the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 38. The times are out of joint: Seamus Heaney, Ballymurphy, and Kenosha

Yesterday I was reminded by Teju Cole that it was the anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney.

This morning, as I sat with the cat and the peaceful light, I took down my copy of Heaney's North (1975), which is both about the idea of North, and Northern Ireland. Opening the book at random, I read “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”

The poem begins:

I’m writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of ‘views
On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,

Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,
‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,
‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing...

and it ends:

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

--

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up
In Ballymurphy. competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

 

Then I opened the precious book to the page with Heaney's inscription (to the original owner, a man in Toronto), my left hand holding the curl of the facing page flat, and thought: his hand held this book just like that, before his pen touched the paper, on a day in March 1986 when he was still very much alive.

I hadn’t read the news yet; I wanted a few more minutes of the soft light on the oxalis and spirea, the seeping red of the begonia blooms, the slightly heavy lift of coffee to lips. Better, I thought, to listen to the poet speak of humanity’s endless appetite for conflict, while he manages, genius that he is, to work in Shakespeare and the Greeks, the Russian camps, the endless clamouring for news on the way to Ballymurphy or Kenosha, and have his company this morning as I “hug my little destiny.”

I copied out the poem and wrote this far. Then I looked up the details about “Ballymurphy.”

Eleven civilians were killed in the Ballymurphy massacre in August, 1971, by members of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army, which had already been in Northern Ireland since 1969. Britain had just launched “Operation Demetrius” which had the objective of interning without trial anyone suspected of being a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Members of the regiment said that as they entered Ballymurphy, they were shot at and returned fire. An account by Mike Jackson, who later became head of the British Army, stated that those killed in the shootings were Republican gunmen. This account was emphatically denied by the Catholic families of the people killed, all of whom were civilians. They included a Catholic priest, Father Hugh Mullan, who was trying to aid a wounded man, reportedly waving a white flag as he did so, and a woman, Joan Connolly, who was standing near the army base and then was left lying in a field for hours without medical attention, where she died.

None of the soldiers were held accountable and there was no investigation at the time.

45 years later, in 2016, an inquest was requested by the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. Funding for the inquest was “deferred” by the ruling party, and hearings did not begin until 2018. The last witnesses were heard in March 2020 after 100 days of testimony. A report is expected “in the coming months.”

--

Now, I’ll summon the courage to turn to today's news.

Hermit Diary 37: Beginning Again, and Again, to Draw

Red ochre on my hand, Anatoliki, Mani Peninsula, Greece.

 

This week, thanks to a link from Jean Morris, I read an essay by David Farrier at LitHub, titled "On John Berger and Rediscovering Drawing during Lockdown." Some of you might connect with the personal story he relates:

When I was younger, I used to draw. Not particularly well; enough to gain a little praise from adults and peers, although it wasn’t praise that interested me. There was a stillness in drawing that I didn’t find anywhere else. Paul Klee famously called drawing, “taking a line for a walk.” In a way, like walking, it gave me a sharper sense of how my own body occupied space. The close attention to shape and space was grounding. It made me feel both more distinct from my surroundings, and at the same time more a part of them. Knowing that I could draw was a talisman I carried with me, like a pebble in my pocket.

And then, without any clear sense of why, I stopped.

It’s now nearly 20 years since I have drawn out of habit. When my children were small I did plenty of scribbling and doodling with them; twice, I have painted my wife a picture for her birthday. But I have rarely sat down to draw for the sake of it. On the few occasions I have picked up a pencil I retreated after a few sketches. The line was broken. I felt guilty for letting it go, and unable to pick it up again.

As he remarks, the initial appeal of drawing was not in seeking praise, but in finding a sense of groundedness, that he defines as "stillness" and a different sense of self, as both "distinct from his surroundings" and at the same time more connected.

During the lockdown in Edinburgh, he kept thinking about drawing.

Thinking too much about the sudden disconnection from the life I knew before, or about how dramatically the future I had anticipated had changed, brought on a kind of vertigo. Lockdown left me feeling unmoored, and my mind turned often to drawing. I needed the old feeling of being grounded by the line. But still, as the weeks of lockdown went by I didn’t draw.

Instead, I read John Berger’s essays about drawing.

Berger compared the drawn line to music, saying that the line emerges from somewhere and leads you on to someplace new. As a musician, it's always been helpful to me to remember that music is never static; it's always coming from somewhere and going somewhere. As an artist, I agree with Berger too: the drawn line arises and moves forward, and so do I, the draughtsperson. Each drawing takes me somewhere I didn't anticipate, and in some very subtle way, changes me. But during the time when I'm drawing, everything except the line is very still.

“Each mark on the paper is a stepping-stone,” Berger writes, “from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as thought it were a river.”

After all those years of not drawing, Farrier finally pulls out an old sketchbook and some charcoals and goes out into the garden. He makes three sketches, and describes them all as "clumsy" but in the third, a branch of tomatoes, he says he "feels something shift."

But then, as Berger wrote, real drawing is both “a clumsiness” and “a constant question.” I realized that drawing is not a pause, but an entry into the complexity and open-endedness of any given moment.

I too felt something shift as I read this essay. It reminded me that drawing is not just something I do, but a place where I go. It's a human activity nearly as old as our species itself. Yes, some of us have greater facility and perhaps greater innate talent, but drawing always improves with practice. I've been fortunate to draw almost continually, all my life, and it's been a great help to me during this period of time. But from what many of you have told me, you're more like the author, who "for years, ... had shied away from drawing because I regretted breaking with it, and as more time passed the gap seemed ever more difficult to bridge."

Regardless of where we begin, or begin again, the place where drawing happens is accessible to everyone, and doesn't need to involve a great deal of self-consciousness or self-criticism. Sometimes all it takes is the courage to makes some marks.  The hand, the eye, a stick of charred wood taken from a fire or a lump of ochre picked up from the ground -- this is all we need to take a line on a journey, and be taken by that line to somewhere new.

Basil and Tomatoes, fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

 

 

Hermit Diary 36: Out of the City

For someone who loves the countryside and nature as much as I do, staying in the city this summer has been a real stretch. Usually we would go to the U.S. to visit my father and spend time at the lake, but the border is closed to non-essential travel, and even if we did it, such a trip would mean a month of strict quarantine - two weeks on either side. Staying in hotels or B&Bs seems risky, so overnights away haven't really been considered. I've never been so grateful to live near a large city park, or to have a fairly private terrace that I could fill with plants.

For several weeks, we've been working very hard to clean our studio of everything we're not going to need. This has meant sorting through possessions, tools, supplies, equipment, and the work of our whole professional and creative lifetimes. It's a huge, heavy, and sometimes emotional task that felt almost overwhelming at the beginning, but after steadily putting in several hours a day, day after day, we're getting there. We've sold or given away a lot, recycled or thrown out the rest, and are gradually getting down to the core of what we want and need to keep for the next period of our lives. As you can perhaps imagine, doing this in the middle of a pandemic, very hot weather, and the current worldwide political and social crises has contributed to a roller-coaster of moods, from frustration to encouragement, that we've managed with as much equanimity as we could. However, we've really needed some breaks, and those are coming now in the form of day trips out of the city.

One beautiful day this past week, we decided to drive south toward Vermont and visit a favorite farm that used to be a perennial stop when we were making that trip every fortnight. Earlier in August, we had driven to our favorite fromagerie, Fritz Kaiser, where we bought cheese made from the milk of his herd of Brown Swiss, goats, and something new: water buffalo, which was delicious. Then we swung back to this same farm to buy the first sweet corn of the season.

We love seeing the flat fields of southern Quebec, filled with hay and corn and soybeans; the blowsy summer clouds; the blue skies.

At the farm this time we bought corn, strawberries, and field tomatoes, and then sat at a picnic table beside the barn, eating local ice cream from little paper cups that came with a wooden stick -- when was the last time I'd had one of those?

Then we went into the barn to find the source of the deafening crowing that had punctuated our snack. It was this magnificent Plymouth Rock rooster, who continued to crow while we visited the ducks and geese and chickens...

the rabbits...

...and the sheep and the goats. Watch the video and at the end, you'll hear him too!

 

Hermit Diary 35: Proud

 

It's Pride Week in Montreal, and although there won't be the usual city-wide festivities, the cathedral held a virtual version of our annual "OutMass" on Sunday evening. The link above is our choir's offering of hope and love, with photographs from last year's Pride parade. This piece of music was written by the British composer Will Todd and made available to musicians worldwide. It was originally written to celebrate the NHS in the early days of the pandemic, and offer some hope and cheerfulness with the rainbow as a symbol, but we felt it was just as appropriate for a dual purpose, acknowledging that the coronavirus is still with us, making events like these as well as the usual closeness between friends impossible, and also as a symbol of Pride.

Just as the service began, our gathering -- which had been advertised and was open to the public -- was Zoom-bombed by a group of anonymous men, who spewed homophobic hate in the most vile way possible. Thanks to the quick reactions of our hosting team, they were removed and the "room" was locked, but of course it was a shock, and distressing. However, the service resumed under the calm leadership of our music director, Jonathan White. The incident was unable to mar the beauty, love, and solidarity of the hour that followed, which was filled with music, spoken word, prayer, reflection, and shared purpose. In fact, I think all the positive qualities of the gathering were actually augmented, and burned into the memories of the people who were present.

When I think of the courage, gentleness, openness, honesty, and calmness of the people of all ages who were gathered, representing all aspects of LGBTQ+ expression as well as their straight allies, and compare it to the cowardice of those who tried to disrupt this beautiful celebration of pride in our human diversity --  and the sanctity of that diversity -- there's really little to say. It's so obvious. Love triumphs over hate.

I'm proud of our community, and extremely proud of and grateful for the friends who planned and prepared this service, and all those who came and stood together on Sunday night. Your strength makes all of us stronger, and I'm glad to be able to help salute you in music and join with you in working for a better, kinder, more just world.

The full service is embedded below. I'd like to call your attention particularly to the section from 26:16 - 32:10, where members of the community offer a litany asking God to "walk with us, grieve with us, and rejoice with us," interposed with Jonathan White singing a Kyrie.