the cassandra pages

Jung's Tower

Toward the end of his life, C. G. Jung dictated and wrote a memoir called Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It was published in 1961. I'm reading it now. The book is strange, intriguing, disturbing, and provocative, for Jung refuses to write a "typical memoir," as he defines it, placing his life in the context of a time and particular events in history. Instead, he says, his life has been almost entirely an inner one, so what he recalls are the memories of that inner life: hence the title. He can remember dreams, in detail, that occured when he was a little boy, and he recounts the elements of his fantasy and dream life, and how he analyzed himself and his own unconscious in order to better understand how the unconscious works in all of us. I've never studied Jung, so much of what he speaks about is pretty new to me - and I had no idea he was so "out there" himself -  although his terminology and major ideas have become embedded in our language and knowledge of the psyche, and so a familiarity exists.

In himself, he identified two personalities - one the scientist/philosopher who traveled and worked and wrote in ordinary time, and another personality that seemed drawn to, and at home in, the seventeenth century. When he built a home for himself, he added a tower where he could "withdraw" from daily life:

In the Tower at Bollingen it is as if one lived in many centuries simultaneously. The place will outlive me, and in its location and style it points backward to things of long ago. There is little about it to suggest the present. If a man of the sixteenth century were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamp and the matches would be new to him; otherwise he would know his way about without difficulty. There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestor's souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down through the centuries, were peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on...

This struck a chord. My little "studio" in Vermont is a quiet place that I created to give myself a rest from the technology and lights and sounds of normal life, and in making it feel comfortable I used old things that had important associations with my past and the past of my family, as well as symbolic importance to my particular individual interests and periods of my life. None of this was especially "intentional," but I now see what I was doing more clearly than when I made it. A visitor (and that is strange to write, since I've rarely shared that room with anyone, and even my husband only goes there if I've invited him) might experience it as an unfinished, even shabby room, and focus on the easel and paints and canvases rather than the small oak desk which was mine as a child, and where I've spent most of my hours in the room, meditating or reflecting as I looked through an old lace curtain onto my garden. I've always liked that the room is cold and usually unheated, that the lamps are old glass kerosene fixtures set onto wrought iron brackets, that the curtains are handmade, different combinations of white linen and antique lace. I too have written on the walls, or left drawings pinned up - or objects in view - for years without knowing exactly why. Jung has made me want to think more closely about this room and what I put into it, and what I might do to replace it if we move from that house someday. Clearly it is more than its function as refuge or retreat; it is deeply personal and symbolic.

Tomorrow I'll write more about Jung's ideas on progress and the psychological state of humanity.

Soyinka's courage

An excellent profile of Wole Soyinka, who own the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, is in today's Washington Post. The Nigerian writer has also been an activist for justice and freedom in his native country and in Africa in general; he was imprisoned for two years and considered an enemy of the state; in the 1990s he was in exile, until the death of the country's former dictator, Sani Abacha.

Like many white Americans, undoubtedly, I have not read Soyinka - but I intend to change that. Do any readers have comments about him, or his works that you've read?

LATER: We have been gifted with a wonderful first-person essay about Soyinka the writer and Soyinka the activist - and how the two have affected each other - from the pen of St. Antonym. It's in the comment thread. Please read. What is said there was foreshadowed in Soyinka's Nobel Lecture, which I read yesterday, wondering about writers who have become political symbols, and the extent to which politics informs or erodes their literary gifts and productivity.

A Walk

Flânage

I never knew there was a word for it.

In Montréal's Maisonneuve magazine, photoblogger Christopher deWolf (a precocious and talented young photographer and writer I've enjoyed meeting a few times at blogging events) writes an article about photoblogging and the renaissance of "flâneurism." He quotes a doctoral student at Concordia, Mia Hunt, explaining how the term came into being:

"The flâneur, she told us, emerged in nineteenth-century Paris, the product of a new bourgeois class and Baron Haussmann’s dramatic makeover of the city. A dandyish figure who strolled unhurriedly down the capital’s boulevards, the flâneur was best captured in the work of Charles Baudelaire. “For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer,” he wrote, “it's an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity; in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: you're not at home but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you're at the centre of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody.”

Chris, a photoblogger who regularly wanders the streets of Montréal, camera in hand, must have felt the same flash of recognition I did in hearing those words of Baudelaire. While the wandering is sometimes described here as "aimless" I wouldn't entirely agree; I may not set out on a walk expecting to go somewhere or find something specific, that's true, but rather I set out with anticipation as the goal of the journey itself. Alongside that quest for the interesting sight, situation, person, conversation around the next corner exists one's own anonymity and transience. The scene will change, and you will also move through it and into another, and another: part of an ever-shifting interplay between the relatively static structure of buildings, streets, trees and the beings, vehicles, and sensory sensations that move through them. This is the most fascinating aspect of the city to me, and perhaps the way it differs most from living in the countryside, where change and drama are found more on a micro-level, observed more successfully, in fact, when one become entirely still.

(Access to the Maisonneuve article may require filling out a quick, free registration form; for people interested in Montréal it's worth going to the trouble.)

Religious Geography

My "paying" work involves a lot of maps, generally focused on various aspects of health care in the United States. The same basic technology, which uses zipcode or other geographic data correlated to particular variables, has been used by the Glenmary Research Center to create national maps of religious faiths and denominations showing the concentration of adherents. Some of the maps are obvious, but others not - and if you're like me, it's fascinating to see the anomalies and surprises as well as the predictable results (what are all those Episcopalians doing in Alaska?) One especially interesting illustration maps the various church bodies as a whole. (Thanks to Numenius of Feathers of Hope for the link.)

Happy Easter

This is the first year in a long long time that I haven't either made at least a few Easter eggs or my traditional braided, cardamom-scented Easter bread. Instead, I got out this basket of eggs from previous years and have been enjoying their bright colors on the table - and maybe one day soon I'll have time to bake. Because we weren't in Montreal for the holiday, I also didn't see the beautiful loaves, with embedded hard-cooked eggs, in the windows of the Portugese bakeries. But here in Vermont, the daffodils are starting to bloom in the back yard and the days have been warm enough to suggest spring and lighter clothes. This week I got the perennial garden raked, and on one of the few mornings without wind my husband made a small bonfire for the year's brush and leaves and apple-tree-prunings. It felt wonderful to be outside and working, rake in hand and sun on my back, while slate-colored juncos hopped beneath the feeder and the cardinal couple chipped and called from the wild apple trees. Because of our strange traveling lifestyle, I haven't planned how much of a vegetable/annual flower garden to plant this year - not much, I don't think - but I know I won't be able to completely resist. A tomato or two, some zinnias, nasturtiums, fresh herbs -- enough to keep my hands in the earth and my spirit connected to the sources of life.

Paris Hill

Paris Hill, New York.

(Click image for larger version)

We made a quick trip to central New York to see my parents on Monday, and came home yesterday morning. Spring is just coming to the fields and farms, and the land was tender and beautiful: the first velvety green on the hayfields, the yellow tresses of the willows in the swampy hollows between hills, the cows slowly walking out from the barnyards, chickens roaming happily behind houses. Tractors plowed wide dark brown swaths across the valleys, and the entire landscape smelled sweetly of manure. Behind one barn, a middle-aged man followed his aged father out to the field, the latter in a cap and dungarees, walking strongly but bent, holding a long green stem of something in his hand.

 

Crows and geese and blackbirds and hawks were everywhere, and letting you know it; deer grazed - the occasional alert ears raised to face the road - in the edges of fields and turkeys brazenly pecked close to the road. A heron flew low over our house, on its way to some morning hunting of the  spring peepers, maybe, who had been so vocal the night before, and just beneath the slightly rippled surface of the lake, four carp swam lazily, their backs to the sunlight. I dug a few worms and fished a little with my mother, in the same sun, and - other than the jet trails in the blue sky far overhead - it felt like we could have been in just about any century of the last four or five.

Bonjour, madame!

Les Chiennes de Garde (the guard dogs - a French feminist group) are trying to eliminate the use of "mademoiselle" ("miss") in favor of one salutation for all women, regardless of marital status or age: madame. Although I enjoy the singsong "bonjour madame!" with which I am routinely greeted in Québec shops and offices, the assumptions inherent in the word do irk me - imagine if everyone in the U.S. said, "Hello Ma'am" rather than just the usual "hello". As we found out a few posts back in the discussion about "priest" and "priestess", since French has trouble expressing "female priest", the gender wars are written into the very core of the language, much more strongly than in English, since every single word must have a gender. While Les Chiennes de Garde are growling about implications of sexual availability, what I've heard from French women is actually the opposite: they hate being called "madame" because it makes them feel old and unattractive. I don't suppose people are about to drop "madame", though, and start calling all women "mademoiselle," and the feminists say they don't want an equivalent third title like the English "Ms." (And, let's note, they are still Les Chiennes, not Les Chiens.) Quite a sticky problem. I'd suggest a simple "bonjour".

Between Words

I’ve become aware, from browsing in francophone bookstores here, that considerably more Arabic literature seems to be available in French translation than in English. French, not English, was and is a more common second language in many parts of the Arab world, especially in Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria -- and the historical, academic, literary, and political connections continue. The first language for translation of major works often seems to be French. Many prominent Arab writers (especially from the Christian communities in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon) who have left the Middle East (or who maintain two households) have emigrated to Paris rather than to London or New York.

An article by Hala Halim in Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo) discusses the translation of Arabic literature into western languages, based on an interview with Roger Allen, a British-born professor and translator of Arabic who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Several issues are brought up here, but the most interesting is that as a by-product of the trend for translators to know and work with the authors (as opposed to the former practice where translation usually occurred without any contact at all), translators have encountered pressure from book publishers and sellers to make editorial changes in the original text. The result can be books which have undergone substantial changes from their original Arabic form. Another issue concerns the status of Arabic literature studies in American universities. After the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1988, interest in Arabic literature courses increased, and after 9/11 there was another jump in interest, both in language courses and in Arabic studies in general. However, the author says:

after Mahfouz's Nobel "the availability of a much larger repertoire of translated Arabic texts -- and in most literary genres -- means that it is now possible to offer a variety of courses under the general heading of 'Arabic literature in translation'." But when the conversation turns to the future of Middle Eastern Studies in the US and the pressures brought to bear on it post-9/11 by, for example, the neoconservative Campus Watch web site which monitors and seeks to stifle dissenting voices in the field, Allen is far from optimistic. He mentions, nonchalantly, that he was recently quoted on Campus Watch: "my 'sin' is to say that I think that the American government and the American academy have different views about the way to embrace Arabic studies, and that people making decisions on that level are not qualified to make them...

Maghreb Pastries

The New York Times has an article on the new trendy dessert in Paris: North African pastries, which are local variations on the general Middle Eastern theme of baklava and other nut-filled, honey-sweetened delights. The author, desperate to recreate the taste in New York, got some help through an Algerian cooking blog by chef Farid Zadi that I was happy to discover too. The three recipes she publishes look very good and not too demanding -- but as a veteran of many less-than-successful attempts to make these sorts of sweets at home, I'd like to suggest that the author could run up to Montréal instead, where pastries from all across the Middle and Near East are available. Perhaps they won't be as elegant as the Paris variety (check out the picture in the article - they look really gorgeous) but they'll taste just as good. One suggestion for North African desserts would be the free-standing shop on the east-central end of the Jean-Talon market, near the elevators that come up from the new parking garage. Be sure to eat your sweets with a little cup of thick Arab coffee, or mint tea. My husband is - at this very moment - shopping at Adonis, another place in Montréal where Middle Eastern pastries are abundant and more refined than the too-sticky, cloyingly sweet, diamond-shaped baklava most people associate with this category of desserts. I'm hoping he'll come home with something for a treat.

Farid Zadi recommended another Algerian cooking blog that I also liked very much (it's written by a Parisian, in French, but can be translated): Les Casseroles de Nawal. The current recipe is for a puff pastry appetizer with anchovies and poppy seeds - looks fantastic - scroll down to an elegant but fast fish dish with onion, lemon, grain mustard and capers. The recipes in the archives look equally unusual and delicious.