the cassandra pages

Lisbon, Incomplete

Something about this picture embodies the last two weeks spent in that city better than all the tiled façades and wrought iron balconies and pastel loveliness, more than the hilly streets and clanging trams, and much more than the throngs of tourists eating their natas, and buying shoes and clothing from international fashion shops. Beneath all of that is a melancholy solitude that is difficult to glimpse or grasp, but seems as deeply embedded in the city's spirit as the two-inch chunks of black and cream stone, laid in geometric patterns, that pave the sidewalks and plazas: installed originally, I learned, by prison work crews.

The tradition of fado, and the now-overused Portuguese word saudade... these seem increasingly exploited as commercial expressions, losing meaning rather than being an entry into the soul of the place and the people. Saudade, which has no English equivalent, means a longing for an absent something or someone who may never return; saudade brings both happy and sad feelings, but it is more than nostalgia. It is  described as "the state of mind  that has subsequently become a 'Portuguese way of life'': a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that's missing, wistful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of what is now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence." Fernando Pessoa, the greatest of Lisbon's poets, wrote an unfinished work called The Book of Disquiet:

"The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies – wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis – inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet, which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie."  --George Steiner

 

So, I walked. Where do all those kilometers of pattern lead? I wondered. To the plazas, certainly, but then they wind out, up another hill, into a narrow maze of streets, curving out and down again to the edge of the sea, along the edges of buildings the color of marigolds, lavender, sky, up into the maze again. It is a city that leads the walker to walk, but toward what? Toward incompleteness itself, perhaps. The image at the top of this post shows the only conclusion I found: a place where the pattern changed into green growth and light, at the end of a small dark tunnel.

I also kept a journal with some drawings, which I'm still adding to; I'll probably share them here as time goes on. But I struggled with making art there. I had the sense that drawing and photographing were, to some extent, futile -- I left Lisbon feeling that it was impossible to capture its essence, because we cannot capture incompleteness, absence, and longing, even in the present age where the emphasis is on having a "complete experience", of checking items off a list, taking selfies at the proscribed spots to prove we were there. The Time Out Market, a concept that was first tried in Lisbon, is a perfect example: the tourist doesn't need to discover anything for him or herself; they can just go to a centrally-located and packaged "destination market" -- an upscale food court where a curated selection of restaurants and shops have stalls with the same signage, the same style, offering a sample of their wares, with long tables for seating in the center of the space. It's enticing and exciting on the first visit; on the second, not quite so much. All major cities will soon have these markets, and they will all look alike, too. 

Better then, perhaps, to write in fragments, like Pessoa, or to express feelings in music, or simply to reflect on experience in solitude. Even as a brief visitor, I sensed Lisbon's elusive, melancholic undercurrent, and I find I'm appreciating it even more now that I am home.

Greetings from the Deep Freeze

It's one thing to have a few bitter cold days now and then: that's just part of living in the north. But the cold has been unrelenting up here for more than a month; I can hardly remember a winter when it was below 0 degrees F. for so long. The Celsius readings have hovered around -19 to -23, and out in the country they've been in the minus 30s. Today is a heat wave - about 12 degrees F.! It feels almost balmy! The mountain of plowed snow in the studio parking lot has become a mountain range, and I'm grateful every day that I don't have to keep shoveling out a car that's parked on a city street: people are really having a hard time this year.

Between Christmas and New Year's, we built ourselves a new IKEA bed, and completely tore apart and rearranged our bedroom. Meanwhile, my husband's computer underwent an automatic operating system upgrade that trashed everything, so he spent a lot of the holiday week trying to reconstruct his digital life. Then the same thing happened to mine. We had daily backups, so there was little damage or loss, it was just a pain in the neck. He quickly got my computer back up and running, but yesterday I realized that all my accounting files for Phoenicia had been in a different location, and the data starting from the middle of 2016 was gone, and not backed up where it should have been. Today I began reconstructing them. Strangely, it hasn't put me into too bad a mood. Like many other things, I figure I'll just do a little bit every day, and eventually it will be done. The cliches run through my head: "No use crying over spilt milk"; "what's done is done."

We've also had the inevitable mid-winter colds, sneezing and coughing our way through the month. Unlike Europe, our January and February here in eastern Canada tend to be bright and sunny a lot of the time, so I haven't felt depressed by grey days. What the cold does is make me feel cooped up, because I can't walk: it's far too cold and far too icy underfoot for walking-as-exercise. So, although I try not to make New Year's resolutions, I did vow to get back to the pool and to some sort of exercise regimen. That began last week in earnest, and it does feel better.

A double-length cowl in progress, in Alegria yarn from Manos del Uruguay.

I'm working on the design and layout for the new book by Luisa A. Igloria that Phoenicia will be publishing in March, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. And I'm trying to draw a little every day, and finish a knitting project, and cooking soups and stews and baking bread, as well as reading The Odyssey again, along with two friends. We're each reading a different translation (I'm reading Fagles, the others are reading Wilson and Lombardo), one Book a day, and talking about them as we go - a perfect midwinter project that reminds me of Sicily and the Mediterranean, and the Greek cities we visited. 

Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, from The Golden Iliad and Odyssey, by Martin and Alice Provensen: the book that first hooked me on the classical myths, and still has my all-time favorite illustrations. The look on Odysseus' face, in the background, is priceless.

The Last of Fall

At first, upon leaving, there's the Jacques Cartier bridge, the city bathed in morning light below, the harbor with one or two big boats at the docks, the flat wide expanse of the canal. Then the long cloverleafs off the bridge and around to the south and west, with the old wooden rollercoaster at La Ronde over your shoulder, back onto the busy highway past the Bucky Fuller dome from Expo, the rows of skinny poplars along the banks of the canal, the line of commuters waiting to cross via the old Victoria Bridge. The city's skyscrapers recede in the distance, past the Champlain Bridge, now being rebuilt and surrounded by a giant construction site; the last of the tall urban condos with signs on their roofs, "Vue sur le fleuve," and finally the concrete and steel rapidly yield to trees, grassy fields, flatness, a huge sky.

It's early morning at the very end of October, and the light is tender: ravishing, really. The sky is a pale, slatey blue, dappled with an overall pattern of little clouds, and the soft light from the east washes over trees to which colored leaves still cling, fields that remain green. Two weeks ago, the color was as intense as I've ever seen it. Now the landscape is desaturated, but, to me, perhaps even more beautiful. Everything in the visual field has been turned down not just one notch, but several, and in this greying, filtered morning I feel no trace of the melancholy many seem to associate with the end of autumn; I love these softer shades of lavender and chartreuse and olive, russet and brown, mustard and citron; I like the sense of the earth sleepily yawning and putting itself to bed.

In the summer you always see tractors in these fields, or groups of workers bent over strawberries and beans; in the fall, big machinery harvesting corn or plowing or spreading manure, or a flock of geese or gulls gathering up the leavings. But today there's no human activity; just the long narrow arpents strobing past in the side window like measures marking off a musical score: this one still full of dry standing corn, this one grassy, here a woodlot, the next plowed and ready for spring planting. Far beyond, a house or two, a row of tall windmills, a blue tractor parked at the far edge of a field, a few orange dots that must be pumpkins left on the vine. Flocks of crows haunt the tops of pines; I see a Cooper's hawk that's after something, several big red-tails, and, far ahead, a single flock of Canada geese.

Soybeans.

Corn.

The roadsides have been planted with tall grasses, whose white plumey fronds wave in the wind. Their long stalks are pink, and suddenly the grasses seem like vast flocks of tropical birds on spindly legs, feathers ruffling, resting before a much longer migration than usual.

Maybe I imagine them this way because I, too, am leaving soon, or maybe it's just a desire to populate this landscape with something incongruous: a sign that its once-unfamiliar flatness has become familiar enough to engage my imagination, not just my eyes. I decide to delay my errand across the border long enough to stop and take some pictures, but by the time I exit the highway the light is already changing, the sun a little higher, a little harsher, and the poetry of the morning disappears with a flock of starlings that rise from a field, whirl, and vanish over the horizon.

Petite histoire

The young man stood in the narrow entrance to the studio parking lot, and as I approached on my bike I could hear him talking excitedly to a handful of others standing near the building's doorway. He wore a dark coat and had long unkept hair, and seemed like he might back up into my path at any moment, so I carefully made a wide circle around him and continued on to the bike rack in the corner.

I was removing the key from my lock and gathering my things when I looked up to see him walking toward me. In one hand he carried a long wooden staff, and around his neck was a polished amulet that seemed to be the front tooth of a large animal. His coat flapped around his ankles as he came closer, and he met my gaze with a wide smile.

"Madame," he began, in heavily-accented English, "you see, this is the bizarre part of the movie." He held out his hand. The fingers were clutching a small spray of crushed purple flowers, which he laid carefully on the rack of a bicycle near mine, close enough for me to reach. He swept his empty hand back in a knightly gesture, and smiled again. "If you have nothing to talk about with your colleagues today, you can tell them that someone gave you some flowers."

"Thank you," I said, smiling back at him and bending toward the flowers, but by the time I touched them he had already turned and was walking away, a crow-like apparition about to take flight.

In the studio, I laid the flowers on my desk, and noticed that a long dark hair, definitely not mine, was entangled with them. The flowers looked sad, but it felt wrong to throw them away, so I put them in a tiny vase of water, and now, this afternoon, they've completely revived.

#theshortestdays (8)

The eerie wrongness of the attenuated fall, the inversion of the evening air, the desolate parks, the silent wait for snow that has refused to fall, until yesterday, from a warm sky.

Travel Conversations

Sunrise over the North Atlantic

 

"Excuse me, sir, are you going to London?" The old man who had been sitting next to me at Gate 60 for the past hour looked up from his small computer, and peered at me with bright blue eyes that were far more awake than mine.

"Yes...?"

"They've just announced a gate change. We're moving from here to Gate 54."

He glanced over his shoulder; most of the other passengers in the airport departure lounge had already gathered their bags and were moving slowly down the hall, shoulders slumped in resignation, travel pillows around their necks. It was past 11:00 pm on a perfectly clear early summer night, but for no apparent reason our flight had already been delayed for more than an hour. The Qatar Airlines flight to Dubai scheduled for the same time as ours, across the hall, had boarded and left long before; since I had arrived, two Air Canada flights had left from Gate 60 for Vancouver and Dublin. Except for our sold-out flight to Heathrow, the lounge was now deserted, and in the darkness beyond the sloping windows, I could see no British Airways jets waiting for us to board. "Gate 54..." my neighbor repeated the number, as if to himself, and thanked me.

"I'll walk over with you," I said, checking to see how much he had to carry. "Do you need any help?"

"No, no, I'm fine," he said, stowing his computer in a small backpack and getting to his feet without difficulty. He pulled out the handle of his rolling carry-on and snapped it into place. We rolled our bags around the ends of the rows of seating, and moved out into the central aisle, walking side by side. I looked at him from the corner of my eye, hoping I hadn't insulted him. "Are you going to London as well?" he asked: a predictable, polite response from someone who didn't really want to talk.

"Berlin," I said. "Do you live in England?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm going on from there." A hesitation. Then: "To Poland. And you?"

"I live here in Montreal -- I'm going to Berlin to visit friends. It will be my first time in that city." He smiled but made no response. "Do you have family in Poland?"

His eyes ran over my face like quick fingers. "No, I am alone," he said after a moment. "I live all over the world. I've been here in Montreal for a while -- an interesting city -- before that I was in Brazil, before that, Italy..."

He was a small man, shorter than me, wearing nondescript khaki trousers, a white shirt, running shoes, and a plain khaki baseball cap. He had bypassed the moving walkway, and seemed happy to stretch his legs after the long wait, pulling his carry-on without any apparent effort. I guessed his age to be at least 85, though it was hard to tell. His eyes were his most distinctive feature: awake, clear, very alive. When we arrived at the gate he chose a seat and removed his hat to reveal a nearly bald head with a few wisps of white hair. "What time did they announce for boarding?" he asked.

"I thought they said 11:35," I said, "but at this point, who knows."

He got up and looked at the lighted board at the departure gate, and then sat down again.

"11:35," he confirmed. "So...you live in Montreal. Do you speak French?"

I told him I did, but didn't consider myself fluent.

"C'est ma langue préferé, such a beautiful language to listen to and to speak!" he said, smiling, and so we switched and spoke in French. I asked him how many languages he spoke, and he named five or six. "It's a hobby," he said. "I go somewhere, learn the language, stay a while, and then move on. My favorite place is Portugal."

I nodded and smiled: "Much better than Montreal in the winter." He raised his eyebrows and smiled, and then reached over and pulled his computer out of his backpack: suddenly our conversation was over. "Merci," he said. "Enjoy your stay in Berlin." The last I saw of him, as I boarded the plane, he was engaged in an animated conversation at the desk with one of the flight attendants, pointing out something on a piece of paper.

---

(to be continued)

 

 

 

Northern New England

 

A diary entry from a week ago:

Yesterday was sunny and I lay on my back on a warm rock near one of those big perfect maple trees that grow alone near houses. The sun was so bright against the white New England clapboards it made my eyes water. Above me were lazy summer clouds and high, high up, swallows playing in the wind. The air smelled like lilacs and grass; redwing blackbirds argued in the trees and a solitary cricket sang under the porch. It was as if my former life were colliding with the present one: all the sensory impressions were as familiar and readable as my own skin, while my actual self seemed to be elsewhere. I felt like a ghost.

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.

Bonjour, Summer!

The first local berries.

On a recent weekend we made our first foray to the Jean-Talon market with friends (she writes the blog Passage des Perles, he is one of the best and most knowledgeable cooks we've met in Montreal.) Thought you might like to see the colors and beauty too.

Enchanted mushroom forests.

Considering the wild asparagus.

 

Artisanal breads at Joe le Croute.

 

Foxglove plants, wanting to go home with me (they didn't.)

Radishes that did.

Are you starting to shop at farmers' markets or get deliveries of a CSA basket, or harvesting some produce and flowers of your own? I'm curious if the variety, freshness, and local availability of produce and local food products (honey, cheese, yogurt, etc.) have improved in your region in the last decade. It's a simple way we can all help the earth, support local agriculture and the local economy, as well as improve our own health and state of mind. What could be better than that? Bon été, bon appétit!

 

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"The wind moved like the wake of a massive beast through the city..."
-Seon Joon

 

At the end of January, I wrote:

The month ended with a spell of 40-degree weather blown through the dirty streets by fierce and unpredictable gusts of wind. The city looked its worst: piles of half-melted snow and ice covered with dirt and cinders vie for visual prominance with the detritus revealed underneath by their retreat. Everyone's in a bad mood, or sick -- hacking in the buses and sneezing on the streets as they pass you, merci beaucoup. The hockey rinks lay fallow, full of water reflecting the bare branches above, and ringed with people's cast-off Christmas trees. Children trudge to school, heads down, still swaddled in pink and blue snowsuits. There's no rejoicing, no unseasonable outdoor cafe-sitting as there will be in March; we all know it's a trick: real winter will be back, and soon.

It came the very next day, with the temperatures hurtling down into the single digits, and the wind, now viciously cold, chilling faces and hands the minute we stepped out the door.

There are bright spots, though, even as we hunker down for the final long slog through the next six or eight weeks, the long days of Lent, the inevitable winter storms. Florist windows are full of creative arrangements: tightly packed red roses in unusual vases, the first sight of primroses and daffodils. Ash Wednesday is right around the corner, but that means Easter will be early this year. This week's thaw finally melted through the thick, treacherous sidewalk ice, sothat there are long bare stretches of pavement, making the walking much easier. I sent in my annual garden inscription, and got a note from the chairman of our jardin communautaire: it won't be that long before the sap starts running in the maples, and it will be time to start seeds, place orders, and think about growing things again.

In spite of the ridiculous length of Canadian winters, I always feel like we've cleared a hurdle when January is finally over. It always feels like a long month, and a rather grim one. This past Sunday was Candlemas, that ancient pagan holiday appropriated by the early British Christians; we blessed the year's liturgical candles, and gave thanks for the light, and - with the groundhogs - took a symbolic step toward spring. For the first time in ages, I left the cathedral after Evensong in brightness rather than gloom, and the light in the sky lasted all the way home.