Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 33

Scarce

 

Block Island

Yes, I've been scarce around here, and there is a good reason: I've been keeping my little nose to the writing grindstone, and not allowing myself to deviate too much. It's been surprisingly difficult not to draw or paint, because I had gotten in the habit of doing it regularly. I've been pretty disciplined about the usual distractions of social media, surfing, chatting with friends, and posting to the blog and to Instagram. The result, though, has been a productive stretch of writing and editing. There isn't really any other way around it, regardless of the art form or the medium: in the end you just have to show up, close the door, stay at your desk and do the work. It's kind of like these rocks, the ocean reminded me: they didn't become rounded and smooth overnight.

So what is that schedule? We arrive at the studio around 8:30 in the morning, break for a half-hour lunch at noon, and leave around 5:30. Of that time, I've been writing and editing for four or five hours every day. Then I usually make dinner, and after we're done eating might knit or read, plus doing whatever bathing or laundry is necessary, before bed at 10:30 or 11:00. I try hard to get seven hours of sleep. In recent weeks I've nearly finished my green Gansey sweater (it was missing one sleeve and the collar), and have been fooling around with a lace pattern that has taken me three tries to figure out. Reading has been more consistent: in recent weeks I've re-read Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the fourth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, and am halfway through Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett -- have any of you read that? It is strange, brilliant, unique. I've also been catching up on past issues of Brick, an excellent Canadian literary magazine.

Scavenging on the beach -- that's a dead seagull I'm poking at, hoping for bones. (photo by J., of course)

Nevertheless, I haven't felt I had much to show here, and now there is an additional problem -- my phone died and that's where all my photos are. J. is working on it with tech support today, so I'm hoping to be back up and running soon.

Friends.

In the meantime, September has arrived, and with it, cool weather, right on schedule. I've had a good summer, with plenty of outdoors time, a number of visitors as well as visits to friends, and days outside the city, so I am not going to utter one peep of complaint, especially when so many worldwide are experiencing devastating weather.

Where we bought fish.

I'll leave you with these photographs from our August weekend on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, where we visited friends and enjoyed the ocean's changing temperament, and the vast starry nighttime sky. I foundd those days near the ocean extremely peaceful, and I hope that feeling with continue to stay with me as we embark on la rentrée, as the September "back-to-school" season is called here in Quebec. For me, that means a return to the regular choir schedule, to Phoenicia Publishing, to preparing a talk I'll be giving later this month, a condo committee, the music committee at the cathedral...the list goes on. I'm glad I worked hard this summer, because now my time will be much more divided.

 

Eclipse

 

 

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.

Which side are you on?

President Trump's remarks in support of the alt-right are worse than despicable: they signal what is to come if he stays in office. I've just written or called all the members of the Vermont congressional delegation, where I vote, and I urge you to do the same. If I were in the U.S. today I'd be out on the street with a protest sign and working with whatever coalitions I could on behalf of all marginalized people -- which means everyone who is not white, straight, and male.

It's absolutely incredible to me that America has a president who openly supports neo-Nazis and white supremacists with so little effective opposition. It is not surprising to me that he was elected, or that these elements in American society have come out into the open, because I have always known they were there; only those who have existed in homogeneous, naive, privileged bubbles could have missed this in their lives in America. Yes, the Democrats and a few Republicans have managed to block his legislation, and the courts have overruled his most egregious anti-immigration orders, but where are the people who will actually finally stand up and stop this? Where is our own Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King? Where is the present-day Edward R. Murrow, speaking out against McCarthyism? But let's not stop there. Where and who are you? Because the time has come when each of us must face the decision to stand on the sidelines, or to actively resist, shelter, and protect those who are being persecuted: Jews and Muslims, people of color and of non-European ethnicity, the poor, women who are not protected by their wealth or association with white men.

And I'm sorry, but isn't enough to write hand-wringing Facebook and Twitter posts to our like-minded friends, or even blog posts like this. Are you willing to go to Washington, or to protest neo-Nazi book burnings in your city, or police brutality against blacks, or hate crimes against Jews or Muslims? Are you willing to go to city hall, to write letters, to organize your neighbors, to stand on a street corner with a sign, to call and write your representatives not just once but every week? Are you willing to protect, comfort, and shelter those who are and will be persecuted?

I've been an advocate and activist for peace and non-violence all my life, but I do believe that there are values worth fighting to protect. My own father, still living, risked his life as a tank driver in WWII to fight against the fascism that Trump is now championing. I just spent a weekend with five Jewish people my age whose families came to America from Germany, Austria, Russia, and Egypt to escape the Nazis; some members did not survive. My mother-in-law's family was killed in the Armenian genocide; my father-in-law's Arab family only survived the Ottoman persecutions of Christians because a Muslim leader protected them; they immigrated to America, were educated and assimilated, and now face prejudice and persecution. Where does it end? What an irony and obscenity it is to have a president, 80 years later, whose definition of American "greatness" has nothing to do with freedom and equality for all people, but instead bases his definition on rampant capitalism, exclusion, racism, homophobia, misogyny and privilege solely for the benefit of wealthy white males exactly like himself.

Do not kid yourself: 80 years after that World War, there is a war for the soul of western democracy. Which side are you on, and what are you willing to do? People everywhere -- white people in particular -- and not just in the U.S., have to speak up, stand up, and demand that our democracies work the way they are supposed to. One thing I have learned in my own fairly long life is if you wait for "the system" to quietly fix things on its own, nothing will happen, and the voices of fear will always drown out the voices of justice, fairness, and reason. A government of the people, by the people and for the people only works when the people themselves stand up for what is right, and not only demand the changes they want to see but make the decision to BE and LIVE as courageous people of justice and inclusion in the face of dark forces.

By the Sea - 1

We've just returned from ten days on the New England coast, first for the wedding of J.'s sister on the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, then a few days in Boston, and finally a reunion of a few of J.'s college friends on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast between Long Island and Cape Cod. I've come back browner and more relaxed, with several bags of shells, bones and pebbles collected on the various beaches; happy about renewed friendships and new beginnings; and dismayed about political events.

There was a beautiful wedding of two people, both widowed after long, happy marriages, who have found each other now and decided to spend the rest of their lives together.

There was a house full of beloved relatives, above a rocky shell-strewn beach, where we made a party for the whole family one night, and the sun created a spectacle across the bay.

There were long walks on the beach and along the salt marches, with white egrets and gulls, and ospreys carrying fish in their talons, and stranded horseshoe crabs from prehistory, and regular crabs and mussels, and seaweed to nibble on, and the sound of the sea as we fell asleep, and in the night, and when we woke.

And this, from my journal:

One night, a nightmare: a party of friendly strangers turned dark, and I became hunted to the death by Trump's armed henchmen. I woke, tried to dismiss the sticky cobwebs of the dream, fell back asleep only to re-enter the same party, except now the men were strangling the women, one by one.

We're staying on Poppasquash Neck, a small peninsula in Narragansett Bay settled just after the Plymouth Colony was established. Narragansett is an irregular network of rocky coastline, islands, large peninsulas and and these smaller ones known as "necks." The larger Bay, named after one of the two native tribes of this region, has three divisions that the English settlers named Prudence, Patience, and Hope; their main settlement became the city of Providence. But not far from here is the site of the assassination of Matacomet, also known as King Philip, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, who - unlike his conciliatory father - saw the true intentions of the white settlers and went to war against them. The English namers -- my own ancestors were of similar stock and time -- were served well by Prudence, Patience, and Hope, and it's their stone walls and old orchards, white-sailed boats, flag-bunting-festooned old houses, and wealth that have created the visual identity of this place.

The serenity is so studied and so well established it disturbs me, and so I walk on the beach of weathered slipper shells, scallops and quahogs: more comfortable in that graveyard, and the longer timeline of the sea.

Clematis, and our entangled politics

 

 

The earlier fancy varieties of clematis have gone past, here in Montreal, but the sturdy Jackmanii types are still blooming, and creeping into my studio and home. I have an established vine at my community garden, and brought a few stems home the other day.

Drawing, and concentrating on nature, are one of my refuges from the insanity that American politics has become. I never thought I'd see the depths of behavior that we've witnessed this week, or the utter lack of compassion for transgendered and gay people and for all who need affordable healthcare. I'm thankful for the Republicans who broke rank, and for the military officers who are keeping less discriminatory policies in place as long as possible. I keep hoping we'll see an end to this travesty soon, but I think it will go on for a good while longer -- and we all need to find ways to take care of ourselves.

In any case, I wish you a good weekend. We have guests arriving soon, and I'm looking forward to seeing them and spending some time away from my computer and phone. This was last night in the park, and I plan to repeat the formula: a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, some knitting, and thou. Surrounding us, lots of young Montrealers with their bikes, instruments, babies, dogs, wine, weed; the homeless guys who come along and collect bottles and cans -- and all with universal free healthcare, cheap daycare, and a civil government. It is, actually, possible.

 

 

 

Green Almonds, reprise

The following conversation with my father-in-law occurred almost a decade ago, but whenever I see green almonds in the market, they remind me of him, and I buy a few -- though I probably like looking at them more than eating them. This year, I drew and painted some.

--

Green Almonds

"Such grapes we had from my uncle's vineyards in Bludan!" he exclaimed.

"What else?" I asked.

"Figs, apples..."

"Are you hungry now?"

"Not hungry, but I feel like I want to eat."

"You mean, just have something to chew on?"

"Yes," he smiled, as if he was relieved someone understood, but when the three of us suggested several things, he just shook his head no, smiling rather sadly.

"He's been asking for nuts today but he refuses what I offer," the caregiver said. She was a young woman of twenty-two or so, pretty, with dark hair and eyes, wearing large star-shaped earrings.

"What kind of nuts have you been thinking about?" I asked him.

"Green almonds."

"Ah! I've seen them but never eaten any. How do you do it?"

He explained how you crack and remove the outer covering, to reveal another shell that has to be removed in turn. "Sounds like a lot of work," I said.

"Yes, but that's the point. You sit and do it all day... We got those in Bludan too, there were lots of different kinds of nuts in my uncle's orchard."

"I'll look this week and see if I can find you any, sometimes they have them at the market."

He seemed to sleep again after this burst of conversation, and then opened his eyes. "Tell me," he said, lowering his voice just slightly and giving a small nod toward the caregiver who sat at the desk a mere six feet away. "Do you think this is a Bludani girl?"

--

Green almonds in a chased copper and silver Damascene bowl from the family home in Syria.

We did bring him some almonds a few weeks after this conversation, for his 99th birthday. He was quite frail at that point, but his eyes lit up when he saw the fuzzy green nuts in my hands. "What do I do now?" I asked. He told me where to find a hammer, and I went out on his balcony and hit one of the almonds along its seam, as he had explained. Because they are green and relatively soft, I found out that you have to give them a decisive whack it the right place, and then the nut will open to reveal an inner, thin brown covering, with the nearly-white almond inside. (More recently, I've discovered that a regular nutcracker does a much cleaner job, but it isn't nearly as satisfying as the hammer.) My father-in-law looked delighted, and he worked over the cracked shells to extract the nuts with his slow fingers, put them one by one in his mouth, and happily ate them.

He died a month later, nine years ago today -- July 25, 2008.

Since January, I've been working on a manuscript adapted and expanded from those posts, under the title The Fig and the Orchid, to finally make it into a book. I'm thinking of illustrating it with drawings like the ones here. My father-in-law was a Syrian immigrant to America in the late 1940s: he was a teacher, scholar of Arabic culture and language, a Unitarian minister, writer, thinker -- and a larger-than-life character. Considering world events, it seems like a good time for such a project. I know that some of you here have been along for this ride a long time, and read those posts about him long ago, for others this is a new subject. Would you be interested in such a book? What would make it the most compelling for you?

A beach of shells

For the past couple of weeks, I've been painting shells that I've collected in recent years on the beaches near St. Augustine. First, three small watercolors, each one of a different scallop, with a tiny smooth shell beneath. On July 4, I started a much larger painting, of many shells, arranged on a plain page; the impetus for this arrangement seemed to come from some deeper place in my subconscious. Why? I wondered, as I finalized the composition and set pencil to paper. What am I doing here?

The Fourth of July came on the heels of two other national holidays - Quebec's St-Jean-Baptiste on June 24, and Canada Day on July 1. The separatists always come out in force for La Fête St-Jean, along with the less-political French-Canadians who simply want to celebrate their heritage. By contrast, Canada - which turned 150 this year - barely seems to know what to do to celebrate itself, since the question "What is Canada?" often yields only amorphous answers, or stereotypes involving parkas, snowshoes, hockey, and beer.

On Canadian holidays I still feel mostly like the observer and recent, mid-life immigrant that I am. We went down to the Jacques-Cartier bridge on Canada Day to watch the fireworks, and the moment they finished, the heavens opened and there was torrential rain, drenching the thousands of people on the bridge in a few minutes. I looked around: as usual for the fireworks, here was a microcosm of Montreal: French and English-speakers, Indians, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Africans; older people like ourselves, family groups, teenagers in packs, couples with small children and babies. Everyone was laughing and chattering in their own languages, and smiling at the strangers near them. The initial dash to get off the bridge soon turned to a slow splashing stroll, and a kind of collective merriment. I was so wet I could feel water streaming down my legs inside my jeans from my soaked underwear; like almost everyone else, we had no umbrella, no hoods or jackets. By the time we finally got to our bikes, at the end of the bridge, the downpour had stopped, and we cycled home. Now, that experience seemed Canadian: the lack of drama or hysteria, the acceptance of nature's unpredictability, the good mood in the face of it. But you can't encapsulate that, it's merely a feeling, one that I not only recognize from being here for more than a decade, but share -- like a lot of other inexpressible things about Canada and Quebec -- because it feels natural to who I am, to who I've always been.

America, on the other hand -- what was anyone to make of July 4th this year?  The celebratory spirit seemed muted, but I felt even more removed than usual, and wrote to a friend that I felt I was "done with nationalisms of any kind."

 

Instead I stood at my work table that day and made the careful, detailed under-drawing for the new painting, and thought about the beach above St Augustine: a shell beach, with a perfect gradation from intact shells close to the water's edge, to smaller and smaller water-worn pieces, and finally coarse shell-sand forming the dunes. Each one of those shells, I realized, represented one organism, one life, in numbers that seemed much more profound than the clichéd impossibility of "counting the grains of sand." Who was I, I wondered, in the face of all those lives that had been lived: one human in the year 2017, bending down to pluck a dozen shells from the beach and put them into her pocket to bring back to Canada, far to the north, a cold place surrounded my frigid oceans where not one of those organisms could have survived for very long?

 Maybe, I thought, the multiple shells in the new painting represented some sort of subconscious move away from a focus on the individual, brought on by my reflections about July 4th and America. The shells are a sample that represents an entire beach, which in turn is a sample that represents the life of an ocean. They have characteristics and vital needs in common, yet are extraordinary and beautiful in their uniqueness.

Later, though, as I worked, I began to realize that the shells in the painting were also symbols for me of the refugees who have arrived on Mediterranean beaches, both dead and alive: people we have labelled collectively but who are -- as a few striking images have shown us - individuals with personal and deeply-affecting stories.

I wrote more about nationalism, immigration, and politics, but on re-reading deleted it: too heavy-handed, and maybe even too obvious.

Let's just say that the more I travel and the more people I meet from all over the world -- all of us arriving, some more battered than others, on these beaches of our lives -- the more I see my personal story as one of many, and that our shared humanity is a far greater connection than any arbitrary division, especially when it is those divisions that are so often responsible for conflict and exodus. I'm much more interested these days in trying to express my feelings about the interconnected world, which includes the preciousness of each anonymous human and non-human life. As the poet Gary Snyder wrote: “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”

A Dream

I dreamt of swans last night. They appeared, swimming, on the lake where I grew up: two white, two grey with tufts on their heads like long-necked grebes, and two light brown, which I identified as juvenile. (In fact, they didn't actually look like real swans, but some combination of loon and grebe or merganser and swan, but because it was a dream, this didn't matter.)

As I watched from the shore, a boat or a sort of floating wagon appeared in the lake -- painted orange, with tall sides and a ramp, with a genial man who stood up to his knees in the water and herded the birds into the enclosed boat; he doesn't speak, but he's friendly. Above the dark entranceway through which they walked, black hand-painted letters read "Royal Swans."

After the swans and their boat and boatman disappeared, another boat - open and full of loud people, like the multi-bicycle-pedaled party-vans that roam the Plateau Mont-Royal in summer - came racing across the lake, and near our shore it plowed right over a swimmer, who fortunately bobbed back to the surface, looking shocked and waving her arms. I went down to the edge of the water near where the boat had stopped and spoke to the driver. "This is not acceptable," I told him, calmly. "For one thing, this is a motor boat and there is a rule that no motors are allowed on this lake." (That is true) "For another, you're going much too fast and you ran right over that swimmer, didn't you see her?" We talked on in this vein; he said they meant no harm and were just trying to have a good time and enjoy the lake, and I explained that if they wanted to come here they could need to ask a resident for permission. What was significant (and ridiculous) was the tone - the whole conversation was reasonable, not angry or hysterical, as you'd think it would have been under real circumstances.

I've had many dreams of this lake over the years, where I'm watching from the bank or the shoreline, and various things materialize or happen above or on or below the surface, as if it were enchanted, like Avalon. Sometimes these dreams are dark and frightening, sometimes mysterious or fantastical, but, unlike nearly all my other dreams, they are usually highly significant, even if it takes weeks for me to understand their meaning, as will no doubt be the case in this one.

White birds on the lake -- usually snow geese -- have always been a good omen for me, or even a sign of death and resurrection, but I don't yet see quite what these were doing, in their three variations. The painted sign, though, I can identify as an echo of the "Paradise Pickles and Preserves" sign on top of the family's Plymouth in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which I was re-reading just before I went to bed last night!

What I think the dream is about is a process in two parts. (I've been dealing with some problems lately, which I was thinking about as I went to sleep, so I'm interpreting the dream in that context.)  The lake always represents insight of some sort, arising perhaps from the subconscious (unexpected things that come from below the surface) or more familiar things that are seen on or near the water, but might be unexpected or in odd juxtapositions, asking for new interpretation. The lake itself always feels "safe"; nothing scary has ever come out of it, or happened to me in it, in a dream. When there is something frightening or even apocalyptic, it comes over the trees from the horizon - from the world "out there," away from the security of the lake itself.

So far, then, I think the swans are a sign saying that things will be all right - they are swimming peacefully, they're not afraid of me, even when they look straight at me and pass close by, and they walk docilely into their boat, their ark, to be ferried away by the circus-barker-like Noah. Nothing indicates that I'm supposed to go with them, or that there's a flood or other disaster coming. However, in the next scene, something definitely not-OK happens, and I have to leave my position as a mere observer and go down to the water to deal with it. But the tone of the ensuing conversation seems to indicate a calm, collected, reasonableness in my manner, and because of it, no one gets angry, no one gets hurt, nobody goes away mad. I think the message is "if you stay calm and centered, you can deal with whatever problems come up," and "don't forget the messengers" - the swans - who are a reminder that I'm not alone; there is help in the universe.

Any other ideas? Do you have significant dreams in a recurrent setting?

Catching up while nature steams on ahead

During the four days we were in Florida, two weeks ago, my garden exploded. The entire spring had been cold and rainy here, so the plants had emerged very slowly, and I got used to that pace. Not so after a weekend of 95 degree heat: everything from poppies to peonies burst into bloom, and faded almost as rapidly. I haven't been able to keep up at all, plus there was the huge pleasure of having guests -- our dear friends from Iceland visited us last week! So, in this post I'll show you a few color studies I did earlier in June.

This is a clump of Pulsatilla in the alpine garden at Montreal's Jardin botanique. I'm crazy about plants with this sort of blooming habit - hellebores, hepatica, anemones. Pulsatilla is a genus of small plants with finely-divided foliage and fuzzy stems and buds. I found it devilishly hard to capture their delicate, hairy essence - this was the third attempt (detail at top of page.) (Watercolor and ink on paper.)

 

The pea-like, trailing flower clusters of a large blooming tree, the thorny locust. (Watercolor and ink on paper.)

And this is an acrylic on paper of an elderflower branch. I was curious to try using acrylic washes, thinned a great deal to resemble watercolor, over a pencil drawing. Because the acrylics are opaque, it was also possible to add a few lighter details later. I'm pretty happy with the result here, especially in the leaves on the right, and I'll probably do more experimentation. The acrylic dries extremely fast, so it's tricky and quite different from watercolor, which has a delicacy that can't be matched by any other medium. Every medium has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it's only by working with them a lot, fooling around, and refusing to get discouraged (!) that we find out what works for different situations, different desired results.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins was talking on Facebook recently about his use of acrylics, which I found fascinating. Like Clive, I use professional quality Golden Acrylics, made very near my home town in upstate New York; lesser-quality paints can become gummy or granular. Clive mentioned that using acrylics with just water, without adding a medium to extend the drying time, forced him to work fast and that it had been good for him -- "It made me a more confident painter and speeded my output" he wrote. I can see that this would be true. While watercolor also requires speed, it's for somewhat different reasons -- an overworked watercolor loses the spontaneity, delicacy and brilliance that are the medium's greatest strengths. It's a different process to create loose, transparent effects in acrylic, and you can't count on being able to go back and blend colors on the paper with your brush, or remove pigment to create highlights: the paints are plastic, and they don't dissolve! With watercolor, I'm often able to erase pencil marks right through the painting, but here, the pencil is embedded permanently beneath the acrylic coating. That can be used as an advantage, with pencil, ink, or many other types of media; acrylic lends itself to mixed-media work, but it requires planning and experience, just like watercolor.