it in such a short period of time.

"As we discussed in the ministry seminar on Friday, the world needs prophets, evangelists, missionaries, and preachers. But we also noted that it needs priests, people who can gather the community and enable its gifts to be released. We saw that in Montreal on Friday in the relatively low-profile and anonymous group of people who provided the forum for a prophet of our time to preach her word."

In my lifetime, I don't think I've ever seen anyone quite like this young David going up against Goliath. Montreal is not a religious city any longer, but it is a principled and progressive international city where people think, and are willing to stand up for their beliefs. Last Friday, it felt like part of what the crowd was doing was holding Greta up with our bodies and our voices, giving her that forum in which to preach, and also giving her "our ears to hear." Each of us must find our own role in this crucial struggle, and we can't allow ourselves to be discouraged: it is her future, and the future of all the young and yet-to-be-born of our precious and fragile earth -- not just humans, but all living things -- that we are responsible for protecting.