the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 44. Lockdown Language Learning

When coping with this interminable disruption to our lives, daily routines help -- so say the psychologists.  I've tried. Predictably, some routines have been more successful than others. Daily exercise gets maybe a B, that is, after my Achilles tendonitis got better - which also required a daily routine of PT stretches and tendon massage. I've done almost no strength training, though, just walking. Practicing the piano barely rates a C, though I've been doing better lately. I've read a lot, and will give myself a A for that. Cooking with some energy and ingenuity. Drawing and artwork, OK, but not every day by any means. Meditation? Yoga? Nope. Writing has been tough. I've tried to give myself some fun -- each day I do the NY Times mini crossword and several days a week I do the Spelling Bee puzzle, putting the answers on a spreadsheet and looking them up the next day, because I'm too cheap to buy a games subscription to the Times. I've been getting dressed (jeans and a top or sweater at least) every day, taking care of my non-professionally-cut hair, putting on earrings and even a little lipstick, because without that basic self-care I know I'm lost.

But where I've apparently been the most diligent is on Duolingo. When I passed the 300-day streak mark, I went back to figure out what date I started -- it was right at the end of last December. I've "studied" several languages on Duolingo over the years: French, Spanish, a bit of Italian and German. When I began this time, we had recently come back from Greece, and I decided to study some modern Greek, since I still remembered some ancient Greek from my college days but had been frustrated while traveling by my ability to "read" signs but say practically nothing. Then, in early March, the pandemic began. Somewhere right around there, I switched to Latin, and did the whole course on Duolingo, which is short and easy, and only comprises three checkpoints. Then I went back to the Greek and have kept it up every day since, using only three or four "streak freezes" to protect my streak in case I forget.

The app reminds you, occasionally, "15 minutes of Duolingo a day can teach you a language. What can 15 minutes of social media do?" Well, the latter phrase makes is a good point, but can you really learn a language this way? I wasn't so sure. I had learned some basic Spanish on Duolingo that definitely helped during our travels to Mexico City, and the French lessons clarified my weak areas in that language. Starting essentially from scratch with the Greek (I knew the alphabet so that wasn't an obstacle, but very few words or phrases) I was barely able to tell if the conjugations and declensions bore any relationship to ancient Greek, because Duolingo doesn't teach you that way. Different concepts are presented, sort of without you realizing it, under the subject heading of, say, "Animals" or "Clothing." Nobody says, "the third person singular of the verb to have is such-and-such", you just get sentences like "The woman has a child" and "The boy has a dog" until you've got it, and then "I have a husband" and "I have a cat" introduce the first-person singular form of the verb, also without telling you, or asking you to memorize a conjugation. In fact, you're never shown a verb table, or how to decline nouns, adjectives, or pronouns. Nobody tells you the rules, and nobody tells you the exceptions; you just have to figure it out by making mistakes and puzzling over the correct answer. For someone who has studied languages the traditional way, I found myself doubting I was learning anything except how to say inane and useless things like "My pet is a hamster."

So at first I got frustrated, which is why I switched languages. In the meantime, I ordered a modern Greek grammar book and a small dictionary/phrase book. After I finished the Latin lessons, I went back to the Greek. To my surprise, I actually remembered some of what I'd learned, and then started being a bit more methodical about it: writing notes, keeping lists of vocabulary, and making flash cards. I also started studying the basic grammar, just to get a better idea what the rules were -- sentence order, for one thing, and pitfalls for English speakers like the fact that modern Greek requires articles before most nouns, including first names: "the Eleni" instead of just "Helen."

In Duolingo, the first two practice levels (of five) for each skill or subject area don't require you to do difficult listening exercises, or write much Greek translation either from written English sentences, or from audio Greek. I progressed through two and a half checkpoints, going through the first two levels of each skill. Then, doubting myself, I went back to the beginning and started trying to complete all five levels -- and it got a lot harder, very fast. However, my retention started to improve, and my listening skills took a leap forward: modern Greek pronunciation is completely different from what I had learned from my classics profs.

So, am I learning, with my 15 minutes a day? Yes, slowly, just because I've been at it for a long time now. I'm not impressed with my concentration or overall effort. It's the persistence and repetition that have paid some benefits.

I remember at the beginning of the pandemic how people were saying, "Oh, with all this time, we ought to be able to write that novel, learn a language, study classical guitar, read Ulysses or War and Peace..." and then, when our concentration went to hell, our sleep became terrible, we fought with our partners or kids or became consumed by loneliness and confinement, and we didn't even know what day it was -- that was when we got obsessed by the news and started riding a rollercoaster of anxiety and depression, amid other days that felt more normal and optimistic. A lot of us felt guilty or confused about why we couldn't seem to do the things that we thought we were going to do -- I had hoped to finish writing a book, for instance, and I'm nowhere close. A friend sent me an article written by someone funny, who was trying to express her depression and lack of motivation, and she describes herself telling her therapist, 'I feel like I should be learning Portuguese" and the therapist says, "Don't you DARE learn Portuguese!" And no matter how well we may have managed in one area, I bet most of us feel like that in many others, and wish somebody would just say, "Don't you dare...!" and let us off our self-hung hook.

My sister-in-law, a retired academic who's gifted in languages, is studying Arabic for the third time in her life, and this time it's finally taking hold. She's taking a rigorous online course, and working on it for many many hours a day, and I think that's fantastic. But I can't do that, and don't really want to. Fifteen minutes a day works for me, and I've made enough progress that when I see a Greek sentence I know the parts of speech I'm seeing, even if I don't know the words, and my vocabulary is growing. Will I ever use it? Who knows. I think what this exercise has shown me is that the little-bit-every-day approach does pay off over time in language study, just as it does in a drawing practice. A seemingly daunting but desired goal is broken down into manageable little bits, and you commit to it, try not to get discouraged and give up, and eventually you see you've actually made progress. That's all.

But we're not all the same. Also at the beginning of the pandemic, someone created a humorous set of twelve staged photos showing people of different Zodiac signs reacting to the new reality. One person was in pajamas all day, another was happily boozing, another in a cleaning frenzy, and so on. And there was my sign, Virgo, looking neatly pulled together, at her desk, working away. Great. I'm not a believer in astrology, though I do have many of the characteristics thought to be "typical" for a Virgo. What I appreciated, besides the humor, was not that Virgos are organized, annoying workaholics, but that it illustrated so clearly how different we all are -- a fact that's been borne out throughout this thing and that is totally OK. "Don't you dare learn Portuguese!" you Gemini - it will make you miserable!

So, I'm curious how it's played out for you. What has worked, and what hasn't? And are you beating yourself up or accepting yourself as you are, because, honestly, having compassion and gentleness for ourselves is the first and most important practice of all. Then, only then, maybe you can find 15 minutes a day to practice something else.

 

Hermit Diary 43. Moving Inside

We call him "Mr Fang"

The days are getting shorter, the nights are colder, and there's already been a frost out in the countryside. This past weekend we disassembled our terrace plantings, and brought most of the plants inside. For the first time since living here, we've set up full-spectrum LED grow lights and are keeping most of our plants here at home rather than overwintering them in our studio. We have one area for succulents, another for culinary herbs, two others for our many houseplants that live outside in the summer, including some geraniums and begonias in the hope that they'll keep flowering. We thought both the plants and the additional light might help our mood and brighten the rooms where we're now spending so many of our waking hours. After only a few days it already makes a big difference.

Of course the proximity to all those shapes and textures inspires drawing! One of our most spectacular plants is the aptly-named Kalanchoe beharensis "Fang", at the top of this post, a gift from our friend and excellent gardener Guylaine.

Last Saturday I cut off the dragon wing begonias, which had grown to a huge size, before bringing them inside, and put the flowering stems in vases:

Last fall I'd done the same thing, and went back to look at the watercolor/ink drawing in my previous sketchbook. Maybe I'll manage to do another watercolor this year before the gorgeous crimson and hot pink flowers all fade.

And in another still-life painting, I tried to catch the last of the sweet pea blossoms, of which I had so few this summer, but the flowers got way too fussy:

Sweet peas in a Syrian glass vase, and a pebble. 6" x 9."

The best part of the painting is the lower section, with no plants at all!

Hermit Diary 42. A Greek Hillside,Pigments, and a Thorny Problem

Greek Hillside with Blue Agaves. Watercolor in sketchbook, 11.5" x 8.5".

This is where I ended up after working more on the previous sketch (below).

 

This sketch seems to be another example of my lifelong obsession with the thorny problem of how to depict the varieties of natural vegetation and growth which often form an almost abstract pattern that also teems with life. It's often what draws me to a particular scene, and that certainly was the case with this hillside. Van Gogh is the only artist who went after this problem, in both drawings and paintings, in a way that I identify with. Somehow, I keep going back to it, and maybe I should just give in and pursue that challenge as obsessively as he did. It's particularly difficult to capture in watercolor, but the spontaneity of the medium also mimics life in a way that none of the others can do.

Here are a few details closer to life size:

 

 

 

A regular reader here asked, a while back, if I'd post about my palette and what colors I'm using. Unlike the compact travel box I often use at home or outdoors, I used my large studio watercolor palette for this one. It has a fitted cover that helps to protect the paints, and you can leave a thin sponge or dampened paper towel inside overnight if you wish.

However, as is often the case, I didn't use more than a few colors! But some of them were different from what I'd normally have on hand when traveling. Here they are:

Now for some technical details. I don't usually use cobalt green, but with the addition of a little cerulean blue it gave the perfect color for the agaves. The painting was begun with very transparent washes using highly dilute Winsor red, Winsor yellow, sap green, cobalt green, and other greens/yellows/olives/ochres mixed using Winsor yellow, cobalt blue, yellow ochre. I find that in order to unify the colors across a landscape painting, it helps to use the same blues as the sky (cobalt blue here) and to continue mixing the colors for leaves and rocks and earth with a limited pigment palette, rather than using raw colors "out of the tube," as one-off appearances on the page. Therefore the olive colors are made with blue and yellow, with the addition of a little red -- a much livelier and more transparent way to get greyed greens than by using a opaque green like the chromium oxide, which is an enormously useful color, but it can get muddy when other colors are added to it.

The darks were all mixed with Indigo as a base (Indanthrone blue would have been another choice) which kept these areas quite transparent and luminous. A slightly dirtied (greyed) cerulean blue was used for the shadows on rocks and hills.

As the under layers begin to build up, then you can add some opaque pigments along with the more transparent ones. Here I chose chromium oxide green, Indian red, cadmium yellow, and Naples yellow.  If you look at this detail of the vegetation in the foreground of the painting, you can see the opaque mixtures on top of the darks -- but those have to be added when the dark areas are quite dry if you want the brushstroke edges and shapes to remain!

Finally, I added some pencil lines for texture and form.

Hermit Diary 41. Searching the Landscape

I can't leave Montreal, at least until the end of the month, because a new lockdown was imposed on October 1, so there is no question of driving out into the country to see the fall foliage, visiting a natural area, or going apple picking, let alone visiting Vermont or the Adirondacks. I'm fortunate to be able to see trees and fall color from my window, and to have begonias, geraniums, nasturtiums and sweet peas blooming on our terrace, but I still have a persistent sense of being trapped -- as so many of us do.

It helps to turn to images of places I love. A couple of weeks ago I re-explored a garden we visited at the Ex Convento del Carmen (former Carmelite convent) in the Mexico City suburb of San Angel, and made a few drawings and watercolor sketches. The first drawing is below, and that's a watercolor of the same basic view at the top of this page.

From a different position, 90 degrees to the left, this is a massive stone seat with the convent walls behind:

One afternoon at the studio, I was looking through last year's Instagram posts and came across a  watercolor of Delphi that I'd forgotten, and it struck me as much better than I remembered. I searched and searched through my sketchbooks until I finally found it in a drawer in the flat file -- I hadn't remembered that it was painted on a scrap of extra-heavyweight Arches watercolor paper -- my favorite surface to use -- and that's perhaps why it came out well. I'm always surprised how certain materials seem to inspire a better effort, while using others that may be just as good but somehow don't feel quite right to me personally always seems to end up with a lesser result. Originally I had cropped it much tighter; I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, I cut a matte, put a frame on it and brought it home so I can remember that extraordinary day, everyday.

Yesterday I started on another subject, a hillside in Greece with blue agaves and cacti, and if it ever stops raining, I'll walk back up to the studio and finish that one, or work on the same idea in another medium.

As you can probably see, these watercolors are getting looser, less realistic, and more expressive -- but often I still do a fairly realistic black-and-white drawing first to work out the shapes and compositional relationships -- plus, I just like to draw. There are few activities that feel more absorbing, and even though I've done it all my life, it always feels like magic to start with a blank sheet of paper and end up with a representation of something observed and a record of that particular time and place and state of mind.

Drawing, more than any other art activity, also connects me to all the artists who've filled sketchbooks and made drawings. I feel my eyes travel from the object to the paper and back again, without much conscious thinking, as my hand somehow -- I don't pretend to understand it -- translates that seeing into lines and forms. Even when the drawing doesn't come out particularly well, it still seems like a little quiet miracle that human beings try to do this, and have always done it: "I sat here, I was still, I looked, I used my hands and eyes and made this." Maybe there's some hope for us after all.

Hermit Diary 40. Devoid.

Tonight I'm reeling with anger at the despicable remarks of the desperate and reckless narcissist who is president of the United States. Apparently, to him, people who have died of COVID are like those dead, maimed and captured soldiers he called "losers." And not only have his inaction and denial caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, he's now blatantly risking the lives of those who've been closest to him. We hear about the staff members who've been exposed and tested positive, but what about the White House chambermaids who clean up after his family, the janitors and handymen, the secretaries and mail clerks and security people, the cooks and servers, pilots and drivers, to only mention a few? What are their names? What kind of medical care will they receive?

For those of us who have known people who died of this virus or are suffering either because of its longterm or indirect effects -- loss of work and security, lack of healthcare or insurance, displacement, grief, loss, separation, prolonged and intense loneliness --  the president's words are utterly revolting. But you don't have to have a direct connection to the pandemic's victims be an empathetic person, to see what has happened in the world because of it, as well as in so many other areas of cruelty, neglect, violence and suffering that this administration has caused and encouraged. I've never witnessed a leader and band of syncophants so devoid of empathy and compassion; it sickens me.

I don't wish death or this virus on anyone, including any of them: I want to see the Republicans resoundingly defeated in November and for the present inhabitant of the White House to go to court and be convicted. I want to see them fail to confirm their Supreme Court nominee. Whether any of that will happen or not, none of us know. Let us not demean ourselves by wishing ill on others, but let's not delude ourselves either. They will stop at nothing until the bitter end, and I'm sure we haven't seen the last twist in this tortuous road.

Meanwhile, it's even more imperative to take care of ourselves and each other.