the cassandra pages

Drawing my way through a rough week

Bone. Pencil drawing, August 19, 2021.

For any of us who care about other parts of the world and the people who inhabit them, it's been a difficult and emotional week. I'm not going to get into any of it here. Suffice it to say that this blog wouldn't have been named what it was, back in 2003, if I hadn't foreseen much of the tragedy that would unfold as a result of American foreign policies -- though I fervently wish I'd been wrong.

Obviously we need to continue to do whatever we can to alleviate suffering and work for justice and for positive change, while caring for those closest to us as well. Our primary responsibility is to remember to take care of ourselves so that we have a chance of being able to help others. What does that mean for you? Have you ever thought about it in depth, and written it down?

The monastery garden at San Giovanni degli Eremiti, in Palermo, Sicily. August 18, 2021.

Many monastic orders follow a rule of life that not only gives structure to the day, but helps the mind find the stillness at the heart of everything. I've always been interested in this, and read a good deal about it. While I don't feel called to that degree of commitment or structure, I know from long experience that without paying attention to a personal set of basic practices, my anxiety goes up, I'm unable to concentrate or get things done, and I'm likely to experience feelings of helplessness and depression. I'm also a whole lot less pleasant to be around: cross, frustrated, impatient, and apt to blame those feelings on others. On the most basic level, I want to be a loving partner and daughter, and to keep in touch with family and friends to the extent I feel able. Now, with not only the world situation but the prospect of yet-another pandemic-restricted fall and winter, it's clear that self-care needs to be intentional.

A street corner in St-Lambert, Quebec. Fountain pen; roughly sketched on location and finished with watercolor later. August 16, 2021.

What this means for me (in no particular order) is maintaining a daily practice of drawing and/or music, so that I don't forget who I am, even if it's just fifteen minutes. It means taking care of some plants and flowers, and petting the cat: remembering that there's a lot of life that isn't human. Food is part of that category: paying attention to ingredients, and cooking meals that have some love and care put into them. Taking some time each day to read a good book, and to learn something new: for the past 18 months that's meant daily language-practice for me.  Making the bed, taking some care with my appearance, picking up the house, keeping things in relatively decent order. Getting some exercise, and trying to get enough sleep. And, both first and last each day, feeling gratitude and making a point of remembering specific things that I'm grateful for. I wish I could maintain a meditation practice but it doesn't seem to be in the cards for me right now: basic mindfulness, gratitude, and the contemplative practice of drawing, and following my breath during lulls in the day or wakeful periods in the night, seem to fill that niche.

Plants on the terrace. August 15, 2021.

Do I succeed at all of that every day? Of course not. But having a basic, thought-out framework seems really helpful in trying to keep some order, sanity and calmness in my life -- and when I forget, which of course I do, it's there to go back to.

Begonia. Pencil. August 14, 2021.

For instance, I hadn't been drawing every single day, but this week gave me a wake-up call to try to get back to it. There you have it: we can always begin again.

 

 

Gathering the Summer Fruits

Edge of a cornfield, central New York.

It hasn't been a normal summer for any of us, but it's been a whole lot better than last year, and for that I'm grateful. Vaccination proofs and passports in hand, we crossed the Canadian -U.S. border in July, for the first time in 18 months, to visit my father. My sister-in-law also drove over from Massachusetts to see us for two days, which was a special and unexpected pleasure. Dad and I were so happy to see each other again, and even though he's having trouble with his legs and back -- very difficult for someone who was always so athletic -- he's still doing remarkably well for his age. I wish I could say the same for the United States. I was shocked to see and hear the polarization expressed so vehemently, and often crudely, on lawn signs and in conversation even in the small rural towns we visited. The vaccination levels are nowhere near what they are in Canada, (but far better than the U.S. South) and with Delta the cases are rising fast, but people were acting as if the pandemic were over. It was, to say the least, pretty disturbing to witness what seem to be two distinct realities between our countries. Nevertheless, finally being able to see family and friends in person, both there and here at home, has made a big difference in my emotional equilibrium.

A corner of G.'s garden.

Last week we went out to the Eastern Townships to visit our friend G., which is usually an annual pilgrimage, but one that we missed last year. We enjoyed his gorgeous perennial garden, in the last flush of summer bloom, and shared a memorable meal of fresh sweet corn, tomato and basil salad, duck confit, and blueberries. While there, the three of us picked the black currants that the squirrels and deer had left on G.'s bush, and later that weekend I managed to eek out four jars of intense, deep purple jam, to be shared with G.

Picking black currants, photo by J. - my new favorite photograph of myself.

A few days after that we hosted a tiny candlelit terrace dinner party for our friend V., with just four of us; Julia Child's butter spongecake (French Cooking Vol 1) was the hit of that evening, filled with mascarpone cream and sliced Ontario nectarines and topped with whipped cream and more nectarines and raspberries.

Our terrace garden is mostly flowers and leafy plants, heavy on the begonias, but it's also yielded a bumper crop of grape tomatoes and non-stop herbs, of which I've especially enjoyed the Thai basil and regular Genovese basil and its small-leaved Greek cousin.

Of course some of these summer scenes and bounty have made their way into my artwork. I spent several hours one afternoon sketching the hemlock trees on my father's front lawn, above the lake:

And on the non-edible side of things, yesterday I did a painting of a branch of monkshood, Aconitum, from G.'s garden, and found myself struggling to find the patience to do that sort of detailed botanical painting after a long hiatus.

But I'd wanted to capture its fantastic shape - those dark blossoms that are so evocative of the monk's hoods for which they're named, and because it feels somewhat connected to G. himself, who lives an intentionally contemplative life. Monkshood has quite a history. The botanical genus name Aconitum (there are 250 species) is most likely from the Greek word for "dart," because it was used in antiquity and throughout history as a poison on arrow-tips for hunts and in battle. A couple of grisly anecdotes: in 1524, Pope Clement VII decided to test an antidote for this plant -- also known as the "Queen of Poisons" -- by deliberately giving aconite-tainted marzipan to two prisoners; the one who received the antidote lived but the other died horribly. And in 2020, the president of Kyrgyzstan touted aconite root as a treatment for COVID; four people were hospitalized before his suggestion was debunked.

So in the middle of the summer harvest, it felt rather exotic to learn all of that about a common plant of northern gardens -- in fact, there's quite a bit of it in one of the city's gardens in a park near my home.

I think the limitations of the pandemic have created greater pleasure in these small things; I find myself paying closer attention, and appreciating the first ear of corn, the succulent strawberries, the succession of bloom and the phases of the moon. I dreamt the other night that I had awakened at my father's house at the lake, and looked up through the bedroom window to see the sky glittering more brilliantly than I'd ever seen it, with millions of stars.

People here are still being very prudent, and not gathering in large groups; masks are required indoors, and everyone is bracing for the fall as cases due to the variants begin to rise, even though 84% of the population has had at least one dose, and over 70% have had two. As elsewhere, almost all the hospitalized people are unvaccinated, but there are breakthrough infections and we can all transmit the virus. Please get your shots and be careful, wherever you are.

Olive Trees at Epidaurus

When I began this pastel a month ago, I was thinking with longing about the silvery olive trees in Greece, billowing in the wind off the sea and the mountain tops. That was before the wildfires began that are now raging across the mainland and the Peloponnese, bringing enormous destruction, suffering and loss. Today I look at this picture with different eyes, and have been thinking of the legend of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humans -- for that deed he was glorified by humans, but punished by Zeus, who chained him to a rock where an eagle continually preyed upon his liver, until Hercules freed him many centuries later. But it has taken three millennia for us to begin to understand the deeper meaning behind that myth, and why the gods might not have wanted man to have fire, and to start to recognize the results and the price of our selfish neglect of the earth and all its gifts.

--

This particular olive tree grows at the top of a hill in Epidaurus, site of perhaps the most perfect ancient Greek theater, and of the shrine of Asclepias: a sacred place of pilgrimage and healing for the ancient Greeks. I had climbed up all the steps of the theater to the very top, and then looked out over the back in the opposite direction, where there was a farmer's road and a grove of olive trees, whose leaves made rustling music in the wind.

In the pastel, I tried to capture that sense of restless, continual movement against the stony ochre-tinged earth and the tall mountains in the distance: the time I spent contemplating that scene remains a memory just as vivid as that of the theater and the surrounding shrine. Here is an early stage of the picture, after the first few hours of work:

and another, after a second session:

In the end, it took quite a bit of time to figure out where I wanted to go with this, and how to create a feeling of density as well as movement, where light played with obscurity and shadow. The colors changed too, with the hills and sky becoming a much brighter, clearer blue to complement the reddish earth under the trees.

Because pastel occupies a sort of middle-ground between drawing and brush-painting, it lends itself to expressive drawn strokes as well as rich color and texture that can be built up through layer upon layer. In this case it seemed to suit the way the olive tree grows -- all those tiny leaves that actually create a dense, thick mass of foliage that's dark on the inside, close to the trunk, and shimmery on the outer edges where individual leaves catch the light. As I worked, I had the sense of building something solid out of evanescent powder and pigment, some of which comes originally from the earth -- which is the strangeness of this particular medium.

Like so much of nature, the olive tree is an enigmatic combination of strength and delicacy, and yet it cannot withstand fire. In Greece, much of the land is covered with trees, and an unimaginable number of those trees are olives -- so surely they are burning.

The Greek poet George Sefaris wrote a poem called "Fires of St John." The title refers to the Christian practice, begun in Medieval times, of lighting fires on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, who was described in the Gospel of John as "a burning and a shining light". His feast day is June 24, so it coincided loosely and conveniently with the Summer Solstice, when pagan elements like fire and light and water were already celebrated. The tradition of lighting fires on the eve of St John's feast spread throughout Christendom, and in rural mountainous regions, fires were often lit in a succession along mountain tops. In Sefaris' childhood village in Asia Minor, it was traditional for children to light small fires in the streets and jump over them for good luck. The poem also mentions Herostratus, a Greek arsonist in the 4th century BC who set fire to the Temple of Artemis in order to gain immortal notoriety for himself - a reason he confessed under torture. After his execution, it was forbidden for his name to be mentioned ever again, but instead, it's become synonymous with a person who commits a crime in order to become famous.

Here's the second half of Sefaris' poem:

It is the children who light the fires and cry out before the

    flames in the hot night (Was there ever a fire that some

    child did not light, O Herostratus)

and throw salt on the flames to make them crackle (How

    strangely the houses - crucibles for men - suddenly stare

    at us when the flame's reflection caresses them).

 

But you who knew the stone's grace on the sea-whipped rock

the evening when stillness fell

heard from far off the human voice of loneliness and silence

inside your body

that night of St John

when all the fires went out

and you studied the ashes under the stars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Somber July 1

Though I'm a relatively new Canadian, I am a North American of New England settler/colonial stock, and therefore share in the shame of what was done to the indigenous population of this continent. There is no way I can celebrate Canada Day, in light of the discovery of the graves of nearly 1,000 children who died at residential schools -- and there will certainly be many more. I urge all of us to spend at least some time this day in reflection and sorrow about the tragedy that took place on this soil, and consideration of what can be done to make reparation.

 

In addition, the indigenous people have warned repeatedly about the damage being done to the natural world, and have never abandoned their sense of stewardship. Do we need any more proof than the temperatures and wildfires in western Canada, or the recent tornadoes and violent weather here in Quebec? This is a time of reckoning on so many fronts, and we can either bury our heads in the sand, or demand genuine action by our governments, and work individually for change.

Thinking of Palestine

That's the title of this painting, done back in 2014. Like many of my still lives, it contains objects that are self-referential: this is my father-in-law's family's brass coffee pot, which we now have; the window with blue sky above eye level represents the Palestinian sense of enclosure and imprisonment; and the small fossil which I found in central New York, where I grew up, represents the remnant of Christians still living in Jerusalem.

Neither of my in-laws were Palestinian -- she was Armenian, he was Syrian, and both were Christian -- but they both lived in, knew, and described vividly the great ancient cities of the Middle East when they were inhabited by people of all the Abrahamic faiths, for the most part co-existing peacefully and respectfully throughout the centuries, although of course there were times of genocide and evictions, especially under Ottoman rule. This multi-faith existence was true in Damascus, Aleppo, Istanbul, Beirut, Alexandria, Jerusalem. And it is rapidly becoming true no longer.

I've been involved for two decades in trying to promote dialogue between the faiths, educating people about the history, and working for peace. The situation between Israel and the Palestinians is so much worse today than back in 2000, at the time of the second intifada. I won't go into the reasons here. My heart aches for the lost lives on every side, but especially for the innocent Palestinian children who have been killed before their lives have even had a chance to unfold, not that these nascent lives would ever have been easy or filled with opportunity.

In thinking about the events of the past few weeks, I keep asking myself what I can do. I will give to local charities that send money directly to families; that is certain. But I know that I have at times been guilty of letting my own anger, frustration, and grief make dialogue harder with those who disagree with me, or who understand the situation differently. Because I know a great deal about it, I'm sure I've sometimes come on too strong and added to division, rather than making it clear that what I care about most is peace.

However, the point I want to make today was written very well by the poet Leila Chatti, who said:

 

One cannot advocate for racial equality, LGBT & women's rights,

condemn corrupt and abusive regimes and other injustices

yet choose to ignore the Palestinians' oppression.

It does not add up.

You cannot pick and choose whose human rights matter more.

 

I'm glad to see this point finally being made by courageous politicians in the U.S. and by both Jewish and Arab activists all over the world, particularly the young. That gives me hope. All of us need to join together to try to find a solution, and to "be peace" rather than fighting the same battle in our living rooms and communities. We need to find ways to talk to each other, to tell each other our stories in the same ways that we have begun to tell stories about how we were abused as women, or as Black people, or LGBTQ+ people, or Asian Americans, as Jewish people or Muslims, or any other group that has endured marginalization, oppression, prejudice, and violence. We have to have the courage to be vulnerable, and open up our first-person narratives, because that is what changes hearts and opens formerly closed-minds to the lived reality of others.

And I would say to those who have closed their eyes to this particular oppression because they feel it's intractable, or too difficult to understand -- please ask some questions, please educate yourself by looking at multiple sources. If you don't think that the United States plays a major role in this oppression, and has used some of the same tactics in its own foreign wars, please educate yourself. If you don't remember what happened in South Africa, then perhaps you feel that peace is not possible. But I do not believe that, and I will never believe it.

 

Some resources to start with:

Another person who refuses to give up on peace is former US president Jimmy Carter. His book The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East, revised in 2007, "explains his understanding of the Middle East and seeks to provide an enlightening and reconciling vision for greater peace in the region."

Here is a book list about the history of the conflict from a Palestinian perspective, and there is a lot of other information on this website, Middle East Eye, including videos by young people made during the last month.

My friend Rabbi Rachel Barenblat has written movingly about her own feelings about the conflict over the years and the difficulties it has presented for her in her family and in her congregations; I'm happy to commend her posts to you.

Finally, I was moved to tears by this photo essay, They Were Only Children, in the New York Times about the children, Palestinian and Israeli, who have been killed in the most current conflict. If anything is a desperate call to us to do better, surely this is.

 

Hermit Diary 60. Full Circle

When I began writing this blog, eighteen years ago today, it seemed appropriate to name it after the Trojan princess Cassandra, cursed by her spurned lover, Apollo, to utter prophesies that would always be accurate but never believed. That was on the eve of the Iraq War, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, which I was certain would plunge the world into an endless war between cultures, and a great destabilization that would cause untold human misery through civil war, destruction, loss of life and livelihood, and migration that would be rejected by much of the western world, which would also refuse to admit they had caused it. I am not happy to say that I was right; I would have loved to be wrong.

At the time, I couldn't have predicted the exact shape that the far right would take in the United States, or in other countries: this has been worse than I ever anticipated. Climate change has accelerated even faster than I feared, and I never would have thought the United States would actually withdraw from international environmental agreements - thankfully, this decision has been reversed. I didn't know that I would not only move to Canada, but become a Canadian citizen, though it was a possibility. I'm appalled but not surprised by the racism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and violence of these years,  as I wrote in that first blog post in 2003:

And so I’ve spent the day -- this day that feels like an ultimate Good Friday -- trying to work, trying to do "normal" things, well aware that nothing is normal, that it may be a very long time before the world feels normal again. As a pacifist and a liberal Christian, I’m wracked by two conflicting emotions: the desire to be peaceful and centered ... and an intense anger at everyone who has contributed to bringing us to this abyss. On this day of self-examination I don’t exempt myself. Somehow it doesn’t help in these final hours to know that I’ve been a dedicated antiwar activist, to know I’ve tried. All I have to do is look around at my comfortable home, or hear the oil-burning furnace come on, or draw some clean water from the tap. All I have to do is walk over to the filing cabinet and take out last year’s tax return with my signature at the bottom, authorizing the use of my money for whatever purpose my government decides. What percentage for tanks and bombs and depleted uranium shells? I could do the math and figure out my personal subsidy. If I really wanted to go crazy, I could do the math.

The anger persists, and toward mid-afternoon I realize a lot of it is anger at that particular kind of high-testosterone male aggression that is fueled by revenge. It cannot see the victim, cannot empathize, cannot imagine another way other than striking out with violence. It feeds on itself and on talk with other like-members of the species, enlarging, encouraging, exaggerating, moving inexorably toward a violent, cathartic release...

This is the maleness that has given rise to, and perpetuated, all patriarchal systems. Theirs is the personal patriarchy that treats women as property but insists it is only protecting them. Theirs is the patriarchy that institutionalized oppression of women, and allowed slavery, and fought tooth and nail against emancipation and equal rights for any groups other than itself. It is the patriarchy that destroyed native cultures, and gave rise to colonialism and empire-building. It is the patriarchy that chooses theory over empathy, the patriarchy that always knows best.

Eighteen years later, I wonder how many deaths will it take. The United States has glossed over so many, from the bombing of faraway innocent children to the murders of its own Black, Asian and Hispanic citizens; deaths in the desert and at the border and in prison camps; deaths of women from domestic violence; deaths during an invasion of the nation's Capital;  even -- incomprehensibly -- the deaths of little American children gunned down in their classrooms. Right-wing hatred is continually directed at The Other, but the perpetrators of this terrorism, in almost every single case, have been angry white men.

Still, I never would have predicted what the world has lived through over the past year: a pandemic of such magnitude that it brought the entire world to its knees, cost the lives of millions, and caused untold human suffering that has been unjustly borne by the poor, by people of color, the elderly in care homes, those working in high-risk professions without proper protection, and those without access to technology. 

Because I am not in those categories, I have been safe throughout this long year. Two days ago, I had my first vaccination. It was given in a huge conference center here in Montreal, the Palais des Congres: Quebec has made a commitment to vaccinate all adults with a first dose by our national holiday, June 24, St-Jean Baptiste Day and they are moving very fast toward that goal. The nurse who gave me my shot seemed to be about my age, and I asked her in French if she had been working throughout the pandemic. No, she replied, I'm retired, but I volunteered to come back and do this because I have the training. Merci beaucoup, I replied, and our eyes smiled at each other above our masks. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude -- for the scientists who dedicated themselves to developing the vaccine, the people who were working to deliver it, for being in a country that believed in science, planned well enough and has the money to provide for its citizens, and for reaching this point of greater safety. And I felt overwhelmed, at the same time, with sorrow for the loss, suffering, separation, and disrupted or damaged lives that may take years to recover, if they ever do.

--

I also couldn't have predicted that I would have spent this year making music with a virtual choir, or that an online reading group I organized would have just finished reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon via Zoom, where we can see each other and talk easily in spite of physical separation. The final words spoken in that play by Cassandra, before she dies at the hands of Agamemnon's wife, remind me that human beings haven't changed that much since this lament was written 2500 years ago:

Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well

a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind

one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out;

and that is far the most unhappy thing of all.

 

 

So, as with the images I've posted here, it's a question of holding both the darkness and the light. It's been a year since I began my pandemic diary here. We will continue to be very careful until we've had our second shots, and I think today of my many friends in Europe who still have no access to vaccines, as well as the people of Mexico and Brazil and so many other countries who are having to wait, and wait, while the virus continues to surge. But the light is returning to the north, and to our lives, as we begin to see a way out and a way forward. I'm working on several creative projects that will attempt to express and preserve something about this time, and I may consider publishing a collection of the essays I've written here -- it would be good to know if any of you would be interested in that. I also want to try to encourage others who are younger and having difficulty seeing their way into the future. It's somehow easier when you've lived a long time. Life, you find out, is always unpredictable in both collective and individual ways, and part of living is learning to deal with uncertainty -- not that any of us are able to do that with perfect equanimity, or all the time. Here is a final excerpt from that first blog post, which I think still holds true:

Yet I believe the days of patriarchal power are numbered. The ranks of women and men in all cultures who understand and voluntarily choose a different way of being are increasing. Threatened people will instigate huge battles to maintain the old systems, and for a time it may feel that we are going backwards. It’s unlikely that these changes will happen in our lifetime; perhaps they will take another hundred years or more. But the ultimate trend is clear.

If I am going to deal with my own anger constructively, perhaps I can dredge up some compassion for people who sense, even dimly, the threat to the only system they know, the only way of being they can comprehend... they are locked in a cage that only they can see. How horrible it must be to experience life this way, whether you are Osama bin Laden, hating and fearing the West with its personal freedom, its emancipated women, and its lack of understanding of all the traditions and values you hold dear, or George Bush, thinking that friendship and loyalty can be bought with dollars, terror quelled by violence, and true democracy established by the forced occupation of a sovereign people and the repression of your own.

The world sees through them both, as it begins to see with clearer and clearer eyes all patriarchal systems that promise protection in exchange for economic or political or sexual submission. On this eve of destruction, perhaps we can try to look forward, far forward, seeing these terrible and tragic events as part of the death-throes of patriarchy: a crucial step toward real freedom and justice for all the earth’s people.

 

Hermit Diary 59. Late Winter, Interior

What do we do -- what do I do -- after a year of this?

The past week has not been easy. Everyone is fatigued. The vaccination program is aggressive here, finally, with large sites in convention centers, shopping malls, and the Olympic stadium; on Friday the age limit was lowered to 65 and above, so I am now eligible, even though there are no appointments to be had at the moment. My husband received his first vaccination on Monday. This is good news, and of course I'm relieved and happy about that, but I was actually feeling pretty down most of the week as Quebec observed the one-year anniversary of the first COVID death and we looked ahead to what is still a very uncertain future. Watching a live video of the solemn official ceremony, I found myself in tears as the Orchestra Symphonique played music on a large outdoor screen outside parliament in Quebec City, and then the players stood, and conductor Kent Nagano slowly laid a white rose on a black bench, mirroring the scene as a huge wreath of white roses was laid in memory of those who have died, and politicians laid their own single roses in front of it. I didn't listen to Premier Legault's speech, and felt sorry for him having to find words; silence, music and flowers seemed inadequate enough in the face of so much loss. But these gestures are what we have, and what we do.

With vaccination proceeding well now, and new cases, hospitalizations and deaths lower than they've been for months, the pressure to lift some of the restrictions is tremendous. Doing so too soon seems very foolish, with all of the variants circulating in the city. And because Quebec is delaying the second shots for four months, in order to vaccinate as many people as possible, it will be July before most people my age are fully vaccinated. Even then, we don't know exactly what it will mean. Will we finally be able to travel to the U.S. to see our family? Will we be able to gather with friends this summer? When will the masks come off, if ever? Incredulous, I read about an entirely different reality playing out in Texas and other parts of the U.S. and the world.

Three more months is nothing, I try to tell myself.

So, I play the piano, I read, I draw, I try to write, I go for walks when there are the least people in the park. I cook what seem like endless meals, after making endless grocery orders: going into a store to pick out what we want feels like an unattainable, distant luxury. I try not to worry or allow anxiety to crowd into my life. This is easier during the daytime than in the middle of the night.

I'm sure you've noticed, as I have, that our moods this year have tended to go up and down in waves. I wish I had the spiritual maturity, or strength, to maintain equanimity at all times, and to put the problems of others at the forefront, but of course I can't. The waves seem to correspond not to any particular outside event, but more to how affected I feel personally; when I'm more anxious, the outer world recedes and I find I'm thinking about myself or my own inner circle, but when I'm feeling more resilient, I have the energy and compassion to consider all of us, and how connected we really are.

Yesterday I received a letter from a friend in China which brought me up short, and made me remember how small my own problems are by comparison. The same is true when I read about Mexico, or Brazil: places where we also have friends or family. I need to pull myself up out of the gloom of the pandemic anniversary, summon some more patience, get busy on projects, and appreciate the brighter, longer days, the blooming plants, and these objects that have kept me company during this long winter.

One of those objects is a pre-hispanic ceramic reproduction by a Mexican artisan that my husband gave me recently. We have admired small sculptures like this in the Archaeological Museum in Mexico City, but the four male figures with linked arms, seated around a fire -- now a votive candle -- seem particularly poignant to me right now. When we have our evening meal, we watch the glow of the flickering light on their individual faces. The drawing above was my first attempt to draw this rather complicated arrangement of figures, forming positive and negative spaces. Afterwards, I did the detailed drawing below to try to familiarize myself with how the shapes fitted together, and the drawing became a meditation on human connection too. 

We aren't finished with the virus, and it is certainly not finished with us, in spite of the fact that many of us in wealthy western countries now have access to vaccines. The disparity in access, as always, has to do with poverty, the color of our skins, our ability to use technology, the strengths and weaknesses of our governments. I am holding in my heart those who desperately wait, and also thinking of the incalculable toll of loss and grief, interrupted lives, and dashed hopes that this year has cost. Those of us who survive will continue and someday fairly soon, we'll start picking up the threads of our former lives. I don't think any of us will be the same, but each of us has a chance to be a better person than we were before.

 

Hermit Diary 56. Eros and his bow

Still life with shells, orchids, and bowl. Fountain pen in sketchbook, 9" x 6". The ceramic bowl was made by my mother when she was around 20, long before I came along. I use it most days for my cereal in the morning because it reminds me of her.


On this Valentine's Day I'm thinking about all the people who've lost their lover, their husband or wife, their child or parent -- especially those losses that have occurred during the past year. It's an astronomical number. A mind-boggling number. A river of tears stretching around the world. For many of us, there may not have been an actual death of someone we loved deeply, but days and months when we feared it more than anything we've ever feared.

Why do we take the risk? Why do we love, if we know we're either opening ourselves, or the ones we love, to inevitable, eventual pain?

We seem to be wired for it, don't we? Of course, some of the people with whom we're in relationship came into our lives without any choice on our part: our families, mainly. But when it comes to erotic relationships, is it choice or fate? 

Eros and his mother Aphrodite, from the museum at Pella, Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great.

Our modern minds tell us that love is a product of free will, but I'm not so sure. Cupid is featured in so much valentine imagery, but the Greeks who gave us Eros (the Greek name for the winged child-god, son of Aphrodite/Venus, with his quiver of arrows) didn't see him as a cute, benign cherub, but rather as the source of fatal attractions and passions that often satisfied the gods' desires to punish and torment humans. Their myths and plays are full of stories of star-crossed lovers, maidens and youths dying of unrequited passion after being struck with one of Cupid's arrows, or humans who've spurned the advances of the gods, only to be doomed to a fate of loving someone unattainable, or who dies (or is turned into a rock or a tree or a star) before the couple can attain happiness. Of course there are some stories with happy endings, too, but the Greeks understood the double-edge of love -- as most of us do, too.

I fell in love at first sight, more than forty years ago, and actually did feel like I had been pierced by an arrow. Somehow it worked out and has lasted a lifetime. We know how fortunate we are to wake together each morning. And more than ever before, we do not take this for granted: the happiness of being together is colored with the knowledge that it won't be that way forever. This year, in particular, I'm not inclined to post pictures of hearts and flowers on a day when so many people must be grieving. We ourselves had a close call this past year, and I've never been more frightened, or wept in such anguish. Love comes with risk. Is it worth it?

Yes. At least it has been for me.

Learning to love with my whole heart, and to accept love the same way, isn't the province only of romance: love takes many forms, as it needs to. Unless we open ourselves to the path of loving others, we'll never learn what it means, and never be changed by it. And of course love, and relationships, are never simple. Some exist for a lifetime, but many more do not, and there is always a temptation to hold back and protect ourselves from the possibility of loss. The paradox, though, is that the more we love, the more we see that our heart can be a pitcher that always refills, and that there will always be other people, as well as the earth and all its creatures, who need our love, even if Eros only gave us great romantic love for one person, and for a limited duration. The love we give throughout our life continues to reverberate for a long time. Realizing that nothing, not even death, can destroy my capacity to love, has been a comfort to me.

Hermit Diary 55. Inside, Outside, and Elsewhere

Interior with rubber tree and straw angels. Sailor fude-nib fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

I've been trying to draw and paint more regularly. It's therapy, and it's a joy, and it's a way to remember who I am -- as well as, I suppose, record who I was. My sketchbooks are just as much a diary as a written one, but that reminds me of my recurrent dream where I'm seated at the piano and required to play, except that what's on the music stand isn't a musical score but a painting. Somehow, I start playing what I see, and in the dream, it seems to make sense...

For someone who works in both words and in images, as well as being a musician, that dream feels all too real, and it makes me ask the question of whether a diary of one's days isn't just as valid if it is drawn as when it is written. Of course, the two can be merged together, as I guess I sometimes do here on my blog. But because I often find words (and especially, my own words) tedious, I like the idea of "reading" a sketchbook in order to discern something about a person's life.

Orchid and quilt. Sailor fude-nib fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

When I look through my drawings of the past year, however, I don't think anyone else could tell we're in the middle of a pandemic. Taken in the context of all the other sketchbooks from other years, it's clear that the artist often goes other places, and hasn't in a long while. But otherwise, except for a couple of pages at the beginning where the chaotic state of my mind was evident, all I can detect is a turn toward more color, the same objects appearing repeatedly, and occasional forays into places I've visited, mainly Mexico City, Sicily, and Greece.

As we near the one-year mark of isolation, in another month, in the middle of yet another winter, I can tell you that I am intensely tired of these walls and these two rooms. I've been going up to my studio a couple of afternoons a week, and managed to do a painting of Sicily this week.

Segesta, Sicily. Watercolor, 12" x 9".

I was working on a Cartiera Magnani "Toscana" watercolor block, which is very different from my usual Arches paper: much more absorbent and "cottony", without sizing. Although the colors immediately sank into the paper and were both harder to manipulate and less vibrant, I found I was liking the effect, the difference in feeling, and not being able to rely on a practiced technique. I painted everything until the very end with a 1/2-inch dagger brush from Rosemary & Co., and that was a departure too. Sometimes it's good to shake things up. And it's good to go places in our imaginations, and in the books we read and the drawings we do. For now, that has to suffice.

Hermit Diary 53. Few Words for this Horror.

I'm thinking tonight of particular photographs of yesterday's storming of the U.S. Capitol: the image of the burly white guy carrying a confederate flag through the Capitol rotunda. The image of a blonde white woman and her friend, seated on the dais of the Speaker of the House, taking selfies. A line of Capital Police on the steps, two of them jostling each other and laughing as the mob ravaged the building and milled around below them. A video of the President of the United States and his family in a tent, keeping time to loud pop music, while watching the rally on large screens, like it was a party. And then inciting that mob to unprecedented actions in the history of the country, before retreating into the White House, behind the barricades.

A friend posted the phrase that this would go down as "one of the whitest moments in American history." Many of us are well aware what would have happened if the people storming the Capitol had been black.

The Italian newspaper, La Stampa, published its front-page story today with the headline, "Once Upon a Time, there was America."

I'm afraid that sums up how I'm feeling.

Is there a road back from this abyss? Perhaps, partially. But I think a line was crossed yesterday: the culmination of four years of permissibility and normalizing of hate speech, violence, lies, militarism, white supremacy, injustice and cruelty toward everyone who isn't white or male, and total lack of respect for law and democracy.

The saddest thing is that this enormous damage to American democracy was predictable, and preventable. The pandemic has shown us how selfish, self-serving, and irresponsible a great many people are. In politics too: Every one of the elected Republicans. The administration officials who agreed to serve, and are now deserting the ship like rats. Prominent former officials who've refused to speak out.

But all the ordinary people who voted for Trump and have made excuses for his behavior are the ones who are truly complicit in this. All the people who have refused to understand that Black Lives Matter, and do something about it. All the people who refuse to believe climate change is real, and work against the clock to reverse it. All the people who continue to support drone strikes that kill brown children, or turn their head the other way when migrants are put in indefinite detention in warehouses, or children put in cages on the southern border. All the people who think they deserve good health care, but poor people don't. The people who don't think women are equal, deserving of respect, safety, and autonomy, or, likewise, the people who refuse to accept those of different sexualities and genders. I don't know. I could go on...it's a long list.

Unfortunately that list includes vastly more people than those who subscribe to conspiracy theories. It comprises all the well-meaning people who have seen what was happening, and thought it was wrong, but did nothing because they had their own problems, or, more likely, because they weren't really being hurt directly -- or perhaps even benefiting. Because they were comfortable in their own privilege.

Tonight I just want to ask each of us to look in the mirror and ask, Where was I, and where am I going to be? Because if you think Joe Biden and the Democrats alone are going to fix this cancer that has been growing for decades, of which Trump is merely a symptom and a mouthpiece, you are very badly deluded.