the cassandra pages

Review: A Recipe for Daphne

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish politics or revisionist history. However, I was very pleased to read and review Nektaria Anastasiadou's  new novel A Recipe for Daphne, for Cha: An Asian Journal, which is based in Hong Kong. It's an engaging, well written novel about the dwindling Rum (Greek Orthodox) community of Istanbul, their complicated history and challenging future. I also reflected on the history of the different religious and ethnic minorities under and after the Ottoman Empire, including that of my Armenian and Protestant in-laws. When doing the research for the review, I learned a lot more about the history of the ethnic and religious minorities in former Ottoman territories and in Turkey -- and it is not a happy story. Please go to the review page on Cha if you'd like to read the full piece; I'll just excerpt a little of it here. Kosmas, mentioned below, is an Istanbul pastry chef who falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful American woman visiting her aunt in Istanbul and searching for her own roots.

Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.

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I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.

A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.

Thank you to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor of Cha: An Asian Journal for publishing this review, and for all the tireless work she does on behalf of Asian literature and writers. I first "met" Tammy when Dave Bonta and I were editing qarrtisiluni, where she submitted excellent work that we published on several occasions. That was a long time ago! It's always a pleasure to find these old connections circling back around, and to make new ones.

 

 

Short Story with Swans

Mountains and Orchard

The large mountains behind the city of Edessa intrigued us, and one afternoon, curious about what we might find, we drove west of the city and up into them. After leaving the main highway, we followed a smaller paved road through huge orchards of densely-planted, unfamiliar fruit trees with an upright habit of loosely vertical branches -- were they almonds? I got out to take a closer look, and decided they might be cherry trees, but there were more than we imagined possible, stretching for miles in every direction, the only cultivated crop in what appeared to be a rocky, dry wilderness.

After traveling along these orchards for a while, we came upon a small hill village. It was built of rock, and although we saw a few cars and motorcycles parked along the roads or in driveways, there were no people walking around, just a few stray cats and the occasional dog. The little closely-placed houses seemed well cared for, with tall, blooming rose bushes and sometimes a heavily laden pomegranate tree in a front yard. But the village streets were so steep that our underpowered car needed several tries to gain the top of one of them.

After leaving the village, all signs of habitation gradually vanished. The road, now unpaved, climbed and narrowed; the slopes became steeper and rockier, and the vegetation wilder. Figs and hop vines scrambled with abandon over every tree and rocky outcrop. Just as we were about to declare defeat and turn around before the road became impassable, we suddenly came upon a blue lake with a flock of large white birds on it, in the middle of nowhere.

We pulled the car off onto the non-existent shoulder of the road, and got out; the water wasn't far from the road itself and you could stand on the edge and get a good look at the birds, who seemed unconcerned about the presence of human eyes. All of the white, large birds were swans but, closer to us, we could also see a flock of small ducks that I couldn't identify. Wildflowers, some of which were familiar and others not, bloomed on the edge of the bank, and behind the lake, the mountains rose: dry, rocky, bare except for the occasional patterned rows of a vineyard or orchard. Just beyond them was the border, and North Macedonia.

After ten minutes or so, we heard a vehicle approaching. It was a small beat-up truck that stopped when it came around the bend in the road and saw our car, parked on the side. The driver peered at us out his window, and then pulled off in a nonchalant fashion which seemed to indicate both familiarity with the road, and that there was seldom any traffic to worry about. Both doors opened, and a middle-aged Greek couple got out and walked closer. Initially they seemed concerned that we'd had a breakdown, but they quickly realized, when we gently gestured toward the water, that we were watching something.  I recalled "poulia" - "birds" - but couldn't remember the word for swan, which annoyed me because the word appears along with a picture of a swan on the red tins of the "swan" brand of Greek tomato paste and sauce. I had liked those tins so much that I had brought an empty one home, from our first trip here, to use in my studio. 

But the couple now said "swans" aloud  -- "keeknous!" - and nodded to us in some excitement. They walked over to the side of the road to get a closer look. "Mikres papies" said the woman, pointing at the little birds in the foreground, "little ducks." I nodded and repeated, "papies," which was another word I had learned and forgotten.

The four of us stood watching the birds on the blue water for a few minutes, and then they turned to us, quizzically. Both of them had open faces, and were dressed simply; they were probably local people who lived nearby. He was stocky, with a round face and short grey hair; she was short, smiling, and blond. "Tourist?" they asked. "Canada," I said, pointing at both of us. "We like your country," I managed to say in Greek, and in a combination of pantomime and words I conveyed that it was our third trip there. "How long?" they asked. "Three weeks." "Pou?" "Where?" "Edessa, Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Athens..." I stumbled over the word "Chalkidiki", the peninsulas to the east of Thessaloniki, and looked to them for help, and they quickly pronounced it for me.  We all laughed.

Before they had arrived, I had plucked a ripe fig from the tree growing wild on the lake side of the road, and the woman spotted it in my hand. Ah! she said, and told her husband to go look.  She brought her cupped hand to her mouth and raised her eyebrows, then pointing at my hand, wanting to know if I had eaten one. I shook my head no. The man went over to the tree and rummaged through the branches, looking for the best fruit, and picking a handful. He held out his open palm to me, and to my husband, proffering the small, dark figs. We each took one, and he pressed us to take more, so we did. The man nodded slightly, pointing his index finger toward me and then toward himself in a gesture that said, "Look!" He took a fig between his left forefinger and thumb, and began to slowly but deftly peel off the skin with his right hand, looking over at me to make sure I was watching -- it was a lesson. Then he split the flesh, examined it to make sure it met his expectations, and handed the peeled fig to me, gesturing to me to eat it. I took the fig and ate it in two bites; it was delicious. "Nostimo," I said. "Efcharisto!" ("Delicious, thank you!") and we all began to pick and lazily peel and eat figs, keeping the unconcerned, floating swans in the corner of our vision. The woman split a fig open, laughed, and shook her head "no", making a wiggling gesture with her finger as she showed it to me -- that one had a worm in it. I nodded, and glanced at Jonathan, who raised his eyebrows and surreptitiously dropped the fig he had been holding into the bushes.

Swan and wild fig tree

After a little while, we felt it was time to leave, and I gestured to the couple that we were going back to our car. They had been talking together and grazing on the figs, while J. and I took some pictures of the swans and the lake, but now we approached them to say goodbye. I smiled at the man and put my hand on my upper chest. "Elisabeth," I said. He grinned and said, in Greek, "Like the queen!" I got it and laughed and nodded, then pointed to Jonathan and said his name. They shook hands. The man touched his own chest and said, "Konstadinos," and then turned to his wife, who was also smiling at us, and said, in halting English, "She is  -- Chryseis. It means...gold."

We drove back through the endless orchards of fruit trees, down the winding roads through the stone villages, until we re-joined the main road that led to the Edessa highway. I couldn't believe I had actually met someone named Chryseis. At the beginning of the Iliad, a young Trojan virgin of that name has been seized by the Greeks and given to their leader, Agamemnon, as his slave and mistress. She is the daughter of Chryses, a high priest of Apollo, but Agamemnon refuses her father's pleas to return her. Chryseis, desperate, prays to Apollo. The god hears her and sends a plague that strikes the Greek camp...and sets in motion further events that alter the course of the war. (The name Chryseis literally means "of Chryses", and it is Chryses that means "golden".)

When we were finally back at our inn, we asked the innkeeper about the fruit trees we had seen up in the mountains. She asked us what towns we had been near. "Agras?" I offered. "Nisi?" She nodded, and answered, "Then they must have been kerasies. Cherries." She gazed at us calmly with that knowing, slightly sly smile we've seen on many Greek faces when suggesting something we must do or try: the special dessert they are offering "on the house", the free glass of homemade tangerine liqueur, the sight to be seen if we would just walk up to the top of the hill. "You must come back in the spring," she said, "when they are all in bloom!"

A Brief Stay in Exarcheia

Today, November 17, marks the fateful day in 1973 -- fifty years ago -- when tanks were driven through the gates of the National Polytechnic University in Athens in an attempt to put down the student-led uprising against the military junta that had ruled Greece since 1967. 24 civilians were killed. Several days before, students had barricaded themselves in the main university buildings and called on their fellow citizens to rise up. These events are acknowledged today as the beginning of the overthrow of that oppressive regime. They are still commemorated with a permanent shrine, including the wrecked and twisted metal gate, inside the university entrance where many of the victims fell.

In preparation for today's expected 50th-year commemoration, we hear that 5,000 police have been stationed in strategic areas around the city, including at the US and Israeli embassies. The US embassy is the usual end point of student marches on this date every year, since the country is generally blamed by them for having been in league with the military junta, and now for being a partner in "imperialist wars." The police have said that drones and helicopters will be hovering and transmitting images to their operations center throughout the day. Yesterday, crowds of people, as well as the political opposition leader and the head of the communist party, laid wreaths and carnations at the Polytechnic site in memory of the students who were killed.

The surrounding neighborhood, called Exarcheia (or Exarchia) continues to be known as the home of anarchists, activist students, and bohemian intellectuals who oppose the government's authoritarian and conservative policies. In recent decades it also became a refuge for migrants who established squats in empty buildings, with periodic crackdowns by the government to clear out those settlements. The clashes between students and police have often included tear gas, Molotov cocktails, and broken windows. However, Exarcheia also one of the most vibrant and interesting neighborhoods in the city, and we've stayed there twice.

I drew this view into the courtyard of the historic neoclassical buildings of the Polytechnic University back in 2019, from our apartment balcony. At that time, students had taken over the main building and seemed to be living there, and in the evenings there were meetings with music and speeches in this courtyard -- all peaceful but continuing well into the late hours. These were the original university buildings; the main campus is now located elsewhere. 

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After arriving in Athens our taxi dropped us off at our small hotel, where we'd be for the next two nights, and after a nap we went out to explore. Many tourists would probably be freaked out by Exarcheia, with its Marxist posters, abundant graffiti, edgy vibe, and continual police presence. We were prepared for that because we'd stayed in the area previously and realized there was little to fear under normal circumstances. What got to us this time wasn't any perception of danger on the streets, but the greatly increased police presence since four years ago: large groups of helmeted police riding motorcycles through the narrow streets at all hours, and three huge buses filled with police in full riot gear, with shields, parked on a main street, apparently perpetually ready to confront a student demonstration. Maybe, as children of the 1960s and peace activists who have experienced plenty of this ourselves, it feels unfortunate and wrong, but not that abnormal.

The next morning, jet-lagged but hungry, we walked up to a block of small restaurants with outdoor seating that we'd passed the night before, coming home from dinner. We chose a little eastern-European café, and sat there for an hour and a half, watching what was going on as the street came alive, shops opened, and people began their days. The gentleman shown in the drawing passed us, wearing a long black coat and carrying an armload of heavy books. He sat down at a table outside the door of the neighboring café, where he was greeted by the server in a way that made me think he must be a habitué. Was he a retired professor? Were those clerical robes? He didn't seem to be an Orthodox priest. Whatever the case, I'm sure he was doing exactly what he did on many mornings in his own familiar neighborhood  - sitting at that same table, ordering coffee, reading, checking his phone, and having a few cigarettes. Likewise, the man who ran the small fruit and vegetable shop on the other side rolled up his awning and came out to chat with a fellow who pulled up on a motorcycle, then later a woman doing her morning errands, and two men who sat down at a table to smoke with him: longtime neighbors and friends.

When our young server returned to the table with our breakfast order, I asked how things were going, and mentioned the police buses we'd seen the previous night. He shook his head and asked softly: "You know about this neighborhood?" We nodded. "It's been getting worse and worse. Constant intimidation, on the orders of the government. It's to try to keep the students quiet, keep them from protesting their policies. And the problem is, say if something bad happened or you had an accident late at night and needed help, then no one would come." We had the impression that student opposition to the government's immigration policies was at the heart of this increased intimidation, and also their direct opposition to police brutality, but there were many other issues as well, from economic policy to the planned construction of a new metro stop in the heart of the neighborhood.

Typical posters pasted up on the streets announced demonstrations, and exhorted people to take action on various issues, such as migrant rights, anti-police brutality, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, war in the Ukraine. The large letters on the top poster here say something like (Greek speakers please correct me!): The Elector is Responsible / Remember / The people choose the leaders they deserve. It's accompanied by a picture of Karl Marx. (This is basically the same as Alexander Hamilton's famous quote: "People get the government they deserve" - an ironic comment from an American founding father, in the light of current world and domestic events.)  The next sentence in black letters, is a quote from the "national poet of Greece", Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), and reads: "My poor people, good and beloved. Always gullible and always betrayed." The poster below says "Marxism 2023" and advertises an action that took place this past July in Athens.

There's a lot of graffiti everywhere. It ranges from spray-painted names and tags, such as those above, to some breathtaking murals like the one below.

Everything in Exarcheia is not political. Because of the intellectual/artist/student vibe, the area is filled with small bookstores, art supply stores, vintage and ethnic clothing and thrift stores, small artist and craft boutiques, cafés and restaurants -- many of which are very good and far more affordable than those a few blocks away near the city center and Syntagma Square. One of our favorite restaurants is a mezedopolia, or "small plates" restaurant specializing in meze, located at the top of the hill. You eat at café tables in an outdoor terrace where vines climb on the rustic pergolas overhead, and cats wander between the table, in an atmosphere of convivial groups of friends. The food is fantastic, the wine and ouzo are great, and who could complain about jasmine blossoms falling on your table as you finish your coffee?

During our three visits to Greece, we've spent considerable time in Athens and grown to love this gritty, complicated city not just for its monuments, art, and cultural history but also for its people and vibrancy today. Most tourists sleep and spend their time and money in the city center and the area around the Acropolis. These are fairly sanitized and curated, with English signs everywhere, good restaurants that provide predictable menus and a "Greek experience," and shopping from the very high-end to souvenir shops filled with evil-eye jewelry, sandals, cheap reproductions of classical vases, olive oil soaps and Mediterranean sponges. You're much more likely to get your pocket picked in those crowded places than in Exarcheia. But you won't be as likely to fall on cracked and uneven pavement, or stumble over garbage and animal waste, or find yourself in a neighborhood populated by non-white immigrants wearing ethnic and religious dress. We've stayed in Plaka, the area near the major museums and monuments, and yes, it is pretty incredible to go up on your rooftop and watch the sun set over the Parthenon. But it's also much more expensive, and at this point we are less interested in seeing those sights again than in trying to understand the city and the country in a deeper way. When we planned this particular trip to begin and end in Athens, we deliberately chose two neighborhoods - Exarcheia and another, close to it and to the northwest - where we'd see a different side of the city.

Having said that, I am always skeptical about how much a visitor can ever truly understand a place where they don't live and don't speak the language well. You can read history from a book, and absorb plays and poetry and art, and enjoy the local cuisine. You can even get a college degree, like me, in "classical civilization." But there is no way to fully grasp the lived reality of present-day people, or the effect of politics, and economic and social movements over time, on actual lives, without living there for a long time yourself. I know that I've been extremely irritated by newcomers to Quebec who rhapsodize about how wonderful it is, and even pontificate about the political situation, when they actually don't know anything beyond the superficial. I hope - even after twenty years here - that I am always willing to listen to French Canadians about their own long, fraught, and particular history. Likewise, I've now lived in Quebec long enough to have my own opinions and experiences, as well as a personal stake in it and full citizenship, so I resent being made to feel like an outsider, while acknowledging how complicated such questions of belonging and identity can be. 

With an unfamiliar country, like Greece, if we want to learn, we have to get off the beaten path, live in real neighborhoods, talk to Greek people, and remain porous, inquisitive, and open-minded. I'll write more about my language adventures in another post. I just want to express my respect and humility at the outset, and try very hard not to write with more authority than is justified. Certain qualities, however, cannot be mistaken: the natural beauty of a place; the warmth, generosity and openness of the people; and an intangible sense of a history to which I do feel, in some soul-level and lifelong ways, connected.

Views of Edessa

View of Edessa, Greece, looking southeast.

After arriving in Athens on October 8, we stayed in the city two nights to give our bodies a chance to acclimate, and then took off in our rental car for the roadtrip portion of our Greek trip.

The first day's drive was the longest of the entire trip, more than six hours if we had gone straight north and not stopped, but we did take a break for a picnic lunch on the seashore, and then stopped a few more times to take pictures of cotton fields, orchards, and mountains on our way to the north of Greece. Our destination was Edessa, a city in the foothills of the Pindus Mountains near the Macedonian border, not far from Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, and Vergina, where his father Philip II and many other Macedoniam royalty are buried. We were going there not so much for culture or ancient history, although there is plenty, but for natural beauty and a few days of quiet decompression as we began our journey. And spectacularly beautiful it was.

The old city, with its fortifications, sits high above the newer Edessa. We stayed in Varosi, the oldest inhabited part, above the fortification walls, in a stone building that has been lovingly restored and turned into a bed and breakfast inn. Our room was on the second floor of the heavily-timbered structure, with lace curtains and a wooden balcony that looked south across the broad valley, and east toward Thessaloniki.

View to the northeast. The mountains weren't snow-covered, just rocky.

One of the main attractions of Edessa has always been its waterfalls, which spill from rivers coming off the high mountains behind Varosi, and historically powered the city's textile mills. The cataracts were within walking distance from our inn, along with low-key restaurants, service businesses, and a tiny Orthodox church in a shadowed park filled with ancient plane trees, above an old grain mill, no longer in use. Now the water is channeled and collected for human use and water power in the valley far below the falls. Everything was very lightly curated, and because it was already the off-season, we saw few other tourists.

Edessa is thought to be where Caranus -- ancestor of Alexander the Great -- founded the first capital of ancient Macedon. Our waiter at dinner confided to us that Greece had it wrong in spending so much money on the archaeological site of Alexander's purported birthplace, Pella, because those who live in Edessa know that he was really born there. Whether that is true or not, ancient ruins have started to be excavated down in the valley. The city eventually became a major cultural center during medieval times, and has been the site of much fighting during all the centuries and all the wars since, because of its strategic border location and the clashes between Byzantines and Serbs, Ottomans and Greeks, Bulgarians and Greeks, Nazis and Allied powers, and Communists factions and Slav-Macedonians during the Greek Civil War.

The streets of Varosi are ancient and beautiful, and here we met the first of the many stray cats with whom we'd became acquainted during our journey. Some were in good shape, others less so, but many people put out food and water for them, and the cats are opportunistic too, hanging around restaurants where they know they're likely to find dropped tidbits, or sympathetic diners. This beautiful kitten spent most of her days on a rock near the door of our inn, and it was only later that we discovered she was managing on only three legs.

Within a short distance from our inn, I think I counted five Greek Orthodox churches and chapels. The main cathedral was open, and a tall bearded priest in his black robes sat talking with his assistants in the garden courtyard as I went up the steps. In the foyer I lit a thin beeswax candle for peace, placing it in the sand-filled container with other burning tapers, as war broke out in the Middle East. I sat for a while, meditating beneath the huge brass chandelier and its hanging ostrich eggs. The priest eventually came in, kissed the two main icons, and then paused near me to say a warm kαλημέρα, good morning, before he disappeared behind the iconostasis.

Someone's sunken garden, orchard, grapevines, and extraordinary woodpile.

I was able to draw in Edessa, on our balcony, and expected to be able to continue what I had begun throughout the trip, but it turned out to be almost impossible as our pace picked up and we had less time to just sit and observe our surroundings. I took lots of pictures though, and did as many fast sketches as I could, so in the weeks and months to come I hope I'll be able to fill in the gaps. Now I look back at our stay in Edessa as a particularly quiet and lovely few days -- and although I didn't draw the famous waterfalls, I'll try to paint them to show you.

Pine tree and a view toward the lower town, with orchards and vineyards.

In Defense of Omicron

An inscription. Altes Museum, Berlin.

It was my mother who first taught me the Greek alphabet. I don't know how or why she knew it, because she didn't know the language itself, but she knew the letterforms and their names, and taught them to me when I was still quite small. We used to chant the alphabet, just as children do when learning the Roman one; alpha, beta, gamma, delta, zeta, eta, theta... and I heard her voice again when I sat down in my first ancient Greek class in university and the professor presented us with the alphabet to be learned for the next day. There was something about the letterforms that obsessed me then, and continues to obsess me now: to me, they are extremely beautiful and balanced, whether carved in an inscription, or playfully scattered around the heads of characters on a vase, or written by hand in script in my notebook. I like making these forms. They can be seen, of course, as a code that my mind used to translate laboriously, but now does quickly, into sounds and their equivalent Roman letters, but I don't want to see them as a code, but solely as their own identity. For some reason, I just like being around them, having them in my life.

Pages of Aristotle, from a monastery library in Meteora.

I don't remember much of my ancient Greek, but a pandemic project has been to study some of the modern language. When we made our first trip to Greece, I was completely engrossed in sounding out all the Modern Greek signage; and at ancient archaeological sites, I would spend a lot of time looking at bits of inscriptions and was thrilled when I could actually understand a name or a word, but frustrated that I couldn't communicate much at all. Now I do at least one lesson a day on Duolingo, often two. My first uninterrupted "streak" ended after 200 days or so when, somehow, I simply forgot; today will be day 320 of the next streak. As I wrote earlier in the pandemic, it's a lazy and not terribly effective way to study a language if you really want to become fluent; I still believe you've got to put in the hard and boring work of memorizing conjugations and lists and grammatical rules, and I haven't done much of that. But I know a lot more than I did when I started, even if I'll still be tongue-tied if we ever make it to Greece again. I'd be a lot faster now at knowing what I was looking at in signage, be able to read a menu, ask some questions, be polite, but I'm not sure how much useful material I've actually learned, and very much doubt I'd understand much of what was said to me, at least at first.

What has kept me at it, I think, is this strange desire to be in the presence of those ancient letters every day and live in their world, which is not the world of Roman letters, is not at all English or French or German -- though those languages all owe a great debt to Greek -- but a set of symbols, descended from the alphabet of the seafaring Phoenicians, that have been used to write the Greek language since the 8th or 9th century B.C. That, alone, is incredible to me.

The numbers, in my notebook.

Obviously these letters have been used to represent a lot of things over the years, especially in mathematics and science. And now, we've got virus variants named for Greek letters, so that geographical places can avoid the stigma of attachment, and subsequent blame. I wasn't too upset about Alpha, or Delta -- both of which are overused letters in fraternity names, and therefore seemed like fair game -- but Omicron? Omicron rather upset me. I like the word itself, and am very fond of the letter, which is so...round, simple, elemental. It's one of the few letters of the Greek alphabet that remained entirely unchanged in the Roman, precisely because of that simplicity and the universal necessity of its sound.

I had better steel myself: we're probably in for a slew of variants, and Greek variant names. For me, though, omicron will remain first and foremost a letter, a sound, and a form: the universal circle. Something beautiful, written by human hands, almost forever.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hermit Diary 58. My Companions the Books

Today, I learn, is #WorldBookDay. Who makes up these things? (And immediately hear a response in my head: "Publishers like you!") Be that as it may, in my life, every day is book day, and it's been so practically ever since I can remember. Last week the members of my book group started talking about when we had begun to be readers, and what form it took for each of us. We told stories about the books in our homes, local libraries in the small towns many of us had grown up in, how reading early made problems for us in school, happy hours spent reading in treehouses, or curled up on couches on rainy days, what those favorite books were and how they shaped us as the readers we are today. I've never been a solitary introvert, but I was definitely a bookworm whose parents often told me, "Come on, get your nose out of that book, and go outside!" This was a somewhat half-hearted admonition from my mother, who was pretty much of a bookworm herself. As an only child, I was alone a lot, and books always felt like my friends as well as boats and planes and magic carpets on which I could travel to other places and times.

Exactly one year ago today, Jonathan and I made a decision at 5:00 in the morning, half an hour before calling a taxi, to cancel our planned trip to Mexico City because a pandemic looked like it was actually going to happen. We figured we could get down there all right, but coming back on March 20 might not be easy, or safe. A number of people thought we were being over-cautious, but it proved to be the right decision. During this long year, one that I don't think any of us will be able to truly process until much more time has passed, life has changed a lot. In addition to the good developments, like becoming proficient at Zoom and finding new friends, communities, and artistic outlets through that medium, we've stopped seeing family and friends, moving freely from place to place even within the city, having a studio, singing with my choir and going to the cathedral, shopping in stores, having routine medical appointments or getting our hair cut, going to any kind of in-person event, or even having normal visits with our neighbors. Montreal has been hit very hard, and people over 65 have been asked, and at times required, to stay in their homes. Thank God none of us knew it would be this bad, or go on this long, or I think we would have been even more despairing. Although it's been a very hard year for us in a number of ways, I feel incredibly lucky that we're still here, and we have appointments for our first vaccinations next week. I'm immeasurably grateful to the scientists who have developed these life-saving, world-saving vaccines in record time. I just wish that they would be available equally and fairly to all human beings -- but, as this year has also shown, inequality and injustice are concentrated in minority populations, and there is no vaccine for that: we ourselves are the only solution.

Fortunately, during this time I've had three steady companions: my husband, my cat, and books. As always, books have transported me to other places and allowed me to glimpse other lives, and that has been both a saving grace and at times uncomfortable, as it should be. Walking with James Baldwin, Ibrahm X. Kendi, Toni Morrison or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have forced me to confront realities and histories that have not been my own. While I've already read a lot of Haruki Murakami and his rather peculiar world of male-female relationships, the experience of reading a previous generation of Japanese writers like Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata is disconcerting in a different way. They speak of a world where women's and men's lives were markedly stylized and fixed, often to the great detriment of women, but there is little sense of happiness or fulfillment on anyone's part. I've gone on this year to read some contemporary Japanese female authors like Banana Yoshimoto and, most recently, Mieko Kawakami, whose Breasts and Eggs depicts in graphic detail the lives and preoccupations of non-wealthy Japanese women seeking self-fulfillment in a rough life, mostly without men at all. Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a literary exploit that took me from academic literary Europe to the horrific world of Mexican drug cartels -- an undercurrent we have always felt and guarded against during our tips to Mexico City, but never experienced directly. Then there was the pre-revolutionary Russia of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamzov, where a sense of social morality and ethics based on tradition, culture and religion clashed with "new" nihilistic, atheistic ideologies espoused by young thinkers influenced by Europe, who insisted that free will is all, and "everything is permitted." The book list has been long and challenging, and probably isn't most peoples idea of escapist, but it's been a big part of what's kept me going while living in a two-room apartment, especially through this long winter.

Right now I'm re-reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon, written in the 5th century BC, which reminds me of how little human beings have actually changed. The immediacy and familiarity of the characters and their thought and language goes a long ways toward erasing the cultural and historical differences between us and 2500 years ago; it's what drew me with amazement to those myths and stories when I was young, and then to the original works of literature. Agamemnon was written when Athenian democracy was just beginning, and its author was critical of government and especially of tyrants who fought wars that cost thousands of lives -- he himself had fought at the famous battle of Marathon during the Persian Wars. Athenians were preoccupied with the questions of justice, the rule of law, and free will in a society where the tyrant and the fear of his wrath had been removed: a new form of justice had to be created and agreed upon by its members. At the time of Aeschylus, most people still believed in fate being determined by the will of the gods, and that the sins of the father were often visited through subsequent generations, but as the Greek plays and Athenian democracy evolved in the next hundred years, we see a change away from this sense of fate and divine retribution to a greater exercise of free will and human choice, and how that is reflected in the government.

Fast-forward to Russia in the waning years of the Tsar; and further still to our own time when large swaths of society believe that individual freedom is more important than the collective good. These seem to be fundamental human tensions, with which we still struggle, along with the fact that justice is never equally applied. Thinking these questions through and acting on them are a lifetime's work, and for me, that task is helped by reading what humans have written not just in our own time, but throughout the millennia. While justice struggles to advance and our understanding of difference is greatly enhanced and shaped by contemporary writing, the best and the worst aspects of human behavior have always existed; we are neither unique nor isolated from the past, and, frankly, we believe so at our peril -- as books and their authors have always tried to tell us.

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

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

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

 

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

Here are a few details closer to life size:

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hermit Diary 41. Searching the Landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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