the cassandra pages

Tango

Yesterday we went to a wedding. The bride and groom are both talented, accomplished professional musicians  -- both organists -- who will be making their first home in England. Our choir sang for them. From the loft, on an extremely hot and humid day, I watched the bride walk down the aisle toward her waiting husband-to-be; she in an elegant strapless white gown, carrying a sheaf of delphinium and calla lilies; he in a morning coat. Over the past four years I've watched her grow from a gifted, determined, but less confident young woman into this poised, mature, accomplished and beautiful woman who was walking now, with grace, toward her new life. And I cried a little, as I always do at weddings, because even with all their hope and joy, no young couple can possibly know what they're getting into.

Tomorrow, J. and I will have been married for thirty years. We laughed with H. and D., the couple who married yesterday, that their marriage followed right after a royal wedding, just like ours did: we were married the week after Charles and Diana. Our wedding, and theirs, were both a whole lot simpler, and, fortunately, we've been a lot happier. "Be happy forever!" I told H. as I hugged her after the ceremony. Her face lit up, as it does when she smiles, and she said, "I really think we will be!"

What does it take, this elusive thing called happiness? One thing I think I see now, that I didn't then, is that happiness doesn't mean the same thing. No one, and certainly no two people together, can maintain the bliss that they feel when they fall in love and embark on that crazy promise to spend their lives together. Staying together becomes work at times. Hard work. It also takes some luck, a lot of patience, and a sense of humor; it requires a growing sense of one's own self as an individual as well as a partner, and an increasing flexibility to allow the other person to be who they are meant to be, and to see the beauty not in some idealized notion of what the other person and this union ought to be, but in what they are at any given moment. And frankly, sometimes it's better to let it go and move on.

We've been fortunate. It's been, and continues to be, an adventure. We're still growing and changing, and have become not only "the protectors of one another's solitude," as a dear friend remarked about his own marriage, but the protectors and defenders of each other's quirkiness. One day, we may be protectors of each other's dignity.

What a beautiful and insane endeavor; how much we expect from it and from one another, and how far we fall short! But as the tango shows us, there are infinite ways for human beings to dance together.

 

 

Some Views of the Park

Sunny afternoon, Park Lafontaine 7/25/11

The past few days, I've been experimenting with different drawing techniques for foliage, searching out a shorthand that captures the rhythm, busyness, and emotional tone of trees and shrubs at different times of the day. I've been thinking about this problem for years, and keep coming back to it, but now I have a bit more time to explore possibilities. These are just some initial sketches done with my Lamy fountain pen, quickly. I'll move on to washes and broader areas of ink and contrast, but I'm curious how far one can go with just a pen.

Early evening, 7/26/11

 

Night, 7/27/11

Death of the Book Box?

On my Phoenicia Publishing blog, some further thoughts on the future of books, bookshelves, and that great symbol of passage from home to home: the book box.

Quieter and quieter

On Sunday, we drove with friends out into the Eastern Townships to spend the late afternoon and evening talking and visiting at the home and garden of a mutual friend, G. He lives in solitude at the end of a long driveway, in a house perched on a hillside, without electricity. No other dwellings can be seen or heard, though there are others on the road.

I've been coming here once every summer for a number of years now. The gardens, the solitude, the little meditation house, and the way the conversation always turns toward the spiritual have become precious to me, and restorative. I walked in the garden by myself, a little while, and visited my amphibious friends - salamanders, tadpoles and frogs - in the pond. We shucked the first corn of the season, bought at a local farm on the way, and V. and I picked black currants from which I plan to make some cassis eau-de-vie -- "water of life" -- according to G.'s recipe.

That's the master gardener, G., seated at right above. We all brought food...there was plentiful wine...and many beautiful things to look at, and to talk about. The talk turned often to the spiritual, for we're all friends who share that interest, and in many ways this is a place of retreat.

G.'s woodpile called to J., who likes to split wood; he added a substantial contribution of split logs for the winter and worked up a good sweat.

Then we gathered on the porch -- mercifully screened against the ravenous mosquitoes and deer flies -- for dinner. That's fresh duck from the local duck farm, below, cooked with orange juice, wine, and rosemary.

When we finished eating, it was completely dark, and we found our way back up to the main level of the house carrying the candlesticks that had lit our table as the sun went down. We did the dishes, packed our things and headed back to the cars by flashlight -- and then stopped still. The sky above us was ablaze with stars, brighter and more numerous than I've ever seen, with the Milky Way stretching across it like a bright ribbon. Our goodbye chatter became silence as we gazed overhead. No other lights could be seen anywhere, and the only sounds were the occasional calls of birds, the hum of insects, and the chug of a bullfrog. Finally V. said, "Look...there's no moon, but we can see each other's faces. We're seeing...by starlight."

These brief sojourns in the countryside have taken me out of myself, and brought me back. They remind me how important nature is to me -- and not just green things and creatures, but wildness. I very much need these times to be alone and quiet with nature, as I've been throughout my life; rather than making me feel insignificant or lonely these are times of unity, emptying, and renewal.

I think of that morning on the lake, the sky so magnificent, and I, so fortunate to see it. I feel my fingers pass across the rough, lichen-encrusted surface of G.'s standing stones, then grasp and tug a currant from the fragrant bush, its smooth matte roundness, each like a black pearl filled with the sun's warmth. And I remember the coolness of the slippery frog I held momentarily on the muddy shore of the pond, and the strength of his legs pushing against my hand before his leap to safety.

In the kitchen as I was cutting fruit and G. was making tea, we talked. He has been volunteering at a summer music festival that takes place each July and August. "At my age, I find that I want to immerse myself more and more in music," he said. "I get tired of words, but music takes me... to other worlds." I nodded and said, "It's important for people like us who get caught up in..." "...being articulate!" he said, finishing my sentence, and we both laughed. "It's the wordlessness of music." Just then, a bird called. "It's a thrush,"  I said. "I hear them every night, said G., "but I don't know their names."

A Farm in the Catskills

 

This was our final stop, after Cooperstown, before heading back to Montreal. We stayed overnight in the farmhouse, visiting someone dear to us, who served us white wine and cheeses and huge pickled capers and olives in the garden, and a delicious dinner afterward, and then talked until we were all falling asleep. The next morning we got up and ate the breakfast I've already shown you. Then we went on a walk to see the ancestors' resting places, the basil and tomatoes, the barn filled with new hay, the old tractor and the young workhorses -- and finally, reluctantly, headed back up the Northway in the Hudson Valley and along Lake George and Lake Champlain, the long and beautiful waterway that lies between the Adirondacks of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont.

 

Meeting Marly, and some memories

On Monday, J. and I drove two valleys east from my father's home, which took us from the Chenango to the Unadilla, and then to the beautiful valley which holds Otsego Lake, from which the north branch of the Susquehanna arises. That's a mouthful of Iroquois names, isn't it? All I can do to convey the beauty of the'se places is to post a few photographs, but this piece of earth is the landscape that's forever imprinted on my mind and soul.

Our first stop was a field not far from my father's. We needed photographs of sheep in fields that looked somewhat like rural England, for a theater poster we're designing. The sheep obliged.

On the way, I wanted to take a photo of this abandoned general store in South Edmeston, NY, one of several tiny villages we passed through on the way -- and home, in recent years, to a thriving yogurt factory that's providing desperately-needed employment in this hard-hit rural area.

Then we continued over the hills to Cooperstown. The town, as usual in the summer, was crawling with tourists, especially on the main street where we parked, not far from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Parents with kids, little league teams in uniforms, nostalgic elders...and a street of historic buildings containing shops selling baseball souvenirs and memorabilia of every variety.

We ate lunch at a small cafe, where there was a pile of magazines on the table. I opened up a copy of The Christian Century, a liberal magazine I used to read, and was pleased to see a poem by Jill Alexander Essbaum...After lunch, J. took off to take some photographs, and I walked down to my favorite landing to gaze out at the lake for a little while. This is the site of Council Rock, a famous meeting place for the Iroquois. No one else was there. I stood and watched the lake, and then walked around the shoreline a short distance. The north branch of the Susquehanna River is the outlet of Otsego Lake, and begins right here as a mere brook.

 

I thought about my own history in this town, Cooperstown, named for its famous writer, James Fenimore Cooper, who called the lake "Glimmerglass." We came here fairly often when I was a child, to visit the Farmer's Museum or Indian Museum, or have lunch at the Otesaga Hotel. Here's a photo of me there, taken, um, a lot of years ago!

Later, as a naturalist/artist/exhibit coordinator for one of New York State's environmental education centers, I came here to take a summer course given my the New York State Historical Museum, in Fenimore House, and met a man I'd later marry: he was an artist/blacksmith working at the Farmer's Museum. for the next two years I travelled back and forth over these hills very often, deepening my affection for the landscape and Cooperstown itself, and enlarging my familiarity with the trickiest spots on the icy, drifted winter roads. With him I moved to New England; my transplantation there would survive, but our brief marriage did not.

 

Much more recently, J. and I had spent long days and nights here, in and out of the Cooperstown hospital -- a teaching hospital that's the best in central New York -- during my mother's surgery and final illness. There was a lot going through my head as I looked out at the lake.

But then I climbed back up to street level, and rang the bell at Marly Youmans' house. Within minutes, we were talking like old friends. The reason for the visit was to meet face-to-face, and ostensibly, to talk about Marly's book-length epic poem, "Thaliad," which my press Phoenicia will be publishing at the end of 2011. We got to that after, well, a couple of hours...

Marly, who -- no surprise -- is delightful, intelligent, articulate, funny, and warm, introduced me to her children, and showed me her house (which is very old) and some brand-new books (by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and a group of poets including herself and Dave Bonta -- on the floor in this picture). Clive's original artwork for Marly's book, Val/Orson, hangs in her front hallway.

Jonathan arrived, and after tea and bowls of freshly-picked raspberries with cream (whipping cream!) and sugar - what a treat! - we inscribed and exchanged books (a copy of my biography of Bishop Gene Robinson, and Marly's latest poetry collection, "The Throne of Psyche) and walked to the Episcopal Church, where J. took pictures of the Tiffany windows and Marly told me the history of the building, in which James Fenimore Cooper and his family figured heavily. They're all buried in the churchyard, and commemorated in stained glass.

Then sadly, it was time to leave, for we had further destinations and many miles to go. We gave Marly three ripe Pennsylvania peaches - she's a Southern girl, after all! - and took a few pictures to commemorate the first of what we hope will be many future get-togethers. We liked each other a lot. Can you tell? And although we don't really look that much alike, we sure do in this picture. Kind of uncanny. Thank you, Marly, and thank you, Cooperstown, for being the catalysts for this journey backward and forward!

(Marly has another photo, and some local lore, on her own blog today.)

RIP, Lucian Freud

About an hour ago, I heard the news that Lucian Freud had died, at age 88. One photograph of him that I saw in the newspaper showed him last year, holding a small fox-like dog; the New York Times slideshow includes an early painting of a woman with a kitten, fascinating and not typical of the work he did later in his career.

I've admired Freud's work for many many years. He's a consummate realistic painter, perhaps the greatest of contemporary realists, and whether one likes his subjects and approach or not, I am intoxicated with the sensuousness and possibilities of paint when I look at his work.

So, a bit pensive, I took up my pen and drew on the paper that was nearest to hand. Which I should have done a great deal more in my life, but perhaps there'll be some time to make up for that.

Being in my father's house for the past few days, I was surrounded by a little retrospective of my own artwork, and I spent some time going around and looking closely at the paintings and drawings I'd given my parents over the years. On Friday night we met some of Dad and B.'s friends, mostly octogenarians themselves, who had been invited over for drinks before going out to eat as a group. As we were leaving, one of them took me aside and said quietly, I've admired your paintings here several times. Are you doing more now? I said I hadn't painted much at all for the past fifteen years but hoped to do more. You should, and I sincerely hope you will, he said.

It isn't about painting or drawing like Lucian Freud, or anyone else, though I am enormously grateful for their examples and inspiration. It's about doing my best, and going wherever each drawing or painting (or piece of writing) takes me. About surrendering, and listening, and then moving on freely, joyfully, to the next.

The BBC obituary said that Freud "lived to paint." I don't; most of us don't, and can't, live solely to do our art, whatever it is. But he reminds me to get on with it; now is as good a time as there will ever be.

Farmhouse breakfast

My blue heaven. Blueberries, peaches, chewy whole grain toast with feta and dark wildflower honey, scrambled eggs, strawberry jam, coffee and rooibos tea...and a petite angel who prepares it all for you with love.

We're home now, after a beautiful drive through farmland and mountains. Home to our well-tended cat and garden, grateful for good neighbors and friends here, too.

More pictures and stories to come, including a visit to Cooperstown (not far from where I grew up) and my first fact-to-face meet-up with friend and writer Marly Youmans!

This morning

Confronting the Limits of Complexity

This week:

We joined the 21st century, and bought smartphones.

We changed our phone system to a different v.o.i.p. provider.

We replaced our modem, after days of intermittent internet service that drove us crazy.

I started a new feed on Twitter.

Everybody started flocking to Google+.

This was the week it all became Too Much.

I knew it was getting bad by Tuesday afternoon, when I started having visions of getting rid of as much of my stuff as I could, in order to create a nearly bare room in which I saw myself sitting in total silence.

My husband and I went to bed each night and lay there, each with our new phones, learning how they worked. "We've become just like everybody else," he remarked, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. "Now we'll go to restaurants and not talk to each other, but just play with our phones."

"Maybe you," I said. "Not me!" But my vehemence was only the result of disgust at the seductiveness of the little gem-like computer-phone, and what all of this was doing to my brain.

On the internet, invitations to Google+ have been flying around, and everyone seems to be talking about what it is and how to use it and will it actually be a competitor to Facebook, or will we all just have yet another social networking site to manage?

I asked myself why this was bothering me so much, why did I feel fried, annoyed, even angry? Why did I feel, most of all, like unplugging completely?

Part of it was information overload: the difficulty of solving technical problems, learning a new system, dealing with frustration. That's OK. But once that is over, what do I want?

What I want is to be creative, I said. I want the tools to serve me, not the other way around. I'm getting absolutely nothing significant done, but I'm supposedly "busy" all the time. And it's all driven by a shared anxiety: if we don't keep up, we'll be left behind; if we don't flock over here with the Crowd, we'll lose our audience and no one will talk to us or listen to us anymore. We're not so sure they're listening now...maybe we'd better issue another Tweet or Post or Dent and make sure they're there.

Meanwhile, we're all being manipulated by huge corporations who stand to make enormous profits by understanding, influencing, and controlling our behavior, and then recording what we do and who we are, and selling that information to others and using it to get us to buy things ourselves.  Don't people see that? Increasingly, we are becoming pawns not only in the political arena we used to call democracy, but in a worldwide web of profit-making.

I, for one, don't want to participate in that game any more than I have to. And I am going to unplug, to a certain extent, while using the various media in as subversive and creative a way as possible.

I can see perfectly well why I've been writing micro-posts, but there's no need to maintain a new Twitter feed to do that.

The blog is my central focus, and will remain so; I'll continue cross-posting from the blog to Twitter and FB but I'm pulling back from anything new. I opened an account at Google+ because I like its lack of ads and lack of games and clutter, but my attitude is wait-and-see. Maybe it will replace FB as the place for conversation, but I can't maintain a significance presence at both. I know, for sure, that I've reached a point of complexity that is my own limit.

I've decided to cut down dramatically on my interaction on Facebook anyway. FB is useful for keeping in touch with certain people, for sharing news, and for marketing, but can be a tremendous time drain, and the busyness of the interface and constant bombardment of ads, along with all the voices demanding my interest and attention, are part of what's putting me over the edge.

Analog activities suddenly seem very appealing: seeing friends in real time, gardening, cooking, drawing. This week I cut out and sewed a dress, the first I've made in ages.

And I'm going away for a few days, out into the country, with my sketchbook and camera and some pieces of paper; A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" (3/4 finished) in paperback, and the complete novels of Virginia Woolf on my phone. You'll be hearing from me, but in brief.

Meanwhile, what do YOU think about all of this?