New Beginnings

It's taken me several days to get up the courage, but I've taken that first step back into oil painting. I love this first stage of a painting – the smell of it, the freedom of it before anything is decided or reigned in, the wide-open possibilities, the feeling of the brush on the canvas and the knowledge that I've overcome the first big hurdle: beginning. What lies ahead is the struggle and journey that each painting represents, and frankly I have no idea where we're going on this one.

One exciting discovery is that there's a terrific art supply store only a couple of blocks from my studio. It just relocated there from its former home. I promise not to go there very often, but having had to rely on mail-order or a very limited local selection of fine art supplies in Vermont, it seems like an impossible luxury to be able to walk to a good store!

Thank you all for your responses to the previous post. Your positive comments and encouragement make me happy and grateful. As for deciding what to do — I'm pretty sure that I need to move strongly ahead, building on the past but exploring and taking risks in order to grow. If I really need to make money from the sales of paintings at some point, I can do realistic works like these, but it's not where my heart is and I know that doing them would drain my energy and time and be, in some significant way, a betrayal of self and potential. I'm learning a lot about myself from looking at older work, though, and will be posting more of it in the weeks. These are paintings I love and am proud of, or I wouldn't have kept them, and now they also feel like letters to myself from my past – letters I couldn't fully understand when they were written.

Speaking of Carp

This morning we went over to the south shore again, and took our bikes. While J. was taking photos of one of the grain elevators across the river, I rode further west, locked my bike on an old rack overgrown with rugusa roses laden with rose hips, and followed a narrow trail through the woods to Point du Marigot. This is a nature preserve that runs along the river for a ways, and it includes a waterfowl nesting  site in the trees at the back of this photo – I'm looking from the point that goes out into the river back toward the path that runs along it. The area downriver from this point is a secluded lagoon where the water is much calmer, and it's a haven for waterfowl and shorebirds of every kind.

We saw more great blue herons than we could count. The one in this picture, though, is a great  egret – at least I'm pretty sure it was a great egret rather than snowy egret. There were quite a few of them too. Lots of ducks, lots of geese, cormorants, gulls, and many sandpiper and plover-like things that I don't know well enough to identify. Next time, I'll take the field guide and larger binoculars along.

We were captivated by the terns. I don't know if they were arctic terns or common terns, but whichever they were, they were remarkable fliers and fishers, plunging into the water repeatedly and changing direction in the air – it seemed – in mid-wing-beat, at will. They were noisy, too, calling "keer-keer!" across the water as they harassed the gulls and swooped back and forth over the slowly-swimming ducks.

Two small flocks of geese came in directly over my head, completely unafraid and only twelve feet or so above me; I could see their muscles flexing and felt like I had just entered a clip of "Winged Migration."

This is how close we were to the city; you feel like you're a million miles away even though the container ships are being unloaded right across the water, and there's a big highway beyond the trees.

After we'd been there for a while, a fisherman came along, in hip boots and vest and carrying a fly rod. We watched him creeping along the shore of the lagoon, quite like the herons we'd seen stalking their prey. Suddenly – a huge splash – he had hooked a big fish and the rod was bent nearly double. We watched him play, land and release his catch without ever bringing it fully out of the water, and then went closer to talk to him. It had been a carp, a pretty big one, that he had seen and enticed with a large artificial fly. "They're eating worms and insects right now," he told us, "but they're very wary – I rubbed this fly, which was new, on the grass before using it to take away any human scent." He was a lifetime Montrealer who knows all the natural places close to the city, and especially likes this area near the Boucherville islands on the south shore. "North American fishermen tend to turn up their noses at carp, but in Europe sportsfishermen see them as a great game fish – it's all cultural," he said. "But I release everything anyway – I'm using hooks without barbs, and try hard not to take the fish out the water." What else does he catch in the river? Pike, small and large-mouth bass, and sometimes a sturgeon. I told him I'd seen a huge fish leap out of the water the last time I was there, and he said it was probably a sturgeon – which seems as mythical to me as a flock of Arctic terns.

Chez nous

Just back home from a trip to attend my uncle's funeral, visit my father and see my whole extended family for the first time in a while. It was a good trip even though the occasion was sad, and we enjoyed a beautiful drive down on Sunday when the weather was at its midsummer best. Tomorrow I hope to have a little sketched travelogue for you. I've just done a fast blog tour of what I missed while away; next a cup of decaf green tea, an Italian biscuit, a shower, and then to bed.

End of the Weekend

Here it is already, Sunday evening, still balmy, lights flickering and voices passing outside the window, murmuring in French, English, Spanish. I had intended to do some sketches this weekend but didn't; there's a video to upload, and several photographs which need writing to accompany them, but that hasn't happened either. What did happen was very realtime: four or five hours of gardening yesterday; cooking; cleaning; laundry; a long walk in the afternoon and a bike ride yesterday evening that yielded the video which I'm not going to talk about yet; and another long day today spent mostly in the cathedral either rehearsing or singing music mainly by Peter Aston, which required a lot of concentration because it is Not Easy. Inbetween the services: the annual church picnic with hot dogs and potato chips and cake with sticky white frosting and Boston-cream-pie-type filling and a tug-of-war which we women won against the men, twice, while tourists stood on the side of the street gawking and cheering. Then a noontime demonstration for women's reproductive freedom at Dominion Square; a quick trip to the bookstore to look unsuccessfully for comprehensive books on perspective drawing (I can't find mine) ; a decaf latte; more rehearsing and singing in a very hot choir loft. After Evensong I biked home and went over to the garden for a little bit, and then we had gin-and-tonics and ate two of the most humongous artichokes we've ever eaten and decided we didn't need anything else for dinner except a nectarine and a pear. Now I have just enough energy to clean up the kitchen, fold the laundry, and go to bed, so please forgive me for not uploading the video or the photographs or writing the thoughtful blogpost I'd intended. There's more to come, but your correspondent is…weary.

A Classical Education

As a former classicist, I was attracted to an opinion piece in today's New York Times by Stanley Fish, titled "A Classical Education: Back to the Future." However, I found it was only peripherally about the kind of classical education I received (based on the study of Greek and/or Latin, plus ancient philosophy, literature, history and art.) It was still interesting; how we love to talk about what's wrong with education! And yet part of the problem is that no theory of education can possibly fit all situations or all children in our current world, or even in one country like Canada or the U.S.

Fish writes about three recent books which critique current educational patterns and the Obama government's positions on education. The first author, Leigh A. Bortins, is an engineer, a home schooling advocate, and the C.E.O. of Classical Conversations, Inc.; she advocates an education that exposes children to the great thinkers of the past, in order to cast light on "our current predicaments" – OK – but she also "warns against the narrowing distractions of 'industrialization and
technologies' and declares that 'students would be better educated if
they weren’t allowed to use computers . . . until they were proficient
readers and writers,' ” a statement I find both silly and completely impractical. Bortins bemoans the loss of a type of rigorous education, steeped what she calls  "classical skills:"… "imitation, memorization, drill,
recitation
and above all grammar, not grammar as the study of the formal structure
of sentences (although that is part of it), but grammar as the study of
the formal structure of anything." While those are definitely requirement for the study of any language, this is not the definition or even the foundation of classics. The foundation of classics is thought.

The third author, Diane Ravitch, is an historian and theorist of education who was once a supporter of "No Child Left Behind" and its emphasis on testing, accountability, choice, and markets, but became increasingly disenchanted. 
Like many others who have studied educational trends in recent decades and researched the results, she now feels these initiatives were a dismal failure. She says that "the mantra of choice produced a 'do your own
thing' proliferation of educational schemes, 'each with its own
curriculum, and methods, each with its own private management, all
competing for . . . public dollars' rather than laboring to discover 'better ways of educating hard-to-educate students.'

Are we talking about "back to basics" here? If so, I agree that's important, but only Martha Nussbaum, Fish's second author, approaches her study of education as a classicist (she is also a philosopher, ethicist, and law professor,) and it shows right away:

{Nussbaum…} critiques the current emphasis on
“science and technology” and the “applied skills suited to profit
making” and she argues that the “humanistic aspects of science and
social science — the imaginative and creative aspect, and the aspect of
rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground” as the humanities
and the arts “are being cut away” and dismissed as “useless frills” in
the context of an overriding imperative “to stay competitive in the
global market.” The result, she complains, is that “abilities crucial
to the health of any democracy” are being lost, especially the ability
to “think critically,” the ability, that is, “to probe, to evaluate
evidence, to write papers with well-structured arguments, and to
analyze the arguments presented to them in other texts.”

Every professor of the humanities that I've spoken to in the past decade says the same thing about their students: that the vast majority of them have basic, often intractable problems with critical thinking, and cannot construct logical arguments or use their own language effectively. My own feeling is that this comes from a failure in the rigorous teaching of reading and writing, not to mention oral comprehension and oral presentation. If a majority of kids can't read well and can't listen to the spoken word and remember and then analyze what they've read or heard, we're going to have a society… well, pretty much like the one we've got.

For Nussbaum, human development means the development of the capacity to
transcend the local prejudices of one’s immediate (even national)
context and become a responsible citizen of the world. Students should
be brought “to see themselves as members of a heterogeneous nation . .
. and a still more heterogeneous world, and to understand something of
this history of the diverse groups that inhabit it.” Developing
intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even
begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that
“cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is
“flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that
too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.

I couldn't agree more, but the magnitude of the task facing teachers today is tremendous, and most of those teachers didn't receive that sort of education themselves. As the cost of education and living rises, the pressure increases — from both parents and students — for goal-oriented education based on the transmission of skills that will lead to jobs and income, and the education itself necessarily becomes more narrowly-focused. As fond as I am of the liberal arts, I find it rather quaint that Stanley Fish and these authors all say:

Forget about the latest fad and quick-fix, and buckle down to the
time-honored, traditional “study and practice of the liberal arts and
sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics
mathematics, the arts and foreign languages.”

In short, get knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, equip them
with a carefully calibrated curriculum and a syllabus filled with
challenging texts and materials, and put them in a room with students
who are told where they are going and how they are going to get there…

as if these teachers can be plucked from a tree. I agree that many of the educational experiments of the 1970s, 80s and 90s were a disaster, but turning those tables around in an utterly changed world would take as many decades; how are graduates supposed to exist in the meantime? In 1970, a degree in English or fine arts or classics wasn't a liability; what does it get you today? Nor does this type of education, which Fish declares "worked for me" – as it did for me, too – take into account the most "hard-to-educate" students who have always existed but whose numbers have also increased over these decades, often as a result of extreme stress and tension in their home families.

It's a huge problem, and lies at the bottom of the predicament in which we find ourselves in the U.S. and increasingly in Canada: citizenries divided into nearly equal camps by their opposing world views and reactions to that chaotic and fast-changing world: one which is capable of transcending provincialism, nationalism, and demonization of "the other" and one which, as yet, cannot.

On Suffering (2)

 

Why did Haiti have an earthquake? Because of where it is.

Seven or eight years ago, J. and I worked on a project researching and designing an exhibition about the 100th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. Pelee, on the island of Martinique, in 1902. The panel above is a map and graphic we created that illustrates the location and general movement of the plates below the Caribbean Sea; there is still argument among geologists about the origin of the Caribbean Plate and its movement relative to three other tectonic plates on its northern and eastern Atlantic sides. However, it's agreed that the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Plate is a "subduction zone" where the Atlantic edges of the North American plate, and/or the South American plates (which basically cover those entire continents) are descending below the Caribbean Plate. The archipelago known as the Lesser Antilles Island Arc is a region of young islands – of which the best known are probably Monserrat and Martinique – being formed by volcanic activity as one plate dives below another, forcing magma up from below the earth's crust. There are no less than sixteen active volcanoes in this island arc, and the Caribbean region is one where earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions have occurred frequently in modern times.

The first-person history of the eruption of Mt. Pelee, on Martinique, exists in extremely fragmentary accounts because of the 30,000 residents of St. Pierre, its capital city, only people survived. Let me say that again. Two survivors, out of 30,000 – all of whom were probably killed in minutes. One of these survivors was a prisoner in a subterranean dungeon, so he saw and heard very little. Boats at a great distance from the harbor saw two clouds of glowing, super-heated gas and rock which swept down the mountain and out to sea after annihilating the city as effectively as a nuclear eruption, but any boats that were already in the harbor burst into flames and were destroyed. We worked with before-and-after photographs of St. Pierre from a private, unpublished collection, and being there is somehow even harder to imagine than what it would have been like to be at Hiroshima.

The temperature of this type of "pyroclastic flow," the product of a certain type of volcanic eruption, can be greater than 1075 degrees C.; the speed of the clouds which swept down Mt. Pelee have been estimated at 420mph (670kph), and obviously they ignited everything in their path. This eruption was the first time the French term "nuée ardente" or "glowing cloud" was used, because, of course, most of these islands were French colonies considered to be tropical paradises; Gauguin went there to paint before ending up in Tahiti. There was plenty of warning that Mt. Pelee was going to erupt; in addition to minor eruptions of smoke and ash, animals of all sizes became extremely disturbed; several days before the eruption the Guerin Sugar Factory was invaded by ants and giant centipedes. (Like most of the islands in the Caribbean, Martinique's main export was
sugar, and the majority of its population were descendents of slaves imported from Africa to work on the sugar plantations.) But the worst omen was a swarm of deadly fer-de-lance snakes that came down the mountain into the city, biting humans and horses. In spite of all this, officials insisted there was no cause for alarm or evacuation, and everyone stayed; many of inhabitants were in the cathedral when the cloud struck because it was Ascension Day.

In July of 1995, Monserrat fared better in terms of loss of life, but not economically, when its previously-dormant Soufriere Hills volcano erupted and buried the capital city of Plymouth under close to 40 feet of mud. The city has been closed to visitors because the eruption continues at a low level and most of the inhabitants who evacuated cannot return.

Volcanic eruption can't be predicted with certainty, still, but there tends to be at least some warning. Earthquakes and tsunamis aren't like that; after doing this work on Mt. Pelee I read a book about California and pseudo-science of earthquake prediction – people who claim to be able to "feel" a quake before it happens or claim to be able to "read" portents in cloud formations or the activity of birds. None of these people have a very good batting record, but science doesn't either, when it comes to earthquakes, which have terrified human beings and destroyed their lives and works for ever.

Into the Starry, Starry Blue

 

Favorite Posts of 2009 (2)

 

Graffiti on a Montreal wall…

6) June 4: War is Sin – thinking about Obama's speech in Cairo, and a look at the cost of war from a spiritual perspective.

War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the
old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by
politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious
institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This
betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the
nation or in any god.

–Chris Hedges, "War is Sin."

J.'s old ski boots in our nearly-empty Vermont attic.

7) July 13: Ghosts - unexpected visitations just before we moved away from our Vermont home of thirty years:

It
started today with my father-in-law's groaning ascent of the stairs as
I made the morning coffee. I even turned around to watch him climb up,
smiling, making exaggerated sounds with each raising of a knee…

 

Reading on the metro.

8) September 22: How We Read – thinking about how we choose the next book to read:

I wonder if those of us who grew up in libraries have markedly
different reading habits than the online generation. That search
through the shelves for something new, with nothing in particular in
mind when we start, isn't something that can be replicated in a
bookstore-less, library-less existence – or can it? And then there's
the pleasure of confronting a whole shelf of a particular author's work
and knowing that you can read from one end to the other, burrowing
through the pages like a real bookworm, until that sad day when you
emerge out the other end into empty air, suddenly hungry again.

 

…and back in Montreal, for the plumage of fall.

9) November 1: All the Many-Colored Saints - thoughts about All Saints' Day:

The baristas speak Arabic behind bottles of colored Italian syrup with French labels: rhum, gingembre, pamplemousse.
I often come to this cafe for a quiet half hour before the rehearsal
for Evensong; they recognize me now and are very kind, and I like
listening to their voices. The coffee is always good, the chairs are
comfortable, and I find can write or read calmly in the company of
these sympathetic semi-strangers. I’ve begun to wonder, too, if this
place represents a sort of way-station between my identities: the
Anglican and very English choir-singer, and the girl who’s always been
drawn to cultures other than her own.

Delancey Street, Philadelphia.

10) November 6: Meeting Hafez on the Road to Ottawa – if I had to pick just one of the micropoems from this year, maybe this would be it:

Writing Farsi script
on the page of the sky
blackbirds roost
in graceful dots and curves
then fly off all at once
like a poem

Canadian Bloggers Get Some Legitimacy

A new Canadian ruling, in late December, has made steps toward clarifying the legal status of blogging amid other forms of news media, affording bloggers some legal protection but also increasing their responsibility to verify sources. (CBC News, Toronto.)

While the focus of this second article, from the Chronicle Herald in Halifax, is on the future of traditional journalism, and the threats against it, I found it interesting for its Canadian point of view — the bit about Stephen Harper's attempted control of media seemed refreshingly precious to my jaded American sensibility. But it's great that in Canada we think we still have some control over how this goes – and, as in many discussions of public policy, we actually may.

JUST AS a pretty dark year was ending for journalism, the sun broke
through over the Supreme Court last week, shining a light that will
illuminate free speech in Canada for generations to come. In two key
rulings, the court established a new defence against libel and
defamation: the defence of responsible journalism. With that, media
organizations as large as TV networks and as small as one-person
blogs can defend themselves against defamation if they can prove
that, among other things, they acted in the public interest.

And while we're talking about Canadian bloggers, congratulations to my friend Ed, whose BlorkBlog turns 9 today. Ed was not only a pioneer in the early days of blogging, he's kept it going all this time – but might be shutting down to put his energy into other projects. You can go over there and vote in a poll he's taking about his blog's future.

Guest Photo: Frost Oak

I've recently gotten back in touch with an old friend from college, and we've been renewing a conversation that was carried on not only in person, but in long letters we wrote to each other during the summers. I found some of those as I was cleaning out the attic in Vermont last summer, and re-reading them encouraged me to try to find him and reconnect. As he's discovered, I've left a fairly long trail of words and pictures of my own on this blog! He always liked being out in nature, and has been sending me some photographs from his daily walks – this was one from last week and I liked it so much I asked if I could post it here. Thanks, G.!