the cassandra pages

Departures and Arrivals

Paper birch catkins. A watercolor from 2017.

Today is Good Friday for most of the Orthodox Church, and I wish my Orthodox friends a blessed Triduum and a very Happy Easter.

And it's a day when we can feel spring arriving. Last week at this time, Montreal was in the throes of a destructive ice storm that left much of the city without power, and devastated the city's trees. Yesterday it was 22 degrees C. here, and it felt like everyone was sitting out in the sun, blinking with amazement. I had coffee with my friend K. at a favorite café (Café Parma, on the north-western edge of the Jean-Talon market), and we could hardly believe we were sitting outdoors, wearing only light sweaters -- and sunglasses, because the light was so bright. We may have more snow, we all know that's entirely possible, but we also know it won't last.

Yesterday was Seamus Heaney's birthday; he would have been 84. I miss him. Here's a small section close to the end of his poem "Station Island," where he talks about meeting a blind stranger who gives him advice in a voice "as definite as a steel nib's downstroke"-- earlier this person has grasped his hand as he disembarks, but the poet cannot be certain "whether to guide or to be guided." In the poem the stranger, or blind seer, also mentions fasting and penitence -- appropriate for Good Fridays present and just past. 

(Read aloud for you, if you like, below.)

Heaney_station island

From "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, "your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite,
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,

So ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget,
you've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

 

 

Winter Night

Night settles over the park, shadows have rolled themselves up;

the sky, a flat translucence behind cut-out branches

casts a blue light on the snow.

 

In the hedge, little lights glow like forgotten fireflies,

the sparrow-flock has flown, a leaping squirrel

leaves sculpted waves of white along the rail.

 

Now, only furtive shapes move on the white path:

runner, skier, the eager dog

pulling his master further into the black trees.

Hermit Diary 38. The times are out of joint: Seamus Heaney, Ballymurphy, and Kenosha

Yesterday I was reminded by Teju Cole that it was the anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney.

This morning, as I sat with the cat and the peaceful light, I took down my copy of Heaney's North (1975), which is both about the idea of North, and Northern Ireland. Opening the book at random, I read “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”

The poem begins:

I’m writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of ‘views
On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,

Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,
‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,
‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing...

and it ends:

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

--

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up
In Ballymurphy. competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

 

Then I opened the precious book to the page with Heaney's inscription (to the original owner, a man in Toronto), my left hand holding the curl of the facing page flat, and thought: his hand held this book just like that, before his pen touched the paper, on a day in March 1986 when he was still very much alive.

I hadn’t read the news yet; I wanted a few more minutes of the soft light on the oxalis and spirea, the seeping red of the begonia blooms, the slightly heavy lift of coffee to lips. Better, I thought, to listen to the poet speak of humanity’s endless appetite for conflict, while he manages, genius that he is, to work in Shakespeare and the Greeks, the Russian camps, the endless clamouring for news on the way to Ballymurphy or Kenosha, and have his company this morning as I “hug my little destiny.”

I copied out the poem and wrote this far. Then I looked up the details about “Ballymurphy.”

Eleven civilians were killed in the Ballymurphy massacre in August, 1971, by members of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army, which had already been in Northern Ireland since 1969. Britain had just launched “Operation Demetrius” which had the objective of interning without trial anyone suspected of being a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Members of the regiment said that as they entered Ballymurphy, they were shot at and returned fire. An account by Mike Jackson, who later became head of the British Army, stated that those killed in the shootings were Republican gunmen. This account was emphatically denied by the Catholic families of the people killed, all of whom were civilians. They included a Catholic priest, Father Hugh Mullan, who was trying to aid a wounded man, reportedly waving a white flag as he did so, and a woman, Joan Connolly, who was standing near the army base and then was left lying in a field for hours without medical attention, where she died.

None of the soldiers were held accountable and there was no investigation at the time.

45 years later, in 2016, an inquest was requested by the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. Funding for the inquest was “deferred” by the ruling party, and hearings did not begin until 2018. The last witnesses were heard in March 2020 after 100 days of testimony. A report is expected “in the coming months.”

--

Now, I’ll summon the courage to turn to today's news.

Hermit Diary 22: Forsythia

Parc Lafontaine, Montreal, May 1 2020, gouache and pencil in Moleskine pocket sketchbook

 

Forsythia 

 

It caught my eye a while ago, lit up 

against the gloom of the woods

in the corner of a wild field,

the pulsing color of caution. 

 

And now that I have spent a little time

on this stone wall watching its fire

flare out of the earth

I begin to think about the long chronicle of forsythia

 

how these same flowers have blazed

through the centuries,

roused from the ground by the churning of spring.

I would rather not look around the next 

 

corner of the year to see how this will die,

its lights going out,

its bare, arcing branches

waving like whips in the bitter wind. 

 

So I sit facing the past,

letting my feet dangle over the wall, 

beating time against stone with my heels

as the long gray clouds roll over me. 

 

Remember how Arnold by the Channel

thought of Sophocles who must have heard 

the same shore-sounds long ago,

walking by the edge of the Aegean?

 

Well, I am holding in the palm of my thoughts

all the others who once were stopped,

like me, by this brightness, 

this sulfuric cry for help:

 

women in tunics, women gathered by a well,

men in feathers, men swimming by a river, 

all speaking languages I will never know,

saying the different words for its color 

 

as I feel the syllables of yellow form in my mouth 

and hear the sound of yellow fill the morning air.

 

-- Billy Collins

 

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 6. Tranströmer plays Haydn.

Yesterday Teju Cole asked his Facebook followers a simple question: "What's helping?" As you can imagine, the comments included a wide range of answers: everything from "the stillness" to "connecting with others." In addition to "talking to friends", a lot of people (including me) mentioned reading and music. I've been playing my piano much more lately, and I'm going to miss it badly because we are seldom going to our studio, where it lives. The cathedral, where I've been involved in music for more than a decade, is closed, and there will be no choral services for a long time. I'll have to sing to myself, or get out my flute, because there's a music quotient in my life that can only be satisfied by making music, not just by listening.

So here is a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, the late Swedish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, who also played the piano. After suffering a stroke in 1990, his right side was paralyzed, and he taught himself to play with just his left hand. He is quoted as saying that playing was a way for him to continue living after the stroke -- though he did go on to write poetry until the early 2000s, publishing his final book, The Great Enigma, in 2004. He died in 2015, just weeks before his 84th birthday.

Allegro

I play Haydn on a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag--it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace."

The music is a glasshouse on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

--Tomas Transtromer

 

The Navel of the World

Some of you may remember that last winter I was working on a series of sketches of the landscape at Delphi, Greece. The one above remains my favorite - I even made it the screen image on my phone.

A few weeks ago I did another one, this time in oil pastel, following up on the oil pastels of Sicily. I thought maybe that medium would lend itself to this subject. Here's the full painting:

There's a lot that I like about it, and a lot I don't. My handling of the medium has gotten more confident. The color palette here works well, even though it's mostly imaginary. What doesn't work for me is the composition. It's fine for a "pretty painting" of a scene, but that's not what I'm after -- I've got photographs that serve that purpose. The circular, central lawn-like area is boring, and it makes the entire left side of the painting boring too, even though there are some interesting passages in the trees. Furthermore, the ruins in the foreground feel too literal and too prominent, even though I tried to subdue them. The result is that there are too many places for the eye to look, and this distracts from what drew me to this view in the first place. Why is it so hard to remember that, I wonder?

The picture is in this area:

Which is, not surprisingly, much like the gouache. Here it is again:

What makes this compositions work is the combination of strong simple shapes with intersecting angles that create tension and interest. In the gouache, which is really pared down to essentials, both in shape and in color, these elements create a locked-together composition of dark, slightly-triangular verticals held within the picture frame by the intersecting diagonals. Because the viewer isn't overwhelmed with details, and because the palette is so limited, the more abstract picture is able to create an emotional response that, for me anyway, is much closer to what I actually "felt" when standing there, and what I hoped to take away.

With the oil pastels and the picture cropped this way, I really like the strong cobalt blue with the lavender and dull green of the mountain. The foreground is missing in this crop, but the gouache helps me see better what to do with it. In addition to the beautiful, iconic trees, one of the most striking aspects of this landscape was the circular pattern of rocks and scrubby growth of the mountain behind the cedars. I like how the oil pastels have worked to capture that -- it's subtle, not detailed, but effective. Now I'm thinking about making a larger painting, in oils, based on what I've discovered by analyzing these pictures. The main message is simplify.

--

While I was working on this piece, I found a suite of poems by Seamus Heaney that he had written in Greece. One of them is set in Delphi, and it speaks of Heaney's desire to drink from the spring where all visitors to Delphi who came to consult the oracle stopped to wash and drink; the same spring was used by the Pythia and the priests for a ritual cleansing before giving an oracular pronouncement or interpreting an oracle.

The Greeks believed that the spring was located at the center of the earth. Zeus, king of the gods, had loosed two eagles from opposite ends of the world, and, flying at the same speed, they crossed paths above Delphi. Zeus let a stone fall from the air where they crossed, and where it fell became the sacred site, marked by a stone called the omphalos, or navel of the world. Under the omphalos was buried the mythological monster called Python, which had guarded the sacred spring, until it was killed by the god Apollo, to whom Delphi and the Oracle became sacred. We saw a Roman copy of this large carved stone in the museum in Delphi. The carved pattern represents a woolen net that was once thought to cover the stone.

If you've been to Delphi, you would have thought, as I did, what a long, difficult journey it must have been to get there from any of the major city-states of Greece, and then to have to add the arduous climb up the side of Mt Parnassus. I wish I had known that the spring still exists, and that there's a modern fountain by the side of the road for modern travelers, but I had no idea! Heaney, visiting in the 1960s, did know this, and of course -- as a poet who had been steeped in the Greek classics, translated some, and used so many references and stories in his own poems and plays -- he was determined to drink from it himself. The poem speaks of his frustration and its resolution, and it's an image that has now been added to my own thoughts about Delphi.

Castalian Spring

Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—
But the inner water sanctum was roped off
When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,
And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!
So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,
The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,
Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless
Anger draining away, on terraces
Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.

--Seamus Heaney

The Book of the Red King

I hope that readers of this blog will want to know about this beautiful new book of poems, written by Marly Youmans, illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and designed and published by me. It's available as a hardcover with linen covered covers and a printed dust-jacket, and a paperback, and the pre-order pricing extends until this Friday, July 19th. All the ordering information and full book information is on the Phoenicia website.

"For those who love well-formed poems and for those who love fantasy, this is a must-read and a distinctive, evocative voice. There is no one like Marly Youmans." --Kim Bridgford 

"The reader will be spellbound." --Kelly Cherry

"It is the territory of Yeats and Tolkien." -- A.M. Juster

A short book description:

From Marly Youmans, author of the epic poem Thaliad (Phoenicia, 2012) comes the story of the mysterious Red King, the metamorphosing Fool, and the ethereal Precious Wentletrap, told in a series of connected poems of rare beauty. Whether read as fantasy, symbolic story, or simply poetry, the world Marly has created is a spellbinding place where we can glimpse truths about our own lives, and the world. The Book of the Red King is illustrated with drawings by the acclaimed Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

 

Susan Elbe

Yesterday the news came that we had lost Susan Elbe, one of the best poets I have known, a good friend, and a kind, loving, and deeply concerned person. Dave Bonta and I first met her through qarrtsiluni, published a number of her poems, and worked with her as a guest editor of the "Health" issue; that mutually-supportive relationship has continued through the years. I was looking forward to publishing a book of hers one of these days, and am very sorry that this won't happen.

 

I wanted to share a link to Susan reading one of her poems at qarrtsiluni, from November 2011, titled "Between Us and the Slow Fall." The kind of person she was comes across clearly through both her voice and her words. We shared September birthdays, political views, and a genuine friendship though we had never met in person. I will miss her.

 

After the Ocean

 

Back in the city, waves of people --

soft folds of sand-colored hair

pinned at a woman's nape,

light glancing off phones.

 

Flowers on dresses, swooping scooters

instead of gulls, flapping orange wings

of a cyclist's safety vest, the ceaseless lap

of traffic on de Lorimier.

 

And a little girl in black tulle, glimmering with gold --

like stars that night on the island --

tripping across Marquette, still unaware

of either infinity, or oblivion.

A Deficit of Consonants

I've been re-reading some of the Cassandra Pages archive. Here is a post from May 26, 2011.

--

Poems - a lot of poems - come across this virtual desk. Some I need to read with extreme attention, because my advice or input or decision is needed; some, often written by friends, feel like gifts during my day. Others - the majority - are part of the large volume of words that pass in front of my eyes, sifting and tossing but eventually falling like bits of colored paper drifting from skyscraper windows during a parade. My words, too, are part of that constant fluttering: some catching the light for a brief moment before coming to their own rest, lost among so many others.

Today, unaware, I read a poem that utterly devastated me. It wasn't a good poem. It simply sliced me, the way a sheet of paper turns into a thin, efficient blade and cuts the side of a finger.

A friend quotes W.S. Merwin, in conversation with Bill Moyers:

"I think poetry's about what can't be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said. Out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. Probably grief. Maybe something else. You know, you see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman whose husband or son or brother has just been killed by an explosion. And you know that if you could hear, you would be hearing one long vowel of grief. Just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that's the beginning of language right there.

Inexpressible sound. And it's antisocial. It's destructive. It's utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. And I think that's how language emerged."

Poetry is about what's can't be said: yes, often true. And we need poetry, art, music to try to express the rawness of our pain more often, I think, than our joy. We enter the realm of art full of emotion, need, and desire, wanting to say something about ourselves, about existence, about what has happened to us or what we've seen happening to others.

But if poetry is the language that emerges from inexpressible sound, we must learn that handling words is like handling knives. Becoming masterful often means saying less, or coming at the subject obliquely: the slant light of late afternoon picking out one falling shred of paper and setting it aflame during its flight to earth. Becoming a master of oneself as well as the words.

The amateur and the egotist, however, say everything. Their work has the capacity - perhaps even the intent - to violate rather than move us, like the graphic news photograph on the front page that can now never be erased from our mind.

It was safer, perhaps, before the internet gave everyone a platform from which to dump their buckets of vowels.