the cassandra pages

All the Beloveds

Yesterday was All Saints' Day, and, in Mexico, the Day of the Dead. A few days before, we made our annual ofrenda in our home, and each evening, we've lit the candles, eaten our dinner, and sat with our dear departed ones. I'm surprised how comforting and welcome this ritual has become, connecting us both to our friends and family, and to Mexico, which we miss very much too. The tradition is to put little offerings of favorite foods or drinks or pastimes in front of the photos of each person to encourage them to return to be with the living for the evening, so the whole thing ends up becoming poignant, quirky, and personal. I didn't have marigolds, which are a traditional part of everyone's altar in Mexico: the color and pungent scent are supposed to help guide the dead on their journey. But we did have orange zinnias, sunflowers, dahlias, cacti and herbs,copal incense, Mexican pottery and textiles, and small reminders of each person.

And because my sketchbooks are becoming a visual diary of my life that feel more and more significant to me, I decided to do a drawing of the central section of the ofrenda too. What a complicated and busy sketch it turned out to be! I liked the black-and-white drawing, but the color made it all make more sense, and the process of doing it was one more way of connecting to the people and the tableau we had made.

I know I've been scarce around here. We're working on cleaning, reorganizing and downsizing both our home and our studio. We're keeping the studio for one more year, but it's been emptied of more than half of its contents. And I admit to struggling to keep my mood up, as the days have grown shorter and colder, the pandemic continues, and I've had very little time for writing, music, or art, let alone meditation: the things that center and ground me. Now that we've reached November and life has moved mostly indoors, I actually feel better in the coziness and warmth of home, and seeing that there's some light at the end of both personal and global tunnels. We're gradually beginning to be more social, to take public transportation and do a bit more out in the city, and starting to think about traveling somewhere else again. I'm hoping to be able to write more here, too, soon.

 

 

Drawing Our Past and Present

Last week I spent several days visiting my father in central New York State, where I grew up. He lives in a different town now, but I was staying at the house he and my mother built when I was young, mostly with their own hands, on a small lake. It was extremely quiet there, unlike the busy city where I now live. We went to sleep to the sound of bullfrogs, and woke up to songbirds at dawn. Wild rabbits grazed on the clover-filled lawn, and the woodchucks and chipmunks and squirrels paid no attention to us. I saw birds I haven't seen for a long time, like flickers, orioles, and a scarlet tanager, and whenever we drove through the fields and pastures of the surrounding area, we saw deer. At night, countless fireflies illuminated the edges of the woods, and crawled on our shirts like tiny, living flashlights.

Every day I walked along the shore, watching the fish in the still edges of the water, making a mental note of the plants in bloom. I was both in the present moment, and remembering being in these exact places at different stages of my life, alone or with people who are now gone or far away.  There's a stone wall that my father built along the shoreline, and one place in particular where I always liked to sit. I thought about fishing there with my mother, and swimming with friends and cousins; I saw myself at seventeen, filled with romantic dreams, waiting for my boyfriend to come driving around the lake to see me late at night. I thought of standing in that spot throwing stones out into the water, as far as I could, the day we buried my grandfather.

The lake was impassive, reflecting my memories back to me, and also insisting that I notice what was going on right then. A catbird hopped in the the trees behind me; a chipmunk chattered. Large fish broke the surface farther out. Ducks flew low, quacking. And I saw the reflections of swallows in the water before I raised my eyes to follow them in the sky, flying at dusk just the way they always have.

I had brought my sketchbook and watercolors, and I did several drawings inside the house, which has remained almost exactly the same way it was when my parents lived there. We'd stopped at a farmer's market outside Utica and bought some fresh peas in the pod to shell -- we ate all of them raw. I'd also picked some crown vetch, which is in the pea family, and put it in one of my mother's Wedgwood vases, so the drawing became a sort of ode to legumes. 

After returning home this week, I did the two small watercolor sketches of the shore. I don't know why exactly, except that I enjoyed trying to capture the delicate quality of the evening light and the stillness of the water, and perhaps it was my way of staying there a little longer. I don't think I've felt like I had the skill before to tackle this particular subject in watercolor, but the practice over the past couple of months has helped. I'm happy now to have these paintings in my sketchbook -- they take me back instantly to the place and its emotional feeling in a way a photograph somehow can't -- and maybe they'll be a step toward something else.

That's the challenge with subjects to which we're somehow attached. We may want very much to draw or paint them, or write about them, but because of the familiarity as well as the emotional charge, whatever we do may always seem to fall short of the mark. But as we make those attempts, over time, they also reveal a lot about ourselves: think of Van Gogh's self-portraits. About thirty years ago I did an oil painting of the same basic view of the lake as the second watercolor; it now hangs in my parents' house. It's detailed, accurate and well-painted. Most people would probably prefer it, and when I did it I was pretty pleased. Now, not so much. These little watercolors come much closer to the feeling I have when I'm actually there, and if I pursued that even further, maybe I could come even closer. The difference between the two has less to do with skill, and more with years of living. The place may be much the same, but I'm not the same person I was then.

Not Forgetting

 

Remembering my mother today, on the tenth anniversary of her death.

There are people who sweep onto the stage of our lives, and show us something grand, impress us with their brilliance, magnificence, charisma, power. We always remember them, and even try to emulate them, but they may disappear from our lives just as quickly as they came. Then there are other people whose presence is much quieter and steadier, who teach us how to actually live a life, day by day.

My mother never traveled much; she had asthma and it was difficult for her to be in strange environments, but she was also fairly shy, and happier to stay in familiar surroundings - her home, the lake and woods - which she loved deeply and knew in detail. She loved the beauty and peace of simple things, and never complained about her life being boring or mundane - how could it be, when it was filled with family and friends, books, plants and animals, a natural world that changed not only with the seasons but daily, for she observed all its minutiae. She bore life's inevitable difficulties with stoicism and grace, and far more equanimity than her daughter, who seems to have taken a much longer and circuitous route to learning those lessons - I should have just observed the Zen-master qualities of my mother, but when we're young, we can't see our parents clearly, nor their wisdom.

Each year, when the lilies-of-the-valley are in bloom, I make one of these drawings for her; I think she would like this one, the first to include color, and some other flowers: the purple violets she loved, and the forget-me-nots that always filled our gardens. I'm happy today, remembering her, grateful for so much that she gave me, including this love of art, and her gentle, steady encouragement about everything I tried to do.

I look at the painting, closer, closer, searching for her, for myself.

And I decide that the underlying emotion is captured best in the drawing rather than the painting that it became. There's something in that horizon line that stops short of the edge of the page; it was a deliberate but subconscious gesture, if that makes any sense: our relationship is not finished, cannot be squared up; something continues, or is left open. I don't mean that in terms of "meeting again," but rather that I continue to discover her, and myself in relationship with her. A gift I've only understood well after the passage of an entire decade.

Ten Years Ago

Text from this blog, ten years and a lifetime ago; images from this week in Montreal.

We drove to central New York to visit my parents. Spring is just coming to the fields and farms, and the land was tender and beautiful: the first velvety green on the hayfields, the yellow tresses of the willows in the swampy hollows between hills, the cows slowly walking out from the barnyards, chickens roaming happily behind houses. Tractors plowed wide dark brown swaths across the valleys, and the entire landscape smelled sweetly of manure. Behind one barn, a middle-aged man followed his aged father out to the field, the latter in a cap and dungarees, walking strongly but bent, holding a long green stem of something in his hand.

Crows and geese and blackbirds and hawks were everywhere, and letting you know it; deer grazed - the occasional alert ears raised to face the road - in the edges of fields and turkeys brazenly pecked close to the road. A heron flew low over our house, on its way to some morning hunting of the spring peepers, maybe, who had been so vocal the night before, and just beneath the slightly rippled surface of the lake, four carp swam lazily, their backs to the sunlight. I dug a few worms and fished a little with my mother, in the same sun, and -- other than the jet trails in the blue sky far overhead -- it felt like we could have been in just about any century of the last four or five.

--

My mother died a month later. I've been thinking about her a lot lately: good thoughts, but I'm incredulous that it's been ten years without her.

 

 

Still Life as Self-Portrait

Coffee pot, fruit, and bowl of almonds on a Druze chest. Pencil on paper, 2002.

Another version of the same subject. I love how free this drawing is.

This week I've been taking breaks from designing, carving, and printing illustrations for my Annunciation project by doing some studio cleaning and organizing. I started with my eleven-drawer flat file, where I keep most of my finished paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as supplies like acid-free tissue and glassine paper. All the big paper sheets go into a larger five-drawer flat file beneath this one. Anyway, I went through two drawers of old drawings and threw out a lot of uninteresting work that had no reason to be kept -- and that felt really good.

Coffee pot, fruit, almonds, and tambourine on a Druze chest. Pen and ink on paper, 2002.

But in the process, I found many things I certainly wanted to keep, including some sheets from large, old sketchbooks, such as the drawings in this post.

I was interested to see that even though they date from 2002, they're in a style quite similar to what I've been using lately. In some ways they're looser than the current ones - which doesn't please me so much, though it may be partly a result of the much-larger paper size here - but they're also more derivative of the Matisse and Picasso drawings I was poring over at the time. I'm curious to see that even back then, I was using some of the same favorite objects that have appeared in my work in recent years: the family coffee pot, the hourglass-shaped brass vase, the carved Druze chest.

Hydrangeas and blown glass rooster. Pencil on paper, 2002.

A still life, as I think I've written before, can be just as much a self-portrait as a picture of one's own face. In 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, I was working with interfaith peace groups and thinking hard about our own family's Middle Eastern heritage, trying to put that into some sort of context with my own family background. The flowers in the vase above were certainly from my own garden, and represented me; the blown glass orb in front of them was part of a trade I had made with a Vermont artist, Paedra Branhall. My mother-in-law had died not long before; this glass rooster was hers, from a collection made by her Armenian uncle. The silver bowl with pinched corners was a family heirloom from my father-in-law's family in Damascus; those were also his leather-bound books. He was well into his mid-90s,  and I was beginning to try to collect some of his stories, which eventually became the "Fig and the Orchid" series here. And my husband and I were starting to think about the possibility of moving to Canada. Looking back, these choices form a much clearer portrait than I ever consciously realized at the time.

Here's a final drawing, this one in red Conte crayon on newsprint - which reminds me how much I love drawing in that particular medium.

Here, the blending of family histories is even more deliberate: the aloe plant is from my father-in-law, the lemons a Middle Eastern symbol; the tile at right was from Rhodes and belonged to my mother-in-law; the brass hourglass vase had been on my own grandmother's desk; the little covered ceramic pot at left was made by my mother, and the flowered cloth was one I had bought myself. Thirteen years later, I still use these objects (minus the aloe plant and lemons, of course!) in my daily life and in my drawings, as a natural matter of course, not deliberate exploration or statement: there's something reassuring about that.

 

May 23

Thinking of my beautiful, beloved mother today, who left us nine years ago. This photograph was taken in 1974, when she was 50.

And, as has become my ritual (here and here) I made a drawing as a way of remembering her, incorporating lilies-of-the-valley and one of her Wedgewood pots. This one also includes three Mexican palm-leaf fishes, made by the Nahuatl for Palm Sunday. 

Pictures from an Exhibition

Time-travel takes many forms: for us, the opening of Jonathan's show last weekend was a step back into our former life in northern New England, where we saw many old friends, some of whom we hadn't seen for a decade or even more. For many of them, these photographs of late 1960s and early 1970s were a real trip into a personal past and regional/social history that affected many of our lives forever.

A lot of people came to the opening, and the photographs were received with wistfulness, amusement, nostalgia, and genuine appreciation: many people said "this was me, this was my life and a special moment in time, you've absolutely captured it." The two hours went by in a wink. Several of the people actually pictured in the photographs were present, providing a somewhat mind-blowing collapse of time. It was great to meet a couple of blog readers as well as many old friends I was absolutely delighted to see, and we were also so grateful to some close friends from Montreal who made the effort to be there with us.

Some of the visitors were close friends we've known through almost the entire thirty years we lived there, and others were from specific contexts -- Vermont Public Radio, community organizing, church and choir, artists and board members from AVA Gallery, professional contacts and former clients, neighbors -- a long and varied list. Each time someone else walked in the door it felt like I was seeing another piece of my life -- it was a good feeling, and an odd one too-- something that perhaps I could only experience at this age, after so much time has passed, and after living elsewhere for a considerable time as well.

And of course I was most happy for J., whose work was beautifully hung -- it's always a pleasure and a new experience to see a body of work on the walls, large and all together for the first time. This project has consumed both of us for a long time, and this first exhibition (with prints specifically chosen for that Vermont/New Hampshire location) felt like a culmination of that effort. Thank you to AVA for making it all go so smoothly, and to everyone who came to see the work and has supported the project thus far.

Jonathan will be giving a gallery talk at 5 pm on May 20, just before the exhibition comes down.

In Alabama

by Teju Cole

When I went down to Alabama last month, I listened repeatedly to John Coltrane’s Alabama. The introduction of the song has a discursive quality to it, like a black preacher’s exhortations. And that, it turned out, was what it was: the keening saxophone line, built over rolling piano chords (like a congregation’s murmuring), was a paraphrase of the eulogy Martin Luther King, Jr., gave after a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls.

Alabama’s earth is red like West Africa’s, dusty, unpromising. On this earth one expects nothing to grow, and on it everything grows. Kudzu and Virginia creeper run riot. This is fertile earth. William Christenberry likens it to brown sugar. James Baldwin wrote: “I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.”

I was sad all the way to Selma. We drove from Gadsden, where cattle prods had been used on protesters in 1964. Down through the counties, across land that had known human love and life long before the white man’s arrival. Selma’s not much, a main drag, Broad Street, that chucks you out of town via the Edmund Pettus Bridge almost as soon as you arrive. The town is much smaller than those others in whose company it evokes the civil rights movement: Montgomery, Birmingham. In the hot sunshine of a Sunday, it was stunned and quiet, with the fable-like air of a crumbling movie set. Selma is named for an Ossianic poem; to me it melds “soul” and its Spanish cognate, “alma,” into a single moody word. Selma’s shops are closed that day. People are few and drift about in the sun like people in Google’s Street View. But if you take a left some crossings before the bridge, and a right, you come around to a housing project and, across the street from it, the clean and well-kept Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the starting point for those marches fifty years ago.

Long after history’s active moment, do places retain some charge of what they witnessed, what they endured?

On Sunday March 7, 1965, six hundred people, led by John Lewis, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Just after crossing the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers and local police. The men in uniform wore masks, and some of them were on horseback. They gave a brief warning, and then shot teargas and charged into the crowd with billy clubs. They rolled through undefended people with a sickening carelessness for human safety that the corresponding scene in Selma—Ava DuVernay’s necessary and otherwise fine film—failed to match. That’s the point, perhaps: that what we watch from the safety of a movie theater cannot, and should not, relay to us the true horror of things. For how would we bear it?

But watch the original footage. These Americans brutally beat unarmed women and men, thorough in their mercilessness, cheered on by other Americans, sending more than fifty Americans to hospital. The footage made the difference, and shocked the nation’s conscience. It accelerated the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

 

How not to link it all together? Selma and Ferguson, New York City and Cleveland, torture by the CIA and mass murder in Gaza, the police state and slave patrols: no generation is free of the demands of conscience, and no citizenry can shirk the responsibility of calling the state’s abuse of power to account.

Selma was a small town then, and is a small town now. On Sunday December 7 when I visited, the headline of the Selma Times-Journal was “Surprise At Parade: Fire department mascot Sparky makes return at Christmas parade.” The lede: “Sparky the Fire Dog has returned and he made a grand entrance the morning of the Selma-Fallas County Christmas Parade. The dog costume was stolen from a vehicle parked at the Station 3 firehouse on Oct. 20 and found weather-damaged, dirty, torn and missing pieces behind the old Pancake House...”

I walked down the Pettus Bridge alone. I thought not of Sparky but of John Lewis, whose face and whose spirit I like so much, his light brown trenchcoat, his back pack, the concentrated dignity in his small frame. I felt these things in my body, tried to honor with my solitary stride the bravery of those women and men, and in the silence of my walk, the steep drop of the Alabama River to my left, the clear air ahead where there had been smoke and atrocity, I began to hear again Coltrane’s Alabama, not a melody but rather a recitation delivered with the saxophone.

Then the drive down to Montgomery, winter’s dry bright landscape flicking by. This bitter earth, these crumbling signs, the things that may have happened in these woods: in this place, I touched on a fissure in America’s unfinishable history. Selma to Montgomery on U.S. Route 80 is an hour’s drive, some fifty-four miles. It was a walk of four days in 1965, and on that third and successful march, many thousands walked together, 25,000 of them by the time they surged into Montgomery and rallied at the Alabama State Capitol. Around those days, some died. Klan work.

“These children,” sings Coltrane’s line in 1963, “unoffending, innocent, and beautiful.” McCoy Tyner weeping on piano. “Were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes every perpetrated against humanity.” Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. After Montgomery, after the memorial to the many murdered during those years, the placid-looking Court Square where tens of thousands had been auctioned into slavery, Dr King’s church, the Rosa Parks museum and the woman who was so much more—so much smarter, so much wiser, so much more tactical—than her best known act of refusal: after all this, we went to Birmingham. And Birmingham was heartbreak, too. At the 16th Street Baptist Church, my soul took fright. How could humans?

 

History won’t let go of us. We’re pinned to it. Days later, after my return to New York and with Alabama still in my ear, I’m in the crowd of tens of thousands for a march that takes us some miles through lower Manhattan. The language is close in its keening. Rosa Parks, John Coltrane, Martin Luther King, Jr., not a melody but a recitation, an exhortation. The raised voices echo down the caverns of the city’s streets. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter.

Tequila, a Doll, some Dishes: this week's drawings

The Empty Bottle. 9" x 6", fountain pen on paper.

Mexico has been much on my mind lately. In Washington, we have Obama making a bold executive order about immigration. In Mexico, continuing violence by the drug gangs, and massive public protests. Last night's anti-government-corruption demonstrations in Mexico City were peaceful, but I am worried: I've come to care a lot about this country and it people. The drawing wasn't a result of conscious thinking. For some reason we've kept this thick glass bottle that we bought in the Mexico City airport, intrigued by its name and design. Awareness of the Mexican revolution is still everywhere: in the street and building and monument names, in popular culture, in the murals. Spiraling violence, government corruption and increasing revelations of government complicity with the drug cartels have created increasing frustration and anger. After the recent killings of protesting students in Guerrero state, apparently handed over to a gang by the mayor of a town and his wife, who had ties to the group, public outcry has risen to its highest in recent memory. I'm the last person to condone violent revolution, or violence of any kind, but I greatly admire the spirit of the Mexican people and their tradition of protest, and I share their outrage. This week the image on this bottle (the paired guns, much larger, are also deeply impressed in the glass on the back) seemed ominously appropriate : the Mexican revolution was intended to give power back to the people, and they remember that. Today I saw a Mexican proverb posted on social media: "They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds." How much we, in this rich country (where we buy the drugs and refuse their citizens entry) have forgotten.

Dish Drainer. 9" x 6", blue fountain pen on paper.

A very fast drawing made after dinner one night, intrigued by all the shapes and the complexity of how they fit together. This image would easily lend itself to abstraction, but I can't say that abstraction interests me very much these days. I seem to be drawn toward the concrete and the everyday.

Old doll in my Studio. Grey ink and wash on paper, 9" x 12".

I've had this doll ever since I can remember. She was given to me by a close friend of my grandmother's, a single woman who lived in New York City and traveled a good deal. I also have a small heart-shaped box with the same yarn embroidery that must have come from her as well, but I've never known what country's folkloric costume she is wearing. I've always thought she was from eastern Europe - maybe Hungary - does anyone know? Her dress is red with yellow and green embroidery and colored ribbons, and she wears a lace chemise and large gold earrings, and a long red headscarf. Her enigmatic, sideways glance intrigues me, and I'm hoping to explore other ways to use her more expressively in still life compositions.

Where are these drawings going? I don't know. Maybe toward paintings, maybe toward some larger charcoals where the relationships between objects are more developed. I figure eventually they'll tell me themselves. Right now, they are practice, and exploration.

Anemones

Japanese Anemones, pen on paper, 18" x 6" (left side), 10/22/2014.

Amenone is a Greek word that means "daughter of the wind" -- an apt name for these flowers who do the wind's bidding; their common name is "wind flower." Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses that they were created when Venus/Aphrodite sprinkled nectar on the blood of her dead lover, Adonis.

The Anemones are a large group of flowering plants within the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae): there are some 120 species. They're related to Hepaticas, my favorite spring woodland flower: something about this particular petal form, with its ring of stamens around a center, simply touches me.

I first discovered the fall-blooming Japanese anemones when a family friend brought a huge bouquet from her garden to my mother, that October when she was first ill. The white flowers were very delicate, moving with the slightest breeze. Sitting in a glass vase on her bedside table, their beauty and fragility seemed to affirm the truths of life itself. Along with lilies-of-the-valley - those spring flowers that bloomed at the time she died - these fall flowers became reminders and personal symbols for me.

Japanese Anemones, pen on paper, 18" x 6" (right side), 10/22/2014.

However, I had never grown them, and I had to search for a source. The more ubiquitous and tougher mauve/pink varieties were easier to find, and I also found out how invasive they can be: I now have a veritable hedge of them in my garden that has to be hacked back every spring. But it was the white ones I really wanted to grow. Finally I found a Japanese cultivar at Jardins Jasmine, a professional nursery here in Montreal. It's taken two years for the plant to become established, but this year it bloomed beautifully. I not only love the fully-open white flowers, but also the plant's form, with its tight round buds, and spherical seedpods that remain on the multi-branched stalks after the petals fall. Yesterday, after putting my garden to bed for the winter, I cut the last branches and brought them home; along with a few dahlias, they were the last plants blooming in my garden and would clearly keep going right up to frost. The flowers won't last long in the warm indoors, though, so I did a drawing, wanting to capture their essence.

A few weeks ago, the husband of that family friend died, in his mid-80s, and I thought again of the bouquet of anemones, and of those two long happy marriages. I hope the wife will find comfort in her garden and be able to make a new life for herself, as my father has: not forgetting, but still living, loving, creating, blooming.