the cassandra pages

The Navel of the World

Some of you may remember that last winter I was working on a series of sketches of the landscape at Delphi, Greece. The one above remains my favorite - I even made it the screen image on my phone.

A few weeks ago I did another one, this time in oil pastel, following up on the oil pastels of Sicily. I thought maybe that medium would lend itself to this subject. Here's the full painting:

There's a lot that I like about it, and a lot I don't. My handling of the medium has gotten more confident. The color palette here works well, even though it's mostly imaginary. What doesn't work for me is the composition. It's fine for a "pretty painting" of a scene, but that's not what I'm after -- I've got photographs that serve that purpose. The circular, central lawn-like area is boring, and it makes the entire left side of the painting boring too, even though there are some interesting passages in the trees. Furthermore, the ruins in the foreground feel too literal and too prominent, even though I tried to subdue them. The result is that there are too many places for the eye to look, and this distracts from what drew me to this view in the first place. Why is it so hard to remember that, I wonder?

The picture is in this area:

Which is, not surprisingly, much like the gouache. Here it is again:

What makes this compositions work is the combination of strong simple shapes with intersecting angles that create tension and interest. In the gouache, which is really pared down to essentials, both in shape and in color, these elements create a locked-together composition of dark, slightly-triangular verticals held within the picture frame by the intersecting diagonals. Because the viewer isn't overwhelmed with details, and because the palette is so limited, the more abstract picture is able to create an emotional response that, for me anyway, is much closer to what I actually "felt" when standing there, and what I hoped to take away.

With the oil pastels and the picture cropped this way, I really like the strong cobalt blue with the lavender and dull green of the mountain. The foreground is missing in this crop, but the gouache helps me see better what to do with it. In addition to the beautiful, iconic trees, one of the most striking aspects of this landscape was the circular pattern of rocks and scrubby growth of the mountain behind the cedars. I like how the oil pastels have worked to capture that -- it's subtle, not detailed, but effective. Now I'm thinking about making a larger painting, in oils, based on what I've discovered by analyzing these pictures. The main message is simplify.

--

While I was working on this piece, I found a suite of poems by Seamus Heaney that he had written in Greece. One of them is set in Delphi, and it speaks of Heaney's desire to drink from the spring where all visitors to Delphi who came to consult the oracle stopped to wash and drink; the same spring was used by the Pythia and the priests for a ritual cleansing before giving an oracular pronouncement or interpreting an oracle.

The Greeks believed that the spring was located at the center of the earth. Zeus, king of the gods, had loosed two eagles from opposite ends of the world, and, flying at the same speed, they crossed paths above Delphi. Zeus let a stone fall from the air where they crossed, and where it fell became the sacred site, marked by a stone called the omphalos, or navel of the world. Under the omphalos was buried the mythological monster called Python, which had guarded the sacred spring, until it was killed by the god Apollo, to whom Delphi and the Oracle became sacred. We saw a Roman copy of this large carved stone in the museum in Delphi. The carved pattern represents a woolen net that was once thought to cover the stone.

If you've been to Delphi, you would have thought, as I did, what a long, difficult journey it must have been to get there from any of the major city-states of Greece, and then to have to add the arduous climb up the side of Mt Parnassus. I wish I had known that the spring still exists, and that there's a modern fountain by the side of the road for modern travelers, but I had no idea! Heaney, visiting in the 1960s, did know this, and of course -- as a poet who had been steeped in the Greek classics, translated some, and used so many references and stories in his own poems and plays -- he was determined to drink from it himself. The poem speaks of his frustration and its resolution, and it's an image that has now been added to my own thoughts about Delphi.

Castalian Spring

Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—
But the inner water sanctum was roped off
When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,
And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!
So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,
The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,
Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless
Anger draining away, on terraces
Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.

--Seamus Heaney

Montreal Welcomes a Modern-Day Prophet

Text by Beth Adams, all photographs (c)2019 by Jonathan Sa'adah

 

I participated in the climate march last Friday, along with more than half a million other Montrealers. We had a good-sized contingent from Christ Church Anglican Cathedral, and we all met up there, and walked to the starting point together. My husband, who's a professional photographer, roamed around the route of the march, and ended up just behind the official press area at the stage where Greta Thunberg eventually spoke. 

One of the young people who was marching with us said that this was her very first protest march - she grew up in the Midwestern U.S., and has just started graduate work at Montreal Diocesan Theological College. Several of us, who've already done this for a lifetime, talked to her about how she was feeling -- she was excited -- and she asked about the most recent, or most memorable, marches we'd gone to. 

Students climb up the Sir George Etienne Cartier monument, for a good view at the start of the march.

There were a lot of great signs in both French and English -- I thought the large poster of Greta as Joan of Arc, in armor and dark bangs, was pretty clever, and very French, but certainly hope she doesn't meet such an awful fate.

Who could not be impressed, buoyed, and encouraged by the spirit of this preponderantly-youthful crowd, who seemed determined and mostly cheerful in spite of the dire warnings on their signs? But I noticed that the faces of many of the older people looked much more solemn: we know the stakes and the opponents now, we've been here before: against war, against nuclear power, against apartheid, for the rights of refugees, the rights of women, blacks, the disabled, those who are LGBTQ+. We're worried that this movement, as large as it is, and as absolutely right as it is, will have great difficulty prevailing over the forces arrayed against it. Nevertheless, it was a great day, and I was proud of my city and every person who had come out to march.

We had a long time to wait before getting started, and the crowd was enormous. I never made it to the end because I had another obligation, and my feet were killing me, so I bailed out in mid-afternoon and walked back home; Jonathan didn't get home for several more hours. In spite of the city making the metro free for the day, it was still very crowded, and some of the stations had been made entrance- or exit-only to try to alleviate the congestion. I was impressed, too, with the orderliness and camaraderie of the marchers, and the benign, friendly attitude of all the police. A day later, when my husband and I walked around the area where the march had ended, there was not a trace of debris or destruction from those 500,000+ people.

The Rev. Jesse Zink, Principal of the Montreal Diocesan Theological College, wrote an essay titled "Thus saith Greta", likening Greta Thunberg to an Old Testament prophet. That wasn't a comparison that had occurred to me, and it really struck hpme, especially when I saw the photographs Jonathan had taken. She stands alone and vulnerable, a child, looking even younger than her 16 years, and she yet she has the courage to speak truth to power. Rev. Zink writes:

"Like many other prophets throughout history, her ministry has imposed a cost on her: she has given up school, she has changed her life, she has been subject to accusation, slander, and attack...

In both her UN address and her Montreal speech, Thunberg leveled a straightforward generational challenge: 'You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.' One of the reasons climate change is such an intractable problem is precisely its inter-generational nature: the actions of one generation are largely felt in another..."

Zink speaks of the Biblical covenant between humans and God that Moses revealed as being specifically inter-generational -- in fact, "down to the thousandth generation" - in other words, forever. Other cultures and religions have similar stories that pass down the idea of stewardship for the earth to subsequent generations. Part of why human-caused climate change is so malevolent is that it violates this long inter-generational responsibility, and, I might add, destroys it in such a short period of time.

"As we discussed in the ministry seminar on Friday, the world needs prophets, evangelists, missionaries, and preachers. But we also noted that it needs priests, people who can gather the community and enable its gifts to be released. We saw that in Montreal on Friday in the relatively low-profile and anonymous group of people who provided the forum for a prophet of our time to preach her word."

In my lifetime, I don't think I've ever seen anyone quite like this young David going up against Goliath. Montreal is not a religious city any longer, but it is a principled and progressive international city where people think, and are willing to stand up for their beliefs. Last Friday, it felt like part of what the crowd was doing was holding Greta up with our bodies and our voices, giving her that forum in which to preach, and also giving her "our ears to hear." Each of us must find our own role in this crucial struggle, and we can't allow ourselves to be discouraged: it is her future, and the future of all the young and yet-to-be-born of our precious and fragile earth -- not just humans, but all living things -- that we are responsible for protecting.