the cassandra pages

Fall Color

Last week the incessant rain in Vermont suddenly thickened, became opaque. "It's raining snow!" wailed a friend, and that was right: big white globs the size of maple leaves splattering against the skylight and sticking to the hostas and junipers, coating the still-green grass and fallen yellow leaves with a strange whiteness.

The weight of an early fall snow often brings disaster too - trees fell, their roots wrenche from the ground by the sudden topheaviness. No such problem in our yard; the snow disappeared into the already sodden earth and we headed north, on Friday, thinking that the nearly-overflowing river was the only reminder of the storm.

But as soon as we began to climb up the foothills of the Green Mountains, we saw white: the tops of the mountains were covered with snow which gradually diminished to nothing about halfway down. We drove through the valleys, where the last of this year's dull fall color still clung to the trees, while the mountains towered above us, dusted as if by a heavenly shaker of confectioner's sugar, with the highest peaks shining in the sun like the mythical landscape of a digitally-enhanced film.

Here, in the city, most of the leaves haven't even fallen and finally, yesterday, there was sunshine and a blue sky. I celebrated with a long afternoon walk that included browsing at La Tricoteuse, the yarn store; a friperie (clothing thrift store) up on Mont Royal, and one of the French used-bookstores in the neighborhood. And although my café fare is likely to be a tisane rather than an espresso for quite a while, life begins to seem more normal.

A London Request

Next week, Bishop Gene Robinson is scheduled to be in England, a visit which has stirred a great deal of controversy. The opposition has become, in my opinion, outrageously offensive. The Guardian ran an article today about their so-far-unsuccessful efforts to pressure the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres:

The London Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship, which includes senior lay and clergy members of the diocese, has been urging the bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury not to allow Bishop Robinson, who was elected two years ago as the diocesan bishop of New Hampshire, to set foot in the capital or attend a scheduled service for homosexual Christians at St Martin-in-the Fields church in Trafalgar Square.

Hard to imagine.

I have a real fondness for St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a place I visit every time I am in London, not only for its concerts but for its mission to the homeless of London. Since I can't be there for this upcoming event to support my friend Gene and write about it in person, I'm wondering if any of the London readers of this blog might be willing to go for me and send me an account of what happens. I'll be happy to send you a free copy of my book when it comes out. The event is on Saturday, November 5th:

Changing Attitude are holding an Anniversary Eucharist at St Martin's on 5 November at 11am. The President will be Revd Canon Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford. At 12.30pm an address will be given by Rt Revd Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire. Admission to the service is by ticket only (free). There will be an Anniversary Reception at 1.30pm for which tickets (£15) are also required. Tickets can be obtained from Changing Attitude, 12 Lavender Gardens, London SW11 1DL, e-mail: [email protected], or from their website www.changingattitude.org

Details are at the St. Martin-in-the-Fields website, here.

Purchases

Yesterday I drove over to the local shopping center to do a few errands, planning to treat myself, post-box-store, to some browsing at the bookstore. The parking lot was crowded already at 11:00 am, and inside the big box the checkout lines went back into the aisles. I hurried to get the supplies I needed, and then picked up a bottle of lotion in cosmetics. There were a lot of couples in the store, some with children, some without. Most of them seemed to have come into town for a little Sunday recreational shopping, and they were from the lowest economic segments of local society. I looked at the faces as they passed me: rough, hard-looking men wearing caps and overalls, camouflage barn jackets, snowmobile parkas in dark green, dark blue, brown; women with pinched, hard-luck faces and unwashed hair. The complexions were sallow and unhealthy, the bodies either hugely overweight, it seemed, or gaunt and nervous, most likely propelled through each day by cigarettes and coffee. Back at the checkout lines, people waited herdlike, dull expressions on their faces, their carts piled with plastic. I glanced over my shoulder, looking for kindness and a glimmer of somethign beyond emptiness; listened to snatches of conversation, hoping for a bit of liveliness rather than the predictable crudity and coarseness. On this day, I found neither.

I knew these people once: I grew up among them, went to school with their children. Parts of my own family aren’t far from this. Back where I came from, they had (and many still do have) hard but decent jobs on farms and in the feed mills, or maybe they ran a small engine repair shop or worked as mechanics keeping farm machinery going. Some couples ran small subsistence farms up in the hills. They were often shy when venturing into town to shop for a birthday present or fill a prescription, but in a small town community where everyone knew everyone else, and people needed each other, life was less stratified and people felt like they were part of a continuum and a natural order; everyone had a place and a legitimacy.

Oh, God, what’s happened to my country? That’s all gone in Vermont now. Today there are the people who have money and opportunities, and those who do not -- and wipe the tables for those who do. There’s a difference between milking cows and plowing fields all your life, and working on the lowest rung of a nursing home, or a cafeteria kitchen or fast-food joint, or on an assembly line if you’re lucky enough to have one of the manufacturing jobs that’s still left. Or maybe you can work on a road crew in the summer, and sit home all winter in front of the television, collecting unemployment and yelling at your kids and your wife because you’re bored and despairing and there’s not a chance in hell that tomorrow or next year or ten years from now will be any different. That hopelessness and resignation is what the people in the checkout lines had in common yesterday. They also agree on the omnipresent “They” -- the ones they blame for their troubles: the Company, the Government, the Rich.

I look in their eyes trying to see something other than emptiness; once in a while you do but not often. They don’t have health insurance or dental care, they hate intellectuals and liberals with a passion. Some of them were in the military and now have kids in Iraq. They believed in weapons of mass destruction, and probably still do.

They’re too easy a target. I want to blame and despise them, but I know too much. The script was written for most of them they day they were born; the educational system didn’t do a damn thing for them – and yet they cling to something called the American Dream, and stick red white and blue ribbons on their pickup trucks, all the while getting screwed over one more time.

--

From the box store I walked as fast as I could over to Borders. I walked straight through the new&noteworthies, the travel section and the romances and science fiction, into the far corner where an island of poetry books sits surrounded by a quiet reef of literature. I sat on a blond wooden bench and read Seamus Heaney like a half-drowned woman gulping air. Every now and then I heard a bit of conversation from the checkout line. Someone had run into old friends; they talked about their purchases. “People say the late quartets are the best,” a man’s voice said. “But I like the middle ones.”

After a while I chose Heaney’s recent Selected Poems, Opened Ground, and stood up. A serious young man walked in, and took my place on the bench.

In front of me in line was a spry middle aged man and his grandson, a little boy of three or four, who was clutching a children’s book. The man had on a hand-crocheted cap of turquoise cotton, and sparkly eyes. “You can pay for it yourself,” he told the boy.

“How do I do it?” said the boy, looking up, his blue slicker falling off his shoulders.

“With these dollars you’ve got in your pocket,” said the grandfather, pulling three bills out and showing them to him.

“But how…how do I do it?” pleaded the boy, in a rising, worried soprano.

The grandfather glanced at me and smiled, knowing I was listening. I smiled back. He got down and explained to the boy how they’d go up to the counter, and what the cashier would ask, and how the boy would hand him the book and then the dollars. The little boy still looked nervous, but the grandfather took his hand and said, “You can do it, it’ll be fine. And I’ll be right here with you. It’s easy, you’ll see. It’s just that this is the first book you’ve ever bought all by yourself.”

“Next!” said the cashier.

“Here we go, it’s our turn!” said the grandfather, glancing back at me. I smiled, and turned away quickly so he wouldn’t see my welling eyes.

(I-95, somewhere in Connecticut)

Another photo of mine has just been posted at qarrtsiluni, following a terrific poem by Tom Montag of The Middlewesterner, both in response to this month's theme of change and continuity.

An die Musik

Eventually, I'll write about the events of last week. I keep thinking, "maybe tonight", but tonight comes and goes and the words don't want to be put down. It's too soon, and although I'm much less unsettled than I was, I'm apparently not ready to write about it.

Meanwhile, though, I'm mending. My body has surprised me with its resiliancy; I'm really feeling pretty good, and although I don't think I'm going to be running any marathons (or even running upstairs) anytime soon, normalcy seems to be returning faster than I would have predicted. I am, however, laying low - saying no, and doing less, and assiduously avoiding stress. I'm eating, but not as much, very carefully, and without fat. I'm working on my book, reading Brodsky, doing dishes, cooking, meditating, taking some photographs, and indulging in two activities I've missed a great deal lately: playing the piano, and listening to music -- right now it's contemporary music, minimalism. There's a bouquet of hydrangea branches on the table, and another of yellow and orange nasturtiums, brought by a friend; some dark red chrysanthemums that J. brought home yesterday. Tonight he's having dinner with his sister and his brother, who is visiting, and I am enjoying the sound of rain on the skylight, the dimly-lit rooms with pockets of light shining on the flowers, the books.

After I write here I'm going to play the piano for a while. Last night I finished reading through all of Bach's Three-Part Inventions, which I've somehow skipped all these years. I played some of the easier Goldberg Variations, thumbed through some Beethoven, which I don't play well at all; looked at a volume of Scriabin and set it aside -- too much trouble -- and finally found myself looking over my shelf of vocal music. I pulled out a book of Richard Strauss songs and some Schubert, and played through four or five: old friends. Tonight - I don't know yet. We'll figure it out.

The notes flow, and I lose myself. Perfection isn't the goal and never has been for me, with music; I'm not good enough and not driven enough in that direction. What I love is the music itself and my interaction, my communication with it: the joy and challenge of sightreading something new; the way each time through contains more discoveries; the challenge of working at something until it really sounds like music and of feeling oneself communicate with the composer. Music resides on a cellular level in me. It's where I turn when upset or confused or distressed, or sometimes it comes to find me. I trust it -- never to desert me.

Reflective Tonight

Evening Walk

Lemon-yellow, white almond-eyes: pointed leaves slick the dark sidewalks and pattern the windshields of the parked cars. We walk up the street, my arm in yours, past the lace-curtained doorways, the night glow of late suppers, readers, bedtime stories. The car wash is buttoned up, the grey concrete rinsed and swept, hoses hung in wide arcs on the wall. A doorway; hunched knees of a long-haired girl smoking a joint, and here, past the seminary-now-condos, a grey kitten interrupts our stride with sharp cries for affection. Autumn vines twist on wrought iron; a mother descends, the child stops, coughs.

After the dark, tree-lined side-streets, lights glare on Mont-Royal. In the Jean-Coutu, the smocked cosmetic-girls head for the back exit, leaving a window of plastic pumpkins leering beneath oversize, flying masks. A blonde girl in pink sateen walks a black dog. Lunettes sleep in their glass cases; rattan baskets hang empty beneath white-lettered chalkboards: “asperges”, “champignons”. In a café, a final patron cradles his coffee, the stools already on their backs for the evening, legs in the air.

Back onto a side street: the dull red of overgrown begonias cascading from a windowbox, a tree encircled by a knee-high forest of nasturtiums. On a third floor, a girl bends forward, straightens up against warm beige walls, making a bed. We look down the empty alley, past the chainlink fence and its sign: terrain privé.

Your hip sways against mine, our walk a familiar dance, a little slower tonight. No need to speak; we see the same things.

West Street, NYC

Another Take

I've been reading a bit of Joseph Brodsky, who I admire but find much less accessible than some of the other Russian poets with whom he tends to be linked. Maybe someone who reads Russian can comment on him - for me, he is powerful, provocative, and deliberately rough, refusing, perhaps, to yield to the lyricism his mentors' poetry retains even in translation.

I've been thinking about the first poem in his anthology Toward Urania. The poem's title is May 24, 1980. It begins (in Brodsky's own translation):

I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,

carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,

lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,

dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.

From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly

width. Twice have drowned, thrive let knives rake my nitty-gritty.

Quit the country that bore and nursed me.

Those who forgot me would make a city.

The poem goes on as he describes places he's been, the "stale and warty" bread he ate in exile. And suddenly he states that he is forty, and the poem concludes:

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.

Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,

only gratitude will be gushing from it.

On the back of this volume, which I hope to be exploring more, is a quote from a review by Czeslaw Milosz in The New York Review of Books:

"It is poetry at two poles of human existence: love as it is lived and suffered through, and death almost tasted and feared...As a defense against despair, we have the oeuvre of a man wholly concentrated on his poetry."

A Slight Break in Stride

The interruption in posts here actually has an explanation. Tuesday we spent the afternoon and evening with friends from out of town, enjoying food and wine and the city together. We went to bed, and I woke suddenly at 2:00 am, unsure why but feeling vaguely uneasy. I got up to go to the bathroom and realized, four steps into the hallway, that I was going to be sick. I went to the kitchen to get a bowl -- and that's where J. found me, several minutes later, unconscious on the floor. Fortunately he had heard a crash and woken up immediately. Unfortunately he was faced with a sight no spouse ever wants to see. I woke up to see his face close to mine, asking what was wrong -- and then became very very sick. When we saw what was coming up, he got a robe and slippers for me and rushed me to Royal Victoria Hospital, where we spent the next ten hours, a period of time I would just as soon forget. Luckily, maybe, I was too ill to be very frightened; I was losing quite a lot of blood, getting weaker, and thinking, well, if this is the way it is, isn't too bad, you just fade away. Of course they weren't about to let that happen; the very attentive staff was monitoring every vital sign they could monitor, checking my hemoglobin levels, giving me fluids intrvenously, ready to give me a transfusion if necessary.

Around six I began to feel a little better, and the diagnosis, after an endoscopy early in the morning, was the most obvious, simplest, and probably most preferable one under the circumstances - a bleeding gastric ulcer, most probably caused by aspirin. The gastroenterologist told me it should heal up, with medicine and care, in four weeks. I am going to have to recover from the anemia too, and have more follow-up. But with my sense of self returning, I'm pretty sure that's all it was and that I'll be fine. Scared in retrospect -- but OK.

Right now I'm reclining on the couch, slowly eating a smashed-up boiled potato, drinking ginger ale, and listening to Vivaldi choral works. I'm alive. I'm grateful for many things beyond that, too. And will write more later, when I've had a little more time to think things through.