the cassandra pages

Early morning, Park Lafontaine

Crossing Rachel a traveler

in dreadlocks and yellow shirt

asks the way to Bellechasse.

Down the avenue of trees

I follow a squirrel

and three leashed malamuts;

unfurl my blanket beneath a maple:

dappled shade; lazy ducks;

the mesmerizing curtain of the fountain.

Sips of coffee between poems

in a salmon-colored binding: the poet,

alone in a foreign city, listens to music.

A visit by a fluffy dog,

black, white, with curious tongue;

an old man turns his fine profile toward the lake;

a young man with tattooed shoulders

bends his girlfriend like the pliant rushes

with passionate kisses.

The sun grows hotter,

the fountain stops, begins again:

a single burst toward heaven.

Farm Life

Entranced by the stormy sky and the sunset - eerie yellow in a clear band beneath layers of flat slate-grey clouds - we stopped so J. could take pictures just as the light was going. I got out of the car and walked up the road and back, while the huge trucks carrying logs and sheetrock, flattened cars and food products whizzed by, shaking the tripod and the very ground under my feet. Along the road stretched a drainage ditch, filled with tight brown cat-tails and the umbels of vigorous mustard plants, chartreuse in the low light; purple vetch and Queen-Anne's lace. Beyond them: a wide stripe of bean plants, as far as I could see to my left andright, and in back of the bean field, tall corn: dark green with a yellow haze of tassels on the top. In the far distance, roiling light grey and white clouds were sandwiched between the green growing earth and a ceiling of dark grey, flat-bottomed cumulus clouds, as unmoving and impenetrable as a sheet of smoked glass.

The little farm stands selling corn and tomatoes had shut for the night, but when we came close to Ferme Reid a bluish fluorescent still glowed in the open shed. "Want to stop?" J. asked, and I nodded, pulling the car off the road. We chose three ripe tomatoes from the mound on the counter; a paper bag full of wax beans; a cucumber and some small new carrots; a little tray of fresh raspberries and a basket of blueberries. The last of the day's corn lay scattered in its big bin, and as I started to peel back the husk from an ear, the young blond farm boy minding the stand came over and solemnly opened five more ears in turn, discarding those that didn't meet his standards and silently proffering the others to me, waiting for my nod or shake of the head. "Six are fine," I told him in French, and he rang up the purchases, handing me the bag with a small smile, while a young tabby cat rubbed her bony ribs against a post and refused - already haughty - to respond to my "psst psst" with anything other than a brief glance.

"Bonne soirée," we said.

"Merci, bonne soirée," the boy replied, and he looked after us a bit wistfully, I thought, across his red orbs of tomatoes and bushel basket of beans.

Tiara

For Lorianne, who loves shop windows, reflections, and once wanted one of these.

The beauty created by others

A little melancholy tonight. It’s because I’m tired: I’ve been working very hard but haven’t been able to get back to the book lately, and there is work piled up as far as I can see ahead of me. The intense focus of the day at the computer means that my back hurts this evening, more than it usually does, and I haven’t got the energy to do the things I wanted or hoped to do tonight. I was a little cross with J. and he’s retreated downstairs, wisely, and so I’m here looking over at my books on the shelves, those markers that make me realize how quickly my life has passed so far. How full it’s been, too. There's the shelf of Greek books – the plays, philosophers, mythology, science; different translations of the Iliad and Odyssey; books on Greek and Cycladic art. Ancient history. Plato. Vergil. Those dark Penguin Classics spines giving way suddenly to French literature, then American; there’s Norman Mailer underneath The pre-Socratic Philosophers. Hah! And Kerouac underneath Vetruvius on Architecture. See, this is cheering me up already. Beneath the French are the Russians, taking up a whole shelf, with the Germans off to the right. And, funny thing, on the deeper shelf underneath them, tilting a little like rock layers exposed along a road cut, are music scores representing most of Europe and the new world, along with a couple of books on anatomy and a few typographic manuals, stuck there because they’re the same height as the scores.

Well, no need to keep going on this except for my own amusement, and besides, the corner of the couch is blocking my view of the lower shelves but I won't shift my gaze to the other bookshelves stretching off to the side. I could stop right here and probably tell a story about any one of those books. Because I read a lot from libraries, I don’t buy and keep many titles, and those I do buy usually have some reason for remaining here, not least of which is as chosen companions and markers on this strange journey of my particular life, decade after decade. From my perch here on the couch I can spot books I had when I was ten, and others purchased forty years later. And even though these books represent an intellectual journey to which I sometimes stuffily attach great importance, the early ones were actually a pretty good predictor of what would end up on the shelves.

The other day, sad about the London and Egyptian and Iraq bombings and the tube shooting and Rice’s and Bush’s arrogant pronouncements, and our fractured, senseless world, I sat down at the piano and played for a while. The slow movement from Beethoven’s Pathetique, then a few preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, ending with No. 16, which I have often played, alone, when someone has died; it’s a journey right into the heart of confusion and pain, and then it gradually untangles and comes to rest, even if the path to that place is still not especially comprehensible. That piece has a lot of mystery in it for me; I don’t play it perfectly but that’s not the point; it’s that it takes me somewhere difficult and dark and undenied, carrying my doubts bundled on my back, and when I emerge out of that woods there is not relief, exactly, but there is a definite sense of having done something I needed to do. The music has accomplished something certain books do too, in a totally different way.

Adam Zagajewski is quoted in one of the current World Literature Today essays as having written “only in the beauty / created by others is there consolation”. And this poet who always acknowledges the darkness of history and human suffering, but refuses – as one of his translators, Bogdana Carpenter writes - to descend into cynicism or nihilism, also wrote, “I was in that strait / where suffering changes into song.”

Green

In a comment on the previous post, Lorianne, with her usual astuteness, spoke about the greenness of Ireland and how it looked to her like "a tattered piece of green velvet stretched over a rock". I've only flown over Ireland, but it certainly looked like that from the air - and does in movies, too. I could see why they call it the Emerald Isle.

Which makes me think about the different qualities of "green". I feel so surrounded by it in Vermont, and find it so unremittant, that I've decided the only thing to do is go into it more - like the Inuit with their snow, and the Bedouin with their sand. We are leafy, frondy, grassy people here, we Vermonters. I think, living in a chlorophyll factory, that we take green for granted.

Ahead of me, outside the second-storey window, I can see nothing but green: the swaying leaves of a big maple tree, only a few feet from the glass. The scene in the photograph above was taken about half an hour ago when I walked up the hill in back of our house (click on the image for a larger view). I'm not showing you the development that stretches up the hill in the foreground, largely obscured by the edge of the hill itself - and it looks as if there are no houses at all across the valley. At this time of the year, all huamn-scale structures tend to get lost among the trees. If some twin of mine were to shoot a picture from a point opposite, on the other side of the valley, these new house which loom so large in my suburbia-is-coming consciousness and above our own home, down in the village, would be mere dots of white and cream and blue on yet another green hillside.

But seen at near-range, the variation among shades and qualities of green is nothing short of staggering. Maybe what we need are more names for green: the big Crayola boxes didn't even have enough choices, nor does English in general. As an erstwhile oil painter, I loved the names of paints and pigments: cobalt green, deep and pale; cadmium green; emerald; viridian; phthalo green (blue and yellow shades); malachite; Hooker's green; permanent green (regular and light); chromium green oxide; sap green; olive green; terre verte; green gold. Each had its own characteristics and the names themselves continue to conjure up images. But when I was painting landscapes, even these were never adequate because things in nature simply aren't a color that can be squeezed our of a tube. Nor can an emerald-green patch of moss be painted with emerald pigment, next to a sap-green leaf, and look anything like they do in reality. Nature is light and reflection as well as pigment, with actual perceived color influenced more by the quality of the sky and by the surrounding neighbors than our intellectual notions of what is red, blue, or green.

So, as a painter, I always found myself back where Lorianne and J. started, stretching a whole-cloth of green over a foundation of earth using a limited palette: blue sky, yellow sun, white light, chlorophyll, and ground-up rocks.

International Transit

As we leave the city, the only people stirring are a few dog-owners in the park, and the squeegee guys on the corner of Sherbrooke and Papineau. J. gives them some change; they thank him, as usual, very politely. One of their number is still asleep on what looks like a mattress with sheets and pillows at the end of the park.

Crossing the Pont Jacques-Cartier: it's a brilliant morning, sun golden on a patch of mackerel clouds, rosy gold as it shines the skyscrapers, glints off the river.

Ducks on the Richelieu.

The corn in the big flat Canadian fields is now above eye level, and tasselled.

Above the fields, a hot-air balloon. It's grey when it first appears, hanging on the distant horizon, and yellow and blue when it passes over us at about 7:00 am.

In addition to the signs for mais sucré, most often indicated by an ear of corn with a smiling face drawn over the kernels, there were big strawberries with running feet, flailing arms, and no face at all.

It occurred to me for the first time this morning just how much seed corn must be required to plant these fields.

At the border, we're the only car. From the booth, sternly: "Where do you live, sir? How long were you in Canada? What was the purpose of your trip?" Passport perusal. "What are you bringing back with you?" A few groceries, we tell him. Lettuce. Plums. Eggplant. "No meat?" He flashes a sudden broad smile as the passports are handed back: "Have a nice day."

Vermont is the darker green of weather-toughened deciduous leaves. J. remarks that the entire rest of the state, underneath its thin skin of vegetative matter and dirt, appears to be rock.

Winooski River. White River.

Chicory on every roadside, growing out of gravel.

Truck farm: kale, brussels sprouts, chrysanthemum plants with a headstart on October.

In my own garden, a surprise of color: yellow daylilies, purple clematis, orange cosmos, white hydrangeas, pink mallow, red bee balm.

A large rodent has been standing on its hind legs, eating the beans.

Caged

I've barely gone out of the apartment for three days. On Friday afternoon, we received a pile of unexpected work, on top of an already busy schedule. Between the hot weather, which finally moderated today, and the demands of this new work, there's been little else to do but keep my nose to the monitor and watch the outer world go by peripherally, as if in an aquarium. J. did the shopping; I did the cooking: we're old hands at shifting into this mode when we have to.

Yesterday evening, before dinner, we decided to walk up to the depanneur for some liquid refreshment. It was still steamy-hot out, and the Montrealers we passed on the street were in various stages of unselfconscious disrobement.

"On the way to the marché this morning,"J. told me, as we walked, "I saw a woman out on her balcony, topless."

I laughed but wasn't all that surprised. We entered the dep and headed for the cooler in the back; we ended up with two big bottles of Labatt's biere fort - strong beer - never having tried the stuff. Back at home I grilled some shrimp that had been marinating in tamari, lime juice, ginger, a little oil, Thai hot sauce, and chopped mint, and cracked open the beers. The shrimp and rice were savory and delicious; a salad afterwards was cool and refreshing, and the buzz was, well, appreciated and definitely fort.

We're not really beer drinkers, but heh, we're in Canada and it's hot. Tonight after another long day of picky work we went through a similar routine, accompanying the beer, or vice versa, with a nice piece of morbier lait cru on hard rye crackers, some spicy merguez sausages, a pasta salad with fresh tomatoes and dry Moroccan olives, and sweet corn.  After dinner I did a little more work, and thinking ahead to the bicycle ride down to the fireworks at 10:00 pm, made myself a little pot of Arab coffee. Let's hope it takes effect now, and not at 3:00 am!

The wind blows in Iceland

Coup de Vent has begun posting from her trip to Iceland. Go see.

la chaleur

 

(Waiting for the fireworks; click for a larger version)

The heat is unrelenting, tropical; flesh steams like damp foliage, refuses movement like a lizard, a sloth. Saturday evening, we bike through the torpid air to the river to watch les feux d'artifices from the deck of the closed Pont Jacques-Cartier. The fireworks exhibition, from the Czech Republic, is billed as being filled with mystere - how can that be? And yet it is. We watch the sky fill with white and gold etchings, observe the slow rise of fiery jellyfishes shedding a trail of white sparks. Afterwards a hot cranky child has a tantrum, people crowd around the water-vendor, the ice-cream cart. A beautiful woman in a black-and-white headscarf sits in a folding chair, langidly swinging one high-heeled foot, waiting for her husband. The crowd streams up Lorimer, Papineau and dissolvies into the night.

In the morning, the cathedral is solid with unmoving air. I've brought my Chinese fan and unfurl it; everyone is limp, miserable, fluttering their service bulletins. Joyce, the associate priest, comes up the aisle and talks to my husband and friends. She's wearing full liturgical vestments including a brocade cope; already theree are huge beads of sweat on her forehead; she looks like she will pass out. "Why are you wearing that?" I ask bluntly. She looks at me, and in one swift motion pulls off the cope. "I'll put it back on during communion if I feel guilty," she says, but she doesn't.

From the baptistry, where there is a fan, the choir sings a Scarlatti mass, a Palestrina motet. During communion I go to the end of the rail, kneel down and lean my bare arm and shoulder against the cool stone. It's as sensuous and refreshing as slipping my body into water. I don't want to get up but I must; people are waiting.

Afterwards we descend into the chilled underground city for lunch. I order a plate of incendiary Thai curry and am suddenly, burstingly happy when I realize the woman always behind the counter on these Sunday noons, with her lovely high cheekbones and serene countenance, has recognized us for the first time as she smiles, saying "hello, how have you been?"

Back at home, mid-afternoon, the power suddenly goes off. It's not just our apartment; we head into the hallway, talk to the neighbors, go back into the bedroom and promptly fall asleep on the bed. When we wake, an hour later, I think I hear a truck running in the alley. "What's that," I say to J. He looks at me incredulously. "What do you think it is?" he asks. "A truck outside," I say sleepily. He gives me another look. I listen harder. "Oh." I say. "The air conditioner."

Don't confuse the pointing finger for the moon

Canadian readers and others who may be trying to fathom the extent and reach of the Karl Rove/Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame revelations will find some answers in this excellent editorial by Frank Rich of the New York Times.