the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 23: Work

^{Vlatadon Monastery, Thessaloniki, Greece}

^{[This essay is cross-posted from "Daily Bread", the blog of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal.]}

In this strange period we’re experiencing, time itself seems to have changed. The indistinguishable days go by in a blur, without the structure of our former schedules. Some of us are out of work; others are adapting to working in completely different ways; suddenly we’re faced with tasks we’ve avoided for years, or spending huge amounts of time getting food and cooking it. Ironically, although we all supposedly have “more time,”  it’s often hard to feel like we’re getting much done. It’s harder to focus, harder to stick to a routine, harder to make decisions and work effectively. Sometimes it’s even hard to sleep, or get out of bed in the morning…and there seems to be no end to this in sight.

Today, in Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, we find what seems to be a difficult message. The Apostle asks the brothers and sisters of the early Christian community to “acknowledge those who work hard…to hold them in highest regard because of their work.” Frankly, we don’t even need to hear this from Paul in order to feel guilty, because we’ve lived for years in a society that constantly dins into us the value of work and accomplishment, even to the point where we are defined by those things.

But as I looked deeper, I decided this passage could be read differently, and that it contains hope and encouragement for us today.

Please come along with me to Thessaloniki for a few minutes. In 2018, my husband and I visited that fascinating city in northeastern Greece, on the Aegean, not far from the Turkish border. Thessaloniki feels eastern. It’s filled with ancient Orthodox churches built during the Byzantine period; monks and priests stride through the streets in their black robes, and across from the Church of Hagios Demitrios, where the martyr-saint Demitrius is buried, are icon-painting workshops and shops glittering with gilded icons and mosaics,  satin vestments, brass crosses, candlestands and candelabras, Eucharistic vessels, incense and prayer beads, and holy books. The scents of hot wax and myrrh pervade the churches; worshippers whose feet are muffled by the wall-to-wall rugs make the rounds of the sanctuaries, kissing the icons, crossing themselves, praying before the relics of martyrs, and lighting handmade beeswax candles that range from tiny tapers to pillars four feet tall.

When Paul arrived here two millenia ago, Thessaloniki was already a large city filled with people of many different races and cultures as befitted its location at the crossroads of east and west. It was also the seat of the Roman governor of Macedonia. The intensity of Paul’s preaching led to the birth of the city’s Christian community. After several weeks, his presence created such a disturbance that he and his friend Silas were forced to escape at night, climbing down the city walls of Thessaloniki at the exact place where the Vlatadon Monastery was later built.

The Vlatadon monastery chapel.

Jonathan and I visited the monastery on a beautiful bright day. The remains of the ancient city walls, circling the top of an imposing hill above the sea, are just beyond the grounds of the monastery, which is still home to a community of monks. There’s a small garden and orchard; pens for chickens, geese and peacocks; a goat or two; and an ancient chapel with Byzantine frescoes on the dimly-lit walls, the unrestored figures defaced with hammer marks made by the Ottoman invaders who tried to destroy all human images.

Just below and to the east, there’s a spring where Paul supposedly stopped to drink, and it’s still a place of pilgrimage. I stood and looked out at the same view of the Aegean that Paul must have seen, and walked over to touch the old bricks and rocks of the original city wall. At such moments, history comes very close.

In his letter to the nascent community, Paul not only appreciates those who “work hard,” but goes on to advise these early Christians to encourage and help one another, avoid division and blame,  and try to do what is good for their own community, but also for others.

I think Paul is talking here not only about the hands-on work of providing food and shelter and other necessities, but the work of being and building community. And it strikes me that during this most unusual time, that is the work to which we are being called, too. Many people have spoken about how our cathedral’s Zoom services have, paradoxically, brought us closer to one another: we see our fellow parishioners, and the clergy, face-to-face and in our own homes; we’re meeting people we didn’t know, deepening existing relationships, finding new ways of worshipping and communicating, and gathering in small groups to talk and share, support one another, and learn. Many of us are doing this same “work” in a more secular context, too, as we explore new ways of bringing far-flung family and friends together, and do collaborative projects.

If Paul and Silas were forced to flee Thessaloniki under cover of darkness, we can be sure that life was not easy for their followers. As many have noted, there are parallels between the early Christian communities, for whom gathering was forbidden and fraught with danger, and our present predicament as worshiping Christians who cannot meet. Paul’s advice seems meant for us too: “encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone.” And he reminds us not to look inward exclusively, but to see the needs outside our own community — as we certainly have been doing — when he writes: “strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.” Regardless of how long our isolation lasts, perhaps we might worry less about how much work we’re getting done, in the traditional sense, and think more about building relationships, and the strength and resilience of our community, for whatever lies ahead.

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

Athens: Anarchists and Antigone

The Polytechnic University of Athens, on a bright day.

The first apartment we stayed in was located north of the center of the city, near the National Museum of Archaeology and the Polytechnic University. Last year we stayed in a tiny room in a less-than-stellar hotel in the touristic center near the Acropolis - a great location, with good breakfasts, but we could barely turn around in either the bedroom or the bath, and we heard loud guests at every hour of the day or night. This time we wanted a larger, quieter place where we could cook, and learn about another part of the city. The apartment we rented turned out to be perfect. It was on the seventh floor, with a wide balcony that looked out over the buildings and courtyard of the Technical University, site of historic resistance by students against the military junta that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. On November 17, 1973, after several days of escalating student demonstrations, armed police crashed through the university gates with a tank. 24 civilians, including students and a young boy, were killed, and hundreds injured, though the official government inquiry disputed these deaths. Nevertheless, this catastrophe triggered events that led to the fall of the government the following July.

After that, a law was passed making university campuses safe zones, where the police cannot enter. The Polytechnic became the main site of resistance movements, and the home of the contemporary Greek anarchist movement. The neighborhood around the campus is called Exarchia, and is controlled by anarchist groups, but we didn't feel any threat from them -- rather than being against authority in all forms, their philosophy seems to be a bit more subtle: they're against the police, capitalism, globalization, and fascism, supportive of immigrants and refugees who they see as victims of capitalistic military actions and policies.

A poster in the neighborhood. The headline at the top reads "οχι αλλοι νεκροι, οχι αλλα στρατοπεδα συγκεντρωσης", "No more dead, no more concentration camps."

Our apartment host explained that the main university building was now occupied by students, and while the area was safe, she was glad we wouldn't be there on the 17th, because that was an annual day of demonstrations, when the anarchists and police always clashed, sometimes violently, with some danger from tear gas, Molotov cocktails and the like. While we were in residence, we watched the students coming and going, as well as faculty -- apparently classes were still going on in some of the other buildings. Graffiti, posters, and large homemade banners in a several-block radius indicated the presence of active resistance by these anarchists, with messages of solidarity with refugees and migrants -- of which Greece has a disproportionate number, many in controversial detention camps -- and anti-capitalist slogans. One weekend night, there was a demonstration that went on into the wee hours, with speeches followed by live music; we had a ringside seat, but couldn't tell what was really going on.

A pencil sketch from our balcony, looking toward the courtyard of the Archaeology Museum.

The buildings of the Polytechnic University are gorgeous examples of neo-classical architecture, designed by the architect Lysandros Kaftantzoglou (1811–1885) who would not be happy to see their current condition. From our balcony we looked down over the tiled roofs of two open, colonnaded buildings modeled after the classical stoa, or marketplace with columns, common to all public agoras in ancient times, and the beautifully-proportioned main building, with its pediment and Ionic columns flanked by staircases. Part of the roof of this building has fallen in. There's a courtyard and garden filled with flowering plants and trees, and, closer to the street, monuments to the fallen students as well as the remains of the gate that was smashed by the tank back in 1973.

Socrates (right) and Plato (left) presiding over the entrance to the Academy of Athens -- the name harkening back to Plato's Academy --which is the country's national academy and highest research institution, where work is divided into three orders: Natural Sciences, Letters and Arts, Moral and Political Sciences.

Anarchistic thought has a long history in Greece, going all the way back to Socrates, who, if not being an out-and-out anarchist in a modern sense, taught his students to continually question authority, and value above all one's right to a free will. He was tried and put to death because of his criticism of the political authority and direction of the Athenian state at the time. (As a political concept, Αναρχια, "anarchy," is a Greek word that first appears in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles around the same time, in the fifth C. BC.)

A copy of Sophocles' Antigone in modern Greek that I bought in an Athenian used bookstore. I can read the Greek alphabet and had three years of university-level ancient Greek, but don't know the modern language at all. I can only decipher it with difficulty and the help of translation programs. I've forgotten most of the ancient Greek I once knew, but I thought I might compare this text to the original and learn something: intellectual folly, probably, but it was one of those things you see when traveling, and just want to have.

As one article I read pointed out, Sophocles' play Antigone is centered on the anarchist question of whether the young protagonist, Antigone, is right to exercise her free will against both family and the authorities -- to choose to properly bury her brother against the advice of her sister, and the express decree of the king, who has forbidden the burial because her brother had died fighting against that state.

Posters for (I think) current theater productions in Athens. Sophocles' Antigone on the left, a play titled The Building" on the right.

These are human questions that have persisted throughout recorded time. It's not surprising to me that this Greek play not only continues to be performed, 2500 years after it was written, but has also inspired a number of recent works, such as Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire, in which a young British woman rejects her sister's (and the state's) prohibitions by trying to aid, and then bury, her brother who left Britain to fight for ISIS, then regrets his decision and tries to return home. We still have a very difficult time deciding which is the highest "right": following the authority and wishes of one's family or one's country, or doing what an individual feels to be right and just, according to their own conscience or spiritual convictions, even if the penalty is ostracism, exile, or death. Jesus' difficult and hotly-debated parable in Luke 14:26, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple," speaks to much the same issue.

Here in Quebec, we also have a new film titled Antigone. The writer/director Sophie Deraspe said she was inspired by her reading of the play many years before, and by the story of Fredy Villaneuva, who was killed by a Montreal police officer in 2008 after an illegal game of dice in Henri-Bourassa park escalated into a physical confrontation with police. The film is about a girl in a Montreal refugee family whose brother is shot and killed by police. Against the wishes of her family, she tries to save her remaining brother, who has been arrested and faces deportation, and then runs afoul of the law herself. 

Socrates would be right at home.

Agrigento

Rock wall and olives at Agrigento. Watercolor on paper, 15" x 11".

The day we spent visiting the ancient Greek temples at Agrigento, Sicily, is etched in my memory less for the temples themselves, as spectacular as they were, but for the landscape and the feeling of the long walk that leads from one building to another. It was a beautiful day, struck with that strong, bright Mediterranean sun that sets shadows in sharp relief and shows colors at their brightest; as for generations of artists before me, that light and color are compelling to my northern eyes that, once experienced, I continue to long for them. Maybe that's why I keep coming back to these scenes, trying to capture something of that feeling.

The "Sicilian wall" in my studio.

The painting at the top of this page was done over two sessions, on two days. Below is the earlier stage, at the end of the first day. I was dissatisfied with my photographs of this painting. I think the reduction in size as well as the photographic process itself results in a loss of immediacy and vibrancy -- probably that's just an inevitable limitation of sharing work online. The bottom detail below captures it best, but it also looks more accurate in the photo of my studio above.

This is after about an hour of drawing and laying in the first washes.

 

Detail of the finished painting.

 

And another detail. 

 

A niche that once housed an early Christian burial, long after the Greeks occupied this valley.

The vibrant ochre color of the rocks at Agrigento, which were full of fossils, created a stunning but entirely natural contrast with the bright blue sky and the sea beyond, and yet that was softened by the silvery olive trees, some of which were very old, with their twisted trunks and branches. At the end of the ancient temple road was the oldest olive tree I've ever seen; I made a drawing of it recently that, I'm happy to say, was bought by a dear friend, perhaps for some of the same reasons I loved it in person. That tree seemed to embody the spirit of the Greeks for me. I went up to it, laid my hand on its trunk, and stayed with it for a while.

NOTE: In a radical move, I've changed the layout of the blog slightly, putting the sidebar on the right (better for phone viewing, since the images sometimes got cut off in mobile view) and taking away the sidebar's black background. Please let me know what you think or how it works for you. Do most of you read the blog in a feed reader anyway?

 

 

 

 

 

Lisbon, Incomplete

Something about this picture embodies the last two weeks spent in that city better than all the tiled façades and wrought iron balconies and pastel loveliness, more than the hilly streets and clanging trams, and much more than the throngs of tourists eating their natas, and buying shoes and clothing from international fashion shops. Beneath all of that is a melancholy solitude that is difficult to glimpse or grasp, but seems as deeply embedded in the city's spirit as the two-inch chunks of black and cream stone, laid in geometric patterns, that pave the sidewalks and plazas: installed originally, I learned, by prison work crews.

The tradition of fado, and the now-overused Portuguese word saudade... these seem increasingly exploited as commercial expressions, losing meaning rather than being an entry into the soul of the place and the people. Saudade, which has no English equivalent, means a longing for an absent something or someone who may never return; saudade brings both happy and sad feelings, but it is more than nostalgia. It is  described as "the state of mind  that has subsequently become a 'Portuguese way of life'': a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that's missing, wistful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of what is now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence." Fernando Pessoa, the greatest of Lisbon's poets, wrote an unfinished work called The Book of Disquiet:

"The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies – wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis – inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet, which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie."  --George Steiner

 

So, I walked. Where do all those kilometers of pattern lead? I wondered. To the plazas, certainly, but then they wind out, up another hill, into a narrow maze of streets, curving out and down again to the edge of the sea, along the edges of buildings the color of marigolds, lavender, sky, up into the maze again. It is a city that leads the walker to walk, but toward what? Toward incompleteness itself, perhaps. The image at the top of this post shows the only conclusion I found: a place where the pattern changed into green growth and light, at the end of a small dark tunnel.

I also kept a journal with some drawings, which I'm still adding to; I'll probably share them here as time goes on. But I struggled with making art there. I had the sense that drawing and photographing were, to some extent, futile -- I left Lisbon feeling that it was impossible to capture its essence, because we cannot capture incompleteness, absence, and longing, even in the present age where the emphasis is on having a "complete experience", of checking items off a list, taking selfies at the proscribed spots to prove we were there. The Time Out Market, a concept that was first tried in Lisbon, is a perfect example: the tourist doesn't need to discover anything for him or herself; they can just go to a centrally-located and packaged "destination market" -- an upscale food court where a curated selection of restaurants and shops have stalls with the same signage, the same style, offering a sample of their wares, with long tables for seating in the center of the space. It's enticing and exciting on the first visit; on the second, not quite so much. All major cities will soon have these markets, and they will all look alike, too. 

Better then, perhaps, to write in fragments, like Pessoa, or to express feelings in music, or simply to reflect on experience in solitude. Even as a brief visitor, I sensed Lisbon's elusive, melancholic undercurrent, and I find I'm appreciating it even more now that I am home.

The Best Thing I've Read about "Roma"

"Roma" exposes Mexico's darkest secret,

by Marcela Garcia in the Boston Globe

 

Such an excellent essay by Marcel Garcia. A number of people I've talked to may have liked this movie, but when we've talked about it in more depth, it's like we've seen two different films. That's always possible with a book or film, of course, but in this case, and at this particular time in history, I've found the dissonance quite disturbing.

 

It always bothers me that so many people think they already know all there is to know (or all they want to know) about the complex cultures south of the American border, when they actually know very little. I'm probably hyper-sensitive because I too was quite ignorant before I started going to Mexico and learning about it myself; I wasn't even sure I wanted to go, except that I knew there was a tradition of art that I wanted to see firsthand. Now I wonder how I could have been so limited. Where does this ignorance come from? Is it because we are inundated with media "information" and mass culture through Hollywood films and TV, and equate that with real knowledge? Is it because most people don't travel to Latin America beyond the resort beaches? Is it because so few of us form real friendships with people from different cultures, religions and ethnicities than ourselves, where we are willing to actually listen to and learn from the truth of their lived experience?  Perhaps most people simply don't want to be stretched in this direction because it also requires looking at oneself.

 

I've now been to Mexico City for six extended periods of time, and have relationships with a number of Latin American friends. Yet with every visit and conversation, as with people from every culture different from mine, I realize how little I knew, and still know. Of course I've become uncomfortably aware of my own privilege, and ability to travel and come back to my far easier North American life. But it's a lot more than that. I want to be as open as possible when I see a film or read a book or talk to someone, as well as when I'm traveling, so that I am able to learn. I don't want to live in a North American bubble and take it with me everywhere I go. We all do that to some extent, but dropping it consciously seems to be more than most people want to do.

 

I also know firsthand how uncomfortable this process can be. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, partly because I married outside my culture, but also because of a longstanding desire for knowledge of otherness and for being stretched. I know everyone doesn't share this, or feel that the reward of growing wiser is worth the pain of feeling uncomfortable, hurt, misunderstood, or being in the minority, where we suddenly have to listen and accept different ways, and not be in a position of control or power. I get it. Most of us prefer to stay in our own tribe, however narrowly or broadly we define that. The world is moving in a different direction, though, and we can either accept that, understand our own privilege, and change -- or fight against it, which I see so-called liberals doing just as much as conservatives, when it involves actually confronting one's own stereotypes and sense of entitlement or superiority. It's one thing to oppose building a wall, or separating families, and entirely another to actually learn what is beyond that border, or who those families are, or our own complicity in the systems that have made them want to leave -- perhaps for a life of domestic servitude in America.

 

Roma confronts racism in Mexican culture, but it also asks us to look within. So I was grateful for Garcia's insights and explanations about her own culture, and the lens through which North America has viewed both Mexico and this particular film. I'm grateful she took the time to write this piece.

A Byzantine Christmas

An Annunciation, second half of 16th C.

The Benaki Museum, in Athens, houses an immense personal collection of antiquities and Byzantine art, especially icons from the so-called Cretan School. Although I'm very interested in Byzantine art, I'm starting from a point of knowing very little about it -- it's our trips to Rome, Sicily, and now Greece that have made me want to learn. I apologize that the photographs aren't better - the combination of the lighting in the galleries and gold leaf on the icons made it really hard to avoid reflections and shine.

Annunciation, by Emmanuel Tzanfornaris, late 16th-early 17th C.

For today, though, I'm just going to post some of the icon paintings we saw at the Benaki that had an Advent or Christmas theme, and include a paraphrase of online articles about what this Cretan School actually was.

The Volpi Nativity, 1st quarter of 15th C. The baby is laid in a strange coffin-like box with a reclining Virgin and pensive Joseph -- but who are all those other characters?

Virgin and Child Enthroned, by Andreas Ritzos, one of the most famous Cretan painters. Second half of 15th C.

In Greece we repeatedly encountered bitter accounts and evidence of the destruction of Christian art, architecture, and artifacts that occurred when the cities of the Byzantine empire fell to the Ottoman Turks. After Constantinople was taken over by the Turks in 1453, a number of Byzantine scholars and artists fled, especially to Venice.

"The émigrés were grammarians, humanists, poets, writers, printers, lecturers, musicians, astronomers, architects, academics, artists, scribes, philosophers, scientists, politicians and theologians. They reintroduced the teaching of the Greek language to their western counterparts, and brought with them Classical texts that were printed on the first printing presses for Greek books in Venice in 1499. Orthodox Christians in other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean gave money to endow monasteries and allow them to continue their work. One major example was on the island of Crete, which was occupied by the Venetians from 1204 until 1669, and was one of the last Greek islands to have fallen to the Ottoman Turks. The Cretan School of icon-writing became the predominant force in Greek painting during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and helped to supply the demand for Byzantine icons throughout Europe. The Cretan artists developed a particular style of painting under the influence of both Eastern and Western artistic traditions and movements; the most famous product of the school, El Greco, was the most successful of the many artists who tried to build a career in Western Europe, and also the one who left the Byzantine style farthest behind him in his later career.

By the late 15th century, Cretan artists had established a distinct icon-painting style, distinguished by "the precise outlines, the modelling of the flesh with dark brown underpaint and dense tiny highlights on the cheeks of the faces, the bright colours in the garments, the geometrical treatment of the drapery, and, finally the balanced articulation of the composition", "sharp contours, slim silhouettes, linear draperies and restrained movements". (Wikipedia:the Cretan School, and Patrick Comerford, The Cretan School of Icons and its Contribution to Western Art.)

With these beautiful, enigmatic images, I want to wish a Merry Christmas to all of you!

Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Ioannis Permeniatus, first half of 16th century

Origins of an Obsession

Apollo and Athena look down on Troy. Alice and Martin Provensen, The Iliad and the Odyssey (Golden Books)

When I was 8, my parents went on a trip to Kentucky, leaving me in the care of my maternal grandparents, who lived downstairs. I don't remember the circumstances; it must have had to do with my father's work, but this trip was exceptional. Except for visiting my father's dying brother in Florida, fifty years later, it was the only time my mother ever flew on an airplane. She was asthmatic at a time when that disease was not well-controlled, and travel was difficult and anxiety-provoking for both my parents. But that one time, they went. I remember feeling confused and nervous, but trying to be good about it. And I remember when they came back home, both because I was very glad to see them, and because my mother brought me a special present that she had found in a city bookstore in Louisville.

It was The Golden Book of Myths and Legends, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, and I was instantly captivated. The book also included the tales of Beowulf, the Battle of Roncevaux, Tristram and Iseult, Rustem and Sohrab, and Sigurd of the Volsungs, but the entire first half was devoted to the Greek myths. I pored over the paintings: Prometheus stole fire from heaven; Theseus faced the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth; a helmeted Jason fled with the Golden Fleece, Daedalus stood on a rooftop studying the birds. I was already a good reader, but my mother helped me with the text and unfamiliar words, and together we studied the pictures and talked about the stories. She had studied Greek art in college, and showed me how the illustrators had adapted the style of ancient vase paintings to a modern idiom. She pulled out her copy of Bullfinch's Mythology when I wanted to know more. Although she didn't know how to read Greek, she taught me to recite the letters of the alphabet, and how to write the characters, and we talked about the Greek origins of many English words.

That Christmas, my parents gave me the Provensen's illustrated Iliad and Odyssey. My mother read it to me when I was sick in bed, and again we pored over the pictures -- these were even more closely linked to Greek vase paintings. She talked to me about the use of positive and negative space; I traced and copied some of the illustrations. The story and the characters got under my skin and into my head, and stayed there, while the gods and goddesses, in profile, looked down on the warring camps of Greeks and Trojans from the heights of Mt. Olympus, their feuds and jealousies mirroring the behaviors of people I knew. I identified most with grey-eyed Athena, who remained above the love-quarrels by staying a virgin, and encouraged wisdom, intellect, and music as well as being the patron goddess of the Athenians. We read the story countless times, and in spite of my preference for Athena, I always went against her and rooted for the Trojans, knowing it was fated for them to lose, but somehow hoping that my wishes would make the story turn out differently. It was the same when I got to university and enrolled in ancient Greek classes, and, in the second semester, opened my student edition of Homer to the first words of the Iliad. And it's been the same every time since, in every translation: the inevitability of defeat battling with my desire for a different result, as if human fate itself could be held suspended or reversed by the force of my own free will. Much later, I would come to see that the Greeks themselves were concerned with the same questions of fate vs free will, and that it would play a large part in the development of their tradition of tragic drama and exert a profound influence on Christianity, and later western drama and philosophy. 

I can't explain the hold that this art and this particular story has had on me, all my life; all I can do is trace it back to its origin. I became a classics major; I almost decided to teach art history or become a conservator of antiquities, but instead became a graphic designer and artist - and I'm convinced to this day that my early study of those vase paintings, and their positive-negative harmony, and the beautiful carved inscriptions of perfectly-balanced Greek letters, had a lot to do with why I became a designer and careful typographer myself, and why my own art has always been concerned with line, and with volume.

Laying Out of a Young Man in the Family Circle, Attic Greek, around 400 BC, white-ground polychrome lechythos (Altes Museum, Berlin)

One day shortly before J. and I left for Greece in mid-November, I began thinking about my mother, and my eyes suddenly filled with tears: how she would have loved to go! Yet in 83 years, she never left the continental U.S. and, like many people in my travel-averse family, hardly ever traveled far from her rural home. But she traveled the world vicariously through me, and through books and the pages of The New Yorker and New York Times, often sending me clippings about some new archaeological discovery. Now, all these years later, I was finally going there, and she was gone from the earth; I wouldn't even be able to tell her what I saw. That particular morning, the prospect seemed unbearable, and I wept. But later, while packing, I decided to wear one of her silver bracelets throughout the trip, and I spontaneously pulled out a favorite black-and-white photograph of her, and stuck it in the back of my sketchbook. When we arrived in Athens, I put the photograph on the table in front of the mirror, and went up to the roof, and saw the Acropolis and the Parthenon for the first time. She was there with me, then, and in my heart, I told her all about it.

Home from a Journey

Dear Readers, apologies for my long silence. I've been away on a trip to Greece, a place I've wanted to visit for an entire lifetime. As the title of this blog implies, I've felt a personal identification with ancient Greece and its stories, gods and goddesses, art and thought. It's what I studied when I was young, and for a while I thought I'd either be a ancient art history professor or a conservator of antiquities. That's not how my life turned out, and part of the reason for this trip was to revisit that earlier self, as well as the place, and see what I thought from a different point in life.

It was a marvelous journey, filled with surprises and adventures not only in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, but in the mountains of northern Greece; and not only concerned with ancient history and art, but also with a quest to see and learn more about the Byzantines. We were gone for sixteen days, and started our travels in Berlin, where we visited one of the best collections of ancient Greek vases and sculptures in the world, at the Altes Museum, as well as going to the Reichstag, taking long walks, trying to stay warm (it was almost as chilly as Montreal) and eating some excellent German food. Then we flew to Athens, where we began and ended our travels in Greece.

I have a lot I want to write about, but it's going to have to wait a bit because...Christmas...and singing, and friends and family, as well as some significant responsibilities here at home. The jetlag in this direction, back home, was really fierce, and I've been really busy besides. Today is the first day since returning a week ago that I've had any time to work on my pictures and videos, and I did get them transferred to my computer. So, eventually, there will be more to share here.

Travel completely engages me when I'm there, and then feels almost unreal when return to my own space. And yet, flight makes those sudden shifts in reality possible. I wouldn't call it disorienting, per se, but it is certainly strange to find yourself inhabiting an image like the one above, that you've seen in countless sources, from textbooks to travel videos. We don't go on tours but figure out our itinerary and plans completely from scratch, and unexpected things happen, so during the trips we always feel like we're very heads-up, paying sharp attention; there's a high level of intensity. I try hard to really be in a place -- to feel it and engage with it with all my senses as well as my mind -- and not just be a person behind a camera, capturing moments like trophies. It takes time to think about a significant journey and to see what I've learned and how it has changed me; I'm doing that now and will be doing it for quite a long time. And I already want to go back. There were good reasons why, as a young girl, Greece got under my skin. I see that better now, and am glad I wasn't disappointed by being face to face with the real thing. Yet I also see that I made the right decision to live a less linear and more personally creative life; it was a better fit with who I really am, but in many ways, it has been a reflection of the values and ideals that attracted me to the Greeks in the first place. As a woman, I'm lucky I live now, though, instead of back then.

So, more to come, soon. 

 

Bright Faces of Hope, and a Long Uphill Road Ahead

The first two Native-American women. First two Muslim women. First Somali-American, a former refugee. Youngest woman ever, a Latina. First black female congresswoman from her state...They are the hope for me today: the brown female faces of those who won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with many white women who also won races, and the first gay male state governor. These are the faces of the future — though their majority power may be very far away, beyond my lifetime even.

When I look at the map, the polarization is depressingly clear, and I can’t even feel smug about Quebec being better, after our last election. It was just the same: most of the rural, homogeneous French-Canadian areas went conservative, while the diverse metropolitan areas (chiefly Montreal) were solidly progressive. The real question in so many places today seems to be: do you want someone who will actually work for the things that benefit all people, or do you want someone who looks like you, expresses the same fears, and wants to go back to the past?

There were a lot of “firsts” yesterday. That’s very significant, though it made me simultaneously weep with happiness at seeing those faces, and rage that it’s taken so long and come with such a hard fight –- which will, of course, have to continue. And I'm not naive. These are modest gains, and even a Democratically-controlled House will, at best, create a stalemate with the executive branch and Senate, that will of course be blamed for blocking legislation and starting investigations. I'm appalled at the support this president still enjoys, and in some parts of the country, it seems more solid than ever, with a looming possibility of re-election in 2020.

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Looking at the Senate and House electoral maps today caused me to reflect on the election of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church of the United States, ten years ago. The church’s polity is set up the same way as Congress, with a House of Bishops, one from each diocese, and a much larger body made up of lay delegates and clergy, equally represented by four of each from every diocese. In every single step toward inclusivity — allowing the ordination of the first black priest, the first woman, the first openly gay priest, and then bishops in each of those categories — the House of Deputies voted positively years before the House of Bishops did, and in exactly that order: blacks, women, gay. And of course, representation in the House of Deputies was itself reflective of that diversity long before there were black, female, and gay bishops. But it did happen. The people in the churches elected the delegates and changed those bodies; the lay delegates pushed the clergy to be more progressive, and eventually even the House of Bishops changed. It's inevitable, but it took a long, long time even in one of the most progressive religious denominations in the United States. Ten years later, however, a great deal has changed in attitudes toward homosexuality in the general population, friends and colleagues, and forced them to confront a choice between love or rejection of real people. We should see this as an indication that change is absolutely possible.

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I've been on the side of immigrants and non-whites all my life, and especially so since marrying into an Arab/Armenian immigrant family, with multiple personal histories of genocide and narrow escapes from persecution to begin life again in new places. Twelve years of being a Canadian-American, and having opportunities to travel, especially in Latin America, have only made me MORE sympathetic and more identified with migrants and refugees. I’m grateful for my life experiences and fervently wish I could share them with a lot more people, because I think if you don’t live it, or have very close relationships with people who do, it’s hard to really get it. Thus, the map we keep seeing, and the fears that keep being exploited.

Besides this endemic hatred of "the other", the environment is the other issue that creates ongoing despair for me. There is so little time, and so little will on the parts of governments -- in fact I believe we've already passed a critical window where reversal was possible.  So much of what I have valued and loved about the Earth is in danger of being lost forever. To me, this is the fundamental issue of our time, and even here in Quebec, where many people say they do care about the natural world and live close to it, the new government feels it is not important, and secondary to economic concerns. How shortsighted can we be?

Today is a day to rejoice in a first step back from the precipice Trump's presidency has placed us in. Frankly, though, we can't let up for a minute.