the cassandra pages

The Water-carrier

Still life with Mounir's ceramic donkey, wedgewood pot, and Turkish tiles.

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends.

I find myself thinking a lot about what to paint or draw these days. With Gaza and our chaotic world so much on my mind, it's hard to focus on simple beauty: it somehow seems trivial, oblivious to reality, self-indulgent. And yet simple beauty and simple pleasure are what nearly every human being desires, and deserves.

The little ceramic donkey in this drawing belonged to my father-in-law, so it's precious to us. I think it came from his native Syria, though I'm not sure; to him it was a reminder of the donkeys that used to bring fresh cool water from the mountains into Damascus. In the later years of his life, he had a whole menagerie of small animal figures: birds, monkeys, camels, an elephant, snakes: a veritable Noah's ark. None of them were to scale, which gave the arrangement an even quirkier air. When he still lived in a house, they were arranged around, and in, a large houseplant. After he moved to a retirement home, they were on a wooden stand, and he sometimes liked to rearrange them for his own amusement. His favorite was a tiny mouse made of ivory. One day it disappeared and he was disconsolate. We searched everywhere but never found it. He blamed the housekeeper, saying she must have knocked it onto the floor and vacuumed it up. After he died I hoped it would turn up as the apartment was emptied, but it never did: I like to think it scampered away to live behind the bookshelves, exactly as long as he did.

Last night I began reading Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun ("Bab al-Shams"). It's been on our shelf ever since we heard Khoury read at the Blue Met literary festival in Montreal some years ago, when he was interviewed and spoke about his close friend Mahmoud Darwish. Afterward we went up and met him, and he inscribed this copy to J., whose grandmother's maiden name was also Khoury. The novel is a story of relationships that contain Palestinian and personal histories; it is woven together rather clumsily - as the NYT reviewer notes - from snatches of stories, but this was a deliberate device by the author, who tried to write in a way that mirrors Palestinian reality: the history of the nation and each person seeming torn and patched together.

The novel is written in the voice of a surrogate son sitting at the bedside of his "father," an elderly freedom fighter who has had a stroke and lies in a coma. The son, a medic in a hospital in a refugee camp, spends most of his days bathing and caring for the dying man, refusing to believe he won't regain consciousness, and then at night, like Scheherazade, tells him stories, hoping that the words are still penetrating. I've been afraid of reading it, and now, even though I've started, I still am.

In addition to the tragic and horrifying events it recalls, the book of course also reminds me of my own dialogue with my very alert, very aged father-in-law, and of the last few months when he slipped in and out of present time and space as we sat by his bed, talking to him and listening to his own stories. When he died, at 99, a door into our family's life and history closed forever; now we too must patch it together out of fragments. Last night, when the narrator began reciting bits of verse by al-Mutanabi, perhaps the greatest of all classical Arab poets, I felt myself back in the familiar room with its blue and yellow silk carpet, the books lining the walls, the statue of Socrates on the stand in front of the old shortwave radio, and my father-in-law, leaning back in his chair, eyes shut, smiling at the ceiling as he recited poetry.

Terrible times can paralyze us, or we can use them, turning their negative energy into something better. Perhaps the time has finally come for me to pull out those dialogues that were collected here under the title The Fig and the Orchid, and see what can be done with them. As sad as my father-in-law  -- a former UN administrator of a refugee camp in Gaza, among his many positions through a long life of teaching and ministry -- would be over the events today, he always believed in the power of education, beauty, literature, noble ideals, and -- most especially -- reason and truth. He often spoke about their remarkable ability to endure across the millenia, lifting people above the worst.

"The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men.
The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.

--al-Mutanabi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabi, I have just learned, was the son of a humble water-carrier.

Crocosmia

Saturday morning I spent some time in my garden, watering and deadheading the spent flowers. My neighbor, Eric P., has an incredible stand of brilliant red crocosmia, and when I was done with my work I stood and sketched these exotic flowers. It seems a little weird to focus on the form of something when its color is  such a standout, but of course when you take away the color, it makes you really look at the form -- which for these flowers turns out to be very cool. They open in order down the stem, with each successive bud slightly larger and more elongated, until the ones in the back start to unfold. The form is like a set of triangles: the triangle of the entire flowerhead is mirrored by the two triangles of each side, both when seen from the top down or from the side; the bloom is always held above the plane of the stem. 

What makes each flower cluster so beautiful, I think, is that they twist gently in different directions, none the same as its neighbor, and all are in different stages of opening. The busyness of the flowers is contrasted with the simple spear-like leaves, in this case in a clump taller than me. They remind me of delicate, fluttery, show-off tropical birds in a green tree: a big clump of Crocosmia is pretty impressive, especially in a northern garden.

I've never tried to grow crocosmia but I feel lucky to be able to enjoy Eric's! Some of you who live in tropical climates must know this plant well. I think it comes in yellow too, but the red is a knockout punch. One of these days it will make its way into a painting: it's too fabulous to portray only in black-and-white.

Related articles

Another painting of Eric's garden

Le jardin d'Éric P.

"Difficulty Can Be Fun"

It's been a long, hard week, full of dismaying world news and, here at home, a lot of work and looming deadlines. I've had my nose to the grindstone for much of it. I used to have a lot of resistance to doing my professional work; I thought that all I wanted to do was have more free time to paint or write. When I did get some free time, I often made excuses instead of actually using it well. Somewhere along the line I saw this pattern and my attitude changed. I'm really glad it did, because resisting what you need to do, and have to do, makes it ten times harder to get it done, and to do a good job besides.

Then, there are a lot of reasons why we resist what we say we want to do the most, or manage to make it into agony rather than pleasure.

Dave Bonta recently pointed me to a terrific essay by writer/philosopher Will Buckingham, "The Pleasure and Difficulty of Writing." In it, Buckingham takes exception to Hemingway's famous quote about writing being nothing but "sitting down at a typewriter and bleeding." He writes:

"But difficulty is not something in itself that we should shun, and neither is difficulty something that people in general do tend to shun. The world is full of people doing difficult things. It’s astonishing. The prevailing orthodoxy that people are, at root, lazy — as if human beings are little Aristotelian universes, and need some kind of outside prompting, some primum mobile, to get things going — is simply nonsense. Sometimes, to be sure, people are doing difficult things out of necessity; but very often, people are doing difficult things because difficulty can be fun."

Learning to persevere in any creative pursuit is really the key, I think. In painting and writing I may get started fine, with enthusiasm and inspiration, but eventually I often find myself in a thicket  -- some sort of difficulty, maybe like the middle game in chess -- and have to find my way out. I've come not to dread this, but to expect it. Sometimes it means putting the work aside for a bit, sometimes not -- but working through that sense of being lost and uncertain is actually the most satisfying part of the whole endeavor.

It can be hard to learn this on your own, and it seems to me it's where a lot of talented and enthusiastic people eventually lose their enthusiasm and may even quit. It helps a lot if students are exposed to an older mentor at some point. You can't teach patience and determination and self-motivation, but a mentor can encourage and share her experience, and model his way of working -- and maybe offer a few key words that will be remembered down the road. A focus on the "tragically struggling artist" may be romantic, or have entertainment value, or be part of someone's attempt to build an artistic identity, but as Will says, it's a pretty destructive image for talented young writers or artists of any kind, who need the tools to shape and live a whole long life, enduring the inevitable ups and downs in as healthy a way as possible.

I live with someone whose ability to keep at it, without drama or complaint, has taught me a lot. When I asked J. what taught him to persevere toward his goals in the face of difficulty, he immediately answered "sports." My dad would no doubt say the same thing: he's still playing competitive table tennis and working on his golf game at age 89, and often tells me about the subtle things he discovers and then practices in order to improve -- in spite of the aches and pains of his aging body. J.'s father, who lived to 99, was still reading and reciting Arabic poetry and discovering new insights and pleasures in it at the very end of his life. My painting mentor went to the studio every day, well into his late 80s, and told me he felt he was "just learning to paint."

For me, as a young person, it was several things: learning to play instruments; a summer course at a college when I was 16 where we had to show up and paint for four hours every single day regardless of how we were feeling; and studying ancient Greek in university -- something that was hard and demanding for three long years; I wasn't even particularly good at it but I thought it was a magical, fantastic thing to do. Forty years later I find that same passion and joy of learning in many areas of my life. Mistakes and failures are inevitable, but the more you persevere, the more you see that they're an intrinsic part of the learning process, and so you actually begin to appreciate your failures too. In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki suggested that the difficulties in contemplative practice are like weeds, and that we can grow to love them as much as the flowers: he wrote "a weed is a treasure." It shifted my perspective a lot when I was able to see that.

Do you agree that difficulty can be fun? What helped you learn that, and how do you encourage yourself to keep going when you run into difficulties in a project? Do you continue to have mentors/friends, or belong to a writers' group or other collective gathering of like-minded people? Do your online friendships figure into this equation? They (including you readers!) are certainly important for me.

A Bouquet and an Elegy

...because we all need to gaze on some beauty, and I'm sad that I haven't got time to paint or draw these flowers from my garden today, but nevertheless want to offer something in memory of so many senseless, tragic deaths.

 

And some there be, which have no memorial;

who are perished as though they had never been...

Ecclesiasticus 44:9

 

And if you'd like to listen to something, here is "Nimod," from the Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar.

 

The hope of the world

What a devastating week it's been. I just wanted to post this snapshot I took a few days ago, from the upper floor of a medical clinic. These two waiting mothers had been smiling and interacting happily, drawn together by their children, who just wanted to play with each other. It's not as though Montreal is a city rife with ethnic or racial tension -- it's not, though there is a certain amount of separation, perhaps to be expected in a place where there are so many immigrants. This scene simply made me feel a little better: a reminder both of what's possible, and of the happy naiveté of children who haven't learned hate or fear. Honestly, if the world were run by women, who bear the responsibility for life's continuation in their very bodies, I don't think it would be the way it is.

Moving Beyond Hatred and Fear

Family Coffee Pot and a Fossil (Thinking of Gaza). 9 1/2" x 8 3/4" . Acrylic on paper, July 14, 2014.

Richard Rohr's meditation this morning contained a lot of wisdom. Being a Franciscan, he was talking about how Jesus embodied this way of "being peace," but I've taken the liberty of removing the Christian language, hoping everyone can find the truth in these words without being turned off. What he says is certainly true for me, and my experience. And I appreciate that he states that this is work -- a lifetime of work and practice for most of us.

"Negativity unites most people far more quickly than love. The ego moves forward by contraction, self-protection, and refusal, by saying no. The soul, however, does not proceed by contraction but by expansion. It moves forward not by exclusion, but by inclusion and by saying yes...There is really no other way to save us from ourselves, and from each other, until we are saved from our need to fear and hate.

Conscious love is the totally enlightened, and often entirely nonsensical way out of this universal pattern. Love has to be worked toward, received, and enjoyed, first of all, by facing our preference for fear and hate. But remember, we gather around the negative space quickly, while we “fall into” love rather slowly, and only with lots of practice at falling.

This is exactly what contemplative practice helps us to do. Meditation is refusing to project our anxieties elsewhere, and learning to hold and face them within ourselves and within God."

For once, I used the best hours of my morning to paint today instead of getting lost in my computer and work responsibilities. J.'s parents brought this coffee pot with them when they immigrated to the United States in the mid-1940s. The fossil shell reminded me of the Sea of Galilee, and the "living stones" - a phrase used by Palestinian Christians to describe themselves; a diminishing remnant of two thousand years of Christian presence in Palestine.

Yet More Tragedy

Longtime readers here will know my views on the Middle East situation, and that those views come from many years of familiarity with the cultures and societies in question. So it's probably no surprise that I am feeling pretty sad and discouraged about the latest escalation of violence, and the fact that nearly 100 Palestinians are now dead as a result, with countless more injured.

When are we human beings finally going to internalize the lesson that violence simply begets violence, and that the cycle of retaliation never ends? When are we going to understand that no one is better, purer, more exceptional, or more chosen than anyone else on this planet?

To blame all of this on religion is a cop-out. Yes, religion has been responsible for a great deal of suffering and war throughout history. But ethnic conflict, based often on the conviction that one group is superior to another, has also played a very large part. It doesn't matter where the idea of exceptionalism comes from, or who originates that narrative, it always points to the same ends: prejudice, inequality, oppression, exploitation, separation, subjugation, expulsion, violence and ultimately genocide. These actions are always justified by the powerful who believe that their lives are worth more than the people they are oppressing, and who create a convincing narrative of how threatened they themselves are by the less powerful group.

A decade and a half ago, as some of you know, my husband and I helped from a Muslim-Christian group that met once a month for prayer and friendship, sharing our stories and celebrations and a meal. We met for three years, from the second Intifada through 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq war. During that time we made repeated personal invitations to the Jewish community to join us. I met with the local Rabbi who assured me of his support, but neither he nor any of the members of the local synagogue ever came to a meeting. I am very sorry about that, because we all could have learned a lot from one another. We did work together with some Jewish anti-war protesters, almost all women who were part of the group Women in Black. Some of the people who joined our weekly street-corner protests against the Iraq war and Israeli violence in Gaza were Jewish, and very courageous for the stand they were taking for peace. One of those people was the poet Grace Paley, who I was privileged to know. Another was Susannah Heschel, professor at Dartmouth and daughter of Abraham Heschel. Like my dear friend Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, their voices truly were crying in the wilderness -- not too pejorative a term for America on this particular topic. In Israel itself, the moderate and progressive voice has always been much stronger and more consistent, but the government -- like the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ongoing drone war against "terrorists" that has killed countless civilians, women, and children -- has consistently taken a different path, one which has made the world far less safe and far more radicalized than it was in 2000.

A group of pilgrims from our cathedral recently went to the Holy Land, spending quite a lot of time in Palestine. They met with Parents Circle, and heard the stories of Palestinian and Jewish parents who have worked tirelessly for peace, while grieving their own personal tragedies. We don't hear enough of those stories in our media here, and we don't do nearly enough to support peace efforts, hospitals, schools, cultural and relief programs that are attempting to care for the victims of this awful conflict without regard to their ethnicity or religion.

Please don't use the comment box to take sides and argue about politics; it is utterly pointless and if that starts happening -- as it does whenever I've mentioned this issue here -- I will close the comments. We need to find solutions, and to look deep within ourselves. This is an ongoing tragedy in which Americans participate through our tax dollars, and which will ultimately affect us all. Ask yourself what you can actually do. I try to continue to act in memory of my father-in-law and mother-in-law, both of whom experienced these conflicts first-hand, but also lived in Damascus and Beirut and Alexandria at a time when all three religions lived together harmoniously. Inpired by the knowledge that this was possible, thay always hoped and worked for a better world for their children.

The Beekeepers

The Beekeepers, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c.1568

Just because.

On the Table

Still life with honeypot, glass salt shaker and fan. Fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

I've always liked the way certain objects recur in some artists' still lives, whether it's for their interesting shapes or their symbolism/role, or both. It seems like this little honeypot may be one of those objects for me. The top and saucer are silver, and the pot iself is glass. It was my mother's, and has a little chip on the rim from a spoon, but I don't remember her ever using it. In our old house there was a pantry off the kitchen, with broad shelves. We never kept food in there though - it became more of a closet for overflow dishes and seldom-used equipment; my father added a coat rack for our winter coats, and built a hanging rack for the vacuum cleaner hose and nozzles; the pantry was the home of the carpet sweeper...that sort of thing.

The honeypot lived on one of those broad shelves, behind a teapot and a set of cups: I can remember it quite clearly, but it never came out to the table, probably because we seldom used honey, except for the squeezable bear that was kept with the baking supplies. Eventually, when my parents moved to their house on the lake, the honeypot came along and was kept in a more prominent place near the everyday sugar bowl and cream itcher, but it was never filled, and never used.

So, a few weeks ago when I was at the lake house, I took it out and brought it back with me; I polished the silver and cleaned the glass, and set it on our table -- that's when I made this drawing.

Last week I bought some new honey with delicious flavor -- a piece of comb suspended within it like an insect in amber -- and filled the pot. I study it as I sit at the table: the little silver bee perched on it the top of its old-fashioned, domed hive, reminding me sometimes of pair of bronzed baby shoes and other times of ancient Greek gold ewelry in the shape of bees. I sit there wondering why it intrigues me so much, wondering where it came from, aware I'll probably never know.

Happy Fourth

Delphinium petals and a fossil, acrylic on paper, 6" x 3"

Once again, this is part of a larger painting, but when I got out the cropping corners, this is the part that I liked - partly because I'm partial to that fossil, but also because the composition and colors just work better. In the full version below, I think the leaves on the left side are too fussy and the daisies feel a little too literal - in this style of painting simple shapes are required, and a lot of attention to positive/negative balance. I do like the stiles of the chairback, though.

The national holiday up here, of course, is July 1, Canada Day, but for me the Fourth of July will always mean parades, cookouts, bonfires, and fireworks, American-style. We've been in the studio all day but are about ready to go home, have a drink, watch some soccer, and maybe fire up the seldom-used grill.

Enjoy!