the cassandra pages

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".

 

 

Hermit Diary 32: Sketches from a Greek Roadtrip

 

Come along with me on the road in Greece, as I try to sketch quickly from the car and during brief stops in-between destinations. (Headphones and full-screen viewing recommended, but it's also fine without.)

And please tell me what you like or don't like about this experimental video, because I'm hoping to do more of them. My videos so far are collected on a new page at my artist website, Studio Cassandra.

Thanks for watching!

 

Hermit Diary 23: Work

^{Vlatadon Monastery, Thessaloniki, Greece}

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vlatadon monastery chapel.

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

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

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

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

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

Hermit Diary 16: Easter Day

The sun is shining here in Montreal, even though it's chilly, and we just finished attending a virtual Easter service at the cathedral, where the clergy and music director have worked hard all week to keep some continuity with our Anglican traditions for Holy Week while embracing the new technology. Oddly enough, I think we've sometimes had a greater sense of community than usual, being able to see a grid of live faces (rather than the backs of heads in the pews) on our Zoom screens and enjoy a virtual "coffee hour" after the services when we can talk in small groups or as a whole.

Yesterday I baked Greek Easter bread, with orange peel, chocolate, and almonds, and it filled the apartment with fragrance. I'm feeling a renewed sense of energy and purpose, so perhaps I'll be able to do some more drawing and writing, but I'm also feeling grateful for the opening up of time to simply be, and think, at a much slower pace than before. The anxiety and uncertainty I felt during the first week or two has been replaced by an odd new normalcy; we know what we can do and what we can't, we know how to get some exercise, how to deal with our food, how to communicate with friends and family, what the days feel like. We're still adjusting to living full time with our cat, and to having her walk on us during the night, or wake with her little face an inch away from our own: that is mostly a delight.

Sadly, the mother of one of our dear friends died yesterday from the virus. She was living in an extended care facility, and in Montreal, as in many other places, this is where the most cases and the greatest number of deaths have occurred. Over the weeks to come, we will all know more people who succumb. At the same time, spring is arriving in the northeast, with its promise of hope and renewal. What a strange time we are living! I find when I can step back from my own concerns and enter the mystery, challenge, and opportunity of it, something opens inside me, and both anxiety and impatience depart. We are living in a rare in-between space, and we are being called, I think, to pay close attention.

I send love to all of you who read here.

 

Caryatids, and an Olive Tree

My favorite site on the Acropolis is not the Parthenon, but the porch of a much smaller temple called the Erechtheum. I've been fascinated by the graceful women, holding the roof on their heads, since I first saw pictures of them almost half a century ago. When we visited in 2018, I kept looking at it from different angles, first from far and then walking close and around the building, unable to let it out of my sight for long.

A recent pen and ink sketch of mine.

This single olive tree marks the site where, according to the legend immortalized on the western pediment of the Acropolis, Poseidon and Athena competed for patronage of the city. Poseidon struck his trident against the rock of the Acropolis, and a salt spring came forth. But Athena planted an olive tree, and won the contest and the hearts of the people. Supposedly, an olive tree has always stood there, each successive one propagated from branches of its predecessor. I'm sure that's not entirely true. Somewhere nearby, a mark in the rock supposedly shows where Poseidon struck it (!)

Athena and Poseidon square off (replicas of the Acropolis pediments, Acropolis Museum, Athens)

Athena is crowned victorious next to her father Zeus, while the other gods look on.

Pericles ordered the Erechtheum to be built as part of the splendid rebuilding of the damaged Acropolis after the Persian invasion (480 BCE) that included the construction of the Parthenon. The Erechtheum was built of shining white Pentelic marble, and named after Erechtheus, an early, mythical, demi-god king of Athens. It was begun in 421 during a peaceful period, but halted after war began with Sparta, and only finally completed in 406 -- the last of these major buildings to be finished.

The Parthenon frieze shows the Panathenaic procession: in this segment, two figures hold the folded peplos, a new robe being carried up to the statue of Athena.

The temple was one of the holiest places for the Athenians. Inside was placed the ancient olivewood statue of Athena that was clothed in a new, specially-woven robe every four years, carried up to the Acropolis in the Panathenaic procession -- a statue that retained its historic, cult status even though a huge crystal and gold statue of Athena had recently been placed in the rebuilt Parthenon. A sacred serpent, said to be a reincarnation of Erechtheus, lived in one of the western chambers of the temple, and was fed on honey cakes. If the snake refused to eat the cakes, it was considered a very bad omen.

The scale of the Erectheum (far right) compared to the Parthenon.

The robed women on the Erechtheum's porch strike me as both beautiful and enigmatic -- there's something personal and almost  intimate about them, especially in the context of the grandeur and immensity of the Parthenon. The Roman architect Vitruvius first used the term Caryatid: he said it refers to a town called Caryae in the Peloponnesus which sided with the Persians against Greece; after the war, the Greeks retaliated against Caryae, killing the men and enslaving the women. "The architects of the time," he writes, "designed for public buildings statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and punishment of the people of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity."

An archaic kore, statue of a standing, draped female figure at the Altes Museum in Berlin.

It seems plausible, considering the historical time when the Erechtheum was built, but there were many earlier examples of young, draped female figures being used as columns, from the korai of Archaic times to some of the treasuries at Delphi. And the Caryatids look anything but burdened -- part of their charm is how graceful and light they appear.

Restoration work on the caryatids in progress, 2018.

The Erechtheum's statues, of course, attracted the attention of Lord Elgin during his plunder of the Acropolis. In the early 1800s he removed one to his manor in Scotland - she is now in the British Museum - and bungled the removal of another which he had sawn into pieces. Eventually, the remaining statues were removed from the porch and placed in the old Acropolis Museum; recently they were moved to the new Acropolis Museum, where they've been cleaned and restored in place, in a process that could be observed by visitors. Obviously the statues we see today on the porch of the Erechtheum are reproductions, but they're still very beautiful. The five originals, in the museum, are placed exactly as they were on the porch, with a blank for the missing one which Greece still hopes one day will be returned.

The Acropolis Museum is one of the finest museums I've ever visited; no one who saw the state of the art of display and preservation there could argue that the Greeks are "not capable" of taking care of their own monuments, or protecting them from pollution. Probably the Elgin marbles have been better preserved by being in the British Museum over the last 200 years, but that is no longer a question; will the 21st century see the return of cultural artifacts taken by colonial powers, or will imperialist arguments continue to prevail?