the cassandra pages

The Foot Lady

Last night I received this story in an email from my friend Vivian. She's a Canadian-American who has lived in Montreal most of her adult life, but she's voting in Florida by absentee ballot. In these days of not-much-humor about the upcoming elections, I appreciated this story:

"Last Friday, a week ago, I went to get a pedicure in the local community centre. My friend Deb made the appointment, or, more accurately, she had given me the appointment her father had since he is now having trouble getting around. I got there late but the Foot Lady wasn't there yet. I sat in the hall on a chair. It was a youth centre, with its own Bingo hall and a little office where they made all the appointment on a clip board. A woman came in from the street and sat down, she said she couldn't stand any longer. Are you waiting for the bus? I asked. I am waiting for a gentleman who is blind, he comes to play Bingo.  How is that? He has special cards, cards in Braille.  So we chat a little. She is retired, as am I, and she hates it, she wants to be busy but the doctor says she cannot work.  Then the Foot Lady arrives. It doesn't matter much, the appointment after me was open, a cancellation. It turns out she had had to detour around a big traffic jam on the overpass at Angrignon and then rushing through Verdun had gotten a speeding ticket. Who knows it is 30? That is too slow. They are just trying to make money. I didn't think she could afford to pay it. A Foot Lady who commutes from the West Island to a different community centre every day of the week, and takes private clients too. It must be tiring. She was a little French Canadian woman  with a round sweet face with bright blonde hair in ringlets around her face, kind of a mullet actually long in back and shorter on the sides, and she patiently unpacked her gigantic black valise with her electric sander-thing and swabs and two stacks of clean towels and the foot soaking tub and creams and little metal implements of different kinds. What kind of work do you do, she asked, are you creative? I think you are artistic.  She spoke an almost unaccented English, just a bit tentatively.  Sometimes she searched for a word. When she found out I was  originally from the U.S. she said, oh, and what do you think, about the vote there?  That one who is running to be the next prime minister, what is his name...Oklahoma!..."

(Most Canadians, I should add, have the facts straight, though they do find the interminable U.S. campaign and electoral college pretty hard to fathom. Every single Canadian I've talked to has asked me, worriedly, "but are you going to vote?" and looked very relieved when I've told them I already have, and for whom.)

Oh-oh.

 

Trois Pèlerinages (Three Pilgrimages) - Part 3

Music has been both a path in my life, and a destination. I can’t remember learning to read music, so in some sense it feels like a land I arrived in before I was born. There have been years of lessons and learning, years of performing with others and of making music on my own, and a few periods when I was doing neither in a concerted way – periods that have always ended with a call and a new journey.

Two of the biggest changes for me in this latest transition between homes have been being without my piano, and without the choir I sang in for many years. I had stopped taking voice and piano lessons a few years before we started coming to Montreal, and the friend with whom I often played four-hand piano was teaching on the west coast. So there had already been a gradual, natural change in focus and intention; because of the lessons I’d been practicing a lot for four or five years, and I was tired of it and a little bored. But it was very hard leaving the choir: when you see the same people twice a week for years and years, and work together on something you all care about, you end up knowing and caring a great deal about each other. We were a family, as well as people who loved singing.

I don’t have a solo voice, and I’ve never had aspirations to be a professional. I’m simply a pretty good lifelong musician, in the category, I guess, of “skilled amateurs.” At its core, for me, music has always been about joy and solace, and since I was very small it’s been my refuge, along with the natural world. It has been an inexhaustible well, always providing something new to learn, opportunities to improve, things to discover. But the journey into music goes two ways; as you go deeper into it, it teaches you more about yourself.

Sometimes, I suppose, we need a break even from that. In my sadness over my mother’s death, and the difficulty of adjusting to an unsettled life in a new place, maybe that intensely emotional place from which music comes was just too much. It seems odd to think of it that way, since making music has always functioned for me as a way of dealing with my emotions. I’ve thought this period had more to do with practicalities: no piano, no way to be a responsible member of a musical group because of my unpredictable schedule. But perhaps it was more than that. Instead, the city opened up a world of musical performance I’ve never been able to enjoy before, and for four years I’ve been a grateful consumer.

During early October this year, Montreal hosted an international organ competition, with sixteen competitors, most in their thirties, from eleven nations, and a high-powered international jury. Quebec has a long tradition of European-style organ-building, and some very fine instruments, so it’s a natural place for such a competition, and the quality of playing was very high. A large video screen was set up at the front of the churches used for the three rounds, so you could both see and hear the performances. Although the contest was eventually won by a crowd-pleasing young Frenchman -- a flashy, virtuoso player who had committed his entire contest repertoire to memory -- I became interested in a young woman from Belgium, Els Biesemans, who won the Bach prize in the first round. During the second round, where the competitors were required to play two imposed works by Olivier Messiaen and other works of their choice from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, she played with such musicality and depth that I was completely captivated. She was like a cat ranging over the manuals, sometimes with a soft caress, sometimes with arching power; she was inside the music. In the final round of five finalists, she drew the first slot - never a good place to be - and perhaps there was a question of nerves, or difficulties with the registration of the huge Casavant organ at Notre Dame Basilica – but after playing works by Messiaen and Bach and seeming somewhat “off”, she took an admirable risk, playing an exciting,  recently-composed experimental work  -- and then reached deep inside for an excellent performance of a tremendously difficult fantasy and fugue by Franz Liszt. She didn’t win, but overall I found so much more to admire in her playing and her inherent musicality than in the choppy, unemotional virtuosity of the man the jury chose. Weeks later, I’m still thinking about it.

(Video and audio from the contest is available here.)

---

I had spoken to Patrick about the choir already. With the death of my father-in-law, our schedule has changed and we are here more: enough, I thought, that I might be able to do it. “Come anytime,” he told me, as he’s been saying almost since we met four years ago. “We’d love to have you with us.” The next Thursday evening, feeling nervous, I rode my bike downtown and walked into the rehearsal room already filling with other singers. I was handed a sheaf of music, nearly all new to me. It was, as I’d expected, quite a different experience from any choral group I’ve sung with. This is a choir of 25 to 30 singers, made up of eight paid professionals and experienced amateurs. Everyone is a good sight-reader -- and you have to be, because most of the music doesn’t stay in your folder for more than a week. We get a look at it on Thursday night, and then there’s an hour rehearsal before the Sunday Mass at 10:00 am and Evensong, which is broadcast and streamed live, at 4:00 pm. That’s it. There’s little “teaching” of vocal parts; the choir starts out already singing the notes, rhythms, tempos and dynamics with remarkable accuracy, and instinctively adapts to the various styles of music. They’re used to singing together and listening to each other; no voice sticks out, and even with so many high-caliber soloists, everyone stays within what a former director liked to call “the sleeve of sound.” The rehearsal time is spent going over details that will create a polished, smooth performance: pronunciation of the various languages, the breathing and lifts that give space, slight modifications in tempo to anticipate, and the all-important shaping of phrases to create music that’s always coming from somewhere and moving toward someplace else: the kind of musicality I appreciated so much in Els Bieseman’s organ playing.

I began to relax after the first services and a couple of weeks of rehearsals; the routines of practices, tea breaks, dressing, running up and down between church and undercroft are becoming more familiar; I now have a robe, a music cubbyhole, a locker with my name on the door, and some nascent friendships. The challenge of keeping up with many singers who are better than I am is going to be good for me. I like the intense concentration required, and know I’ll learn and improve. It feels wonderful to feel my body singing again, and know I'm becoming part of the organism that a choir is. Once again, I realize I’ve arrived back at home.

Our fundraising concert, titled Symphony of Psalms after the Stravinsky piece that will conclude it, is in a week. At the last rehearsal, we worked for fifteen minutes on a complicated double-choir setting of Psalm 150 by Jan Sweelinck, ironing out the tricky rhythms, making sure each of the eight parts had all its notes. Satisfied, Patrick got up from the keyboard and came around to the front, holding his score: it would be a capella from now on. “Ok!” he said, with a big smile. “Now let’s make some music!”

A Walk on Ile Bizard: A Video

Ile Bizard is an island northwest of the main island of Montreal. It was originally called Île Bonaventure but eventually acquired the name Île Bizard, after Jacques Bizard, whose fiefdom or seigneurie it became in 1678.  The island was farmed for many years, and stone walls still run through its woods. Today upscale suburban developments hug much of the shoreline, and the island is home to several exclusive golf courses. But the entire interior is a nature preserve, with nature trails that pass through a number of habitats, most notably a large cattail-filled wetland with a well-maintained boardwalk that protects the habitat and allows access by visitors on foot.

The beaver population is obviously active – we saw many recently-cut trunks – but an interpretive sign said that the adult male beavers had been castrated for population control “without apparent disruption to the beavers’ social life or activity.”

On Friday - probably one of the last real fall days this year - the dragonflies were doing their best to make up for the lack of beaver’s sexual activity. Population control in this species seems to consist of too-low pond flyovers – the pair I photographed ended up in the water, unable to take off again, and I saw numerous other floating dragonflies who had met the same fate. If they don’t drift into a patch of vegetation quickly, their wings seem to become waterlogged and they drown.

Past the marsh, the path entered a beautiful deciduous woods, made up mostly of mature maples and beech. Frost had already hit most of the rest of the park, but in this area, the leaves were still brilliant and still on the trees. It was one of the loveliest forests I’ve ever walked in, and to my surprise, the dominant fern here was the maidenhair, rare in much of the northeastern U.S., growing in lush patches everywhere under the canopy.

We walked for several hours, stopping to take photos, eat the lunch we’d packed, watching ducks and a pileated woodpecker whose call seemed to follow and accompany us as we circumnavigated the park. It was a day of gold and silver, a last fling for what’s been a glorious fall: today it’s raining hard and the leaves are coming down.

City Harvest

Though the days have been warm, winter's coming. Last week in Vermont, we rose each morning to find frost's silvery fingers had brushed the grass and leaves, and left their calligraphy on the windows. But here in the city, there still hasn't been a hard freeze. Nevertheless, yesterday was the day for taking apart the terrace planters, re-potting ferns and ivies and begonias, bringing plants inside.

Much as I've mourned not having a vegetable garden anymore, we did grow a long planter full of herbs. I cut them yesterday, and now there's thyme and mint and verbena drying on paper, and a jar of pesto in the refrigerator.

When I finished picking over the basil and stripping the leaves from the stems, I lifted my fingers to my face. The few times I've bought perfume in my life, this is what I chose: not flowers, but the darker scents of herbs and barks and roots, of spices and earth; the scents of preservation.

What I Did Yesterday

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Trois Pèlerinages (Three Pilgrimages) - Part 2

The original reason for our trip north was to visit Cap Tourmente, staging area for the annual migration of snow geese. On Saturday morning we rose early, ate a hearty Quebecois breakfast at our B&B, and set off for the national wildlife preserve about thirty minutes to the north of St-Anne-de-Beaupre. 

This rough panorama doesn't begin to do justice to the beauty of the Cap Tourmente landscape. The peak of fall color had arrived, and the weather on Saturday was perfect. Behind us, stretching around to the left, were more tall rock faces covered with deciduous forest. By contrast, the floodplain of the St. Lawrence - the river lies horizontally in the center of the photograph - is very flat.  Cap Tourmente contains salt marshes full of bulrushes, the favorite food of the snow geese, and it has been the historic gathering place for the flocks as they come down from their arctic nesting areas on the way to Chesapeake Bay. Partly because of preservation efforts such as this beautiful, pristine preserve (not a souvenir to be seen) - the snow goose population that comes here every year has grown from endangered levels to more than 1 million. A limited hunt to control the population is now allowed in Quebec.

When I first heard about this place last year, from the same friends we traveled with last weekend, I immediately wanted to go. I have... a thing about snow geese. (Forgive me, longtime readers - I've told this story before.)

When I was young the appearance of just one snow goose on the lake was a reason to get out the binoculars and call all the neighbors; when a small flock arrived one year the local people all drove to the cornfields along the river hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare visitors to the central New York flyway, clustered in the middle of a flock of their larger brown Canadian cousins. Something about their graphic whiteness, set off by that triangle of black wingtip, seemed to epitomize for me their arctic origin and their rare beauty. But it's not as individual birds that they most move me, it's something about seeing them as a flock.

It wasn't until the late eighties when we began to see more each year. In 1990 my maternal grandfather died the day after Thanksgiving. It was the first death of someone close to me, and though he had been becoming more and more transparent in his 90th year, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. My husband and I received the call just after we'd returned to Vermont; we immediately turned around and went back.

After the funeral I walked down by the lake where he and I had fished on so many evenings, tears now running down my face as I tried to come to terms with his absence. It was late afternoon, and the large flocks of migrating Canada geese that rested on our lake during those weeks before it froze were returning from their day grazing in the nearby cornfields. I stopped to watch them make their descent, wings wide to catch the cupped air, legs outstretched: one, ten, fifty. I looked down at the water's edge, and saw an unusually bright, white, round piece of quartz. I picked it up and suddenly, impulsively, threw it as far out into the water as I could. Following the arc of the stone, I looked up into the sky and saw a shimmering flash of silver high above me - and then watched, stunned, the tears drying on my face, as an entire flock of snow geese slowly wheeled and descended into the middle of the lake like an apparition, or, as it seemed to me, a passage between worlds.

--

Although this past weekend is the normal peak of the snow goose migration, few flocks have left their nesting grounds so far because of the continued warmth of the weather in the far north, and the promised thousands and thousands of geese at Cap Tourmente were not to be seen. A steady stream of hopeful bird-loving pilgrims arrived anyway in the parking lot throughout the morning, carrying a range of effects from children and sandwiches to impressive amounts of optical aids and high-tech camera gear.

After a twenty-minute walk on boardwalk that wound through the tidal marshes to a specially-constructed blind, we did see several flocks rising and settling over the river. We also watched two heavy wooden sleds slowly pulled through the grasses by splashing, strong work horses, the last vestiges in Quebec of "la chasse traditionnelle" - a traditional hunting method for transporting hunters and their guide. In the blind and on the trail, the human visitors were quiet, looking into the distance through their own binoculars or the mounted scopes provided, explaining about the geese in whispers to their curious children and lifting them up so they could get their first look at something special, something that mattered to them.

--

Faucon pèlerin, reads the French description birds one might see at Cap Tourmente. Peregrine falcon. I'd never really made the linguistic connection in English until I thought back to the Cafe Pèlerin at St-Anne-de-Beaupre...; peregrination doesn't mean quite the same thing as pelerinage.

Did birds first teach us about the possibility of pilgrimage, as we wondered where they went each year? Or does their migration awaken in us our own innate restlessness and desire? The leap or pang in the heart at the call of the flocks passing far overhead is, I think, something more than joy or melancholy about the passage of seasons, though for us northerners there is certainly that.

My own inarticulateness, in the face of the emotions the geese arouse in me, tells me I'm in the place that contains fire and the great waterfalls; the sound of the hermit thrush and the flash of a school of bright minnows; a silent shaft of sun on moss in a dark woodland. The snow geese fly in that space of porosity between myself and the rest of nature, following a map imprinted in my own marrow, a route stretching forward beyond language, and back to a time before tongues.

--

Here is J.'s CAP TOURMENTE PORTFOLIO.

Next: Messiaen and a journey within.

Poverty

A former vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields tells this story on himself:

Hurrying away from the church one day, late for a meeting, I encountered a homeless man in Trafalgar Square. He rushed up to me and asked, "Vicar! Do you remember me?"

I was late for a meeting in a faraway part of London, so I answered brusquely, taking out my wallet: "How much do you want?"

A crestfallen look passed across his face and his hands fell to his sides. "I don't want anything!" he said, his formerly bright voice full of sadness. "I just wanted to know if you remembered me."

(paraphrased from A Room with a View, Rev. Nicholas Holtam’s essays about ministry at St. Martin-of-the-Fields - "ministry with the world at our door.")

Trois Pèlerinages (Three Pilgrimages) - Part 1

What is the hope at the center of our journeys, our private pilgrimages? Where do we find our own cathedrals? Not realizing at first they were pilgrimages at all, I’ve followed three different paths in recent days, walking with others on their own searches for a time, finding myself always curious, occasionally bewildered or even incredulous, sometimes amazed and moved.
--
Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and on Friday morning we took off with two close friends for an overnight trip, four hours to the north, above Quebec City.

Our first stop, on Friday, was at the shrine of St-Anne-de-Beaupré, the oldest continuous site of Catholic pilgrimage in North America, which is celebrating its 350th anniversary this year. The first church in honor of St. Anne, the patronne of Quebec and mother of Mary, was built here in 1658. A succession of buildings was erected on the site where miraculous healings were believed to have taken place. The present basilica was begun after a fire destroyed the former one in 1922; it was consecrated in 1976.

St. Anne’s twin spires rise incongruously above the flat land and suburban landscape beyond the sprawling city of Quebec. The village of St. Anne-de-Beaupre is small and reminded us of a western frontier town, with a couple of inns for the pilgrims, a cluster of houses set close together and nearly touching the winding main street, and a few flat-roofed buildings devoted to the sale of tacky religious and Quebec souvenirs, from painted plaster casts of the Last Supper to moose and polar bears in plush fake fur. These are dwarfed by a great square with trees, a tall fountain, and a towering gilded statue of the crowned saint holding her daughter, the baby Mary, in front of a huge cathedral of carved and decorated grey stone. Encrusted with detail inside and out, the basilica welcomes thousands and thousands of pilgrims every year – and as we stood there, astonished, busloads arrived and disgorged passengers who also stood and gaped at the sight, blinking after their long journeys to the shrine from all over North America. I had absolutely no idea anything like this existed in the province, and certainly not outside of the major cities. We were about to see evidence, once again, of how close Quebec Catholicism remained to the Middle Ages - even in the mid-20th century.

After we passed through the heavy doors covered with copper low-reliefs and into the glittering vestibule, the splendor of the cathedral's interior was even more stunning. I tried to suspend my incredulity about shrines, relics, and the veneration of saints in favor of cpnsidering the devotion and craft that had gone into the building's construction and decoration. How on earth had all of this happened in rural Quebec? The same way it did in Europe: through the donations of thousands of individuals and parishes, and the money left at the shrine by pilgrims. It costs $4 to light a candle, and hundreds of them were burning. One doesn't have to be a genius to do the math; if every pilgrim leaves only $10  - a very conservative estimate - that would generate a huge sum each year.

The story of St. Anne’s life with her husband St. Joachim is depicted in mosaics on the vaulted ceiling and along the sides of the sanctuary. (If, like me, you are wondering where that came from, since St. Anne is never mentioned in the canonical Gospels: the story of her life is loosely based on the Apocryphal Gospel of James, written in 150 C.E. She was venerated in the Eastern Orthodox church as early as the 7th century, but no cult arose around her in western Catholicism until the 12th century.)

Along the walls, gold mosaics and contemporary stained glass tell the important stories of Catholic Christianity and of the cathedral's own history. The lower walls and stairwells are made of black marble striped with lines of tiny gold tiles; above them are walls of polished lighter cut stone with many holes that, on closer observation, are the remains of fossil shells. Every pew is carved with an animal and plant that represent the created world but are predominantly native species of the northern Canadian woods. The sides and back of the altar are surrounded by smaller chapels, each different, given like the windows by cities or individuals, and yet all carefully fitting into the overall design integrity; one, in dark green and gold with mosaics of stylized clovers and a carved dark wooden saint against dark green Vermont marble, was dedicated to St. Patrick. The leaded-glass windows, many also donated by local parishes, depict workers, priests and saints alike. Cities like New Haven and New Orleans are represented by pictures of metal workers and musicians; in one window I read the words "Les Abattoirs" (the slaughterhouses) beneath a portrait of a butcher holding a large knife!

In the vaulted undercroft, square mosaics with gold backgrounds depict more local flora and fauna, from pink lady’s slippers to robins; the central chandelier hangs from a ceiling boss that at first seems part of the blue and white mosaic decoration of the ceiling but revels itself to be a four-foot wide white snowflake. Semi-circular paintings tell the story of the encounter between the (adoring and accepting) native people and (benevolent, generous) French nuns and priests – entirely, of course, from the French Catholic point of view. (St. Anne is said to have been held in particular adoration by native converts to Catholicism, and an icon of a beloved native saint, Keteri Tekakwitha, dressed in fringed buckskin and carrying a rosary, hangs in a prominent place to the left of the main altar in the basilica.)

 

Masses and talks for pilgrim groups take place in this undercroft, where there is one of four purported relics of St. Anne, (the "Major Relic" - a wristbone - is in a marble reliquary in a special chapel to the right of the altar upstairs.) The undercroft also includes a chapel for meditation containing two polychrome statues of the crucified Christ, an altar where people leave photographs of their loved ones, and hundreds and hundreds of burning white candles arrayed on galvanized trays; the heat from this room hits you like a wall long before you reach the doorway.

Monseigneur Laval, the first Bishop of Quebec, is on the right; I don't know the name of the Native American chief holding the map of Nouvelle France. It was Laval who requested that the canons of Carcassonne send a relic of St. Anne to Beaupré: they responded by sending "the finger-bone of Saint Anne, which was first exposed for veneration on 12 March, 1670."

The true focal point of the cathedral is upstairs, though, around the painted statue of St. Anne holding Mary, an image that evolved over time from an Orthodox icon of Mary holding Jesus. The saints, with their gilded crowns, stand on a tall pillar, their feet in a huge cascading bank of fresh flowers. Below them is a circular place to kneel, continually filled with pilgrims in fervent prayer. Are their prayers answered? Some say so: on either side of the entrance to the main sanctuary are banks of crutches and prostheses left by pilgrims who say they walked away unaided, healed by the grace of God and the intercession of Saint Anne.

After we left the basilica, we walked across the street to a much older stone chapel which commemorates the earlier churches on the site. Inside, a woman with a mane of red hair and a flowing green dress was playing a violin, facing the altar. Her husband sat in the sun on the steps outside, working on a Sudoku. I walked with our friends around the back of the chapel where life-size statues enact the Stations of the Cross. When I returned, she was still playing, and J. was quietly sitting in the chapel behind her. “I’m terribly frustrated,” she had told him, in an American accent, during a brief pause in her playing. “I’ve been practicing to do for five months, but my bow is sticking and the trains keep going by so noisily!” The next day when we returned to the cathedral to take photographs in the early morning, we saw her again, in the same chartreuse gown, kneeling at the feet of St. Anne.

Please also take a look at a PORTFOLIO of St-Anne photographs, by J.

Next: Cap Tourmente

Brief Update

No, I haven't disappeared, I've just been busy with qarrtsiluni (check out the terrific first week of "Journaling the Apocalypse"), several pro bono jobs, a new pursuit (to be detailed here later) and several wonderful days away (which will be the subject of the next posts.) Please come back tomorrow for photos and at least the first part of a Quebec travelogue...