Matisse

A Matisse, from my writing room, to end the month on a bright note!


image: Henri Matisse, Open Window (1905)

Constellations

This is the Cornell box at Cantor (see Stargazing). Another writer's shrine of sorts, for those of us who love ancient star maps, mapping the constellations with all of their borrowings from the Greek myths. One of my favorite books is Astronomy of the Ancients (MIT Press), and especially one of its essays, The Gorgon's Eye, by Jerome Y. Lettvin. I'm intrigued too to find that the oldest mapping of the Pleiades, with its missing star, may have been made on rocks in the Valle d'Aosta, near the Plan de Sorcières—country I am fond of.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Joseph Cornell's Untitled (Constellation)

Writer's Shelf

This small writer's shrine on a shelf in my writing room on Thendara Lane—oregano, dappled in late sun, and an alchemical sphere, both elemental in what I've written.

I spent a full quarter of 1999 in travel, and much of the rest preparing for or cleaning up after trips. Given that constant motion, I had to learn to find stillness within the rush, and to understand what the Chinese philosophers mean about there being five directions, not just four—north, south, east, and west, but center too, where all the others come together. I found this greenish glazed clay sphere that summer at an art fair, marked with the alchemical symbol for “compose”—reminding me that composure and composition come from the same place; that the ability to combine diverse experiences rests specifically in one’s own quiet core.

A phrase I found in a wonderful book by a friend of a friend (Padma Hejmadi, Room to Fly) describes so perfectly how one’s life is composed in travelling or the return home: “It is, after all, that old process which Katherine Mansfield once described as ‘going out and looking at a tree and coming back plus the tree.’” I’ve come back year after year plus so much of the world, plus a rich history. Plus Bonnard, plus Mahler and Bach, plus the frescoes on old Roman walls, the short-lived mountain flowers called settembre, the shimmer of cottonwoods and thunderheads and high aqueducts or abandoned poi and rice fields in far valleys (like the white heron in the vanished lake: remembering water).

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons.
More than we experienced has gone by.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, appendix, II)

I’ve come back upon my own past again and again too, in unexpected places. Taking pictures of Ranchos de Taos one recent summer, I recognized the same lines and form to it as to the whitewashed monastery I photographed on Santorini six years before. I learned that the Navajos glaze their pottery with piñon sap, as the ancient Greeks did amphoras. And at Ostia Antica, the silted-over port of Rome, there are rounded clay ovens that look just like the adobe hornos of the New Mexico pueblos.

It all comes around again, which is another lesson of the green sphere.



image: Christie B. Cochrell, Writer's Shelf

Votive Offerings

Thinking about what would go in a writer's shrine . . .


image: Sharon Mollerus, Ancient greek terracotta votive plaque representing female figure flanked by snakes. Offerings from shrine, mid 7th century BC.

Settembre

I remember coming up the length of Italy, from southernmost, closer to Africa, to the mountainous north, the beginning of the Alps, from full summer to advancing fall, from sullen heat to blessed coolness. On the train between Milano and Lago di Garda were people who had been in the mountains, they told us, gathering wildflowers, long spindly stalks and blue blossoms—a flower called settembre, September, they said, because that is the only time it blooms.

And rarer still, that may have been the only year it bloomed; I haven’t found any mention of it since. Could it have been a fringed gentian, maybe, as in the wonderful photo? I can’t remember the details; only the color and the name. The brief-lived flower is as elusive in my memory as it is in real time.

It represents for me, that blue settembre, something lost—like first love, a homeland, an innocence of heart. Now, here, September is hot, dry, merciless, a flaming up of all the summer’s hope before we head into the decline of fall. There is no promise and no lure in our September here; there is no charm in the journey, up and north, no escape to the mountains and the snow-fed lakes—Como, Garda, Maggiore, where love and stories start. And slip through into a new place, like the lovers in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms rowing up Lago di Maggiore from war and strife in Italy to peaceful Switzerland, though that was an elusive hope as well, as it happened.

image: Illinois Natural History Survey

Adobe Wall

A wall on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, since I've been writing about that . . .


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Adobe Wall

Floating Lanterns and Zozobra

I’ve written almost all my life, beginning with an opera libretto (!) when I was four or five, and trying almost everything in turn. The pages have accumulated in dark drawers, mostly unseen by anyone but me. They grow weighty—especially during moves.

It’s time, I’ve decided, instead of hoarding them to start letting the pieces go—let them lift weightlessly into the ether like the fire lanterns, Thailand’s Kome Loy, that grace ceremonies for fresh new beginnings; or the new flying farolitos that amazed us old, earthbound Santa Feans when we first saw them a few Christmases ago, burning above us in the frost-touched night, nearer than stars, while we were out walking on Christmas Eve among the grounded lines of lighted bags following unpaved drives, multi-level pueblo rooftops, and the curve of high adobe walls around a compound of dwellings or galleries or inward-looking patios on Canyon Road, Acequia Madre, or my own first street, Abeyta.

In Thailand it’s believed that by sending off these lanterns one is sending off bad luck into the air. Before the lantern lifts, one prays to have one’s sins and bad karma carried by it far away, into the absolving vastness of the sky.

FLOATING LANTERNS





In Santa Fe, a ceremony with similar intent has just taken place. Every year there at the end of summer, the beginning of fall and school and shorter, darker days, the start of fiesta, comes the burning of Zozobra, Old Man Gloom—and with him, all the troubles of another year.

Zozobra is a massive scowling paper effigy, with thrashing arms and head, whose moans and groans as sheets of sparks and flame and smoke come at him from all sides become an urgent roar of outrage as the fire takes him and the crowd’s jubilant cheers join the flurry of fireworks set off by the combustion of their cares.

THE BURNING OF ZOZOBRA (2008)





I hope setting my words alight in this blog and our new cooperative creative writing blog, Green Scooter, will lighten me and mine (more on clutter soon!) and light the way into a place of momentary grace and new beginnings, like the floating lanterns lifting, lifting, until free from earthly gravity.

Zinnias

Some zinnias, for a gloomy Monday.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Zinnias

Cape Cod Again

An abandoned buoy and a track of solitary prints . . .

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Beach, Cape Cod

Cape Cod

With Labor Day over, we feel an almost-imperceptible dwindling, a drawing-in. The light changes, the days end before we’re quite ready, the abundance of tomatoes, peaches, peppers will all too soon give way to more subdued fall and winter produce.

I used to always travel in September, feeling the wistful pull of things beyond—but this year I am traveling only in my memory, back through old journals and photographs and even recipes.

I remember the year shortly after my father died I went from Boston, where I’d had a book exhibit, down to Cape Cod on the ferry, against the tide of returns. I wrote nothing more than this, that charmed and stolen week, a kind of series of tone poems, though I took hundreds of pictures.

Sept. 8

And now the summer is officially over, and I have come to Cape Cod. I come on Labor Day, when everybody else is leaving. The ferry doesn’t return until Sunday, I am caught here. The beaches are lovely and empty, swept with rain.

I celebrate a rather melancholy Labor Day with orange margaritas and fresh grilled tuna salad with wild greens, oranges, onions, and black olives at Pepe’s Wharf in downtown Provincetown.

Sept. 9

I buy a stripy red sweater today at the Marine Supply—perfect for boating, though I don’t boat.

I’m at the east end of the east end, on a quiet stretch of beach. My walks to town (to buy cards or mail them; to check the Portuguese Bakery; to shop for cheese and wine and rosemary focaccia) takes me first past the lovely cottages, and then into the blocks of galleries, thick and richly colored (or one simple gray with white highlights: an almost screaming white); then into the merry mess of the town center and the wharfs; or up if so inclined to the tower stolen from Siena which inexplicably marks the Pilgrims’ first landfall.

Two women slide shingles down a roof heavily, in the rain.

Sept. 10

I watch the incoming tide reclaim the sand bars, and a retriever trying to retrieve a buoy.

In the end the sand bars take the whole harbor.

Sept. 11

I make a list of the Cape Cod colors:

bruised plum

rusted apricot

royal navy

pale watered turquoise

omelette yellow

burnt umber

muddy mustard

sail white

sand white

shell white

raincloud white

rope white

sneaker white

boatbottom white

lighthouse white

deckchair white

gull white

Sept. 12

The weekenders are starting to come in, which makes me sad because it means my time is almost up, and the week’s peace—meandering on long white sandbars at low tide, across the emptied harbor, sailboats further out still pale, as if imperfectly stamped on a wet page.

Sept. 13

I watch as a child comes to grief, late in the morning.

The heartbreak

of a forbidden

sack of black kelp;

a father’s betrayal

on a bright blue day,

archetype of loss.

Sept. 14

The tide has turned

inexorably after all;

the ferry comes remorselessly

around the lighthouse point,

straight for the shore

(ten minutes more),

heads straight for me.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Sandbars, Cape Cod

Figs and Cinnamon

Black Mission Figs, that came to the Spanish missions here in California from their origins in the Balearic Islands (maybe brought by Fr. Junipero Serra, who started in Palma de Mallorca and ended in Carmel?), bought in over-spilling baskets from the farmers market in this heart of fig season. I remember longingly the loveliest dessert I’ve ever had—the slow end to a slow lunch in a shady June garden—black and green figs together, halved, and served with fresh unsalted ricotta from somewhere up in Marin, drizzled with thyme honey. Do I remember lavender blossoms as well, or would that have been gilding the lily?

Going into the spice shop in Menlo Park on Sunday morning, choosing among the cinnamons. Wondering how to choose, I was advised by the shopkeeper that I’d just have to smell and decide for myself. Whichever smells best to me, it turns out, is the one I should have. Whichever chooses me. Some sort of innate selection. Does it have to do with mood? Or temperament? Does each of the four temperaments, the four humors, have its own cinnamon preference, I wonder?

There’s China Cassia, strong and spicy, with a potent sweet flavor prized for centuries; Ceylon “True” Cinnamon (and what, I wonder in my wayward literary way, would a false cinnamon lead to?), complex and fragrant, with a citrus overtone, most prized in Mexico and England; Vietnamese, the strongest of them all, extremely sweet and flavorful. And there’s Korintje Cassia, which I immediately know is mine—its smell, to me, far richer and more alluring than the others, though it is odd that it isn’t in fact the strongest. Sweet and mellow, reminiscent of childhood’s cinnamon toast, the cinnamon sticks at the Three Cities of Spain on Canyon Road. I wondered if Korintje might have to do with Corinth, but it’s from Indonesia.

I’m reminded of Michael Ondaatje’s wonderful book of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, and the title poem.

If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed

and leave the yellow bark dust

on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek

you could never walk through markets

without the profession of my fingers

floating over you. The blind would

stumble certain of whom they approached

though you might bathe

under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh

at this smooth pasture

neighbour to your hair

or the crease

that cuts your back. This ankle.

You will be known among strangers

as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you

before marriage

never touch you

—your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

I buried my hands

in saffron, disguised them

over smoking tar,

helped the honey gatherers . . .

When we swam once

I touched you in water

and our bodies remained free,

you could hold me and be blind of smell.

You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner’s daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in the act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

peeler’s wife. Smell me.

(Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Figs in Blue Bowl

Pimientos de Padron

Overheard at the farmers market: “Pimientos de Padron are so 2007.”

Beyond reach? Beyond tasting? Like Mallorca itself, which has receded into memory. The hilltop of the writers workshop which I can only visit again in the pages of the mystery I started writing this summer. Goat Song, maybe—

“Tragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία tragōidia, "goat-song") is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure.

The mystery begins something like this:

Isabel would remember ruefully that her first reaction to the body in the swimming pool on the Mallorcan hilltop was one of aesthetic horror. She loved that pool, with its teal green tiles and terra cotta lip, the tiles supposed to have been hand-painted by some artist the owner knew in a remote village somewhere in the middle of the island, and she'd taken to swimming there every morning before coffee, before the others got up and started muddying the day. Only this morning, another otherwise perfect September day in the Mediterranean, someone had beaten her to it. Someone with excruciating taste in color.

She was indignant in the next instant, coming down the matching green and terra cotta steps toward the unexpectedly—and thoroughly—inhabited pool, down from the side terrace paved with honey-colored stone where the writers gathered over Spanish wine at the end of the day and watched the sun go down into the sea behind little Dragonera island just offshore. She thought instinctively about retreating to her room in the main caseta rather than having to interact with anyone at that hour, her private time, her almost holy ritual hour alone in the blessed coolness and quiet of the early morning not usually troubled even by the drift of goat bells from the pine- and olive-canopied valley below.

And then logic kicked in, though shakily, in fits and starts, as she continued down the steps from the terrace in spite of her resistance to approaching any closer. The body was clearly dead, in its sodden garish-patterned jumpsuit, the milk-green water of the pool holding it up for her to see: a picture in a frame. Some kind of awful modern art, the kind that Isabel couldn’t abide, vastly different from the calm Medieval compositions she’d studied in college or the capacious landscapes her famous father painted in his studio back in California, a million miles away. She felt a pang for him, Charles San Gabriel Girard, and for her mother, Mia, who she couldn’t even reach by phone from here. She was essentially on her own on this remote hilltop, responsible for the well-being of the writing group—and now here was this body to disrupt things utterly. It was hardly fair, was her next thought, illogical again. She would have to do something about it. And she had no idea what, beyond summoning help. A Master’s degree in Art History hardly prepares one to deal with dead bodies of any ilk (only the odd arrow-pierced martyr, beatific in his painted pain), let alone students in your charge in foreign countries.

But if you came right down to it, could they really be more difficult than live ones? With that half-serious question, her noted pragmatism finally raised its level head, and she considered the situation with something like coherence. The dead woman, she’d known at once on some subliminal level (thus increasing her annoyance at finding her in the lovely pool during the quiet hour of the Mallorcan morning), was someone everyone had been wishing dead for the entire week of the Mystery Writers Workshop—since the first hour of the first day, when she arrived in a cloud of Obsession out of some gorgeous young Spaniard’s Bugatti convertible and before she'd even put a cinnamon-brown pedicured foot on the steps up to the caseta launched into a loud litany of complaint.

Stay tuned for the rest . . .

images: Christie B. Cochrell, Mallorca

Stargazers

And some Stargazers for my mother on September 4, my father’s birthday. He would have been 89 this year; the fifteen years since he died seems both long and short. So many things I’ve done and been and read and heard, amazed, I would have loved to share with him.

To mark the day, I’ve copied out two sections from the last chapter of his first novel, Rage in the Wind, set in Yellowstone where he worked as a seasonal ranger before and after his time in New York.

In July the slopes of Dead Indian Peak were covered with tiny bright flowers, but now in September they are all gone. It is Indian Summer in Thunder Hole after that first snowfall, but at any time now it can snow to last until spring. Most of the days are clear again, yet the air has no warmth. At the lookout in the mornings you find ice on the ground. During the day the ground thaws to become muddy on top, but at night it freezes once more to leave a crust of frost crystals between stones and sparse bunches of grass. From up there you can see patches of aspen with leaves turned yellow down along the river, and over everything reigns a great peace.

Because it is beautiful even now, Timer thought, I don’t hate the place as much as I should, even though it killed two people I love.

_________________________________________________

The trail swung down the hill in big folds, crossing and recrossing Hoodoo Creek which became larger and deeper as tributaries fed into it. Water flowed home to the sea, and gradually he realized that warming air and continuing life already eased the dark compression within him. Awareness could not be denied, and he watched a porcupine slowly across the trail, heard the sound of geese in the sky. As he moved on, the drainage widened and trees receded on either side until he was once more in grassy meadows through which Hoodoo Creek wound amiably to the lake.

Before he had gone far across the open, a bull elk bugled like a long blast on a rusty trumpet. Another bull answered futher off. They sounded weird and wild on the autumn air, and when he saw the gang of cow elk on a little rise some of them raised camel-like throats to peer at him. He spotted the bull with his spiked rack, standing aside and almost out of sight. And while his head was turned, a flight of ducks took off from the creek, the splash and flap of their wing startling him. He looked around and saw departing teal, but remaining behind, unfrightened by the horses, were eight Canadian honkers, gray and fat and waddling up the opposite bank.

Then he did accept a simple euphoria in himself, a dispassionate sense of well-being that acknowledged these sights in spite of recent agonies. Fall followed summer no matter how abrupt the closure of summer, and he was outdoors in the wide heart of it just as he had been before, inexorably included in eternal space. It contained him as completely as it did the waning white moon in a morning sky, the same moon once full for the McLeods and a wildcat in the night. The same moon, the same space, the same Timer; all essentially unaltered by love or the loss of love. There was no use fighting it.

Thunder and Lightning and Little Lightning rose more than a mile above the valley to hang in the air like a massive mirage, snow-capped and sunlit and wholly triumphant. Perhaps their August-fallen snow was the barren epitome of this country, but he could not hate it. He had never denied its challenge or taken for granted its latent fury. He could understand and even admire the heartless force of such a place. It was, when you came down to it, the wilful violence of men that he disliked, wars and selfish appetites of people like Gloria. You cannot hate the immense and austere simply because in it are natural seeds of violence. You cannot loathe all people because some are loathsome. And although you lose happiness, you do not lose the capacity for happiness. Spring will come again, and possibly then a woman’s voice will call you to her side and hold you there.

Boyd Cochrell, Rage in the Wind (Popular Library, 1953)

________________________________________

And then, to end, this—food for thought from Tom Stoppard.

Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat?

Guildenstern: No, no, no . . . Death is . . . not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.

Rosencrantz: I’ve frequently not been on boats.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Grove Press, 1967)

image: Wikimedia Commons

Stargazing

Driven into Cantor Museum by the heat, we found momentary respite in the small quiet confines—and expanses—of the museum's Cornell box, Untitled (Constellation).

I can't find an image of that particular art box, and will have to take my new digital camera with me next time I go to see it. But in the meantime I am charmed by this one, Verso of Cassiopeia 1—a seductive compilation of skycharts of the constellations and the myths they mark, overlaid on pages in Latin from Lucretius, De rerum natura, The Order of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe" (epic and Epicurian philosophical poem); and then in graceful counterpoint the mythical queen of Ethiopia, Cassiopeia, embodied in a classical statue standing between the groups of stargazers and their field of vision, stars shooting and still. Fragments of antiquity, letters reversed, worlds reflected in the glass of a telescope or in the glass of an art case.

It's possible to see a whole collection of Joseph Cornell's wonderful boxes without venturing out by visiting the WebMuseum, Paris.

And having been reminded of the irresistible lure of compelling fragments, I went back after some months away to the lovely and haunting daguerreotypes which Michael Shanks has digitized on his Web site (a vast museum in itself!), those eerie images resuscitated from the past as tentatively as the watcher's breath on window panes, entitled Ghosts in the Machine—or alternately in the mirror.


image: Joseph Cornell, Verso of Cassiopeia 1, 1960
http://josephcornell.org/boxes/index.html

Thought for the Day

To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.

(Eeyore)


image: http://www.winnie-pooh.org/eeyore-quotes.htm