the cassandra pages

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.

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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.

 

 

 

Hermit Diary 48. Color to the Rescue

There is nothing greyer than a northern November, before it snows. And then, when the dark days and long nights of November stretch into December, and the sun feels like it's on permanent holiday in Patagonia, so far away that it's forgotten us entirely, I'm not the only one who has trouble. I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder in a clinical way, but it's a rare person living this far north who isn't affected at all by the lack of light, the wan sky, and the monochromatic dullness of the city and the bare trees. And that's in  a "normal" year: in 2020, these factors are combined with the isolation and fatigue of the pandemic, dread rather than anticipation of the holidays, and the knowledge that we're only at the beginning of what's sure to be a long winter.

While it's still relatively easy to walk, I'm trying to get outside every day, and I'm also doing a daily online program of stretching workouts, because I know that moving my body helps my mental as well as physical health. We cook a lot and eat well, and although we're often awake for hours in the night, we eventually go back to sleep, so I don't feel physically tired. Our feline companion is a delight and a comfort. I'm quite busy. But I admit: I'm very sick of living this way. 

As I wrote a while ago, color helps. I'm trying to wear brighter colors, and to get out our most colorful ceramics and textiles for our home. We don't plan to put up a Christmas tree, because our houseplants have taken up all the room we've got, but there are little lights and a few ornaments on the rubber plant-that-is-now-a-tree, lights outside our terrace, lights on an evergreen garland above the bookshelves.

And I've been drawing and painting. I was one of those kids who could happily spend hours arranging her giant box of crayons, and even now, just opening my box of watercolors gives me a little rush of delight. I hope I never lose that pleasure at the sight of an array of colors, and the endless possibilities they represent. The other day I got a delivery of a set of colored tissue papers, maybe for gift wrapping, maybe for collage: it cost something like $7, and looks to me like a world of pleasure. I also sorted through a bunch of old origami paper, pulling out a whole set of blue shades to make a ten-pointed folded star (more on that in a subsequent post). You don't have to be an artist to incorporate some "color therapy" into your day: it can be as simple as spending a half hour scribbling with colored pencils, making abstract patterns with watercolors, sorting your lipsticks or eyeshadows by shade, or your neckties; organizing your closet, your yarn, your table linens or towels. You have my solemn guarantee that it will make you feel better.

We're all having to dig deep right now, and many of us are struggling with loss as well as anxiety and uncertainty. The holidays are going to be a mixed bag -- a break in the usual routine, perhaps, but nothing like the holidays we normally share with family and friends. What's the hardest for you, and what's helping? Let's tell each other.

 

 

 

Hermit Diary 47. Talismans

 

 

I made this little video in response to a prompt: What are the talismans that have gotten you through these months? What will you be taking with you into the New Year? (Thank you, wmc.)

Hermit Diary 45. Microcosm

I've made terrariums since I was a little girl. These miniature worlds fascinated me, perhaps because they reflected the natural places where I often played with my dolls: the mossy crevices between tree roots; the lush gardens of moss and lichens and fungi growing on stumps and dead trees in the woods, the little glades of clubmosses, ferns, wildflowers, and tiny tree seedlings in spots that caught a bit more light in the understory. In the fall, my mother and I would go on a gathering walk, collecting these small lifeforms for a terrarium that would stay green through the long winter, often in an old aquarium tank that no longer held water well enough for fish.

My husband and I recently brought all our plants inside for the winter, and, for the first time, set up grow-lights and humidifiers to help them out and increase the range of plants we could maintain during the days of short, dim northern light -- and also to help ourselves endure and enjoy what promises to be our own long winter captivity in a small apartment. We have an area for herbs, we've got orchids and begonias and many houseplants, and another place for cacti and succulents, all of which seem, so far, to be thriving.

The plants in a woodland terrarium are very different from these: mosses and ferns are primitive plants that reproduce by spores rather than flowering; lichens are composite organisms of a fungus living in symbiotic relationship with algae or cyanobacteria. Mosses are non-vascular plants that have been around for 470 million years; ferns, which have a vascular system, first appear in fossils in the Devonian period, 360 million years ago. Today, primitive plants persist in environments on the planet that reflect early conditions on earth: at the volcanic rift valley of Thingvellir, in Iceland, I spent one of the happiest days of my life exploring the riches of that tundra landscape where mosses and a wide variety of lichens thrive on volcanic rock. In geologic history, slow-growing mosses like these absorbed CO2 and dissolved the underlying rock, releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that caused marine die-offs and C02 absorption that ultimately led to the formation of the polar ice caps. Today, the reverse is happening.

Thingvellir, Iceland

My field-biology mentor, Herm Weiskotten, increased my knowledge of these species during the years I worked with him in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A botanist by heart, he loved nothing more than primitive plants, and we roamed central New York together in search of rare clubmosses and maidenhair spleenworts and other specialized plants to be grown in terrariums for our educational exhibits, or carefully transplanted into limestone outcrops or acidic woodland environments on our interpretive trails. One of my most precious possessions is a bent and water-damaged Peterson Field Guide to the Ferns and Clubmosses with Herm's name in the front, and several pressed fern fronds between the pages: he gave it to me after a misadventure where we both fell into the water of some remote bog.

I haven't had a terrarium for years, but as the leaves came down and the weather turned colder, I kept thinking about making one. We have a perfect glass bowl that originally held miniature succulents, a gift from our friend Jenny. Last weekend I brought it home from the studio, lined the bottom with stones and charcoal, added a layer of woody soil, and started gathering moss from northern sides of buildings on the city streets. Yesterday I went for a walk up on Mount Royal, the large hill we Montrealers call "the mountain", where I hoped to find a greater variety of potential inhabitants. It was a warm day, and I was happy being in the woods; I left the regular paths and wandered through the blanket of fallen leaves, checking out fallen tree limbs and moss-covered boulders, climbing higher and higher to where I thought I'd be able to find some lichens. After an hour or two, I came back down to my bicycle and the city with my small backpack holding treasures: mosses, a liverwort, grey-green and chartreuse lichens, a tiny shelf fungus, bits of shale and birch bark, a small fern.

This small and symbolic act has a lot to do with the election. As I’ve worried and waited, my thoughts keep returning to two issues in particular: the struggles of blacks, people of color, and migrants, and the peril facing our climate. The damage already done to both by the current administration is incalculable, but four more years could be irreparable.

I’ve lived a long time, and recognize that, like the lichens, my life continues to exist in a delicate balance with the other lives on our planet -- human, animal, plant, single-celled organisms, bacteria, and those, like viruses, that inhabit a shadowy zone between the animate and inanimate.

The terrarium is not a sealed, balanced, self-sufficient and self-perpetuating biodome, but a micro-environment for which I’m responsible: it can succumb easily to mold, drought, or neglect. As such, it’s a microcosm of the responsibility we bear for everything and everyone more vulnerable than we are, and thus subject to our destructiveness, indifference, and self-interest.

In the end, I find I care less about the survival of the human race than about the survival of biodiversity: the extinction of species at our hands has always cut me to the heart. I shudder to imagine a future for human beings that involves artificial environments or other planets where "trees" and "animals" only exist in giant, controlled biodomes isolated from a toxic exterior. The climate crisis will dwarf anything we’ve experienced so far, increasing human migration and threatening every remaining species as well as the air we breathe and the water we drink. The election of an American president who respects science and understands what we’re facing is perhaps one step back from the precipice, but we haven’t a moment to lose. This little world will remind me of that fact every day; unlike the larger one, I can hold it in my hands, admire its fragile beauty, and try to give it what it needs.

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.

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

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

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

The poem begins:

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

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

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

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

and it ends:

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

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

--

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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