Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 81

Holy Week 2013

(Note: potentially disturbing image below.)

I don't yet have my head around Holy Week.

On Palm Sunday, during the Mass, there was a dramatization of the passion story - a Passion Play -- instead of a sermon. It was beautifully done, and very moving while it was happening.

Tuesday night I led the contemplation group, giving a talk on the various faiths' uses of, and resistance to, bowing, and prostration. (Our priests prostrate themselves on the altar on Good Friday, and at no other time during the year.) I talked about what those practices mean in a mystical sense, and that was followed by forty minutes of silent meditation. Then I joined the choir to sang Compline -- it was a service using Orthodox chant, ending with the Russian Kontakion for the Departed.

Last night, Wednesday, was Tenebrae: the church lit by one candelabrum, one candle extinguished after each psalm, after the Lamentations of Jeremiah, after yet another psalm, until we were all in darkness. Silence. Then a sudden noise, to represent the earth quaking at the death of Jesus. And finally a single candle in the darkness, by whose light we departed.

And tonight, the mass for Maundy Thursday. But still, I am not "in" Holy Week.

How many years have I been doing this -- attending most of the services, singing, listening to the story over and over, presented in different ways, in words, music, dance, drama? As an adult, at least twenty-five. Sometimes it happens: something breaks through the numbness and repetition and locks its fingers around my heart, and when the grip slowly releases, there's a new insight, connecting this story of suffering and acceptance to my own life or the world at large in a new way.

And sometimes it's like this year so far: an intellectual and artistic engagement that remains detached in spite of my desire for it to be otherwise.

Perhaps my Holy Week came earlier in the month, when I was in the cathedral and smaller shrines and churches of Mexico City, astounded by a much more visceral and literal expression of faith and of Christ's agony: in every one of those churches there is a lifesize, lifelike Christ, beautifully carved and painted, with open eyes that look at you, and wounds that drip with blood: He is Everyman, your son - father - lover - husband  - who was killed, and who now gazes at you with sadness and compassion. In Latin America those connections are unfortunately easy to make; not so much here in the north, where we can argue with ourselves and with theology about the nature of this kind of suffering, sometimes for an entire lifetime, without much first-hand experience. And yet violence, imprisonment, oppression and killing because of politics, religion, outspokenness against authority, and all kinds of Otherness, go on in our world every single day. These statues shocked me with their realism. It would be much easier to look away -- but you can't.

Christ holding a stalk of corn, in the Catedral Metropolitana, Mexico City

During these three days that is what I feel not just called to contemplate, but to face. Holy Week and Easter are not so much about faith for me -- faith in the Resurrection, or literal faith in accounts of ancient events. Those are other matters that I think about a lot all year long. Nor is it, as for many Christians of a more evangelical bent, primarily a time of sorrow and catharsis about the death of one particular man. Holy Week, for me, is more about justice, and my own complicity in the systems of power and repression, of militarization, rampant capitalism and globalization. But even more than that it's about my forgetfulness the other 362 days of the year.

Usually a moment comes when I drop my defenses, and I'm there, fully there. It hasn't happened yet. Maybe tonight.

And pictures from J.

(Posted inadvertently for a few hours yesterday -- the post below now contains the missing link to J.'s website.)

With J., reflected in a window at a handicrafts market in Mexico City.

And finally we come to Jonathan, my love and life partner, about
whose contribution to my life I can't really speak without getting
emotional. I'm amused and delighted that just as I reach the ten-year
point in my own blogging journey (which he has both patiently tolerated
and helped over all these years, as I said in the comments, far too
often waiting while I wrote "just a few more words," or even being the
unwitting subject) he has started a blog of his own, with the very
sensible commitment of posting once a week. He's written a little introduction there and put together a short
slideshow of photos related to blogging and me.

Thank you, dearest one, for being you and sharing this crazy
world with me, for cheering me up when I get down, for enlarging my life
in so many ways, for making me braver and more adventurous, for always supporting me in my work and creativity,
for being unafraid to truly know me and allow me to know you, and for being there, not virtually, but in the flesh, every single day.

A Note from Ed Hawco, aka "Blork," and a clarification.

First, I screwed up. For a few hours on Sunday, I posted a mention about J.'s slideshow without including a link - and he hadn't published the pictures yet anyway! So that post wll appear for real at midnight tonight, wth the proper link.

 

Ed Hawco, and Jonathan, at one of the famous roast beef church suppers in Hartland Four Corners, Vermont, during a visit to our old home in 2006

The final letter I got was from Ed Hawco, better known in in the blogging world as Blork, and to me as a true friend, excellent photographer, and a great chef. He is the partner of Martine Pagé, who wrote earlier this week, and they are close friends of ours in Montreal, and the longest-term bloggers I know; they started more than a year before I did, and were instrumental in organizing YulBlog, Montreal's blogger group and monthly meet-up. Like Dave Bonta, Ed has several blogs: a personal one where he writes (not often enough, IMHO) on various topics, including food, plus several photography blogs and a little-known blog of "snippets" from books he reads, for he is a prodigous and eclectic reader (scroll down to the following post for his 2012 book list!) The following is cross-posted on his main blog, so you can go there and check out the others too.

The noise in the blogosphere has long surpassed the signal, which may
explain the decline in relevance of the “personal blog.” Where once the
platform was largely about personal writing and exploration, blogging
now is a vehicle for competitive foodieism, personal branding, and all
forms of marketing.

This shift was inevitable, so there’s no point in complaining about
it. Fortunately, many personal blogs still soldier on, including this
one (although in my case “limp” would be a better choice of verb). Some
toil in obscurity, others attract a bit of attention by issuing screeds
and rants. And then there’s The Cassandra Pages, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last week.

The Cassandra Pages is written by Beth Adams, who I’ve been
privileged to know as a friend for much of that ten years. Martine and I
met Beth when she and her husband Jon showed up at a YULBlog
meeting some time around 2004. (It might have been 2003, or even 2005; I
have a terrible sense of time past, a gift I inherited from my father.)
She and Jon were engaged in a very slow process of moving to Montreal
from their home in Vermont where they’d lived together for 30 years. I
was attracted to them immediately, partially because their story was so
different from the others at YULBlog, but mostly because of their
genuine warmth, intelligence, and curiosity.

Since then I have had the triple pleasure of knowing them as friends, seeing Jon’s photographs,
and reading Beth’s blog. Don’t go there for rants or shopping advice.
Turn away if you’re only interested in tech noise or social platitudes. The Cassandra Pages
is a ten year (and onward) personal writing space for Beth’s
experimentation and expression, and for your reading pleasure. It
strikes that rare note of being a personal blog – based on a life being
lived and the observations made along the way – while remaining
approachable and relevant to anyone who cares to read it. As with good
memoir writing, it never comes of as being “all about me.” Rather, it’s
about us; the “we” that forms when a writer connects with her readers,
and readers see truth and thoughtful inquiry in a writer’s impressions.

Congratulations Beth, on 10 Years of The Cassandra Pages! 

 

 

A story from G.

The following story is a contribution to this celebration by G., who I met in an advanced calculus class during my freshman year in college -- that would have been, ahem, 1971. He was inclined toward math and the physical sciences; I was quickly realizing that my own talents lay in the humanities instead. In spite of the fact that he was becoming a scientist and I was clearly not, we became close friends, and when summer came, we started a correspondence that lasted throughout our years at Cornell whenever we weren't on campus. A few years after, though, we lost touch, and it wasn't until four years ago that I tracked him down and we began, once again, to write, this time by email, and he began to catch up on my past life by reading through the Cassandra archives as well as following in real time. Last year, we finally met up again in person.


Perhaps because it's a long-standing friendship and correspondence, I've noticed that the stories each of us tells tend to elicit personal stories in response, rather than detailed comments on the writing itself, which don't seem particularly necessary in our friendship. However, of the story quoted below, which he also sent to some colleagues and friends, G. writes:

"It's a kind of more open writing that I have learned from watching  you
-- something that a few years ago I probably would not have written,
and certainly would have been afraid to share with more than a few close
associates. I now recognize that such personal writing can have a positive impact
on people I never met, as well as deepening bonds with those whose lives
already intersect with my own."

---



28 Feb 2013

You are what you hold dear. I've held
in my hands five days a week, since 1997, a coffee mug with a Labview
logo.  Labview is a computer programming environment, the product of a
Texas software company, designed to control instruments, record and
analyze data:  the hands and eyes of a scientist, if not the mind. I use
it for everything.  I learned to use it in Zuerich on sabbatical, when I
was afraid to collect data on a rickety computer and had the time to
retool myself and the lab where I was visiting, learning a skill I knew
would be useful then and later.  How convenient to learn and make your
first horrible mistakes, writing your first clumsy programs for someone
else's experiment!  I learned enough to run the experiment and became
proficient enough to rewrite my own lab's data acquisition programs when
I went back to Long Island.  As a Swiss memento, I brought with me a
Labview porcelain coffee mug, left by the sales engineer as just another
piece of crass commercial swag.


A lot of science depends on coffee, as much as programming, so I
made this coffee mug my own, and would have it with me as I went to
seminars, meetings, or just in the office, constantly adjusting the
caffeine trim required to threaten the secrets of Nature with exposure (empty threat, that). 
It is my responsibility to enforce the eating and drinking ban in the
labs, and I do usually set a good example, reducing the slim chances of
taking a sip from the wrong beaker by mistake.  Like so many portable
treasures, it has been repeatedly left behind and rediscovered days or
weeks later after abandoned searches. 


This was only my second scientific coffee mug, artifacts by which a
career is measured.  The first came from a hippie potter in Toronto when
I was a grad student, and lasted through my years in Ithaca and on to
Brookhaven.  That one had an organic brown and white glaze, a silly
thumb rest on the handle, and enough texture inside that the
cream-colored pottery would gradually take on an interior patina that
resisted soap and water, needing oxidizing chemicals appropriate to a
chemistry lab to restore the bright interior whiteness, once every few
months.  The day came, as it must, when I dropped that mug, and I
wondered how my career would be affected -- and if I would ever find the
right mug to replace it. So when I appropriated this Labview mug in
Switzerland, I thought I had found the totem for the next phase of my
career.


But this morning, as I rinsed it out and was wiping down the outside
with a paper towel, it slipped from my hands.  Plenty of time passed,
as it accelerated from the height of my waist, past my knees and toward
the carpeted floor, for me to think back on all the coffee that has
passed through me by way of this mug, wondering and hoping, not too
optimistically, that it might just bounce and come to rest, rebuking me
for my carelessness.  But my long reverie came to an end with a crack
and shattering into a few jagged shards and a splash of white porcelain
powder across the blue industrial carpet, lightly padding the concrete
floor. 


I poured my coffee into a Long Island Symphony mug left behind by
R. when he retired and finally left the lab, 10 years after I was
hired in anticipation of his departure.  But it's not the same.  There
are a dozen other mugs to choose from, but I need to apply more
deliberation than just picking one and using it.


The real loss this morning, however,  was that it was V.'s last
day at the lab, after three fast years with us.  The young scientists
we select and nurture are really what delimit the epochs in our own
careers, sharing problems and successes, hoping that they can find their
way to a real job, and that we will have helped them do so, rather than
leading them into a dead end project from which the only way forward is
to start fresh, leaving behind years of endeavor. The old-timers here
have seen change and mused that they had lived through golden days of
science and wouldn't know how to start over in today's world.  And they
are probably right -- we wouldn't know how. But fortunately we don't
have to, and those that do have to will do just fine, like V.

G.

A few weeks later, G. sent me a string of responses he'd received from his colleagues who had read the story of his broken mug. Among them was this postscript to the story:

I've had an interesting assortment of responses from the ten or so
people to whom I intentionally sent the original essay, as well as an
amusing thread returning to me by way of my friend C., who forwarded a copy of my essay to a Labview engineer
requesting that they might arrange to have a new mug sent to this
hopeless friend of his:

S.:
I really do appreciate your arranging to have a new mug sent to me. 
So of course I want to confirm receipt and thank you. But I'm wondering
if there is some higher intelligence playing with us, testing to see if I can acknowledge that it is time to move on.  Your mug arrived,
carefully packed and with no sign of abuse, yet after rinsing it out and
pouring in my first cup of hot joe, there was a little clinking noise
and a hairline crack became visible, the color of seeping coffee, from
lip to base, inside to outside,  on the side opposite the handle, as
shown in the attached action shot of my desk.



The cameo mug shot on the right side of  the photo is an even older
coffee mug, made by an Ute potter in 1970, and it was undergoing a
probationary trial when the new Labview mug arrived.  It is handsome,
but a bit small and the handle is hard to hold, but I've had it a long
time without using it much, and it is growing on me.



Next time you are coming by our lab, do drop me a note and we can
get together for a drink of something hot.
Best,

G.

Notes from Martine Pagé, Natalie d'Arbeloff, and Parmanu

Martine photographing J.: that was the day Martine taught me the great French expression "l'arroseur arrosé" (literally, "the sprinkler sprinkled")

Martine Pagé and her partner Ed Hawko were our first friends in Montreal, and -- as Martine describes below -- I met them through blogging! Martine (ni vu ni connu) is a screenwriter and editorial writer, and Ed (blork blog) is a technical writer/editor and excellent photographer; our friendship has grown a lot over the years and we see each other quite often in real life where we all enjoy cooking, eating, and good conversation. They both started blogging long before I did, so they are the real pioneers; Martine is considered a Canadian "expert" on blogging and internet media and often writes about those subjects for magazines. (She's also a real sweetheart, as you'll see!)

I met Beth
before I started reading her blog, at a time when I was very involved in a
Montreal blogging community. There were about twenty of us meeting in a bar on
a monthly basis. Beth and Jon showed up one night and my partner and I ended up
talking with them for a good part of the evening. I found them open, curious
and easy to talk to. She and Jon had not yet moved to Montreal full time but
after I went home and read her blog, I really hoped that we would share the
same city one day.

We did more
than that: we became friends, the kind that actually hang out with each other
in person. I have met a lot of people through blogging and I’m often surprised
by how different people are from the presence they project through their own
writing. Not Beth! She’s as warm, calm and thoughtful as her words are.

Over the
years, the Cassandra Pages have been “un moment de pause” for me, a way to stop
time for a minute and take a second look at things that are familiar to me (the
city of Montreal) or things I’m not at ease with (poetry, religion,
in-laws…)

I always
feel better about the world after I read Beth’s blog, even when the subject of
her post is dark or sad. But best of all, after every visit I leave The Cassandra Pages with a deep desire to write. What an inspiration she can be! Of course,
this feeling is immediately followed by nervousness: how could I possibly
express moments, feelings, beauty, places and people as well and as steadily as
she does?

It’s a
silly thought, of course. Blogging is not a competitive sport. It’s
about
giving a platform to a great variety of voices that would not otherwise
be heard.  In the last few years, the blogosphere has lost
quite a bit of steam (my 11 year-old blog included) and it can get
pretty
noisy. Through all that noise, 10 years later, The Cassandra Pages
remain an oasis
of calm and a place to reflect on things that matter. “Longue vie” to
Beth’s
blog and long live our friendship!

Martine

 

In Natalie's flat, London, 2011

Natalie d'Arbeloff - an absolute original. What can I say? Most of you know her already through her remarkable blog, Blaugustine, and her amazing work in many media, from the creation of artist books to constructions to comics to videos and easel paintings and printmaking, where she is, in my opinion, a real master. It has been a joy to know her in person as well as through her blog, and I look forward to being in her London flat/studio again before long, where we can continue our far-ranging conversation on life and art, and laugh together as we always do.

It was here on
June 25th, 2003 that Beth mentioned me for the first time on Cassandra
Pages a couple of months after I had started blogging as Blaugustine.
But I think I must have found her blog before that and immediately
sensed that we were on the same wavelength. In those early days of
blogging there was this tentative exploration of the vast darkness of
uncharted cyberspace, flashlight in hand, sending out signals and hoping
kindred spirits would respond. Being recognised by a talented blogger
was tremendously exciting and Beth's verbal, visual, intellectual and
spiritual gifts were unmistakeable. From then on our connection
strengthened via blogging and email so that by the time we met in the
real world - New York, September 2007 - we already knew each other as
well as if we had been friends for years. Through some blogging
friendships you get to know a person by the way they express their
thoughts and feelings before you see their physical persona and this
filtered reality reveals more of who they are. Nevertheless, there's no
substitute for face to face encounter and I've become aware that a
talent for friendship is a major ingredient in Beth's abundant
resources. It goes with empathy and attention to everything that
surrounds her and precisely because of such acute sensitivity, I'm sure
that sometimes there's overload and a need to retreat. One more reason
to salute and celebrate ten years of Cassandra is that she has managed
to achieve the difficult balance between giving your all and stepping
back. I toast her next decade and many more!

Natalie

 

My print, "Two Torsos," in Parmanu's apartment in Germany

Parmanu is a writer's writer, and this writer's perfect reader. As he says below, we read and admired each other's blogs for a while before making contact, and the post that moved him to write to me was a post I wrote about letter-writing. In the beginning of our correspondence we had the idealistic thought that we'd write real paper letters in pen and ink, and send them by, you know, the mail across the ocean, taking the time to write slow replies. It didn't work out very well, although we both have a few precious initial handwritten letters...somehow we both found the blank page too weighty. We went back to our email correspondence, and have kept it up, and have become close through this commentary on what we both write -- and think about -- for a larger public. I look forward very much to the day we'll finally meet in person. In the meantime, he is represented by a photograph that I keep in my desk, and I am represented by a print that lives on his bookshelf. His remarks here may well spur me on to make him a present -- you can guess what!

 

This must be a sign of age: I do not precisely remember when I began to read The Cassandra Pages.
It must have been in 2004 or 2005, not long after I discovered TC's
blog and began to explore his sidebar links. For many years I was a
silent reader, commenting rarely if at all (a habit that hasn't changed
much since), only absorbing details of a life lived in a state of high
awareness, a compassionate life, a life both activity-filled and
contemplative, a life with friends, family, food, music, art, nature,
politics, religion, photography, literature, travel, and the city.
(There was no sex, but that didn't matter.) Then, moved one day by a
letter Beth posted on her blog, I wrote to her. It was the beginning of a
correspondence, a friendship through letters. 


It is hard to describe what all these years of
reading her blog mean to me. We read to experience and understand the
lives of others, but reading a blog like The Cassandra Pages
is unlike reading a book. More than the individual posts, it is the
accumulated experience of following, over many years, Beth's thoughts
and actions that gives it the quality of a continuous relationship with a
dear friend. Unlike a book, the blog is not static: it grows, sometimes
even responding to your thoughts. Its mood changes, sometimes with the
seasons. It has a past you can look into (the way you sometimes inquire
about a friend's childhood), and it promises a future. Such an impact is
possible only when the person is open, sharing her challenges and
struggles, her vulnerable moments, not just her successes and joyful
moments. To do this in a public space, to do this without appearing
self-indulgent, is difficult. To continue in this fashion, consistently,
for ten years is rare. I know of no other blog that has maintained this
balance so long. 


For all this, I am grateful. May The Cassandra Pages
live long.  Let there be more on friends, family, food, music, art,
nature, politics, religion, photography, literature, travel, and the
city. Sex is optional.


Parmanu

Notes from Teju Cole, Jean Morris, and Dave Bonta

What an embarrassment of riches I am receiving! For someone who tries to be humble, this is becoming a bit much, and I hope you'll bear with me for a day or two longer while we celebrate blogging and ten years of The Cassandra Pages.

Teju Cole needs no introduction to readers here; we are, as he notes, dear friends, and I am enormously proud of and happy for his success as a writer, photographer, and thinker. Without The Cassandra Pages, we never would have met, and my own mind and eye would not have developed in the same way. Throughout my life, I've been attracted to, and sought out, other creative people whose thinking and work challenged me to do my very best. From the past ten years of blogging, Teju Cole and Dave Bonta have been at the absolute pinnacle for me. When those intellectual relationships mature into deep and enduring friendships, as they have in both cases, I know I've received one of the greatest blessings of life.

A drawing of my hands, drawing, by Teju Cole.  NYC, 2011

Dear Beth,



Now you are 10! I remember how I first found you: through Google, which is the way anyone finds anything these days. I had googled “Nabokov,” and landed on Steve Dodson’s blog Language Hat. From the links on his side bar, Cassandra Pages was one of the first that I went to. And once I came here, I stayed.



It wasn’t a great year, 2003. It was a sad year. In February and March, we were all helplessly counting down to the mass murder about to begin in Iraq, watching with horror as the men in charge made up their minds to reshape the world, and to reshape the evidence to suit that purpose. Then the war began, and the terrible news began to pour in. It pours in still.



In the midst of all that, I think we all looked for those things and those people that could speak in a thoughtful, subtle, and prophetic voice to our predicament. We didn’t need more news. We needed presence of mind. I know that this is why I read so much poetry in the past decade, and it’s also why I came to value Cassandra Pages, not long after you began writing here. You used words, images, and experience in ways that set the darkness echoing. Whether thinking about civil rights, a bowl of figs, a journey to Iceland, or a painting by Duccio, you were never lazy or glib or unkind. Through your writing here (and later, through our friendship in the real world), I learned to be more thoughtful. And through you and the way things branch out on the Internet, I found many other like-minded friends, like Dave Bonta at Via Negativa, Natalie D’Arbeloff at Blaugustine, and so many precious others.



Ten years. You’ve done a lot of writing in that time, and so have I, and we’ve written a lot to each other, hundreds of pages, though it seems not at all enough for all the things we wish to say and (to be honest) all the things I need to learn from you. Thank you for being one of the first, and one of the very best, readers of Open City, and for the many times you hosted my writing right here on this blog. I even have my own category in the side bar here, an achievement of which I’m inordinately proud.



Cassandra Pages is still one of the best things on the Internet. You don’t have to do it forever, but it’s a wonderful space, it has blessed many people, and long may it live.



love always,



TC

 

London, the Tate Modern, October 2011, close to the same day I had lunch with Jean Morris.

Jean Morris, who lives in London, is also one of my closest blog friends. She is a gifted writer and translator and an excellent photographer. We have always shared a love of contemporary film, art, and books, especially world literature in translation; a Buddhistic approach to life and daily practice; sadness and sensitivity about world politics; and an abiding friendship on and off our blogs, of which Jean has two wonderful examples: Tasting Rhubarb, for words and photography, and Trail Mix, where she posts daily "small stones" in a steady practice of observation and writing.

She writes:

Beth, I no longer remember the time, I realise, when
Cassandra didn't live in my computer. A decade is a long time, a fair
chunk of our lives. I no longer remember exactly when or how or why,
idly web-surfing one lunchtime in the office, I began to read blogs,
quite how I found my way to a few voices that felt like those of friends.
They were speaking of politics and spiritual practice and literature
and music. They were there day after day, sharing bits of their inner
and outer lives. They were voices of writers and artists, of concern
and kindness, of radical alternatives to the noise and greed and violence
I saw and heard every day in the news. They were there in my computer
and they stayed and I was hooked, and so began a new dimension to my
own daily life, of fellow feeling, conversations and friendships across
oceans.

Cassandra Pages was one of the first and has been
at the centre of this, warming my heart and sparking my thoughts with
your intelligence and eloquence, your fierce and compassionate caring
for daily detail and the wider world. Blogs were up close and interactive,
not like reading a book or a newspaper, and soon your talents for writing,
for art and design, were not only delighting my mind and eyes but helping
to revive the creative impulse that, like so many, I'd lost touch with
in adolescence.

I no longer remember a time when a little of you didn't
live in my computer, in my mind and heart. I hope you'll be there for
a long time to come.

Jean

 

In the Adirondacks, where I went hiking with Dave Bonta and friends last fall.

And then there is Dave. I hardly know where to begin to speak about Dave Bonta, whose wide-ranging, quirky interests and brilliant writing fascinated me from the beginning - fortunately his work is known to most of you so I don't have to try to describe it! In addition to so many other intersections - poetry, philosophy, religion, to name just a few - perhaps what Dave represents to me the most is the wilderness. His knowledge and love of the natural world, and his immersion in it, bring me back to my own roots as a girl of the woods, of the "limberlost," as it were. Now that I've become a city-dweller, I miss that every day, but Dave brings me back there. Our many-year collaboration on qarrtsiluni was a great pleasure and labor of love, and a project of which I'm very proud.

Dave writes:

When I started blogging in late December 2003, the only blogger I knew
in real life posted links to articles on politics with one-line
commentaries. I'd heard that there were also such things as personal,
diary-like blogs, but was told that they were full of mindless minutiae —
I was determined not to write one of those! A librarian's son, I did
the logical thing and consulted a blog directory (remember those?) and
the title of a blog in the philosophy and religion section caught my
eye: the cassandra pages.

When I clicked through, I found an
author with a distinctly epistolary voice who also functioned as the
hostess of a virtual salon, a place buzzing with conviviality. Beth's
blog in
early 2004 was a major node in a large, informal network of
down-to-earth intellectuals, bloggers such as Dick Jones, Lorianne
DiSabato, Rachel Barenblat, Dale Favier, Chris Clarke and many others
using mysterious, lower-case pseudonyms: languagehat, commonbeauty,
butuki, qB... It was a revelation. Beth's own voice was a perfect
balance of wisdom and vulnerability, and her willingness to engage
critically with religion — as well as with the arts and literature — did
more to shape my own conception of what blogging could be than anything
else I encountered online in those first, formative months. Her reports
on the newly elected Bishop Gene Robinson in January 2004 sparked
lengthy, thoughtful conversations in which an especially diverse
collection of political and religious free-thinkers took part. I felt as
if I'd come home.

Adding to the impression of homey-ness were
warm colors and a smart design, and, yes, a willingness to glean
insights
from the far-from-mindless minutiae of daily life. The fact that the
cassandra pages has maintained a consistent design aesthetic for an
entire decade is astonishing, but it testifies to the maturity of its
author's voice and vision. It's an oasis of consistency in an online
world where blogs are regularly abandoned, change names or URLs, or at
least undergo a major design overhaul every year or two. Blogging itself
has gone mainstream since then, and the apostles of online utopia have
moved on to champion social networks, where corporations rather than
individual writers set the tone. Most of the blogs I read have become
quieter places as a result, but the friendships forged in those early
years endure. In fact, one of them has blossomed into a romance, years
after we first met in the comment threads at Language Hat and the
cassandra pages, so it's no exaggeration to say that Beth's red, black
and white blog changed my life.

It was also fun to watch
those initial blog posts on Gene Robinson
blossom into a book published by a major literary press, which seemed to
kind of set the pattern for other bloggers in our ambit who used their
blogs to explore new ideas with a community of like-minded writers,
thinking through a variety of creative and spiritual projects: art
exhibitions,
books of poems, a critically acclaimed novel, monastic and rabbinic
ordinations, theatrical productions, online journals... For me and I
think for many others,
the cassandra pages led the way. Long may it prosper.

Dave

Notes from Language Hat, Maria Benet, and the Velveteen Rabbi

NYC Public Library, February 2004

I had been reading and commenting on Language Hat, which I greatly admired, for a while before Steve and I first met, which happened
in New York City in February of 2004. That
same day I noticed that the New York Public Library - in honor of
the Hat humself, I'd like to think - was hosting an exhibition called
"Russia and the World." Thank you, too, Steve, for the link yesterday on your blog - there was a real spike in my stats as a result!

Steve writes:

Ten years? It seems like just yesterday that Beth started a blog so
literate and humane and open-hearted that I was immediately sucked in,
and quickly got my wife addicted as well; we felt so close to her and
her husband that we invaded their home on our visit to Montreal in the
summer of 2004, and as I wrote here,
they welcomed us, poured good wine into us, and made such good
conversation that we hated to leave.  Her series of posts about her
father-in-law (which I wrote about here)
were so affectionate and affecting that I feel closer to him than I do
to some members of my own family, even though I never met the man.  Her
stories about moving to Canada and learning the ways (and language) of
her new city were often amusing and always thought-provoking.  And she
continues to be open to books, art, the life of the spirit, and above
all her fellow humans.  May she and her blog continue to grace this
fallen world for many more years!

-- Steve

 

Palms in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, taken the same weekend I first met Maria, who actually lives on the west coast.

Maria Benet was one of my first blogging friends; we grew closer
by working together on the Ecotone Wiki, a collaborative project in
writing about Place via monthly themes; it began in 2003 and ended in, I
think, 2005. We also collaborated with other online friends on a poetry
anthology, Brilliant Coroners. Maria, a very gifted poet and essayist, has continued her blog, Small Change, ever since, as well as creating several other online projects; she's the author of a full-length poetry collection, Mapmaker of Absences, and A Month of Haiku, available as an e-book download.

Ten years ago, when Beth and I first “met” as we were both mapping in
words the territory of the nascent blogosphere where we landed, I came
across a quote by William Gibson, the cyberpunk science fiction writer credited with coining the term “cyberspace”:

“I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic
and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is
how it never fails to underline the fact if I’m doing this I’m
definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m
definitely still on vacation.”

It may be that for some of us in the ensuing 10 years of blogging a
lot of novels and books we planned never got written. But plenty were
written as well, among them Beth’s own Going to Heaven, (Soft
Skull Press, Brooklyn, 2006) the story of Bishop Gene Robinson and the
debate over ordinations of gays and lesbians. And while she was also
“still on vacation” blogging, Beth, through reaching out to other
bloggers, created Phoenicia Publishing,
as a bridge between the best of the pixel and the inked words and
images “that illuminate culture, spirit, and the human experience.”

Ten years ago, we were pioneers in “space,” often teased for the
enthusiasm we had for how blogging was going to change the world. Ten
years later, the world has joined us in throngs, and though the world
itself doesn’t seem to have changed in all those way we dreamed of it
through blogging, our explorations and collaborative inspirations have
changed us. Ten years make for a lot of archived posts; but they also
make for deep bonds of friendship that have endured, even if they first
saw light in the illuminated screens in a world of pixels.

If blogging, as William Gibson had us believe, is being on a
vacation, then I hope that “Cassandra” will keep enjoying hers for
another 10 years and beyond, so that we can enjoy the conviviality that widened and deepened our worlds, off and online, through Beth’s explorations here.

Maria Benet

 

Iznik tiles in a shop window on Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, which remind me of Rachel's multi-culturalism.

Rachel Barenblat, who blogs at The Velveteen Rabbi, is
another close friend who starting blogging about the same time I did.
From the beginning we've shared many thoughts and learned from one
another about our different religions, about spirituality, and the
Middle East, and I know from personal experience that Rachel well
deserves the honor she received in 2012 when she was named a "Rabbi
Without Borders" fellow. I've been privileged to serve as her editor and
publisher for two books of poetry; 70 Faces:Torah Poems, and Waiting to Unfold, her collection of poems about pregnancy and early motherhood, which will be published by Phoenicia in May.

Meditations on art and practice -- explorations of spiritual life --
essays and photographs illustrating extraordinary people and lives --
the interplay of shadow and light. These are some of the things I come
to The Cassandra Pages to find. Many of the scenes I've glimpsed here
have entered into my heart and my consciousness, and stayed there. I
feel as though Beth's father-in-law (may his memory be a blessing) was a
longtime family friend, although we never met. I feel as though I have
walked the meditative and musical paths of Lent and Holy Week, although I
am Jewish and inevitably experience those holy days from the outside.
Beth brings a keen and compassionate ate to our world. I am grateful for
ten years of The Cassandra Pages, and for the friends I've made and remade through its pages.

Rachel

 

Lorianne DiSabato taking pictures, Montreal, spring 2006

And there's a very thoughtful  response to my blog anniversary post over at Lorianne DiSabato's Hoarded Ordinaries. Lorianne takes up a topic we've discussed often over the years: as writers and creative people, what is the "real work"of a lifetime and how does blogging fit into that definition?

 

Cassandra is 10: Let's have a Party!

Blogging in Vermont, 2003

Yes, we've arrived at a definite milestone: ten years of blogging, ten years since that momentous day in 2003 when, dismayed by the invasion of Iraq, and encouraged by my Icelandic friend and neighbor, Helgi, and my husband Jonathan (both more familiar with a new phenomenon, the weblog, than I was) I decided to launch something myself that felt more positive and hopeful.

Good Lord, I had absolutely no idea what it would lead to, or how it would change my life!

Some statistics...The Cassandra Pages was originally on Blogger. In the first 2 years, between March 20, 2003 and April 11, 2005, I wrote 731 posts - almost one a day. There've been 54,456 pageviews to date on that archived blog -- it still gets about 50 a day, almost all of them coming from Google searches.

After moving to TypePad in 2005, I've written 1603 posts, received 10,008 comments, and 541,965 pageviews. Visits are down from their highest point, some years ago, as they are all over the blogosphere; mine average between 180 and 190 per day -- and I'm grateful for every single one.

In the end, I'm not sure statistics mean much, though without the awareness of a steady stream of readers, and the development of relationships with many of them through the comments, email, and my own visits to their blogs, I'm not sure I would have kept this obsessive project  (or is it a habit?) going this long.

On the other hand, though, what emerges is a body of work. It isn't conventional, or even graspable, and perhaps will be impermanent, but I know that it is, in fact, THE body of artistic work accomplished in my lifetime which most closely represents me. It's also taught me the most. Once upon a time I wasn't satisfied with that. Now, I am.

For as much as I sometimes have wished to be otherwise, I am not first and foremost a novelist or a painter, a writer of non-fiction books or a photographer or printmaker. I'm a reader, and observer, and an integrator, whose chosen form is the informal essay, illustrated with my own photographs or artwork, and whose perfect medium of expression is the blog. Being a blogger became an intrinsic part of my identity: like someone who works in watercolors or oils, I see the world and my daily life through an intimacy with this medium. It used to feel a bit weird, like constant translating; now it's so normal I don't even think about it, even though I've become a lot more choosy about what to base my posts upon. The change from pure writing to a greater focus on art has simply mirrored what's going on in my own life, too.

I'm a person for whom any artform is incomplete without relationship. This blog has given me that, too, in ways I never expected, and poured richness into my life in the form of friendships, discussions, online groups, collaborative projects from the Ecotone Wiki to qarrtsiluni to Phoenicia Publishing and so many others.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that while the world has hurtled toward heightened anxiety, clashing cultures, and greater misunderstanding, my own life, over the past ten years, has done the exact opposite, and continues  -- through this medium, friendships, travel, and daily life in a big multicultural city -- to open up more and more. I hope The Cassandra Pages always represents that journey toward greater possibility.

As a celebration of these ten years, my friend T.C. offered to write a few words, and inspired by his kindness I've invited a few of the people who've been blogging companions and/or longterm readers here to contribute short guest posts, which I'll be posting here over the next days. If any of you would like to join the party, you are absolutely invited -- please send me your contribution at cassandra (dot) pages (at) gmail (dot) com. And I'd be especially delighted to hear (either that way or in the comments) from the quiet but faithful readers who seldom or never communicate with me: what I do here is just as much for you as for those whose speak up regularly, and I often have you in mind as I write.

Thanks for being here!

Beth

 (2013)

St. Patrick, Pop, and Palestrina

The annual Montreal St. Patrick's Day Parade

Sunday afternoon, 2 pm:

I'm in the chapel at the cathedral, the quietest place I could find. The cheers of the crowd on St. Catherine reach even here, muffled by the double doors that lead out onto the portico, above the street, filled now with people wearing green glittered hats and garlands, children wandering around dazed and high on sugar, rocked by the megaphones and loudspeakers on the floats, and the insistent bass beat of pop and techno rhythms.

After a falafel sandwich in the Underground, which was quickly filling with green-garbed party-ers, I escaped to a bookstore where I spend half an hour looking at books abour Mexico, and another half hour in the poetry section, pulling out volumes by Ted Hughes, Anne Carson, Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo. My sole companion was a fuzzily-grey-haired man with a furrowed brow, across the way in Philosophy; we ranged up and down our respective shelves, two dinosaurs in this updated chain store which is now more devoted to gifts than books.

And I, too, didn't lift a claw to arrest the decline of the remaining books into fantasy and self-help genres, for I left without buying anything, preferring to go to the library or buy used copies rather than pay the printed, inflated Canadian prices which ignore the fact that the U.S. and Canadian dollars have been at par for a long time.

Now, here in the chapel, standing squarely in the Jurassic, I'm getting ready to sing Evensong, an all-Palestrina program this afternoon, hoping that by 4:00 pm when the microphones go live, the crowds will have dispersed to the bars and the metro, and we can at least hear our collective scales rattling as we walk up the aisle.

Afterword:

As it turned out, quite a few people came into the cathedral after the parade, perhaps out of curiosity, or simply to warm up on a cold day. As the choir took its places in the chancel, some of them remained right near us, up on the altar. They stood around the sides as the conductor began her instructions, gawking at us as if this were a zoo rather than a church, and we were the odd creatures. I'm always stunned by the first notes when the choir begins singing; it seems like something miraculous, this power and beauty contained just within the human body. But only one or two of the visitors seemed taken with it enough to stay for a while, transfixed by a different kind of sound and atmosphere from the street, perhaps different from anything they'd heard before: plainchant alternating with Palestrina's own melodies, emerging from and returning to the silence of another stone cathedral five centuries ago. One mother and child stayed for the service, and as we came down the aisle at the end, the mother bent down to whisper something to the little girl, whose wide eyes were fixed on us, rapt.

From Jacarandas to Living Walls: Plants of Mexico City

Inner garden of the Palacio Nationale, Mexico City, with cats

As you all know by now, I'm in love with plants. One of the things I was looking forward to the most about being in Mexico was seeing palm trees, and finding out more about what plants grow in that particular climate.

Unlike some parts of Mexico, the capital city is neither tropical nor desert. There is a rainy season (not now) and my impression was that in general it's quite dry there. But it's also high - over 6,000 feet, in a region of high mountains -- the major volcanoes to the southeast rise to over 17,000 feet!

Mass planting of clivias, at the zoo

I haven't read anything yet about the ecology or botany of the area. Basically, what I saw were succulents and cactus growing to enormous sizes; small houseplants that we're used to having indoors growing as small trees and lush hedges (crotons, rubber plants); banana trees, clivias and agapanthus used as mass-plantings under trees in parks; bougainvillas trailing over trellises and balconies and clambering up trees; and everywhere, breathtaking violet jacaranda trees -- an icon of Mexico City -- in full bloom.

Jacarandas

The Palacio Nationale, where we saw the Rivera murals, has a large inner garden (top picture), open to the public. Part of it is filled with trees, and inhabited by cats who are given food and water and, in return, stay there safely, though some of them they looked pretty scruffy.

The other side is a botanical garden (above), full of succulents and cactus growing on black volcanic rocks. We spent quite a while there, taking pictures and enjoying the atmosphere of an entirely different sort of garden.

I hope the photographs manage to convey the scale, and show you just how huge these plants really were.

An old cactus with new leaves. In the streets and the markets, people are preparing leaves like these to eat, cutting the spines of with sharp machete-like knives, and cooking the leaves on a hot griddle. I didn't try them but I was curious!

It was a shock to me to see that people had carved their initials in some of these magnificent plants! First, because it seems like such an unnecessary thing to do, and second because of the longevity it implied for the plants themselves, which stoically continued to grow, slowly, year after year.

But the most extraordinary thing we saw was this living wall. I could hardly believe it. The substrate is a thick landscape fabric that feels like felt. The plants are all growing in pockets in that fabric, and there must be some sort of internal irrigation system. Isn't it fantastic?