the cassandra pages

London, Provence, Tahiti

Today I looked back into some old journals I kept, in the days before blogging, and read some of this one, from a trip to London in 1998. Maybe, when inspiration fails to strike, as it is today, I'll post a little of it here. I was surprised how Cassandra-like the voice was, long before Cassandra got her very own blog. This section took me right back to that day and the room and the feeling I'm trying to describe, but I'm not sure it comes across, or is even possible to express. It's about color exploding in midwinter, and feeling incredibly fortunate to be alive in such a place.

December 16, 1998, 3:00 p.m. The Courtauld Institute, London

I'm on a bench on the top floor of Somerset House, a bit overcome. In front of me is one of my favorite Gauguin paintings, "Nevermore": the enigmatic Tahitian nude reclining on a yellow pillow while a raven watches from the open window. I was here earlier this morning and came back to sit in this room again.

The previous room holds treasures such as Manet's "Dejeuner sur L'Herbe", which I've never seen in person before, and Renoir's "The Loge," the woman in white-and-black striped silk holding a pair of opera glasses. Behind me, in this, the largest room, is "The Bar at the Folies Bergere"; to the left are eight Cezannes, glowing with blue and deep green; to the right, a huge vase of pink chrysanthemums by Monet and a number of other Impressionist works including a lovely, serene snowscape by Sisley and a luminous beach scene by Boudin.

But the paintings on the wall straight ahead are the most moving to me. Two other large Gauguins flank "Nevermore". One is the mysterious "The Dream", a Tahitian interior about which Gauguin wrote, "everything in the painting is a dream. Is it the mother? The child? The horseman on the path? Or is it the dream of the painter himself?" On the right is a vibrant landscape painted just before he went to Tahiti; it is titled "the Haystacks" and shows Brittany peasants gathering hay. The three form a unified group, united by yellow and gold: the light in the Tahitian interior, the yellow pillow against an entire field of deep blues and olive flesh in "Nevermore", the sunlit field in Brittany.

Then, the next painting is Van Gogh with a bandaged ear, probably the most famous painting in the room, if not in the entire collection, and beside it, a brilliant Van Gogh landscape, radiant with joy.

Males Need Not Apply

Back in my naturalist days, one of my most-favorite pastimes was to dip a pail of water from the mucky, algae-filled edges of a pond and spend a couple of hours exploring its contents under a microscope. I could get lost in that delicate spirogyra forest, searching for its single- and few-celled inhabitants. Some of my favorites were the rotifers, transparent creatures with an incredible propulsion system. (Their name comes from the Latin word that means "wheel-bearer" because each rotifer has a ring of cilia - little hair-like  projections - that move rapidly, causing the organism to spin.)

If you'd like to see some rotifers, here is a rotifer gallery with the best photographs of these creatures I've ever seen, by the Dutch photomicrographer Wim van Egmond.

Today, Chris Clarke has added to my knowledge with one of his signature posts about evolutionary biology. He begins with the rotifers and takes us on a journey through various forms of sexual and non-sexual reproduction, discussing the evolutionary preferences for each, and ending up where the title begins: "What Really Bothers the Creationists." Highly recommended.

A Mystery Solved

Isn't this just so lovely, so tender? The sudden warmth is making spring come so fast that the usual slow unfolding is more like an explosion. The buds on all the trees have swollen double in just a few days and very soon the leaves will unfurl. Perhaps we appreciate spring especially in cold places like Montreal and Vermont; it always feels poignant and joyful at the same time.

If spring is big mystery and miracle these days, we've also had a little practical mystery, with no apprent solution. A few weeks ago we subscribed to the Montreal Gazette, the main English-language newspaper in the city, which gave us both home delivery and access to the electronic edition. For the first few days, everything was fine,and we were really enjoying getting a paper newspaper again. Then suddenly, mysteriously, it stopped coming. We searched outside the building, in the bushes, around the corner...nothing. We are the only subscribers in our building, and the only anglophones - normally there are several copies of La Presse and one of Le Devoir in the rack, waiting to be picked up in the morning. J. called the main office, and was assured that the paper was being delivered. Where was it going?

Enter insomnia. One morning J. was up around 4:30 or 5:00 a.m., and decided to watch and see if he could figure out what was happening. La Presse was delivered, and then our paper - right outside the front door. In a few minutes, along came the paperboy for Le Devoir. He delivered his paper, and then stooped down, picked up the copy of the Gazette, and put it into his pack and took off! J. was dumbfounded. It was being stolen by a francophone who apparently thought an English language newspaper had no business being delivered in the Plateau! Our own little language war!

So again, J. called the Gazette and told them what was happening. He described our location in the building and suggested that the delivery person throw the paper onto out terrace, where it would be protected. OK, fine, they said, no problem. Except that, a week later, we still weren't getting the papers on the terrace. A few of them mysteriously appeared on the rack or in front of our door, apparently placed there by one of our neighbors. What gave?

A few minutes ago, a knock on our door. There was our upstairs neighbor - who, ironically, works for La Presse - with our paper in his hand. He explained that our paper has been being thrown up onto his balcony and he's been bringing it down - except that today, they threw it so hard it broke his screen. We apologized profusely, and tried to figure out what was going on - and then J. realized he had told the Gazette that we lived on the first floor - not the rez de chaussée, or ground floor. A stupid and typical English mistake...but the Gazette will pay for the screen, we'll start getting our paper, the neighbor will be happy, we will never make that language mistake again, and hope the mystery is solved for good.

Happy Earth Evening

Sunset over Québec fields, Earth Day 2007.

The earth showed us a lot to love today: rivers overflowing with spring runoff, and ducks upended in the flooded pools; the first shad trees blooming white against the dark mountainsides; delicate traceries of gold willow branches; the first plowed fields; grass greening on southern hillsides; the awkward flight of a turkey and the graceful flyover of a low wedge of geese; a deer and her fawn bounding through the edge of the forest; Lake Champlain shining like mercury around her long delicate islands; and this sunset.

I spent a lot of the weekend outdoors working in my Vermont garden, raking leaves, and helping J. burn brush in our annual fire-department-approved bonfire. My work was accompanied by the warm sun, and more birds than I could count, from juncoes to redwing blackbirds to sparrows and cardinals and goldfinches, to the pileated woodpecker making a special cameo appearance. It would be hard to describe how much good this did me - I feel better than I have in weeks and weeks.

Pressured Passages

In the comments on the previous post - for which I am very grateful - Fred made a very thoughtful point, and I wondered if we might pick up on it:

"One theme that has been touched on is boys becoming men. In tribal societies there was often some sort of initiation for boys into manhood by the elders. Women had their own initiations. The only such initiations that are common are those that occur in joining a street gang, the military, a fraternity or going to prison. Without guidance a boy looks for role models. If pop culture provides those models we have Columbine and VT. Our consumerist culture can turn us not only into consumers but products for others to consume.

What do you think about this? Do you feel that you had any sort of "initiation" into manhood or womanhood? Was it (or the lack of it) important to you? Where did you look for guidance about becoming an adult man or a woman? How do you see this being different for young people now? How does our society and culture help us or fail us in this regard?

I'd also like to point out a post at Frogs and Ravens, where Rana continued her reflections on cultural insularity. If you aren't familiar with Rana's blog, you should be - she has a lot to say and says it well. Rana is a longterm blogger who's trying to re-energize her blog after some down-time; there's a lot of thoughtful content there.

Thanks again to everyone who's participated in this discussion, and if you've been holding back, please jump in - this is a place where a wide range of comments and experiences are not only appreciated but actively sought. I'd especially love to hear from people who grew up in non-American societies about the subject Fred poses here.

The Violence Drug

A lovely young friend of ours is in college in Virginia. I immediately thought of her when I read the news of the killings, at a different Virginia school, but unlike many of the journalists who rushed to describe the victims and the perpetrator and start up the discussion about gun control and security on collage campuses, my thoughts have been more along the lines of Udge's, and Teju's. Of course gun control is part of it, but easy access to guns in America is not new. Unless we look at what makes America a society so in love with violence - as reaction, as solution, and as entertainment - there's no hope either for change or for security. Furthermore, who were the other people killed yesterday, or the day before, their deaths financed by my tax dollars? Is any one of those deaths a lesser tragedy? And who were the young American men or women who witnessed or caused those deaths, sent into war at 18 or 20, emotionally and psychologically unprepared, often ignorant about the people and country to which they were going, yet heavily armed and placed in a position of fear and, sometimes, chaos? What is the damage being done, in my name, to countless people who, if they survive their tour without physical damage, then return to a society which has, meanwhile, been websurfing for Prada knock-off handbags and worrying about whether Jennifer Lopez is getting a divorce?

I thought back to a time when I was younger, and mass killings like this were virtually unheard of in our country. That was before the 1960s; I grew up in a rural area, and plenty of people I knew had guns (though they weren't assault rifles.) Then came the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the upheaval of the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers and the sight of American troops on the streets clubbing blacks, and later, students who were marching against Vietnam; Nixon's rage and fear of the SDS and the Weather Underground. The rage on both sides represented a fissure between the American dream of the post-war Eisenhower years - with its associated rise of advertising and television as major forces in American life - and a different reality, fundamentally opposed to it, willing to risk a great deal to expose its fallacies and injustices, and crying out for social change and equality for all people. In spite of the fear of the SDS and the Angela Davises, that opposition was fairly benign and there was still hope in the society that change would, in fact, happen.

The Vietnam war ended, but Watergate brought a cynicism to America in the 1970s that we've never overcome. Instead of being met by wholesale change - election reform, for instance - in the subsequent decades America instead sold out in favor of its favorite fixes: money, individualism, and the cult of celebrity. Television, film - and later video games and the internet - became drugs used by increasing numbers of people to dull the pain of a faster, more stressful, more transient lifestyle where both parents worked, and children grew up with less supervision, less support, and more loneliness.

And what was the fare received through these powerful methods of passive or active escape? Increasingly, violence as entertainment. The rise of violence in American society has some roots in that same fissure between portrayed and experienced realities: it speaks of frustration and suffering and lack of other alternatives, especially love and hope. It has roots in the ever-growing gap between rich and poor. It has roots in a war-making and fearful society's willingness to scapegoat and kill "the other", who has been de-humanized and turned into an object. But the most troubling part, perhaps, is the root that grows in the soil of decadence: violence as a response to existential boredom.

I remember when Bonnie and Clyde came out, in 1967. I thought it was brilliant and, at the same time, was incredibly disturbed by it. Something totally different had been portrayed - gratuitous violence; alienated, joyriding, romanticized criminals. Looking back, I think I was right to see it as a watershed moment in film history, even when I was too young to really analyze it or the society around me. How much we've changed since then in terms of what is acceptable and what we are blasé about; how blurred the lines have become for many people between real life and the screen. In 1967, people actually discussed Bonnie and Clyde, both as art and social commentary. They worried about it and what it would do, while admiring the deep nerves it touched, and what it said about us as a society. How innocent we still were.

Wastelands and Bog People - Part 3

This is part 3 of a three-part series

Robert Lowell called Seamus Heaney "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," and whether you agree or not, he is certainly one of the best poets writing in the English language today. He's also popular, and the work is accessible on a day-to-day level - he paint pictures and talks about situations we can all recognize - while being much more complex when you go deeper.

Blake Morrison wrote:

"One does not have to look very deeply into Heaney's work ... to see that it is rather less comforting and comfortable than has been supposed. Far from being 'whole,' it is tense, torn, divided against itself; far from being straightforward, it is layered with often obscure allusions; far from being archaic, it registers the tremors and turmoils of its age, forcing traditional forms to accept the challenge of harsh, intractable material.... A proper response to Heaney's work requires reference to complex matters of ancestry, nationality, religion, history, and politics."

and another critic, Jack Knoll wrote:

"Like Yeats, Heaney combines all the conflicting poles of the Irish experience into a rich, embattled language: paganism and Christianity, repression and expansion, desire and chastity, country and city, ignorance and enlightenment, hope and despair."

I listened to four audio clips of Heaney speaking to the BBC and gained quite a bit more insight. In one, he speaks about the poems he wrote about the ancient bodies dug up in the peat bogs, many apparently victims of human sacrifice to the fertility goddess who would make the seasons renew each year. Heaney, a Northern Ireland Catholic, wrote those poems during the Troubles, and much was made of them as a political statement. Heaney both agrees and disagrees, and says he find new things in the poems when he re-reads them now - they're some of his favorites - things that have nothing to do with politics. He still isn't quite sure where they came from.

But in another clip I found what I'd been looking for: what did Heaney make of Oxford, and the literary tradition and teaching that came before him? How did it shape him?

"[at Oxford]I was the perfect scholarship boy - I 'did English,'" he said. "This was the accepted way, the Tao, at the time: you read in the English language as a way to better yourself." But he said the giants of British, and Irish, literature loomed very large: ""Joyce allays every anxiety - except the one of coming after him."

In an interview in the Boston Review about his influences, he elaborated, saying that as a schoolboy in a Catholic boarding school in Derry, he was daunted "by T. S. Eliot and all that he stood for."  Nevertheless, when a relative offered to send him some books, it was Eliot he asked for, describing his admiration and dismay as a young man with this great quote: "...as much as I was learning from Eliot about the right way to listen, he could not be the starter-offer of poetry for me. He was more a kind of literary superego than a generator of the poetic libido, and in order for the libidinous lyric voice to get on with its initiations, it had to escape from his overseeing presence."

But later, with his own poet-legs underneath him, he came back to Eliot. Heaney quoted some lines from Ash Wednesday, and remarked, "They are not what I at first mistakenly thought them: constituent parts of some erudite code available to initiates."

He continues, saying that perhaps the most lasting influence on him from this time was not Eliot’s poetry, but his prose, including the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that I quoted in the previous post, which Heaney says he "read and re-read."

"But more important of all, perhaps, was a definition of the faculty that he (Eliot) called 'the auditory imagination.' This was "the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to an origin and bringing something back . . . fusing the most ancient and civilized mentalities."

At the end of the interview, Heaney says:

"Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this: in the realm of  poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final, the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement leads directly to the via negativa.

Many of the things Eliot says about poetic composition are fortifying because they are so authoritatively unconsoling."   

 

And he quotes Eliot:

 

                                       And what there is to conquer
            By strength and submission, has already been discovered
            Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
                                      hope
            To emulate–but there is no competition–
            There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
            And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
            That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
            For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Wastelands and Bog People, Part 2

This is part 2 of a three-part series

Another reason I found myself reading The Wasteland can be chalked up to a bit of ethnicity-reclamation. I am now living in a foreign country (and yes, Quebec is, culturally if not politically, a nation unto itself) where English is not the first language and English-language books are not even that easily gotten; I've now gotten sufficently wet in the sea of anti-American and anti-anglophone sentiment here to see this more clearly. Though I understand it, and am willing to roll with it for the sake of what I'm learning as a resident of such a remarkable and international city, the vehemence of French defensiveness (at best) and racism (at worst) has made me - a reader for many years of "world literature" - more interested in going back to some works written originally in English. I feel the need to hold onto my own self, while lashing myself to the mast of this ship sailing through foreign and often seductive waters.

It's not really Eliot I'm headed toward, but bear with me for a minute while I tell you about the peregrinations of yesterday afternoon. First of all, Eliot has always made me feel inadequate (I'd never even noticed that The Wasteland is dedicated to Pound!) As much as I responded to the music of Eliot's poetry and his skill with our language, I used to dismiss this style of work - full of references to other works out of the past - as egotistical exercises in erudition: let the academics spend their careers parsing them out, I thought, and droning on about them to new generations of students. Post-modernism has struck many more blows to that whole concept of historical cultural lineage, especially the hubris of imposing this particular one on students for whom it is either meaningless, misplaced, or inadequately representative of their own identity and experience. As a woman I found precious few role models in that type of literary canon. But I never rejected it entirely for a feminist alternative, because it still spoke to me: this is my ethnicity. I can trace myself back from modernism to Eliot to Shakespeare to Mallory to the Bible to Vergil and Homer. In fact, that's what I spent earlier parts of my life doing, and then, later, moving horizontally, trying to broaden my experience of the world through its literature, and finding echoes of myself there as well.

And I found it was a lot more pleasurable, frankly, to read contemporary Latin American or Chinese or Indian or Egyptian works than to struggle with James Joyce or T.S. Eliot. Whch is not to say that these works, too, had plenty of cultural references. Some I missed and some - like the Qu'ran, for instance - were a new area to delve into.

But Teju Cole's recent post, Disciple, got me thinking about the whole question of influences and traditions, especially as it affected one of the writers he most admires - and I do too - Seamus Heaney. So yesterday, I began with Eliot, and went on a journey that led me to Heaney, and then back to Eliot.

After re-reading The Wasteland, I looked at some of the links to try to find something in Eliot's own words about his method. In an essay called Tradition and the Individual Talent he said, "Someone wrote, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know."  !!

He went on to talk about how an historical sense gives writers an acute consciousness of their own place in time, as well as what is time-less. "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities," he wrote.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement.

That's probably a pretty clear statement of how literature was presented to young people at Oxford when Eliot was writing. Annoying, lofty, limiting - easy for us to dismiss today, perhaps, when writing about the individual's experience, often in what appears to be a post-modern, alienated sensibility, is much more the norm.

But then, on to Heaney.

Continue reading part 3

Wastelands and Bog People: Part 1

This is part 1 of a three-part series

"I've been in Tunisia," said our friend Ann. "Carthage and all. It was fascinating..."

It was a rainy cold day, and when we got home and had had lunch, I settled down on the couch for an afternoon of reading. Carthage, I thought, and clicked through a few screens of information about the ancient Phoenician city, founded in the ninth century BC and finally sacked by the Romans in xxx.

"To Carthage then I came, burning, burning...." responded my brain.

"Yes, The Wasteland, I thought, and a few moments later I had in front of me not only the reference but an annotated, hyperlinked digital copy of Eliot's entire poem.  I may have known the original quote from Eliot, but I didn't know that he was quoting St. Augustine's Confessions:  "to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears." So I went back to the beginning, and began reading, checking links; I learned quite a lot over the course of the next hour or two, and also did some remembering...

When I was in university, three friends and I got together and did a reading - I guess it was a dramatic reading, since we built a stark abstract set and had costumes and music - of The Wasteland. We lived in a residential college at Cornell, called Risley Hall, for students interested in the creative and performing arts. Not all of us were necessarily majoring in those fields, though some were. Of the four of us, I was in classical civ; Bill was, I think, a theater major; David was a pianist majoring in music; and my roommate, Anne, also a pianist, had a double major in music and comp lit. Every Friday night, Risley put on a "Musical Dessert" in the basement theater - a program of music, dance, theater of various sorts including spoofs and skits. These evenings were all homegrown and entirely student-produced, and often quite good and well-attended. I don't remember the details of our performance, but I remember that we worked pretty hard on it, under Bill's dramatic direction, with some music composed for the occasion by David. And to this day,  I can still sing the songs he wrote, and recite large sections of the poem. The music of its words seems deeply embedded in me, although I still don't understand much of Eliot's poem.

I'd been thinking of Eliot before Ann reminded me, through the reference to Carthage, because it's impossible not to think of April's cruelty in northern New England and Canada this year.

Continue reading Part 2

La girafe est née

Last Sunday morning, a baby giraffe was born in a zoo near Montreal. This video from Cyperpresse, complete with enthusiastic French narration, shows part of the birth and the baby's first steps, and I admit to watching it with a goofy grin on my face. (I noticed that YouTube has several other giraffe-birth videos, in case you really get into it.)