the cassandra pages

Crossing into the New Year, with Open Eyes

The year speeds toward its close. Tonight we ate Persian rice-and-beef meatballs that I'd made last night (flavored with dill, parsley, saffron, and onion, in a lime-and-tomato broth) and around 5:00 pm, I walked up to the market to buy yogurt for a salad, because we had run out. I bought bread, yogurt and some labneh, and then, because it was a lovely night, clear and cold, walked on to the bank and back down the opposite side of the street, while the last shoppers finished their purchases and the store-keepers began shutting down their shops for the night. The dark blue and white Christmas lights were still lovely on the evergreen street trees, and seasonal music played on loudspeakers along the sidewalk. In the windows, mannequins no longer wore red sweaters and furry boots, but rather black or gold or dark blue sparkly tops, optimistically accented by shiny jewelry, bare shoulders, and high heels. No one seemed to be shopping for clothes, though; the longest lines were inside the SAQ*.

I went as far as rue Brébeuf, and as I crossed the street to head back toward home, a woman was crossing in  the other direction with a small boy. As we passed I saw that his face was turned toward the sky, and his eyes pressed tightly shut, trying perhaps, to see what the busy street felt like without sight. His mother didn't seem to notice, but dragged him along by one hand.

I remembered doing that as a child, after discovering one sense could be heightened by suppressing another. Now, the thought makes me shiver: too many people I see every day are impaired in one way or another. I thought about the happy naivete of youth, the melancholy knowledge that comes with years, the way that wisdom gradually substitutes itself in place of idealistic hope -- and the choice to greet the New Year, in spite of it all, with eyes wide open.

---

One of the best things about being part of this online community is meeting other people who grapple with similar issues. Here are a few links to recent posts by people you may not have read, who regularly have something worthwhile to say.

• Kat wonders about life and death, blood, rain, earth, and the edges of things
• New Zealand photographer and writer Tony Bridge tells us what he's grateful for (scroll WAY down the page - this link works better in Explorer)
• Jim Murdoch writes amusingly and honestly about depression, and hopes we all made it through the holidays
• Miguel is pleasantly surprised by an encounter with American immigration during the Christmas holidays
• And at Redemption Shoes, a Lost Ritual is remembered, causing me to pause on the faded, floral-carpeted stairs of my own childhood, looking at the bookcase where the row of Victorian glass Santa-ornaments perch in front of evergreen boughs, and two leather straps of heavy sleigh bells hang on the stained-glass panels of the front doors, knowing that this night Christmas would be ushered in with a glittering tree and an open house full of happy adults and children...no, it has never been possible to recreate this either.

Nevertheless, we are a real community, unable to lift a glass together but quite capable of cheer, encouragement, laughter and caring. May the New Year be a good one for you, and a happier and more hopeful one for the earth and its people.

*provincial liquor store

What matters, besides chocolate...

In this recent post, I was musing about "this torrent of words and images" and asking if what we do here, on our blogs, on the web, really matters. Then, in the comments, Bill turned the question back at me, asking, "If you knew what mattered, would you need to write?" A very good question, which I've been thinking about in the days since.

It's true that I use writing - and always have - to try to make sense out of the jumble of thoughts, emotions, and experiences of which life is made, and to figure out what matters most to me. In the years before blogging, I was diligent about keeping journals, which -- along with letters I wrote to my mother, my great aunt Inez, my grandmother, and a few friends -- were a record of what I was doing and thinking. I pretty much wrote about the same things I do here, probably with less style and polish, but the voice in those letters and journals is one you'd recognize. The journals, which I still keep but have written in much less frequently since I started blogging, are much more personal, and serve to help me sort out relationship and spiritual issues -- and they probably ought to be destroyed before I exit this earth.

On reflection, I can say that when I was in my thirties and early forties, it was true that I was trying to figure out "what matters," and that writing became the vehicle for that search. But I think I did figure it out. Even though I still question a lot of what I do, and have moments of confusion and doubt, I do know what matters now, and I think I have a pretty good idea why I'm here and what my life is about. At midlife, much more aware of my own mortality and the limitations of time and energy, the quest has changed: instead of trying to reach personal goals, I struggle to make the best use of whatever time and energy I have, not so much for myself, but for other people, because I've learned that giving fully and freely actually enriches my own life much more than being focussed on myself alone. I also try to be grateful for my life, to reflect that gratitude outward, and to learn to meet life's difficulties with greater equanimity. So if the journal writing, along with prayer/meditation/active reflection, are personal practices that keep me, hopefully, from going off the deep end, or being a complete pain to live with, the writing I do here feels like some combination of fun and challenge, gift, ministry, and, especially, conversation.

Finding meaning in the stuff of daily life has certainly become a spiritual practice as well as a literary one for me, and it's a way for me to express my belief that each of our lives has meaning, and that those lives, when shared, add up to far more than they do individually. What I do or say may matter a little, but what we do together matters much more. Our amazing human capacity for communication has evolved beyond language being a tool for basic survival (though our inability to communicate fully with one another certainly threatens survival even now). But I actually see language pointing toward communication, and then past it, toward communion. What we seek, I think, in our interactions and in our speech and our writing is to approach that place of silent communion where we touch on truth, and language falls away and becomes unnecessary.

I write to make a record, to express myself, to tell stories, to try to touch people...but above all to talk to you. Otherwise I would keep my journals and not bother with this noisy and often frustrating medium. When I get discouraged it is on account of the din and the chaos, and a sense of my voice being one among so many, so faint it can barely be heard by anyone - a state that only a few decades ago was much less the case for thoughtful writers.

Still, I find the advantages of the medium outweigh its frustrations, and my purpose in asking these questions in that prior post was not because I'm thinking of stopping, nor was it to solicit compliments or encouragement, as grateful as I am for them. It was more to ask you to ponder the same questions: what matters to you, and why, and how does what we do here together serve that purpose?

Happy Christmas...

...to all the readers of this weblog, known and unknown, who I appreciate far more than I can tell you. Your willingness to come here and accept my words is the best gift I could ever hope for, and your encouragement to continue reflecting about life in my own peculiar way, and writing about that process, makes me very grateful.

I have been busy with family and travel, and will be back here soon with a more substantive post. In the meantime, may the light that we try to kindle together illuminate all of our spirits. Thinking of you with love.

Shopping

Apologies for the quiet around here. I've had a lot of last-minute, end-of-the-year work to do and,  of course, the preparations for Christmas. Today I went out after an early lunch and spent a couple of hours shopping on St-Denis and Mont-Royal, where the sidewalks are still deep in snow but the ambiance is as Christmas-y as it gets. I saw all sorts of lovely things one can buy, from fair-trade gifts costing just a few dollars to high-end kitchen ware and clothing, but I bought very little. Half of the people I know seem to be skipping the holidays altogether and leaving on trips: Cartagena, St. Lucia, Hawaii, Spain. Midway through the afternoon, I stopped for a cup of coffee and a muffin; the kindly older man across the table was taking notes on a sheet of paper while studying a calendar of pictures of Morocco; I had the sense that we both wanted to talk to each other but were giving each other the private space typical of overcrowded cafés.  "Bonne vacance," I said as I got up to go. "Bonne fête," he replied, with a smile.

Beneath a calm and fairly contented exterior, I sense a deeper, unsettled feeling, but it's not a longing for material objects nor for other, warmer places. Perhaps it's just the end of the year and my tendency, though I never make resolutions, to take stock. Like many of the people whose blogs I read, I too am feeling unsure about where to put my creative energy in the weeks and months ahead, and all too aware of how precious and limited my time and energy are.

What's worthwhile? It's the question I always ask, and after the obvious answer -- being kind to other people, especially those I love -- I always come back to the question of work and creativity. We are living in a time when computers help us to do pretty much whatever we want, from publishing our own books to making high-quality videos. Just like millions of other people. Does any of it matter, in this torrent of words and images, rushing forward on a river of accelerating time?

Poutine et Paris-Brest

Sunday afternoon, as we were heading toward a birthday party in east Montreal. The city cleans the streets with twin graders, huge snowblowing machines the size of combines, and giant dump trucks that cart the snow away.

Blizzards have nothing on us: we've been consuming enough calories to survive on an ice floe. Saturday night, romanced by a beautiful but very cold evening, we decided to have supper at La Banquise - a lively 24-hour Montreal favorite always filled with young people, which is fairly close to our house. The specialty is...poutine, (scroll down to the third entry) and for the first time in three years, we deliberately ordered some and actually ate it, washed down with a bottle of Cheval Blanc. For those who don't know this delicacy of Quebec, it is a generous pile of expertly-cooked French fries, covered with gravy and cheese curds, plus other toppings, ranging from onions and bacon to foie gras. I ordered lasagna and some very good asparagus soup; we shared the two entrees (the poutine and the lasagna) and the dessert, which was a small, deliciously intense brownie. Then we went for a long walk, and returned home about the time our faces had become stiff, our fingers had been curled into little balls inside our gloves, and we had lost feeling in our noses.

Thus fortified, and feeling guilty, on Sunday morning we had a very light breakfast of coffee and fruit, and went off to the cathedral. It was already snowing lightly. When we walked out after the coffee hour, four inches had already fallen and the pace of the storm indicated it was going to increase and keep on like that for a long while. We had been invited to a surprise 50th birthday party in the afternoon, so we called to make sure it was still on, since the birthday girl and her partner were traveling from far out in the country - "Oui," her father said, "pas de problem."

So we stopped first at our favorite florist, on St. Urbain, where I picked out a bouquet of salmon-colored roses and blue agapanthus, and then we drove slowly through streets in various stages of being kept open or becoming snowed-in, to a neighborhood of small detached homes in the eastern part of the island, the heartland of Quebeçois Montreal.

 

We found a parking place of sorts on the already snow-filled street, and went up the drifted steps. It was a wonderful party. There were only five anglophone guests among the twenty-five or so who had gathered- two women originally from western Canada, and the two of us, and a next-door neighbor whose parents had been French and English, but both Catholic. We were immediately warmly embraced by our friend's family, who we'd never met before, and the champagne flowed as generously as the buzzing French conversation, which to our surprise we could follow and contribute to fairly well. Then came a fantastic lunch, with more wine, followed by a huge Paris-Brest, our friend's traditional birthday "cake" - essentially a giant, flat cream puff filled with hazelnut cream and dusted with powdered sugar.

Night had fallen, and the guests bundled up and made their way out the door -- into the scene in the video at the end of this post. That's my husband at the end, walking toward our car. The plastic tunnels along the street are typical winter car-ports, erected temporarily all around the city neighborhoods where people have the luxury of a driveway. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, but the warmth inside the house was just as intense as the cold outside. It was a happy afternoon for us, and we were awfully pleased to be invited and included in the occasion - and to find our comfort level with the language had really improved quite a bit. I can tell not only from our better ability to communicate and understand, but from the fact that we weren't totally exhausted at the end of the afternoon!

It was still snowing when we went to bed.

Losing Friends, and a Nation's Soul

My dear Icelandic friend just sent a link about the detention, humiliation, and deportation of an Icelandic woman by Homeland Security at JFK airport -  and J. and I were talking about the whole sorry mess over lunch. Our general feeling was one of deep discouragement that things have gotten this insane - and yet are glossed over so quickly, with little press coverage and very little public concern. In this case, of course, the outrage is that a white woman from a friendly country was the victim. Try being a Palestinian, a Syrian, or an Iranian: your story is unlikely to even make the news. I have a female friend from Colombia who is routinely hassled at U.S border crossings: of course she, a recent PhD, might be carrying drugs. But now not only profiling has become systematized. Set off a trigger, and you become a number to be treated according to a routine protocol by officials in a vast bureaucracy who are more and more intent on wielding their own power, and more and more detached from their own humanity.

My friend writes:

Iceland used to be a nation of people that would defend the US when our neighbors in Europe derided it for being naive, bullies or decadent. Sadly, you will not find many here anymore running to their defense. I can safely say that the general consensus has become that the US has lost its soul somewhere along the way.

Can you imagine getting 50,000 comments on a blog item? Well, this woman's blog has so far gotten close to 500 comments. In Iceland. A country 300,000 strong. Per capita that translates into receiving 50,000 comments on a blog you write in the USA.

This newest incidence, which has captured all the headlines here, has only accelerated the US reputation's descent to the status of a sadistic, fascist dictatorship.

What a waste.

I really miss the place that – at the end of last century – my wife and I worked so hard to move to.

Last night was J's final French class and at 10:30 pm we went out for a beer with his fellow students, all young people in their twenties. Eventually I found myself trying to answer a bright young Canadian's questions about American politics, and woke up this morning with a headache caused much more by the noise and impossibility than by the drinks. He was so much better informed about current events, and educated about the American political system, than most Americans, and yet I couldn't seem to explain to him that what he was talking about was how it works in theory, not how it is in actuality. Like nearly every other Canadian I talk to - and Canadians love to talk about American politics - he kept saying, "but America has some of the best minds and the best educated people on the planet. Surely eventually the people will just wake up and demand change? They can't let this continue, it's so destructive for the whole world, not just America. How has this happened? How can the president and his advisers have so much power? What about Congress? What about the courts and the constitution?"

I find this hopefulness both wonderful (because it reminds me that some people still hold a nuanced view of America that includes its positive aspects and people) and deeply depressing, because I think the damage done by this administration is so far-reaching, and the undermining and destruction of the very system itself (the circumventing of the State Department, for instance, or the ever-increasing reach of Homeland Security, or the changes that have taken place in the media, let alone in public perception) has been so careful, so complete, and so insidious, that wholesale change is impossible, regardless of who wins the next election. When a hopeful, idealistic young person, committed to peace and protecting the environment, who believes that the world can and should learn to live together with mutual respect and toward the common good, looks at me and repeats, "Why, it simply has to change! People will wake up, won't they?" I honestly don't know what to say. I tried, and have tried before, to explain how America has changed since 9/11, but somehow, none of the Canadians I talk to can really believe it. I wonder if the America they think they know - the America they still believe in and admire - no longer exists except in civics textbooks.

This is not a political blog, although I am very political; I stray into these areas when my sadness or anger overflows and has to be expressed, but I do so reluctantly, because the torrent of words about politics on blogs is another thing I find very depressing and largely pointless.

My young friend finally looked at me and asked, with the same hopeful expression, "Will you vote in the U.S. elections?"

"Of course we'll vote," I said. At the same time, I'll work to encourage Quebec and Canada not to follow suit, not to give in to American pressure and policies, to keep its independent spirit. And, grateful for the perspective we have, I can perhaps speak about the two societies in a comparative and cautionary way. Does it do any good? I don't know - we each need to do what we can.

Another Canadian friend just dropped by after lunch, and we were telling her about the kids in this class, and how idealistic and committed most of them seemed - five or six out of twenty or so are working in jobs that have something to do with environmental issues or study of the natural world, for instance - it seems like a large percentage to me. "Yes," she said, "a lot of young people from Quebec go to British Columbia in the summer to plant trees - did you know about that?"

No, we didn't. There's a lot to learn.

Quebec makes a green move, prodding Canada

From CBC Canada today: Quebec to Adopt Strict California-style Emissions Controls

Quebec will become the first Canadian province to adopt California's stringent auto-emissions standards in a move hailed as part of a domino effect toward greener cars.

Environment Minister Line Beauchamp made the announcement early Wednesday at the UN climate-change summit in Indonesia as a group of environmentalists looked on and applauded.

At least four other Canadian provinces are considering a similar plan, and Quebec described its step as part of a historic march toward cleaner cars across North America.

"This is a movement," Beauchamp said. "And it is an inevitable movement — it's one that cannot be reversed."

Ice-Free Arctic Summers Sooner than Predicted

Cover of a new book, Unikkaaqatigiit: Perspectives on Climate Change from the Inuit in Canada. The book can be downloaded as a .pdf file; text in Inuit, English, and French.

Living in Canada has made me much more aware of the arctic: its people, its animal life, its proximity and preciousness. When you find out that polar bears are symbols on local beer, great grey owls are winter visitors to your neighborhood, narwhals are real, and Inuit people and their art are an everyday part of your culture, it's a lot harder to ignore this vast part of North America.

These new projections point to ice-free arctic waters in summers as early as 2013 - prior predictions were more like 2050 - which would be absolutely disastrous. When, when are our leaders going to wake up and start acting decisively on this issue that impacts every living creature on earth? I've been getting lots of mailings from outraged young Canadians this week, after Canada was awarded a global "fossil" award for being a "worst offender" on global warming, and trying to sabotage the UN climate change talks in Bali. There's a petition to sign:

"Prime Minister Harper's short-sighted, undemocratic and big oil-driven policy on climate change is damaging the world and destroying our image as a good country. We're supposed to be the nice guys, who try to do the right thing in the world.

The vast majority of Canadians are hopping mad on this issue -- we can win this. We just need to show Harper how serious we are that he change course. Sign up now and forward this email to everyone you know - we've got just 3 days to hit 25,000 signatures!"

I've become dubious about the effect of petitions in the U.S., but this one probably has a chance of making a difference. Please sign it and make your voice heard.

Fire

Before dinner I went outside to fetch kindling and some new logs for the fire, hurriedly opening the woodbox and steeping back inside the apartment before the cold seeped into my flesh far enough to penetrate and cling.  I made the fire and sat and read while my husband baked pizza, and we ate in front of the fire, watching the logs turn from dark shapes, still allied with trees and water, into red-gold embers that pulsed like the interior of the earth far beneath the snow that covers the city and the cornfields, the dark flowing river running over rocky tombs, white with the skeletons of sea creatures.

On the kitchen counter is a small glass containing liquid of the same reddish gold, where I poured boiling water over crushed saffron threads and covered the lip of the glass with a saucer to keep the steam and the full perfume inside. Half was stirred with eggs and herbs for today's Persian omelette; half reserved for tomorrow's chicken stew.

You see, we search everywhere now for the molten sun, and swallow it when we can.

Still Life With Bridle

Detail from a still life by the little-known Dutch painter, Floris Dijck

Zbigniew Herbert was a poet, but he was also an essayist and in particular, he wrote about art. One of his books of essays is Still Life With Bridle, in which he examines Dutch painting in the 17th century.

The second essay in the book is called "The Price of Art," and because I have little else to say tonight, I'll quote the end of it here, knowing that you, dear readers, will probably have a reaction. Remember that he's talking about Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, as well as many more obscure painters, all of whom were members of the guild and had the technical skill evidenced in paintings like the one above.

Information preserved about the lives of Dutch painters is sparse. They belong to that species of artists who leave works behind them, not complaints and laments. Really there are no dramatic stories, unhealthy blushing, or sensational scandals. Their entire earthly existence can be summarized in a few dates: birth, qualification as a master, marriage, children's baptism, and finally, death.

They can only be envied. Whatever their greatness and miseries, the disillusionments and failures of their careers, their role in society and place on earth were not questioned, their profession universally recognized and as evident as the profession of butcher, tailor, or baker. The question of why art exists did not occur to anyone, because a world without paintings was simply inconceivable.

Zbigniew Herbert, Still Life With Bridle, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press 1991, pg 36.

Further thoughts, in the bright light of morning:

Two things stand out for me in this excerpt: the reminder that in those days it wasn't enough to "want to be an artist" - one had to go through a rigorous training to learn the skills and the discipline required. It wasn't just a "notion"- it was work. The second is that I keep pondering the final statement. Plenty of people today have no idea why art exists, nor do they care, and to them a world without paintings is not only conceivable, but has come to be. How do we, as people who care about such things, respond to this? Whose responsibility is it to keep art alive?