the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 12. The Spice Cabinet

I don't know if "corona-guilt" has become a catch-phrase yet, but there's plenty of it going around. Faced with these vast expanses of time and solitude, we're supposed to write novels and compose music, establish yoga and meditation practices, communicate effectively with everyone we ever knew, become bread-bakers and sweater-knitters and Great-Book-readers, and finally tackle all the leaky faucets and crammed closets -- not to mention the interior organization of our computers -- that we've put off forever with the happy excuse, "Oh, I'm too busy." Every day isn't Groundhog Day, but instead it's an endless succession of January 1sts, with lists of New Year's resolutions staring us in the face, day after day. Worse yet, with all this communicating, and everyone asking each other, "what did you do today?" it's hard to hide the fact that most of us have been so blindsided by this thing that we've gotten very little done, and suspect that we may continue that way for a long time.

So far, I'm no different: other than these blog posts, I've barely drawn or sewn or done any of the things that first came to mind as possibilities. I've spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get our food delivery together; that's been a priority and it hasn't been easy. But the other preoccupation has been our living space. J. and I live in a very small apartment, and after closing our studio and bringing the cat and a bunch of work-supplies home with us, we've had no choice but to try to better organize our space. There are still boxes and bags and storage bins stacked on the floor and in the hallway, awaiting further resolution, but we've managed to do quite a lot. We installed a new kitchen light, and cleaned the stove and fridge and kitchen walls; every inch of valuable closet space has been reorganized and a lot of things thrown away or recycled. Part of this is practical, but another part is psychological and relational. Things we barely noticed have suddenly become sources of annoyance as we both use our shared spaces more -- shall we say -- intensively. Rather than getting worked up or defensive, as we once might have, the very act of cleaning, organizing, and fixing has been a source of considerable psychological comfort -- I'm doing something for myself, but also for him, and vice-versa.

Yesterday, after J. announced he couldn't find anything in it, I tackled the spice cabinet. The small space you see in the picture above was overflowing with bottles and boxes, tins and packets; I don't think I'd given it a real overhaul since we moved to Montreal more than a decade ago. I knew what was in there, but nobody else could have, since nothing was labeled. In another cabinet, below, were three plastic boxes filled with whatever wouldn't fit into the designated cabinet itself: one labeled "seeds", one for "spices," loosely defined, and one for "leafy herbs" -- but they had all become mixed up, and filled with small plastic bags from Montreal's spice stores, or ziplocs full of dried herbs from my window boxes and pots, plus little clear plastic containers in various shapes, as well as round and square tins, some full, some nearly empty. And besides all this, there was a large beige sac with bay leaves and oregano bought in an Athens market; tzatziki mix and cumin seeds from Catania; and a red plastic mercado sac full of various ground chilis from Mexico.

The task of organizing all of this didn't really take that long, just a few hours. I emptied all the cabinets and boxes; threw away everything old, duplicated, or unidentifiable; washed out the good containers, consolidated and refilled them; made labels. It was a small, manageable task, with an end in sight, and the only disaster was when I spilled a broken packet of Persian saffron onto the counter, and had to carefully gather up every tiny, dark gold stamen before doing anything else.

Cleaning is what I do when everything else feels out of control. My parents used to ride on me unmercifully for my reluctance to clean my desk, my room, my dresser drawers -- I always had something more compelling to do, and it just didn't feel important; besides, *I* knew where everything was. Oddly, once I had my own spaces and shared them with a partner, I got neater -- though there have always been neglected areas. But when unhappiness or chaos or uncertainty seep into my world, I've noticed that I instinctively look for things to do that feel ordered, methodical, and incremental: making a patchwork quilt, knitting stitch after stitch, practicing music or a language, following a complicated recipe, taking the food out of the fridge and scrubbing the shelves. There's a quiet satisfaction today in opening the door to the spice cabinet and seeing the neatly-labeled jars and tins; maybe today I'll do another drawer of my desk. It's all easier than staring at a blank screen, wondering what I can possibly write to make sense of this thing that's happening to all of us -- but, ironically, that time spent doing mundane tasks is when the ideas come, and I've learned to trust that, too.

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 11. What to say?

Olive prunings, Roman Forum, Rome, Italy.

 

Writers write.

At the beginning of March, when we cancelled our trip and it became clear that the virus was coming to North America, it was natural that I -- like so many others -- would turn to the written word as a way to think about, work through, and share my experiences. I began on the following Monday, March 8: "So I thought maybe I'd keep a diary of these unusual days." I kept it up daily for a week or so, and was surprised by the number of comments and the amount of traffic on my blog, greater than it's been for years. I was happy to hear from thoughtful friends and former bloggers who were coming out of the woodwork, and dusting off their literary chops. And of course, on social media and in the news, the torrent of online words became unrelenting. I began to question myself, and what had felt facile for those first days became considerably harder. A few others were having similar thoughts; here's an entry from Nick Cave's Red Hand Files that expressed what I was feeling:

"The Red Hand Files has always been a space in which I could offer dubious existential notions, religious meditations, unsound advice, millennial senilities and general annoyances, while hopefully simultaneously extending a little human kindness and compassion. However, these sorts of ruminations came from a more privileged and fortunate time, when we had the oxygen to muse and to play. Things have changed, we are faced with a common enemy — impartial, unfeeling and of immeasurable magnitude — and it is no longer a time for abstractions. Now is the time to be cautious with our words, our opinions."

"Now is the time to be cautious with our words, our opinions." Twenty days have passed now since I began writing, and the gravity of the situation is such that I cringe at the casualness of those first words: "I thought maybe I'd keep a diary..."  What, indeed, can I say, can any of us say? And yet there are plenty of people, most notably in the U.S., who still don't get it, who are ignoring the science, and arguing about things that don't matter and ignoring things that are literally a matter of life and death. They are not just the leaders, but ordinary people too. And all the while, in places closer and closer to home, the bodies pile up, like the facts that we are beginning to understand about this virus, which will one day come together into a solution for this particular threat. Heroes, both likely and unlikely, emerge. Every one of us, no matter how limited by isolation, fitness, or age, is presented with opportunities to be of service to others. But the looming question is what we will learn in a larger sense: as the human race, and societies, and as individuals.

The most-read article in The Guardian today is a letter from Italian novelist Francesca Melandri to her fellow Europeans, and to the United Kingdom. In it she says "we were just like you," and traces the pattern I've alluded to here: the progression from the arguments between those who say "it's just like the flu" to those who know it's not, to the early novelty of self-isolation, the focus on food, the fleeting attraction of apocalyptic books and films, the obsessive fascination with online connection and video meetups, the online fitness workouts and virtual cocktail hours, the fights with our elders to try to get them to stay home, the ways we buoy each other with songs from balconies and rooftops, the dark humor, the growing awareness of domestic abuse and the divisions of class -- and the gradual falling away of the superfluous and superficial, the transparency of our friends' and families' behavior, the sleeplessness and anxiety, and the sense that nothing is going to be the same ever again.

So, yes, writers write, some better than others.

The advice I'm giving myself today, from decades of writing and editing, and after thinking about the words of Cave and Melandri and others, is: write what you know, and then ask yourself if it feels necessary to say out loud.

Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is listen.

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 10. Grief, Resistance, Acceptance.

A number of years ago, when I was talking about the grief and anger I was experiencing when my mother was ill and dying, a wise person told me, "It's our resistance to what is that always causes the most pain." I'd never thought of that before, and it immediately struck me as true. First of all, that's exactly what I was doing -- I was trying to put everything back into a box labelled "Before." In my experience since, this remark about resistance has continued to be true. When we resist the situation in which we find ourselves, and try to make things go back to "normal" -- when "normal" is what we're wishing for, and it doesn't or can't happen -- we feel a lot of pain that comes out in a variety of ways. But when we can move toward accepting things as they are, and stop trying to insist that they change, suddenly there's some openness and softness in what felt like a hard, fixed, frightening trap. We begin to see what we can control or change, alongside that which we can't, and we also begin to see some new possibilities about how to engage with the present and the uncertain future.

I've lived through a number of personal crises, and political/national times of war, tension, and uncertainty. But I've never experienced something like the present. It's hard. There's a state of dread as we watch the case counts rise, and I feel enormous grief at the suffering the world is going through. I'm literally enraged at leaders and parties who refuse to listen to science and reason, and who care more about wealth and the economy than people's lives -- which makes me angry all over again at the people who elected them. That anger has made me pretty cranky sometimes, which I'm trying to notice and overcome, occasionally with limited success. I'm appalled at some of the cruel comments about older people that I've read on social media and in the news. And I simply fail to understand how some people in all of our communities can be in such denial of reality, or so selfish as to put others at grave risk, even though I understand the characteristics and beliefs that make people that way. Finally, because my husband has an immune issue, I'm trying to make sure I've done enough to disinfect whatever enters the apartment, from the grocery delivery to my own hands when I've gone to the basement with the recycling. It's stressful.

None of those negative emotions do any good, frankly. I've tried to turn my annoyance and fear about other people into action; I've written to the mayor's office several times about situations observed here in Montreal, and received quick, satisfactory answers that were followed up: for instance, the large children's playground nearby was being used by several clueless families on Saturday; now it's closed and has police tape around it, along with all the other public playgrounds in the city. Not my doing, I'm sure, but I know from the reply I received that my letter was read. For my own sanity, I'm trying to limit my time on social media and news-reading while staying informed. Fortunately, we're quite contented being here, engrossed in things we like to do. I remind myself that what we're doing -- staying in, not seeing others, washing our hands, getting groceries delivered, washing produce, disinfecting hard surfaces -- is following the best advice we've got. Each week, we get more used to doing things this new way, and it feels less strange.

Beyond that, it's a time to keep busy, to check in with others, to reach out when we feel weak as well as when we feel strong, and find and share the beauty that still exists everywhere. On my short walk yesterday morning, the sky was blue, the snow brilliant white, and I stopped to watch three large flocks of Canada geese flying overhead. Spring is coming, time's moving forward.

It's unlikely we'll ever go back to what was once "normal". Moving through this over the weeks and months ahead is going to take courage as well as patience, and cost us dearly in innumerable ways. But we can either ride that road rigidly, and feel every single bump, or we can let go of a little of our resistance, and soften into what is, and the journey will be easier not only on us, but on the people around us. It's also important not to be too hard on ourselves. This is rough. We're all going to fall apart sometimes, lose our tempers or patience, confront a sudden wave of anxiety. It's OK. The next breath, the next hour, the next day are all fresh chances to begin again.

Illustration: Grave stele, 5th C BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 9. Leaving the Studio

This weekend we returned to our studio for what may be the last time in quite a while. Over the preceding days we had picked up art and textile supplies, my sewing machine, my husband's old negatives and his scanner, computer gear, and whatever else we thought we'd need the most. More importantly, we got our cat Manon, who has always lived there, and moved her to our apartment. She may be the only creature who thinks this virus is an excellent idea; it took her about twenty minutes to check everything out and settle in, and she seems completely contented now that she has us under her paws and watchful eye all day and all night.

I felt sad leaving the studio. My piano is there, and I'll miss it, and there's no way I can work on anything large or liquid or messy in this apartment. The studio is the only space I've ever had that was large enough for me to put my work up on the walls and live with it. There's been beautiful light, plenty of room to spread out, leave work in progress on the easel or table for weeks, be as messy as necessary and clean it all up in a big utility sink. This studio has been a physical reflection of my inner identity in a way no other space has been in my life; it's not only been a space to work in, but a large container for my thoughts and projects, for collaborations, and it's where a lot of books by other people have taken shape and ultimately been published. Its space has given me space.

Now I'm not sure we will ever go back to it fully. How will we feel when our lease runs out in mid-summer? What decisions will we have to make, and how will our lives have changed? As of today, non-essential work places are closed in Montreal. We can go there if absolutely necessary, but all of us have been asked to stay home, which is what my husband and I have been doing now for two weeks. Montrealers are quite compliant, but the authorities have the power to enforce compliance now.

I took this picture just before we left, because I wanted to have a record of how it was exactly, this section that is mine, out of of a much larger room. It doesn't show the easel, or the boxes of fabric and yarn, or my flat files filled with drawings and paintings from the past forty years and large sheets of blank drawing, watercolor, and printing papers. When I look at the picture, I see the place I stand and make art and write; the objects and surfaces I repeatedly touch. But what it gives me more strongly is a feeling. This is the place where I've struggled and worked for the past ten years, and where I've found solutions, not just to artistic or literary problems, but to understanding aspects of myself.

That, I know, can happen anywhere, and it will.

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 8. In Italy, Derek Walcott

View from the theatre at Segesta, Sicily toward the sea, oil pastel, 2018.

Many of us think of Derek Walcott first as a poet of the Caribbean, but he was widely-traveled and wrote some of his most evocative poems about, and in, the different places he found himself. In his elegiac book White Egrets, written late in life, there's a sequence of twelve poems under the title "In Italy." In the fourth poem, he speaks about coming to that beautiful country late in life, and how perhaps that was better. I feel the same way. Even though Italian art and music, and Italian food and their zest for life, had always meant a great deal to me, I didn't visit Italy in person until I was over 60. It was as if an impression I'd built in my mind finally took on its true color and sound, taste and smell, and became so much more vivid -- and also more nuanced -- than I had been able to imagine: I fell in love with Rome, with Palermo, with Catania, and the ancient Greek cities on the coasts; with the Roman pines and the lichen-covered ancient stones; the pale frescoes and glittery mosaics; the lemon trees and the blue sea; the wizened olive trees and vibrant purple artichokes and glistening fish markets; and most of all the people, without whom Italy would not be Italy. What they are going through now is so terrible, and yet the pictures of the streets that we see, and the people singing from their rooftops, are a moving and beautiful witness to what makes Italy, Italy. Walcott's poems capture some of that combination of beauty and melancholy. Here's the fourth and perhaps best-known one, because it appeared in The New Yorker, and in coming days I'll post a few more.

 

In Italy

IV.

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light
older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth
spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late
to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth
that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous,
while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells
of the hilltop towers number my errors,
because we are never where we are, but somewhere else,
even in Italy. This is the bearable truth
of old age; but count your benedictions—those fields
of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze
of the unheard Adriatic—while the day still hopes
for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes.

--Derek Walcott

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 7. A Medieval Saint, and the Psalms

My post for today is a piece I wrote for the new blog, Daily Bread, at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal. Today, March 20, is the Feast Day of St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindesfarne, who lived in Northumbria in the 7th century, so I wrote a bit about him. The second half of the post is about Psalm 91, the psalm appointed for Evening Prayer today, and my own experience of singing the psalms as a choir member. In the Anglican Church, these ancient poems are an important part of every liturgy, and when we do choral services -- a sung Mass or Evensong, for instance -- we chant the psalms using four-part settings written by many composers for the church.

We're hoping that a number of parishioners will contribute to this new blog during these weeks when we can't meet together - the idea is to take off in some creative direction from the readings appointed for the day in the lectionary. So please have a look! Eventually I'll cross-post the entry here, but not while the post is new on the cathedral website.

I almost forgot, but March 20 is also my blogiversary: The Cassandra Pages started in 2005, during another time of upheaval. Cassandra does not like being right about things, but she's had a pretty good track record. (She also predicts we'll get through this one.) Love to all of you who've been faithful readers, and a warm welcome to anyone who is relatively new. i try hard to answer comments, and am grateful for every single one.

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 6. Tranströmer plays Haydn.

Yesterday Teju Cole asked his Facebook followers a simple question: "What's helping?" As you can imagine, the comments included a wide range of answers: everything from "the stillness" to "connecting with others." In addition to "talking to friends", a lot of people (including me) mentioned reading and music. I've been playing my piano much more lately, and I'm going to miss it badly because we are seldom going to our studio, where it lives. The cathedral, where I've been involved in music for more than a decade, is closed, and there will be no choral services for a long time. I'll have to sing to myself, or get out my flute, because there's a music quotient in my life that can only be satisfied by making music, not just by listening.

So here is a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, the late Swedish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, who also played the piano. After suffering a stroke in 1990, his right side was paralyzed, and he taught himself to play with just his left hand. He is quoted as saying that playing was a way for him to continue living after the stroke -- though he did go on to write poetry until the early 2000s, publishing his final book, The Great Enigma, in 2004. He died in 2015, just weeks before his 84th birthday.

Allegro

I play Haydn on a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag--it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace."

The music is a glasshouse on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

--Tomas Transtromer

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 5. Age and Wisdom

Two friends in Mexico City, 2016

I'm sure that most of us who are older have been dismayed by incidents and expressions of ageism since this epidemic started. To have to add these micro- and macro-aggressions to our own sense of increased vulnerability seems particularly bruising. When a friend told me that he had heard a young person calling the virus the "Boomer Remover" I literally felt like someone had just hit me. I was also dismayed, this past weekend, to see bars and brunch spots teeming with young people who either hadn't gotten the message about social distancing, or were deliberately flaunting it. And that wasn't just here: a friend in Europe wrote that there had been a moral outrage directed at his country’s "urbanized under-30 cool set, when it was revealed that lots of these people flaunted the curfews with 'F*%# Corona' parties in bars that were ordered closed."

On reflection, I've tried to temper my own instinctive reaction by thinking about the kind of world an under-30 person has inherited. While we praise the idealism and activism of many young people, there are some who are in it merely to maximize pleasure and profit for themselves, and still others who cannot make sense out of a world that, even before the present situation, they perceived as hopelessly polarized, dangerous, disintegrating, and devoid of opportunity. Drug and alcohol dependency is one possible reaction; nihilism is another; despair, depression and even suicidal thoughts are others.

Plenty of young people are not like that, and are certainly not wishing for this virus to cull everybody they consider "old." Maybe they were brought up differently, to be less self-centered; maybe they've been blessed with greater emotional stability; maybe they've had older family members, teachers, mentors and friends who took a genuine interest and helped give them the vital grounding anyone needs in order to become a full and responsible adult, taking their place in a world that has never been safe and secure for everyone. I'd fervently like to hear from younger people who may be reading this: please tell us how the world seems to you in this precarious moment.

Like Premier Francois Legault -- who spoke out to young Quebecers, saying he remembered being young and not wanting to listen to older people, but that this was not the time to have a party, it was a time for all of us to consider one another -- I too thought back to my own childhood and young adulthood. My father was a veteran of WWII, which had ended only a few years before I was born; every adult I knew had lost friends and family in that conflict. I grew up in America during the Cold War, when civil defense drills were a normal occurrence; I was completely convinced that my life would probably end in the blast of a nuclear bomb. After that came Vietnam, which tore the country apart, saw college students my age shot on campus, and had every young male in the country eligible to be called up in the draft. Many who served died; others were left with varying degrees of trauma; others left and went to Canada, or went to jail, or maimed themselves; some (both veterans and not) fell into the same despair and dead-end solutions as I mentioned above. There was a massive "generation gap." During those same years, many of us became early activists for the climate and ecology, choosing to live alternative lifestyles to try to maintain some integrity with our beliefs. And right after that came the AIDS epidemic, which cut down some of the brightest and best people we had known... Since then there have been more wars, leading up to 9/11, and the political, ecological, and human morass in which we find ourselves today. People who grew up in India, or Africa, or South America, or other places on earth, were all shaped by different cultural and political experiences, often much harsher than what I've described.

The thing is, anyone who's older now has seen and experienced a particular version of human history, as well as countless personal traumas, health scares, disappointments, losses, and deaths. Yet we've somehow survived, and a good many of us have actually gained wisdom about life, and being human, from what we've lived through. That wisdom seems sorely needed now, just as much as we older people need the energy and vitality of the young who will carry our hopes for humanity into the future. I'm going to try to share some of that wisdom in these posts, not just in my own words but through the writing of some of my friends.

In conclusion for today, then, here is a short recent social media post from Dick Jones, a former teacher, and continuing poet, musician, and father, who lives in London and is an old and dear friend of mine:

Sometimes I find myself just stopping half way across a room & standing still. I'm not really thinking or reflecting; I'm just feeling worn out, defeated & terribly sad. We've only just rocked & rolled our way out of 3 years of Brexit & climate crisis conflict with all of its attendant disillusionment & disgust - that final exposure of the ethical & ideological poverty, the sheer malignant, self-serving stupidity of power politics across the board. And now some half-biblical, half-shit dystopia movie plague has come rolling in like an invisible fog to gather us all up as if in reckoning for our moral failings.

Well, whatever the clichéd symbolism of Covid-19's busy, relentless work across the small, synaptic gaps between us, it brings with it one equally platitudinous requirement: that we be kind to each other. If 'only connect' now has grim connotations of infection, 'long-distance love' must take its place. The immediate casualties of this silent plague are those whose day-to-day welfare was entirely dependent on the physical proximity of others -- from the barrista dispensing a skinny rush-hour latte, to the elderly emphysema sufferer in the doctor's waiting room. We have to look after each other across the old social, political & cultural barriers. As the traditional transactions become redundant, we have to share -- mutual aid must define the way we live against the temptations of the survivalist siege. It's a choice, but surely an inexorable one...

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 4: Shakespeare

                    But when the planets
in evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth.
Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure!

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

It's probably not surprising for me to turn to literature during times like this, as I search for historical patterns and the meanings that past writers have found in similar events. In The Atlantic, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a professor of English at Linfield College, writes "Shakespeare wrote his best works during a plague:" an article about present and past theatre closures due to epidemics from bubonic plague to AIDS, and the dramatic literature that came out of those times.

Shakespeare's work is full of references to the plague, which took the lives of several of his young brothers and interrupted his own life several times. Productions had to be halted, theatres closed, and Shakespeare, as actor/producer, was left to go back to writing. In 1593, he wrote poetry during the closures, and in 1606, he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. The plague also figures in a number of his plays. Here's a quote from Pollack-Pelzner:

"In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written just after the end of the 1593 outbreak, the friar who’s supposed to tell Romeo that Juliet is only pretending to be dead gets prevented from delivering his message because he’s quarantined with a fellow priest who’s been helping the sick: “The searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.” Romeo never gets the message, of course, and he kills himself before Juliet revives."

Shakespeare was just echoing prevailing beliefs when he blamed plagues and earthquakes and violent storms on "planets in disorder" or the wrath of God. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would still do that, if they couldn't conveniently blame this particular horror on "foreigners." What I noticed particularly in the quote from Troilus and Cressida was the wonderfully-stated and apt comment that these disasters "divert and crack, rend and deracinate/the unity and married calm of states" from what before felt firmly fixed -- just as we now witness the world's most successful economies, and supposedly top-drawer health care systems, cracking apart and tearing up the roots of the seemingly-solid states themselves. What is new to us was not new at all to a keen observer like Shakespeare, who never stopped at the event itself, but sought to look underneath and behind and beside it, as well as having his characters predict possible futures that could result.

In watching Trump's pathetic, deluded performance during this crisis, it seems as if we're seeing a drama unfold in the same proportions as some of Shakespeare's history plays or his immortal tragedies: a tragedy that will go down through the ages in history and in literature. The king blusters and blasts and blames through the first act; in the second he concocts fantastic schemes; but by the third, he's relegated to one side of the stage, where he sits, defiant, his jaw set, having lost every shred of our sympathy, while the disaster he's failed to prevent swirls around him, his toady-ing ministers desert him, and once-minor characters begin to take the reins or emerge as heros.

What we can't see yet, of course, is how it all ends.

"Woe to that land that's govern'd by a child!
All may be well. But if God sort it so,
'Tis more than we deserve or I expect."

William Shakespeare, Richard III (II.3)

---

(Portrait drawing by me, in pencil, 3.5" x 5")

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 3

Manon always thinks she is being helpful!

This quilt project, a riff on the traditional bear-paw pattern, is perfect for incremental work: doing a little bit every day adds up quickly. I started it over a year ago and put it aside, then took it out last week when I knew the meditative, repetitive work would be helpful, and began again. The central part of the top is almost finished now, and tomorrow I'll finish sewing these blocks together and begin a border and edging. I'm looking forward to doing the hand-quilting, and hope I have something in my stash that will work for the backing, if not, I'll try mail-order and hope for the best. Most of these fabrics are William Morris prints, collected over the years or purchased specifically for this project a while back.

I didn't sleep well last night. After a solid four hours, I woke up (as I usually do) and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up, made some of my favorite Chinese calming tea to which I added a little valerian, and curled up on the couch with my knitting. I was determined not to read any news or social media, but did see that I had a message from a close friend, and when I checked that, it reassured me and I was able to go back to sleep. I'm sure many of us are having disturbed sleep, and what could be more normal? Usually I can put myself back to sleep by following my breath or reciting familiar poetry or psalms that I know so well the words are almost automatic. Once or twice through usually does the trick. But when that doesn't work, and I've been awake half an hour or more, it's better to get up and "change my head," as my father-in-law used to say. Insomnia used to bother me a great deal. Lack of sleep was more of a problem when I was young and had business appointments in the morning, or was traveling, and I also needed more of it. Now I can function quite well on six hours for a day or two, and rarely get more than 7 1/2 - it's when low-sleep days accumulate that most of us run into trouble. On the occasional night when I do get up, knitting helps, or looking at an art book, or reading a bit if it's not too active or disturbing a book, and I can usually go back to bed in an hour or two.

The good part about this changed routine is that sleeping later in the morning is not a problem! Have you been sleeping well or not, and how do you deal with it?

Montreal is shutting down. There was little traffic today, though lots of people were out walking in the cold sunshine. Premier Francois Legault has ordered all non-essential businesses to close, including bars and restaurants. I think this is necessary, because today the brunch spots were still full of young people who don't seem to understand why social-distancing is important; last night the same was true for the popular bars. There's been inconsistency of messaging at the airports, too, and supposedly the provincial government will now send officials to make sure that every traveler is screened and told to self-isolate if they've been out of the country. I was invited, this evening, to join a solidarity group in my arrondissment; people are offering services and requesting help. I'm always impressed with grass-roots initiatives and how helpful they can be; in this case I feel like Quebec is working both top-down and grass-roots up to do the best we can in a difficult situation.