the cassandra pages

Prophets in their Own Land...are seldom believed

 

Last night we spontaneously decided to go see A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, and ended up at a cinema-plex in the Montreal suburb of Cote-St-Luc. The parking lot was empty, the shops in the dimly lit mall already shuttered; fake plants, vibrating recliners and plastic carnival horses on springs had been pushed into the center of the atrium to accommodate the brooms and mops of the late night cleaners.

There’s a particular weirdness about suburban movie theaters, especially when they’re deserted. Our showtime was at 9:30 pm, and there were no ticket-takers or snack vendors in sight; instead we were confronted with an automatic machine saying “buy ticket here” on its digital screen, and no one ever checked the tickets — resembling a grocery store cash register receipt — that it regurgitated.

When we pushed open the doors of the large theater, final credits scrolled on the screen while three grey-haired people wrestled themselves into their heavy winter coats. One woman, gave me a knowing smile as she passed us on her way out. “Why is everyone so old?” we asked each other, and laughed. The enormous, comfortably squishy seats reclined with the push of a blue-lit button to whatever position you wanted.

I couldn’t help wondering what the young Bob Dylan, shown in an early part of the film in a Greenwich Village movie theater with his girlfriend, would have thought of such a place. The Bleeker Street of those days looked pretty familiar, though; I remember it as it was in the 1970s, and how it’s changed since.

The film, which covers Dylan’s early career up to the time he left the pure acoustic folk tradition and went electric, is excellent. I was glad to see it on a big screen: it’s completely immersive, the acting is brilliant, and the film took me right back to my own adolescence. I was only nine or ten when Dylan first came east, hoping to meet his hero Woody Guthrie who was dying in a New Jersey hospital, but I was already conscious of the resurgence of folk music and began trying to play my father’s guitar by the time I was in junior high school. By the mid- to late-60s, he became the poet-prophet of my generation. When Jonathan and I got together, in the late 1970s, we realized that we owned nearly all of Dylan’s records up to that date between the two of us. We’ve only seen him once in concert, here in Montreal about ten years ago, but that was a definite Moment.

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We left the theater at midnight, and came out into a deserted parking lot covered with light snow. Once home, we hurried to get into bed, but after turning the lights out we couldn’t fall asleep. The film had just been too vivid and too personal, somehow, to allow our minds to rest, and when we finally did sleep, it was a fitful night disturbed by mixed-up dreams.

While A Complete Unknown does an masterful job of depicting Dylan’s life as well as those of the other artists and music industry people around him (most notably, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman), and touches on the politics of the time, I felt that it didn’t show how terrible those politics really were. The moves away from the 1950’s revival of traditional folk music, toward contemporary folk ballads with overtly political themes, and then later toward a much harder-edged, angry, electric music, were entirely motivated by hatred of the rightwing government, which had first viciously pursued anyone suspected of being sympathetic to communism, then fought the Civil Rights movement, then pursued the Vietnam War and attacked students protesting the war and the draft on campuses all over America.

I couldn’t sleep last night because reliving those times, in the context of what I’ve learned and observed about human behavior throughout my life, is visceral. Greying people of my age, who listened to Dylan and felt he was speaking for them, will experience that film very differently from people born in later decades. For me, it brought back not only the forces of evil, violence, and oppression we were fighting against, but also the enormous hope we had during the brief years when Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke stirringly of his dream of equality and freedom, when people became outraged by the assassinations, through the time when the Vietnam War was stopped, largely through public outcry led by the young. It seemed like a new era of equality, peace and justice might actually be dawning.

The film focuses on Dylan’s musical and career trajectory, his romantic relationships, and the growing rift between him and folk music purists like Pete Seeger. It vividly depicts the culture of the time, and touches on the overarching political situation, but it doesn’t fully convey the magnitude of Dylan’s motivation or the country’s political reality at the time.

I think that’s both a shame, and a missed opportunity, considering the place we find ourselves right now. People who wonder how the recent election could have happened should look back at American history. The fascists and capitalists have been there all along, waiting for the people to be sufficiently distracted by and addicted to consumerism, glitz and media, or worried enough to be seduced by fear-mongering and lies. I wish that a fine film like this one, which will be seen by so many, had made those connections more clear.

Winter Solstice

 

The last pale light of the shortest day of the year came barely through the mid-afternoon today. In the summer, the sun sets beyond the right edge of this picture. I’ll be glad to see it begin its course back in the other direction.

Here in the north, we feel these short days in our bodies as well as in our spirits. The brightness of the holidays pushes us through December, but it’s January and early February that are the hardest for those who are most affected by the lack of sunlight. I am not, particularly, but we’ll be leaving our tree and star up for several weeks, grateful for their beauty and sparkle in the dim, short afternoons and dark evenings.

Lately I’ve been buoyed by music: the cathedral’s joyful Sing-along Messiah last weekend; a wonderful recital by my close friend Catherine St-Arnaud and the pianist Julien LeBlanc at a Montreal gallery yesterday evening; and watching a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic this afternoon, on their Digital Concert Hall platform, of Mozart’s D-minor piano concerto and Bruckner’s 9th symphony, conducted by the astonishing Herbert Blomstedt, who is 96 years old.

Today was also a day of baking, package-wrapping, and conversing with friends.

Wherever you are, I wish you a happy solstice and safe passage through this darkest time of the year.

Happy 100, Dad - You Almost Made It!

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A few days after my mother died, a month shy of her 83rd birthday, my father and I were raking the front lawn in preparation for the gathering after her funeral. He stood up straight, leaned on his rake, and said, “Your mother accepted that she was going to die. She said she’d had a good life, and it was fine.”

I waited, certain he was going to say more. Our eyes met.

“I don’t feel that way at all!” he exclaimed. “I want to live to be 100!”

 

My parents, late 1940s.

At the time he was 82, and although neither of us knew it, he would have 15 more years of life -- most of it in remarkably good health— before dying at 97, several months after his second partner. I wish he had made it to 100, but how fortunate he was to have so many good years late in life.

 

My father and his second partner, Barbara, around 2022.

I know exactly what he attributed his good health to: exercise. After quitting smoking in the late 1050s, a habit acquired during his service in Europe in WWII, he became obsessed with physical fitness. He’d always been a good athlete, particularly as a baseball player and runner, and was one of the first people to take up jogging in our small town. He kept running until his knees simply wouldn’t let him. Every morning he did the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises - and kept that up until a year or so before he died. His other sport was table tennis, which he practiced incessantly, playing any challenger, and having a regular weekly game with a series of well-matched players. He competed regionally, at the state level, and many times in the national Senior Games, where he won first place in his age class, one of the years when he was over 90. He denied being competitive, but that claim was disingenuous - he never let me win at anything, even when I was little! I do agree that his drive was less about winning than about continual self-improvement. It could be difficult to be around someone like that, but I also admired it.

 

Dad and me, early 1970s

He ate a lot of sugar, red meat, and had a cocktail every night, but stayed thin, and never took statins or blood pressure medications. Maybe when you exercise as much as he did, both in an athletic sense, and in building and taking care of a house and property, it mitigates the effects of diet. Certainly he had a high metabolism! On the other hand, we’ve also had people in our families who never exercised, were overweight, and took plenty of medication, and also lived well into their 90s. I think my father was lucky in his genetic makeup, courageous and strong in spirit, as well as having two women who loved him and many friends through his life. The greatest challenge he faced was surviving the war — and he had several very close calls. After that, I think he was determined to build a life and live it fully — and he did. I will always miss him, and be grateful for the qualities we shared and the things he taught me.

 

Subscribed

Revisiting Old Journals - 1997

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Recently a friend and I have been discussing writers’ and artists’ journals and diaries. It prompted me to go back and read some of my own, since I’ve kept a journal of sorts through most of my life. Here are some excerpts from two months in 1997. I was 45 at the time and living in Vermont. The pencil drawing above was done today.

February 1997

A comforting thought: when I DO read someone else’s journal, esp. Merton’s, I can see that they too struggle with the whole notion of ego as it is embodied in the particular form that is journal-writing. He gets disgusted just as I do, threatens to (and did, apparently) tear out pages and throw them away, finds, at times, the whole thing embarrassing and trivial and poorly written and full of sniveling navel-staring. Yet for some reason we keep on, I think more than anything because it allows this particular type of person to organize their thoughts. I used to think that I would use the journal as the basis for other writings. I don’t know if that will ever be the case — this may be it. And possibly no one will ever think it is interesting enough to read it through. But to say it is written solely for my own eyes is deceptive. It IS intended to be read, and although I try to be as free as I can in what I express, there is always the sense that I will not be able to edit it myself; that someday it will exist as a record of me. It’s an interesting scenario, and one that I might as well ignore and just get on with the writing.

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September 1997

On Labor Day we finally woke up to a day free from obligations, which we could spend reading the Sunday Times (Lady Di had just died in Paris), making some nice food, going to a movie (“Air Force One,” at the Town Hall Theater in Woodstock).

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Someday someone will write about e-mail being the death of letters, if they haven’t already, but will they also write about it as the death of journals? I have pages and pages of e-mail correspondence from this year, but the idea of collecting it, organizing it, putting it into Word files, and printing it makes me faint with fatigue. But I am sad at the thought of losing a whole year’s worth of thoughts and reflections. I find myself wondering if the form itself, though, breeds a kind of terse, abbreviated writing which lacks depth and substance. I know I try to write well no matter what the medium — a postcard even — but how much am I leaving out by the lack of a journal discipline, and the total lack of what any literarily-minded person could call “letters”. The other day I received a long message — letter — from P.Z. about the birth and first month of his daughter’s life. It was wonderful. But I find myself missing the fat envelope, the anticipation of carrying something with real weight home from the post office and opening it up to find someone’s actual handwriting — written, no less, to ME. And I find myself somewhat ashamed and saddened to notice how quickly I have given it all up myself — and thus deprived my closest friends and family of the same pleasure.

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October 2

At lunch yesterday Mounir said, “Isn’t it odd, how when we get old we want things to be the way they were when we were children. I woke up in the night feeling too hot, and I started thinking about how in Syria we used to sleep under just one cover — it was a padded thing — what do you call it? — right, a quilt, and under it there would be a sheet and on top of it a very thin layer of cloth. When they wanted to wash it they took it apart — it was sewn on the edges — and washed it. I can see my mother spreading it out on the floor — on the rug — with the sheet underneath and this other material on top, and then we would all help by getting around the edges and taking a big needle and sewing the layers together on the edges. Funny how you think of these things.”

October 3

Cold, grey and rainy today. By contrast, yesterday was brilliantly blue with the fall colors just starting toward their peak. In the afternoon the skies became that heavy leaden color and the trees stood out even more against it. Jonathan went skiing.

October 19

News of the world: a Vermont woman who has crusaded against land mines won the Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton is being investigated ad nauseam for his fund-raising practices. It just came out that John Kennedy negotiated a deal with Khrushchev to end the Cuban missile crisis - our missiles in Turkey for theirs in Cuba. Only seven people knew, and not one of them told. Orel Hershiser lost the first game of the World Series (we didn’t watch).

After several nights of frost, the trees have lost their brilliance and the hillsides have all become of a piece again — that muted late-fall tapestry I like so much. Walking across the bridge this afternoon I noticed the dusty blue stems of one of the swamp trees — I don’t know its name — and that they were the same color as the water and the sky. When you rub the stems they become dark maroon under the silvery blue.

Mourning, remembering, and hoping

Today is a day of reflection for me. I am mourning every single life that has been lost or shattered because of the senseless, cruel violence of the past year, and I am reflecting on our part in it. I am thinking about the great frustration and helplessness that so many of us feel who have protested government policies, not just now, but going back thirty years and more. These policies have contributed to a war that now seems to be spiraling out of control, harming any chance for a lasting peace, making the entire world less safe, and harming the reputations and integrity of all the countries that are involved. What a complete tragedy. Although I have strong opinions, as well as fear for our own family members in Beirut, today is a day to reflect on man's inhumanity to man, not to point fingers. Why are we the way we are? How do these same tendencies affect life here in Quebec - because they do? What can I, as an individual, do better? How can I amplify my power as an individual to encourage the institutions to which I belong to stand up and speak out for justice and peace, when so many are being silenced? And finally, in such a world, with so much suffering, fear and darkness, how can I be a person who gives hope?

So here are some flowers to lay on this makeshift, virtual altar. They were a gift from close friends on our birthdays, have brightened our home and our days, and last night I finally painted them before their petals start falling. The beauty of the earth stubbornly persists, and if we look, we find it everywhere. Thank God for that. And I'm thankful for every way in which I'm able to experience such things and mirror them back to the world.

A year ago, I was in Edessa, Greece, a small city in a mountainous northern border region that has been torn apart by ethnic warfare for centuries. After reading the news, I went into a large Orthodox church to light a candle, and sit quietly for a while with the icons and the smell of melting wax and incense. Later I walked in the church garden, and looked out over the valley at its orchards, vineyards, and fields. I no longer pray to God to end human wars and suffering; I haven't believed in such an omnipotent deity for a long time. I pray for us to come to our senses. I pray for strength, and to see what I need to do.

View southwest from the old city of Edessa, Greece.


Today, as I look out my studio window here in Montreal, the trees are beginning to turn to their fall colors, and the dark clouds to which we woke are giving way to sunshine and blue sky. A light wind ruffles the leaves of the plants on our balcony. I can hear faint sounds of construction in the distance, because here, homes are being built, not destroyed. For today, for right now, this moment, I am secure and aware of how fortunate I am. I can use this moment to become even more aware, to tune into all of my senses and consciously take in their input. I need to do this several times every day: otherwise I might miss the gifts that are still part of the reality and mystery of being alive. 

 

Reality and Illusion

 

Parker Palmer writes, “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.” [1] I think he’s right and I would add that great love and great suffering are the normal paths of transformation. There’s an important place for practices of contemplation. I’m not throwing them out, but any practice of contemplation is for the sake of helping us sustain what we temporarily learn through great love or great suffering, whether it’s on a honeymoon or the day after a parent dies. When we’re in the middle of great grief or great love, we become a nondual thinker for a few days, weeks, or months, but we all know it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last—unless we put it into practice.  -- Fr. Richard Rohr

 

Awake in the night, three days after having extensive dental surgery, something that’s been planned for months in consultation with specialists, I find there is a lot to process. I’ve done well; I was brave and handled everything the best I could have hoped for. The specialists were excellent, and so were the medications: I’ve had a lot of swelling but very little pain. But now that the acute phase is lessening, I think it’s all hitting me a bit more -- as I would expect it would. I find my wakeful, restless mind going all over the place in the middle of the night. What have I forgotten to do, what needs my attention now, what do I need to communicate to whom, what should I do next? I thought I would have at least a week or two of exhaustion, recuperation, and being cared for, but the physical recovery is happening much faster than that; in a few days I’ll be almost back to a new “normal.” But what is that? Between the house sale, and all it entailed this summer, and the anticipation and actuality of this significant medical event which came right on its heels, it’s been -- a lot. I don’t think I can simply heal up quickly and hit the ground running.

My reluctance to write regularly on the blog through this period seems both to be a direct result of all that’s happened to me, and is happening in the world. When I see how many people let everything in their lives hang out in public, it makes me want to be silent and private. My little dip into FB this week, because of birthday messages the day after my surgery, reinforces this aversion, but it’s also the news and the media in general, not just social media. The media's relentless invasiveness in their search for attention and detail, the more salacious or anxiety-producing the better, seems to encourage individuals to do the same thing -- “surely there’s something about me that I can use to get attention...and more attention...which will alleviate my own sense of anxiety, insecurity, insignificance, and helplessness about the future.” At the bottom of this, of course, is our fear of our own mortality. But of course the attention-seeking only works temporarily, and it is all ego-driven; it doesn’t help anyone else -- in fact, it has the opposite effect. This is often true even when the person who is writing or posting does so in the guise of “helping” -- leaving aside the blatancy of “influencer” culture and its proven deleterious effect not only on adolescents but many of us, there are many self-styled gurus out there, in every “wellness” field from therapy to spirituality to nutrition, exercise, health and beauty.

Even in my own field of creativity and the arts, where it's quieter, there are plenty of people clamouring for attention. The mediums are made for this, and with every click our preferences and data are used to direct more ads and content into our feeds and inboxes. Most of the time we don’t even think about it. But, if Parker Palmer’s insight is true: “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality,” then the clear message to me is that it’s time to get back on the cushion, literally or not. Too much has happened to me personally, at the same time as the escalating din of war and politics in our world, for me to want to add to it except with a calm word or image now and then. Having some tools for dealing with times of personal and collective upheaval, developed through a lifetime of reading, artistic and spiritual practice, loving others, and observing and thinking about life, helps me to know when I need to step back and take care of myself. Only then can I have any hope of offering anything genuinely useful or helpful to others, which is and should be the goal.

At the same time, I recognize in myself a desire to communicate more with this community of readers and friends -- but quietly. So I will try to do that, while giving myself the time I need to set some priorities and think about the shape of life in the days and months ahead.

Rites of Passage

This summer, we're in the process of selling my family home, at the lake in central New York that I've written about and photographed for this blog many times over the years. My feelings about this change are too complex and too personal to summarize here. Some of them were expressed in my book, Snowy Fields, and others continue to emerge -- and I expect that process to continue indefinitely, though lessening in intensity as time passes. 

Over the past six weeks, I've given three book talks - two in central New York to audiences familiar with the landscape that was the inspiration for that project, and one at Christ Church Cathedral here in Montreal, in which I tried to give people some idea of how the rural place and people of my childhood shaped me and my creative life. I also spoke about the spiritual aspects of creativity, and how I believe that claiming  or reclaiming our creative selves is meant for all of us humans, not just those with a particular gift or inclination toward one of the arts. I've loved giving these talks and hearing what members of the audiences have had to say; that's one of the very positive aspects of this process that I'm going through. If you'd like to watch it, here's an audio/visual slideshow of the talk I gave at the public library in Hamilton, New York:

I've felt grief, poignant recollection, and, I admit, some frustration, as I sorted through the possessions of not just my parents, but my grandparents and their siblings. There are trunks full of photographs dating back to the late 1800s, objects, furniture, collections, baby clothes. None of these people did the work of sorting or letting-go: they kept everything, never downsized or moved but passed it all down, and eventually it became my responsibility. Like the previous generations, my cousins and their families remained in the same area, with houses that could absorb some of the objects of these previous lives, but my own urban life is very different. My task has been a triage of finding new homes for certain things, selling others, photographing some before relinquishing them, and keeping a very small selection of things that mean the most to me and are possible to incorporate into our own life and limited space.

The hardest part for me has been contemplating giving up the place itself - the land of which I know every inch, the view from the porch, the huge maple tree, the sounds of the birds that I've heard since I was five years old. Things have worked out in surprising ways, though. I'll be keeping the woods across the road from our family home, which gives me a foothold there as well as a continued vote on the lake association that was founded by my grandfather and father. I still have dear friends with homes on the lake who I can visit, and many of the places I've always loved will remain accessible. We'll be giving up the responsibility and expense of a property that's impossible for us to maintain well at this distance, and hopefully putting it in the hands of new people who will love and appreciate it, and care for it for a long time to come.

And finally, after the years of the pandemic, and especially the last two years in which we cleared out, moved, and downsized our own home, our studios, cared for and moved my father three times, and then dealt with my family's home, we'll finally be able to settle into our own life in Montreal and think about what we want to do. It's kind of astonishing, really: when the pandemic began, in 2020, we had barely retired from our professional work; I was still singing in the cathedral choir and chairing its music committee; we lived in a different part of the city and had a large separate studio; my father was alive and doing well, and we had a very different idea of what the next years would look like. So much change has happened, and we're also four and a half years older, which isn't insignificant at this age.

How do I feel? Somewhat battered, somewhat exhausted, sometimes sad, but mostly hopeful as I look forward to a new chapter. I hope I can be a better friend to my close friends, perhaps be able to do some teaching, resume more of a musical life, continue to do art and writing with greater focus, travel more, and embrace life in this fascinating multicultural city that has also changed a lot during this half-decade. Perhaps I'll also be able to write here more often -- I hope so! 

Happy Birthday

My mother would have been 100 years old today, June 9, 2024. I'm sitting in her dining room at the moment, looking out the windows of her house at the lake she loved, with my computer on the adjustable pine drafting table my father made for her in the early years of their marriage. Some of her own paintings hang on the walls here, along with mine.

How fortunate I was to have had the mother I did. 

She's been gone for eighteen years now, and I still think of her every day. I wish I could celebrate this day with her, but at least I can celebrate her life and her continued presence in mine.

1955. My cousin Bucky, my mother, me, and my maternal grandmother. (The photos above were all taken by my father.)

2024. The same view today.

 

Cassandra's Blog Day

Today is the 21st anniversary of starting this blog, and it's also the spring equinox...seeing the snow that fell overnight, I'm tempted to contemplate spring rather than the reasons why I continue to keep this space. However, looking up at these objects on my desktop, all of which represent parts of my writing journey, a few words come to mind.

With all the changes that have happened during the last two decades, both in my personal life and in our world, The Cassandra Pages has always felt like home. My home, as a space for working out my own thoughts, but also a place of hospitality where I could open the doors and welcome you, my readers and friends. In that respect, it's very much like an extension of the home that we all carry inside ourselves throughout life. That indestructible home continues in spite of physical displacement, changes in our life situation and in our bodies, the loss of people dear to us, pain and suffering as well as joy, changes in society and the world. And it provides a ground and a center for that private awareness of ourselves moving inexorably through time: shedding, learning, pondering, understanding, letting go. I'm not who I was 21 years ago, and I'm also the same person. It's a mystery, and also utterly natural, even if it's difficult to understand or put into words.

Writing this blog has helped me follow myself and the world more consciously and more intentionally, and, unlike a journal, it's been a way to do that in company. The rewards have been friendship, and also the sense that I've sometimes been able to give something meaningful or helpful. The longer and more reflective blog form has always felt more suitable for me than social media, and now, with more than a decade of the latter having altered society and our own lives in innumerable ways, I feel this even more strongly. I've become weary of superficiality, speed, insincerity, egotism and hypocrisy. We need to create and gravitate toward spaces that are supportive of not only who we are, but who we most want to be.

So, I'm still here. Thank you for being with me.

A Year in a Sketchbook

Over the weekend I finished the last pages in my current sketchbook, with the watercolors of artichokes and fruit that are shown below. This particular sketchbook was started back in the fall of 2022, so it spans more than a year -- today, the view out my window is very much like the first page in this video, painted in January 2023, just without the snow.

Last winter I did all the drawings that went into my book Snowy Fields, in much larger drawing pads -- that explains the big time gap between the second and third pages in the video. I also began a dedicated sketchbook for our trip to Greece, and I keep a small pocket-size sketchbook in my purse for metro-sketching and car trips -- so that's why this larger one covers so much time. In any case, I thought I'd make a video of the pages from just the last year - late winter 2023 to mid-March 2024. I think two pages are missing, one that I tore up and one that I gave to a friend. The next task is to gather up the courage to draw on that very first, blank page of the new sketchbook which is already waiting for me on my studio table.

This book is the latest in the series I've been keeping since I started drawing seriously again in 2010. I'm not nearly as prolific as some sketchers, but drawing and making watercolor sketches has definitely become a regular practice for me, and even more so in the last five or six years. When I look through the sketchbooks, I can see the improvement, and yet I feel there's still so much to learn and to experiment with. But it's not just about drawing and filling pages...the sketchbooks are really a visual diary, and I can usually remember exactly where I was, and some of what was going on, when I was working on a particular page. I don't make many notes - just the date and sometimes the location on the back of the sheet. Maybe I should - I rely on my memory being pretty good, but it may not be forever!

For those who are interested in the tools-and-materials side of things, this is a Stillman&Birn Gamma series 6" x 9" landscape format sketchbook - the paper is slightly cream-colored, perfect for pencil or pen-and-ink, and heavy enough to take light watercolor washes. It has no texture or "tooth", though, and won't stand much re-working, nor is it good for powdery media like charcoal or pastel. It's not a watercolor paper per se, but is versatile enough for me as a multi-media sketchbook. Most of the ink drawings were done with either a fine-tip fountain pen or a fude-nib Sailor pen, and Noodler's ink; the rest are either pencil, or pencil and watercolor, or direct watercolor with no preliminary drawing at all.