the cassandra pages

Returning to Oil Painting

When we were in central New York for a short time a few weeks ago, I started an oil painting. It was the first one I'd worked on since 2018 - a pretty big gap in time. The interruption of the pandemic and the fact that we took apart our studio and moved were, of course, a major factors, but except for the three oils I did back in 2018, I had actually done very few since we moved to Montreal almost twenty years ago. Instead, I concentrated on drawing and watercolor, on keeping a sketchbook, and on printmaking. I also did fair amount of bookmaking and binding, and sewing projects. The larger works I did were almost all pastels - dry media, rather than oil or acrylic easel painting. And all of that had to fit into our professional life, because we were working until about six years ago -- perhaps that's why I did those oil paintings in 2018.

When I reflect on the reasons behind these choices, I realize that the spaces in which I've worked have always influenced what media I used, along with what was going on in my life at the time -- and I'm going to write more about this in a subsequent post. 

But today, I want to talk about beginning again in what has always been the most important medium to me - oil. Why? I guess I just like it - the materials have a seductive and enticing quality that appeals to all of my senses. There is craft involved long before you pick up a brush - the preparation of your support, whether canvas, board, or wood, has to be done properly or the painting will not last. The materials are pretty expensive so you need to understand them. Then, the process of building a painting takes days, weeks, or longer, and it can be utterly absorbing as well as agonizingly frustrating during the period when you are living with it -- because that's exactly how it feels. Fortunately, oil is a forgiving medium, unlike watercolor -- it stays workable for a long time, you can scrape it away with a palette knife, dissolve layers with a solvent-soaked rag and begin again, and continually revise by painting over dried previous layers without the colors becoming muddy. You can work into wet paint for soft edges and other effects, without having to time your efforts down to the minute, as in watercolor. The colors themselves have a unique beauty, luminosity and depth. And all the while, there is a sense of being part of a lineage of painters who have wrestled with this medium over the centuries, trying to create works that are beautiful and that will last. Yes, modern conservation techniques allow us to preserve works on paper, but they are never as highly prized as oil paintings.

View up the Chenango Valley from North Norwich. Oil on prepared board, 12" x 16", February 2024.

I don't think my oils are better than other things I've done; often the liveliness of a drawing or quick watercolor pleases me more. But there is something about the process of creating an oil painting  -- maybe it's because you're with it for so much longer? -- that I find satisfying. It's always a journey, both artistically and emotionally, and there are always points where you're stuck or things aren't working, and you want to give up in frustration, but don't, and somehow find your way out of the thicket. The final painting may not be your best, but you've learned something that you can take with you into the next one. And the medium itself - the unctuousness of the paint, the spring or stiffness of the brushes, the smell, the joy of mixing exactly the right color and value, the way the paint becomes part of the surface -- all this is deeply satisfying. 

When there's been a big gap in time between when you stopped doing something, and beginning again, you can never pick up where you left off. That's because you aren't the same person anymore. A lot has happened in my life, and in the world, since 2018, as well as the fact that I have aged. All of that is carried in my body and mind whether it's formed into expressed words or not. And even though I've done a lot of artwork in other media during that time , and learned a lot from it, painting in oils is different from anything else. I'm very curious to see how these factors will affect my creative work in the long run.

Making new progress in this medium has been a goal of mine for a while, but I haven't been in the right space or frame of mind to start until recently. I'm not sure where I want to go with it, but I trust the process to show me that -- the way to find out is to paint. I don't know what a realistic goal is for the coming year, nor do I want to stop drawing or making watercolors. I don't think I can do a painting every week, but maybe I can do one every month. I do recognize an underlying sense of, if not urgency, then certainly a ticking clock -- if not now, then when? Because I too want to create a larger body of work that has a chance of lasting, being passed down to the next generations, having meaning to people because the work shows a place or a person or a feeling that resonates or captures some aspect of life that perhaps doesn't, in reality, exist forever. And I also want to challenge myself to do the best work I can and take myself, through it, into new territory. So this is a beginning, and I hope that I can keep at it and not let huge gaps in time occur again.

Starting with a winter landscape made sense, since I was completely absorbed in drawing such scenes all last winter. I feel like I've internalized some truths about them.

In this particular painting, I struggled just to get some technique back, as well as to make decisions about how much detail to include, how to handle the tangles of branches and shrubs and grasses, and the snow upon them. In the end, I simplified a lot, as you can see in the video about 2/3 of the way through. At one point I rubbed out the whole lower left section and repainted it; I also brightened the sky and added more blue, and changed the color of the hills, adding some scumbled color to indicate the trees going back. The conifers were lightened, and I added beige and pinkish violet to the bare-branched trees near them in the background.

When I reached the point shown below, I was pretty happy with the brushwork in the foreground and in the bare trees, and also with the small touches of color that I added. The deep blues gave a lot more depth and interest to the snow, while the touches of pink and lavender enlivened the dry grasses and shrubs and helped to unify the painting, since shades of both are in the background trees and sky.

I'm not sure I'm done with it, in fact probably not, but the work from here on will be fairly minor. It's a start.

 

Drawing Manon

Lately I've been working harder on trying to draw Manon from life. In spite of the fact that I've been drawing cats since the mid-1980s, I've never found it easy. There's something about their anatomy that's hard to capture; maybe there's so much fluff covering their skinny little bodies and skeletons that it's hard to see the underlying structure, and you end up with something that looks like a lumpy bag of fur. They move a lot, even when asleep. I also used to get the proportions wrong. A cat's head is actually quite small compared to their body, and I often drew it too large. Manon is a small cat, only 8 pounds. The fact that she's three-colored also complicates things when working in black-and-white.

It's been going better lately, especially when she's asleep. Above is the most recent effort, from the past weekend. Here's a detail:

And here are two other recent drawings:

Here are a couple of much older drawings, from a sketchbook in 2011, not long after she came to live with us. Doing quick gesture drawings of animals, as well as people, is a big help -- I should do more of that now.

Manon is at least 15 now, and a year ago in March we almost lost her. She bounced back, with the help of our brilliant vet, Julie*, who prescribed tiny doses of prednisone every other day. She's regained all the weight she had lost, and has had a good year. It seems like she wants to be around us all the time, even more than before, and is very affectionate while also maintaining her feline independence - as much as possible for an indoor cat. She's still pretty playful and energetic, even though she sleeps more, and she continues to be more vocal in her attempts to communicate. I never tire of watching her - to me, cats embody beauty and grace, as well as having the appeal of all their inherent quirkiness. We cherish every day with her, and I'm sure that's motivating my desire to draw and paint her while she's still with us. I must admit that photographs do a better job of showing her true personality, though -- this is a cat with a big presence! How fortunate we were to have ended up with such a companion, totally by chance.

*our vet is Dr Julie Bereza at Baker Animal Hospital in Montreal - I can't recommend this clinic enough

Centering and Simplifying

When I posted this watercolor sketch on Instagram, one of the comments (thank you, Michael) was that it seemed to capture "the essence of carnation". I thought about that quite a lot, wondering what happens when this occurs. What helps the artist get close to the "essence" of a subject, and is it something that can be "explained," let alone taught?

Sitting down one evening to do this particular piece, several things were going on in my mind. I was drawn by a vase of evergreens and carnations remaining from the holidays, while also wanting some respite from a long day and the constellation of anxieties, sorrows, frustrations and anger with which many of us are living. So I wanted to do something absorbing and, hopefully, to capture some of the beauty and peacefulness in front of me. I decided not to work in my studio, but right there on the living room table, so I brought out my watercolor palette, a large jar of water, sketchbook and brush, and adjusted the position of the flowers for the light angle I wanted.

Then there were a few minutes of considering potential problems. I wanted to do a direct watercolor -- with no pencil under-drawing, or pen-and-ink line -- because I felt that a spontaneous watercolor would better capture the delicacy and emotional feeling of the bouquet. Another issue was how to handle the white flowers against a white background, because their edges would be very hard to see. I decided I'd paint the shadows on the petals, and then add some pencil lines afterward, if needed.

The final questions were the placement on the page, and where to start. I began by mentally calculating the proportion of vase height to flower height and width, and estimating where these would need to be placed on the page. I then started painting with a brush line indicating the top edge of the vase (the whole vase appears in the full painting, as you'll see in the video below) and built the picture from there, placing the flowers before doing any of the foliage. I painted far fewer flowers than were actually in the vase; I just chose representative ones at interesting angles. As soon as I began painting, I became very quickly absorbed in it.

The painting itself took about 30-40 minutes. When I'm working on something like this I'm in a state that's somewhere between meditation and extreme but wordless concentration. I'm not talking to myself in my head, and I'm moving pretty fast because I want the strokes to be quick and alive. I don't fuss over things, but try to create an overall impression as rapidly as possible. The color choices and color mixtures are intuitive and come from experience; this just comes with learned technique and practice. As Zen teaches, you have to master your tools and technique first, and practice over and over so that you can let them go, not think about them, but rely on them when you are in a flow of action. During that time, your attention can be concentrated not so much on what you are doing but on becoming one with the subject -- seeing it with fresh, clear eyes and penetrating to what is essential, while leaving aside whatever is not.

Obviously, that is a goal, but not something I usually achieve! Nevertheless, without understanding it as an ideal, and without having put in years of thought, meditation, and technical practice, I don't think I'd ever be able to come close. Oddly enough, children sometimes approach the essence of things better than adults. They have so much less of a filter; they haven't been told what matters by other people or society, and they haven't learned to care what others think of their efforts -- that judging voice we become accustomed to as adults is not in their heads yet, but --sadly -- it will be soon. As adults, we have to un-learn a great deal in order to open up again.

The result of this process is a picture, yes, but it can also be a period of time that is enormously refreshing. We center ourselves, we concentrate, we forget our ego as we work, absorbed in color and form and the wordless communication between eye, hand, and spirit. It's a journey, and a space in time. There is no way to describe this in detail; as with many things, it's easier to say what it's not.

The detailed drawing above was done on the following day. Here I was trying to see the difference between a careful rendering of the flowers and what I had done in the painting. It's the opposite of the extreme simplification of the watercolor. The drawing was a helpful study in understanding "Chrysanthemum:" its frilliness, the skirt-like stiffness of the petals, the whorls of tightly wound petals that form the centers, the way the darker pigment is concentrated in lines on the edges. Although the drawing is still quite loose and spontaneous, it didn't create the sense of time-standing-still and complete absorption of the watercolor painting, because I was thinking about all of those things and how to explain them in words.

--

Some of you have been asking for some watercolor videos, so I made this short one, which shows me painting one flower from the previous composition, and talking about simplifying what I was seeing while painting. When I watch it, I notice technical things that I don't think about at all, like where I am holding the brush, how much pressure I'm applying. It's helpful for me to watch too.

(Click at lower right to view full screen.)

 

And here's that little sketch from the video so that you can see it better.

I wish everyone some moments of rest and renewal in the coming days. You don't have to be an artist to experience the kind of time-out-of-time that I'm talking about here. Look around you - something is calling for your attention. You don't need to paint it or write about it, just look... and then look deeper for ten or fifteen minutes, being conscious of your breathing, and see if you don't feel that something has shifted for the better.

 

What is Real?

Snow-dusted fields near Lourdes-de-Joliette, Quebec. Watercolor, 6" x 9" in sketchbook.

Whether we feel like we're gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It's hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation - not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I'm hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it's more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I'm trying to do is think about what's real, and that's probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here -- a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year's Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year - we've had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself -- its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance -- remains very real and very much itself.

I'm still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I'm comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don't have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say "look at me!," with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

To make things even more absurd, when the news (let alone social media) attempts to "move on" from these difficult topics, what they offer us becomes ever more bizarre. Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece about the danger of not cleaning one's navel; all the stuff that collects in there, the writer claimed, can build up to a point where surgery may be needed. "Have we really come to this?" I wondered. As if we don't have enough to worry about -- or maybe because we do -- does the news have to manufacture such absurdities for the already-anxious to obsess about? Have our powers of reasoning become so distorted and weak that no one even calls such drivel out for what it is? But of course it is only a short distance from our culture's obsession with celebrity and wealth and consumption to its hyper-anxiety about health and mortality amidst great privilege. Many of the institutions we once had more faith in, from the judicial system to universities as a bastion of free thought, to women's control over their own bodies, are under constant attack. Meanwhile the extinction of species continues at a staggering rate, almost unnoticed.

Many of us are struggling with the resulting dissonance between what we know to be right and true, and how much of the society around us, the government, and the media are acting. I don't think this is going to improve anytime soon; it is a feature of our world as we enter 2024.

Therefore I think it is a time to gird our loins, as the saying goes, and prepare for a long haul. Our armor needs to be whatever is the most real to us -- the people we love, books, art, music, our communities of friends, nature, animals, our faith if we have it -- and in continuing to do our deepest and most heartfelt work. We need to be prepared to take care of each other, to find hope in unexpected places and to share it, and take a very long view of the future.

 

Someone said to me recently that one advantage of getting older is having the perspective of years. I find that to be true. The world has gone through many dark times, seen many despots and dictators, seen wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters, and the accompanying tragic, devastating losses. And then things change. In my own lifetime I've seen many pendulum-swings in politics; I've seen conservatism and progressivism and conservatism again; I've seen greater justice and the backlash against it. At the same time, there have been enormous advances in science, technology, and medicine that have saved and improved countless lives. The Cold War didn't become a nuclear apocalypse. Children don't die of polio and measles; far fewer adults are dying of AIDS than we once feared. The story is not entirely dark, even when we seem to be in dark times.

So I refuse to believe that humanity is doomed, even though I may not live to see the breakthroughs that help turn the tide of what we're living through now. I don't know what will happen, be lost or irrevocably changed, before that happens. But I am going to choose to be a hopeful person while not being an unrealistic one, and to try to see what I can do in my own small corner to keep hope alive. Being more mindful of my senses is one way to immerse myself in what is real and present in each moment of life -- and it's the best way I know to keep despair at bay.

 

Books of 2023

I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there aren't that many books on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two largest were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, but Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague was also a long read. If you have never read Moby Dick, as I somehow had not, I encourage you to do so - it really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest novels of all time.

It took me 75 or 100 pages to warm up to Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, which is written in an unusual style that eschews detailed dialogue or description of the characters' thoughts or feelings, but instead relies on description of events. We found that challenging, because we just didn't have the normal ways of entering the characters' heads, but by sticking with it, the reader is rewarded with immersion in their world -- in this case, Jewish communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine in the mid-to-late 1700s. At that time, a self-proclaimed "Messiah" named Jacob Frank appeared, and gained an ardent following. Of all the books our group read this year, this one probably created the most lively and wide-ranging weekly discussions.

Other books that stood out for our group were Lalla Romano's A Shared Silence, an intense novel about two couples in the Italian resistance, and Pamuk's Nights of Plague, an epic about a made-up Mediterranean island dealing with an outbreak of plague, and the politics and human behaviors that result.

I was thrilled about the publication of Teju Cole's Tremor, his first novel since Open City. Readers here will know that he and I are long-time friends, and I was privileged to be one of the first readers of the manuscript, so I don't feel that I can "review" the book objectively. I will say that it is beautifully written and conceived, as we have come to expect from Teju; it is timely, dealing with subjects from marriage to racism, from the ownership of art objects to the complexities of academic life, from friendship to, perhaps most importantly, death. It is also experimental, pushing the structure of the novel in new directions, and involving the reader in a reading experience that is not entirely linear. So, of course, I recommend it highly.

Greek Lessons, by the Korean writer Han Kang, intrigued me because of its title and also because of its knockout cover, and I was not disappointed. This book, also, pushes the form of the novel, and tells a poignant story of two people who use the study of language to address their own difficulties in communication. It's probably the most unusual novel I read this year. I plan to write a full-length review of it later.

While we're speaking of highly original writing, I was extremely impressed by Nay Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini. This short, chapbook-length work defies categorization as to genre; it is listed by the publisher, Ugly Ducking Press, as poetry, and could be called a narrative prose poem of sorts; it includes illustrations that are integral to the text. It is a work of art that cuts to the heart of what human beings are capable to doing to each other; it's the most original thing I've read this year and I found it brilliant, deeply disturbing, and haunting.

More recently, our book group has begun John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours", about the lives of peasants in the French Alps near Berger's home in the second half of his life. As V., one of our book group members, said, "I am attracted to Berger right now because of his deep humanity," and she was right; these are books that get to the essence of what is human, what constitutes survival, what we need most, and what is unnecessary. They are antidotes to capitalism, consumerism and fads, social media and modern conformity; they're not without violence, but it tends to be the violence of raising and slaughtering your own animals for food, or the rough feuds of local people. Likewise, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli speaks of Greece before mass tourism, when wandering tribes of herders still moved through the remote mountains, speaking dialects that were already in danger of being lost, and mountain-top monasteries were still inaccessible except by horseback or donkey. Having visited some of these remote places myself, his words were more meaningful now than when I first read the book some years ago, and I find myself feeling grateful to both him and Berger for writing down what they observed, and what came to matter deeply to them. This encourages me as a writer, too -- that the daily lives of ordinary people do matter, and it is in our hands as writers to preserve the truths of their existence.

I should also mention that I do a lot of online reading of shorter fiction and essays (in places like The New Yorker, Emergence Magazine, Beshara, The Guardian long reads, quite a few individual Substacks) and I'm a regular subscriber to Brick, a very fine Canadian literary journal which doesn't confine itself to solely Canadian authors, and publishes a lot of work by people of color, indigenous writers, and immigrants, and (I think) as many female as male writers. Do check it out; it's a good journal to support.

Please, as always, do share your own reading lists or highlights from this year! Here's my full list:

2023

The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (in progress)

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor (rereading)

The Capture of Krao Farini, Nay Saysourinho

Pig Earth, John Berger #

Tremor, Teju Cole

A Recipe for Daphne, Nektaria Anastasiadou

*Greek Lessons, Han Kang

*Moby Dick, Herman Melville #

The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander

The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake

Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert #

*A Shared Silence, Lalla Romano  #

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr #

Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4) #

Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk #

Woman at Point Zero, Nahwal el Saadawi

House of Names, Colm Toibin

District and Circle, Seamus Heaney

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan

Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier #

*The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#

The Other Side of the Mountain, Journals of Thomas Merton Vol 7., Fr. Thomas Merton

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

The Innocent, Ian McEwan

The Shortest Day

Winter solstice sunrise, Montreal

We don't have to be pagans to feel, deep in our bones, that something has culminated today, and then, slowly, will begin to swing back in the other direction. In spite of all our protective armors of clothing, our central heating and reliable hot water, our automobiles and all the other conveyances that keep us moving comfortably in every kind of weather, and the technologies that manage to distract us from a more primal awareness, we are animals of this earth and this solar system, and we feel the changes in our bodies and spirits whether we acknowledge them consciously or not.

Today in Montreal, we had just 8:42 hours of daylight. That's not much. Unlike most of the previous week, which has been grey and overcast, today dawned bright and absolutely clear. I got up at sunrise -- not difficult, since it came at 7:33 -- and saw the sunlight hitting the buildings next to us, and the tall towers far in the distance. It was also very cold today, -9 degrees Celsius, and that sun felt very far away.

I always think of the sun, at solstice, as a traveler who's gone all the way down to Patagonia, and is lingering in Tierra del Fuego, before starting his long journey back north. Of course the sun hasn't actually gone anywhere, but it still feels that way. We could mark his path on our windows (I use the masculine pronoun because of Apollo, the Greek Sun God, probably) and it would be a long arc to the far points at the winter and summer solstices. But rather than the astronomical side of this long period of apparent movement, I'm more interested in how it affects us, and the ways we've devised to forget our deep connection to the seasons, the waxing and waning of natural phenomena, the planting and growing and harvesting times, and the long period of hibernation, quiet, resting -- and yes, danger -- that winter once represented.

I've just re-read the first book in John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours," which is called Pig Earth. Berger shows us the lives of peasants in the French Alps -- people who are close to the earth, whose lives depend on understanding it. It's harsh, even shocking, to read about the annual slaughtering of cows and pigs, to hear of women whose only income comes from foraging mushrooms and mistletoe and anything else they can find, to sell to city dwellers, as the seasons pass. Much of it is shocking to our 21st century sensibilities, but how far are we really removed from it? There are subsistence farmers still, in the valley where I grew up, and there are plenty here in Quebec. Another series our book group read recently deals with life on a remote island off the coast of Norway, relentlessly exposed to the North Sea, the bitter winds and storms, the luck of the fishermen or lack of it, the attempt to augment one's income from cod with the sale of eiderduck down and gathered wild bird eggs, the dangers of accidents and failed harvests and dried-up wells, the great precarity of every single winter. Factory farming and fishing have done away with some of this way of life, but not all, and shouldn't we know something about it rather than being cocooned in our urban and suburban comfort and convenience?

Here, even in this northern city which gets plenty of snow, ice, and bitter cold, most of us have so much protection. We have our heated apartments, hot water on demand, and plenty of food -- which can be delivered, already prepared, to one's door if you really want. We walk short distances and descend into the tunnels of the heated metro, which whisks us to our destinations, many of which are also connected underground. Whether we complain about the weather or thrive in it, only the sans abri, the homeless people of the city, are exposed to the elements in truly life-threatening ways. How many of us consider whether we could survive if we had to sleep outside for even one night? Strawberries, oranges, pomegranates and persimmons, figs and dates, are piled in the markets for our holiday consumption, without us having to give a thought to where they came from. It is all...completely unnatural.

At the lake, last week, flocks of Canada geese slept on the water every night, leaving in the mornings to go feed in the cornfields and then return around sunset. It was a predictable pattern. But one night, toward the end of our stay, I heard a commotion among them in the late afternoon. At least half of the flocks swam into the center of the lake and then took off. The sun went down, but in the morning, they hadn't returned -- and they never did. What had they sensed? The weather wasn't a lot colder, and the snow that had fallen earlier in the week was all gone. There was no ice on the lake yet. No humans or other predators had spooked them. It was just -- apparently-- time to move on.

I'm so much more comfortable when I can witness these natural events that remind me who I am in the world. I like to be able to see the night sky, the winter constellations, the positions of the planets. I like to feel the cold on my face, and be able to see my breath; I like to make stews out of root vegetables and to bake bread. I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have a choice but to eat seasonally, and how that made sense. I enjoyed growing food in the summer, and preserving some of it for use in the winter. Of course, like so many other people, we buy strawberries in February now, and anything else that attracts us in the markets unless it's ridiculously expensive. Still, I don't want to forget who I am as an animal, a hunter-gatherer, a creature made mostly of water who can freeze quickly. 

For us in the north, there is a long haul yet to go, even if this night is technically mid-winter from a solar perspective. But the days will start to lengthen, and we'll feel differently as a result; we'll know the sun has started his trek back to us. 

Tonight I'm going to put on my heavy coat and hat and stand on the balcony for a little while, looking at the night sky. Even though there are city lights here, we can see stars and planets, far more faintly than in the countryside, but fairly well on a clear night like this. The stars always pierce my illusions of knowing much of anything, of being powerful or of any lasting importance. Frankly, I like that. When I sense how short and insignificant my life is, my love for everything becomes even more intense and precious. We all ought to be humble, and of course we aren't, because most of us live in a delusion, but the stars, especially in winter, remind me to be kind and to forgive others and myself for all the ways we forget who we are. This clear solstice night is a good time to go out and feel that once again. 

Review: A Recipe for Daphne

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish politics or revisionist history. However, I was very pleased to read and review Nektaria Anastasiadou's  new novel A Recipe for Daphne, for Cha: An Asian Journal, which is based in Hong Kong. It's an engaging, well written novel about the dwindling Rum (Greek Orthodox) community of Istanbul, their complicated history and challenging future. I also reflected on the history of the different religious and ethnic minorities under and after the Ottoman Empire, including that of my Armenian and Protestant in-laws. When doing the research for the review, I learned a lot more about the history of the ethnic and religious minorities in former Ottoman territories and in Turkey -- and it is not a happy story. Please go to the review page on Cha if you'd like to read the full piece; I'll just excerpt a little of it here. Kosmas, mentioned below, is an Istanbul pastry chef who falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful American woman visiting her aunt in Istanbul and searching for her own roots.

Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.

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I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.

A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.

Thank you to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor of Cha: An Asian Journal for publishing this review, and for all the tireless work she does on behalf of Asian literature and writers. I first "met" Tammy when Dave Bonta and I were editing qarrtisiluni, where she submitted excellent work that we published on several occasions. That was a long time ago! It's always a pleasure to find these old connections circling back around, and to make new ones.

 

 

Short Story with Swans

Mountains and Orchard

The large mountains behind the city of Edessa intrigued us, and one afternoon, curious about what we might find, we drove west of the city and up into them. After leaving the main highway, we followed a smaller paved road through huge orchards of densely-planted, unfamiliar fruit trees with an upright habit of loosely vertical branches -- were they almonds? I got out to take a closer look, and decided they might be cherry trees, but there were more than we imagined possible, stretching for miles in every direction, the only cultivated crop in what appeared to be a rocky, dry wilderness.

After traveling along these orchards for a while, we came upon a small hill village. It was built of rock, and although we saw a few cars and motorcycles parked along the roads or in driveways, there were no people walking around, just a few stray cats and the occasional dog. The little closely-placed houses seemed well cared for, with tall, blooming rose bushes and sometimes a heavily laden pomegranate tree in a front yard. But the village streets were so steep that our underpowered car needed several tries to gain the top of one of them.

After leaving the village, all signs of habitation gradually vanished. The road, now unpaved, climbed and narrowed; the slopes became steeper and rockier, and the vegetation wilder. Figs and hop vines scrambled with abandon over every tree and rocky outcrop. Just as we were about to declare defeat and turn around before the road became impassable, we suddenly came upon a blue lake with a flock of large white birds on it, in the middle of nowhere.

We pulled the car off onto the non-existent shoulder of the road, and got out; the water wasn't far from the road itself and you could stand on the edge and get a good look at the birds, who seemed unconcerned about the presence of human eyes. All of the white, large birds were swans but, closer to us, we could also see a flock of small ducks that I couldn't identify. Wildflowers, some of which were familiar and others not, bloomed on the edge of the bank, and behind the lake, the mountains rose: dry, rocky, bare except for the occasional patterned rows of a vineyard or orchard. Just beyond them was the border, and North Macedonia.

After ten minutes or so, we heard a vehicle approaching. It was a small beat-up truck that stopped when it came around the bend in the road and saw our car, parked on the side. The driver peered at us out his window, and then pulled off in a nonchalant fashion which seemed to indicate both familiarity with the road, and that there was seldom any traffic to worry about. Both doors opened, and a middle-aged Greek couple got out and walked closer. Initially they seemed concerned that we'd had a breakdown, but they quickly realized, when we gently gestured toward the water, that we were watching something.  I recalled "poulia" - "birds" - but couldn't remember the word for swan, which annoyed me because the word appears along with a picture of a swan on the red tins of the "swan" brand of Greek tomato paste and sauce. I had liked those tins so much that I had brought an empty one home, from our first trip here, to use in my studio. 

But the couple now said "swans" aloud  -- "keeknous!" - and nodded to us in some excitement. They walked over to the side of the road to get a closer look. "Mikres papies" said the woman, pointing at the little birds in the foreground, "little ducks." I nodded and repeated, "papies," which was another word I had learned and forgotten.

The four of us stood watching the birds on the blue water for a few minutes, and then they turned to us, quizzically. Both of them had open faces, and were dressed simply; they were probably local people who lived nearby. He was stocky, with a round face and short grey hair; she was short, smiling, and blond. "Tourist?" they asked. "Canada," I said, pointing at both of us. "We like your country," I managed to say in Greek, and in a combination of pantomime and words I conveyed that it was our third trip there. "How long?" they asked. "Three weeks." "Pou?" "Where?" "Edessa, Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Athens..." I stumbled over the word "Chalkidiki", the peninsulas to the east of Thessaloniki, and looked to them for help, and they quickly pronounced it for me.  We all laughed.

Before they had arrived, I had plucked a ripe fig from the tree growing wild on the lake side of the road, and the woman spotted it in my hand. Ah! she said, and told her husband to go look.  She brought her cupped hand to her mouth and raised her eyebrows, then pointing at my hand, wanting to know if I had eaten one. I shook my head no. The man went over to the tree and rummaged through the branches, looking for the best fruit, and picking a handful. He held out his open palm to me, and to my husband, proffering the small, dark figs. We each took one, and he pressed us to take more, so we did. The man nodded slightly, pointing his index finger toward me and then toward himself in a gesture that said, "Look!" He took a fig between his left forefinger and thumb, and began to slowly but deftly peel off the skin with his right hand, looking over at me to make sure I was watching -- it was a lesson. Then he split the flesh, examined it to make sure it met his expectations, and handed the peeled fig to me, gesturing to me to eat it. I took the fig and ate it in two bites; it was delicious. "Nostimo," I said. "Efcharisto!" ("Delicious, thank you!") and we all began to pick and lazily peel and eat figs, keeping the unconcerned, floating swans in the corner of our vision. The woman split a fig open, laughed, and shook her head "no", making a wiggling gesture with her finger as she showed it to me -- that one had a worm in it. I nodded, and glanced at Jonathan, who raised his eyebrows and surreptitiously dropped the fig he had been holding into the bushes.

Swan and wild fig tree

After a little while, we felt it was time to leave, and I gestured to the couple that we were going back to our car. They had been talking together and grazing on the figs, while J. and I took some pictures of the swans and the lake, but now we approached them to say goodbye. I smiled at the man and put my hand on my upper chest. "Elisabeth," I said. He grinned and said, in Greek, "Like the queen!" I got it and laughed and nodded, then pointed to Jonathan and said his name. They shook hands. The man touched his own chest and said, "Konstadinos," and then turned to his wife, who was also smiling at us, and said, in halting English, "She is  -- Chryseis. It means...gold."

We drove back through the endless orchards of fruit trees, down the winding roads through the stone villages, until we re-joined the main road that led to the Edessa highway. I couldn't believe I had actually met someone named Chryseis. At the beginning of the Iliad, a young Trojan virgin of that name has been seized by the Greeks and given to their leader, Agamemnon, as his slave and mistress. She is the daughter of Chryses, a high priest of Apollo, but Agamemnon refuses her father's pleas to return her. Chryseis, desperate, prays to Apollo. The god hears her and sends a plague that strikes the Greek camp...and sets in motion further events that alter the course of the war. (The name Chryseis literally means "of Chryses", and it is Chryses that means "golden".)

When we were finally back at our inn, we asked the innkeeper about the fruit trees we had seen up in the mountains. She asked us what towns we had been near. "Agras?" I offered. "Nisi?" She nodded, and answered, "Then they must have been kerasies. Cherries." She gazed at us calmly with that knowing, slightly sly smile we've seen on many Greek faces when suggesting something we must do or try: the special dessert they are offering "on the house", the free glass of homemade tangerine liqueur, the sight to be seen if we would just walk up to the top of the hill. "You must come back in the spring," she said, "when they are all in bloom!"

A Brief Stay in Exarcheia

Today, November 17, marks the fateful day in 1973 -- fifty years ago -- when tanks were driven through the gates of the National Polytechnic University in Athens in an attempt to put down the student-led uprising against the military junta that had ruled Greece since 1967. 24 civilians were killed. Several days before, students had barricaded themselves in the main university buildings and called on their fellow citizens to rise up. These events are acknowledged today as the beginning of the overthrow of that oppressive regime. They are still commemorated with a permanent shrine, including the wrecked and twisted metal gate, inside the university entrance where many of the victims fell.

In preparation for today's expected 50th-year commemoration, we hear that 5,000 police have been stationed in strategic areas around the city, including at the US and Israeli embassies. The US embassy is the usual end point of student marches on this date every year, since the country is generally blamed by them for having been in league with the military junta, and now for being a partner in "imperialist wars." The police have said that drones and helicopters will be hovering and transmitting images to their operations center throughout the day. Yesterday, crowds of people, as well as the political opposition leader and the head of the communist party, laid wreaths and carnations at the Polytechnic site in memory of the students who were killed.

The surrounding neighborhood, called Exarcheia (or Exarchia) continues to be known as the home of anarchists, activist students, and bohemian intellectuals who oppose the government's authoritarian and conservative policies. In recent decades it also became a refuge for migrants who established squats in empty buildings, with periodic crackdowns by the government to clear out those settlements. The clashes between students and police have often included tear gas, Molotov cocktails, and broken windows. However, Exarcheia also one of the most vibrant and interesting neighborhoods in the city, and we've stayed there twice.

I drew this view into the courtyard of the historic neoclassical buildings of the Polytechnic University back in 2019, from our apartment balcony. At that time, students had taken over the main building and seemed to be living there, and in the evenings there were meetings with music and speeches in this courtyard -- all peaceful but continuing well into the late hours. These were the original university buildings; the main campus is now located elsewhere. 

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After arriving in Athens our taxi dropped us off at our small hotel, where we'd be for the next two nights, and after a nap we went out to explore. Many tourists would probably be freaked out by Exarcheia, with its Marxist posters, abundant graffiti, edgy vibe, and continual police presence. We were prepared for that because we'd stayed in the area previously and realized there was little to fear under normal circumstances. What got to us this time wasn't any perception of danger on the streets, but the greatly increased police presence since four years ago: large groups of helmeted police riding motorcycles through the narrow streets at all hours, and three huge buses filled with police in full riot gear, with shields, parked on a main street, apparently perpetually ready to confront a student demonstration. Maybe, as children of the 1960s and peace activists who have experienced plenty of this ourselves, it feels unfortunate and wrong, but not that abnormal.

The next morning, jet-lagged but hungry, we walked up to a block of small restaurants with outdoor seating that we'd passed the night before, coming home from dinner. We chose a little eastern-European café, and sat there for an hour and a half, watching what was going on as the street came alive, shops opened, and people began their days. The gentleman shown in the drawing passed us, wearing a long black coat and carrying an armload of heavy books. He sat down at a table outside the door of the neighboring café, where he was greeted by the server in a way that made me think he must be a habitué. Was he a retired professor? Were those clerical robes? He didn't seem to be an Orthodox priest. Whatever the case, I'm sure he was doing exactly what he did on many mornings in his own familiar neighborhood  - sitting at that same table, ordering coffee, reading, checking his phone, and having a few cigarettes. Likewise, the man who ran the small fruit and vegetable shop on the other side rolled up his awning and came out to chat with a fellow who pulled up on a motorcycle, then later a woman doing her morning errands, and two men who sat down at a table to smoke with him: longtime neighbors and friends.

When our young server returned to the table with our breakfast order, I asked how things were going, and mentioned the police buses we'd seen the previous night. He shook his head and asked softly: "You know about this neighborhood?" We nodded. "It's been getting worse and worse. Constant intimidation, on the orders of the government. It's to try to keep the students quiet, keep them from protesting their policies. And the problem is, say if something bad happened or you had an accident late at night and needed help, then no one would come." We had the impression that student opposition to the government's immigration policies was at the heart of this increased intimidation, and also their direct opposition to police brutality, but there were many other issues as well, from economic policy to the planned construction of a new metro stop in the heart of the neighborhood.

Typical posters pasted up on the streets announced demonstrations, and exhorted people to take action on various issues, such as migrant rights, anti-police brutality, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, war in the Ukraine. The large letters on the top poster here say something like (Greek speakers please correct me!): The Elector is Responsible / Remember / The people choose the leaders they deserve. It's accompanied by a picture of Karl Marx. (This is basically the same as Alexander Hamilton's famous quote: "People get the government they deserve" - an ironic comment from an American founding father, in the light of current world and domestic events.)  The next sentence in black letters, is a quote from the "national poet of Greece", Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), and reads: "My poor people, good and beloved. Always gullible and always betrayed." The poster below says "Marxism 2023" and advertises an action that took place this past July in Athens.

There's a lot of graffiti everywhere. It ranges from spray-painted names and tags, such as those above, to some breathtaking murals like the one below.

Everything in Exarcheia is not political. Because of the intellectual/artist/student vibe, the area is filled with small bookstores, art supply stores, vintage and ethnic clothing and thrift stores, small artist and craft boutiques, cafés and restaurants -- many of which are very good and far more affordable than those a few blocks away near the city center and Syntagma Square. One of our favorite restaurants is a mezedopolia, or "small plates" restaurant specializing in meze, located at the top of the hill. You eat at café tables in an outdoor terrace where vines climb on the rustic pergolas overhead, and cats wander between the table, in an atmosphere of convivial groups of friends. The food is fantastic, the wine and ouzo are great, and who could complain about jasmine blossoms falling on your table as you finish your coffee?

During our three visits to Greece, we've spent considerable time in Athens and grown to love this gritty, complicated city not just for its monuments, art, and cultural history but also for its people and vibrancy today. Most tourists sleep and spend their time and money in the city center and the area around the Acropolis. These are fairly sanitized and curated, with English signs everywhere, good restaurants that provide predictable menus and a "Greek experience," and shopping from the very high-end to souvenir shops filled with evil-eye jewelry, sandals, cheap reproductions of classical vases, olive oil soaps and Mediterranean sponges. You're much more likely to get your pocket picked in those crowded places than in Exarcheia. But you won't be as likely to fall on cracked and uneven pavement, or stumble over garbage and animal waste, or find yourself in a neighborhood populated by non-white immigrants wearing ethnic and religious dress. We've stayed in Plaka, the area near the major museums and monuments, and yes, it is pretty incredible to go up on your rooftop and watch the sun set over the Parthenon. But it's also much more expensive, and at this point we are less interested in seeing those sights again than in trying to understand the city and the country in a deeper way. When we planned this particular trip to begin and end in Athens, we deliberately chose two neighborhoods - Exarcheia and another, close to it and to the northwest - where we'd see a different side of the city.

Having said that, I am always skeptical about how much a visitor can ever truly understand a place where they don't live and don't speak the language well. You can read history from a book, and absorb plays and poetry and art, and enjoy the local cuisine. You can even get a college degree, like me, in "classical civilization." But there is no way to fully grasp the lived reality of present-day people, or the effect of politics, and economic and social movements over time, on actual lives, without living there for a long time yourself. I know that I've been extremely irritated by newcomers to Quebec who rhapsodize about how wonderful it is, and even pontificate about the political situation, when they actually don't know anything beyond the superficial. I hope - even after twenty years here - that I am always willing to listen to French Canadians about their own long, fraught, and particular history. Likewise, I've now lived in Quebec long enough to have my own opinions and experiences, as well as a personal stake in it and full citizenship, so I resent being made to feel like an outsider, while acknowledging how complicated such questions of belonging and identity can be. 

With an unfamiliar country, like Greece, if we want to learn, we have to get off the beaten path, live in real neighborhoods, talk to Greek people, and remain porous, inquisitive, and open-minded. I'll write more about my language adventures in another post. I just want to express my respect and humility at the outset, and try very hard not to write with more authority than is justified. Certain qualities, however, cannot be mistaken: the natural beauty of a place; the warmth, generosity and openness of the people; and an intangible sense of a history to which I do feel, in some soul-level and lifelong ways, connected.

Views of Edessa

View of Edessa, Greece, looking southeast.

After arriving in Athens on October 8, we stayed in the city two nights to give our bodies a chance to acclimate, and then took off in our rental car for the roadtrip portion of our Greek trip.

The first day's drive was the longest of the entire trip, more than six hours if we had gone straight north and not stopped, but we did take a break for a picnic lunch on the seashore, and then stopped a few more times to take pictures of cotton fields, orchards, and mountains on our way to the north of Greece. Our destination was Edessa, a city in the foothills of the Pindus Mountains near the Macedonian border, not far from Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, and Vergina, where his father Philip II and many other Macedoniam royalty are buried. We were going there not so much for culture or ancient history, although there is plenty, but for natural beauty and a few days of quiet decompression as we began our journey. And spectacularly beautiful it was.

The old city, with its fortifications, sits high above the newer Edessa. We stayed in Varosi, the oldest inhabited part, above the fortification walls, in a stone building that has been lovingly restored and turned into a bed and breakfast inn. Our room was on the second floor of the heavily-timbered structure, with lace curtains and a wooden balcony that looked south across the broad valley, and east toward Thessaloniki.

View to the northeast. The mountains weren't snow-covered, just rocky.

One of the main attractions of Edessa has always been its waterfalls, which spill from rivers coming off the high mountains behind Varosi, and historically powered the city's textile mills. The cataracts were within walking distance from our inn, along with low-key restaurants, service businesses, and a tiny Orthodox church in a shadowed park filled with ancient plane trees, above an old grain mill, no longer in use. Now the water is channeled and collected for human use and water power in the valley far below the falls. Everything was very lightly curated, and because it was already the off-season, we saw few other tourists.

Edessa is thought to be where Caranus -- ancestor of Alexander the Great -- founded the first capital of ancient Macedon. Our waiter at dinner confided to us that Greece had it wrong in spending so much money on the archaeological site of Alexander's purported birthplace, Pella, because those who live in Edessa know that he was really born there. Whether that is true or not, ancient ruins have started to be excavated down in the valley. The city eventually became a major cultural center during medieval times, and has been the site of much fighting during all the centuries and all the wars since, because of its strategic border location and the clashes between Byzantines and Serbs, Ottomans and Greeks, Bulgarians and Greeks, Nazis and Allied powers, and Communists factions and Slav-Macedonians during the Greek Civil War.

The streets of Varosi are ancient and beautiful, and here we met the first of the many stray cats with whom we'd became acquainted during our journey. Some were in good shape, others less so, but many people put out food and water for them, and the cats are opportunistic too, hanging around restaurants where they know they're likely to find dropped tidbits, or sympathetic diners. This beautiful kitten spent most of her days on a rock near the door of our inn, and it was only later that we discovered she was managing on only three legs.

Within a short distance from our inn, I think I counted five Greek Orthodox churches and chapels. The main cathedral was open, and a tall bearded priest in his black robes sat talking with his assistants in the garden courtyard as I went up the steps. In the foyer I lit a thin beeswax candle for peace, placing it in the sand-filled container with other burning tapers, as war broke out in the Middle East. I sat for a while, meditating beneath the huge brass chandelier and its hanging ostrich eggs. The priest eventually came in, kissed the two main icons, and then paused near me to say a warm kαλημέρα, good morning, before he disappeared behind the iconostasis.

Someone's sunken garden, orchard, grapevines, and extraordinary woodpile.

I was able to draw in Edessa, on our balcony, and expected to be able to continue what I had begun throughout the trip, but it turned out to be almost impossible as our pace picked up and we had less time to just sit and observe our surroundings. I took lots of pictures though, and did as many fast sketches as I could, so in the weeks and months to come I hope I'll be able to fill in the gaps. Now I look back at our stay in Edessa as a particularly quiet and lovely few days -- and although I didn't draw the famous waterfalls, I'll try to paint them to show you.

Pine tree and a view toward the lower town, with orchards and vineyards.