The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

Yesterday, Vancouver had snow–real snow, the kind that requires snow plows and snow tires, things Vancouverites usually don’t have. The tv shots showed what we would call a blizzard, with low visibility and cars sliding out of control. Years ago, Vancouver had rainy, dreary winters, but seldom snow. As a romantic, I always felt that the dusting of snow we might get over Xmas was not enough to even get excited about. I usually spent the winter under an umbrella, wet, chilly, depressed. I recall how the cups hanging in the cupboard of my basement suite were slimy to the touch from the damp that pervaded everything, like a mist that seeped under the doors and around the window sills.

When I came to Montreal in autumn 1967, I was amazed at the weather. Autumn was golden, sunny, mellow, all that autumn should be, alternating with crisp days that were good for kicking leaves. If it rained, you waited a few minutes until it cleared up to go outside. I didn’t even buy an umbrella until I had been here for two years. Winter came early–in 1968, the first snow fall came before Halloween, for example–but it was bright and cold, with snow sparkling everywhere and lots of sunshine. I immediately lost all my winter depression. I really got into the weather, facing it in a long, warm, khaki coat ( a woman’s army coat, with brass buttons engraved with the head of Athena) purchased from the Sally Ann; leather, knee-high boots so tight that I needed John’s help to put them on and off ; and a Russian-looking faux fur hat. I felt like Lara out of Dr. Jhivago, and yet trendy.

In contrast, our weather lately, in mid-November, has been very mild and rainy. Rain as in Vancouver rain, that lasts all day long and requires an umbrella. And then, this past week, the rain stopped and the sun came out. The temperature was unseasonably warm (around 5-7 C), and people could be seen without coats, some even in shorts. John complained that the tennis nets had been taken down too soon, although in truth he and his fellow tennis nuts had been playing until the end of the first week in November. Some things in the garden, confused, have started to grow again. Some have blossoms! All this is very nice, especially since we also hear that Calgary and Regina have temperatures in the -20 range, as well as snow. I think we currently are the warmest spot in Canada—Montreal, of all places!

If this is global warming, I have to say that it isn’t too bad for us. However, for the rest of the country, things are crazy. And I hear that in Siberia they are having weather similar to ours in Montreal, and the tundra is melting. Not too bad, you might think; they could use warmer weather in Siberia. But the animals that usually hibernating are not doing so. The rabbits have turned white, and are being killed by raptors at unusually high rates because they show up against the brown of the landscape. And there will soon be no food for the bears, who are wandering around blearily, wondering what season it is.

In short, just because global warming isn’t harming us doesn’t mean it’s not causing real problems elsewhere. We have to do something about trying to rein in this trend, but no one in power seems to be able to–certainly not Bush or Harper. Will things change when Bush is finally out of power? We can only hope so.

O Rose, what are you doing here

Blooming at this dark time of year–

November–gloomy, grey and drear?

Your petals torn, yet still intact,

You seem to nullify the fact

That snowy winter draws so near.

O Rose, what are you doing here?

O windblown beauty, do you think

That showing all your pretty pink

Will halt the sun in its fast track

Towards the Solstice, or bring back

The summer flowers? In the cold

November air, you flutter, bold,

A promise of the far-off spring,

O autumn Rose, of you I sing.

“MY NOVEMBER GUEST” by Robert Frost (1874–1963). from A Boy’s Will. 1915.

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:

She’s glad the birds are gone away,

She’s glad her simple worsted gray

Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.

Here’s the soup we had last night. It’s a great way to have fish without smelling up the house, or having to grill/fry it. And, best of all, I think, it is a one-dish meal:

Ingredients:

2 tbsp. butter

1 med. onion, sliced

2 tbsp. flour

4 cups packaged chicken broth

2 new un-peeled potatoes, chopped

3 carrots, cut into coins (can use cocktail carrots)

2 salmon steaks or fillets, cut into 1 in. cubes minus skin and bones

2 cups whole milk (or skim)

1/4 tbsp. dried dil

l/4 tsp. dried basil

4 oz. smoked salmon,(about enough to cover a cracker, or more if desired, chopped into small pieces

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. pepper

1 small tin corn kernals

Optional: 1/2 tsp. grated lemon zest

Procedure:

1. In large pot, melt butter over med. heat. Stir in onion and cook 5 min. until onion has softened. Sprinkle with flour; stir until absorbed. Take pot off burner and add chicken broth a little at a time, to avoid lumps, stirring after each addition until smooth.

2. Return pot to heat. Add potatoes and carrots ; bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered and stirring occasionally, for 3- 5 min or until potatoes are tender.

3. Add salmon and zest. Simmer 3 to 5 minutes or until fish is cooked. Stir in milk, corn, dill, basil, smoked salmon, salt and pepper. Heat until hot, but do not boil. Taste and adjust seasoning to taste. Ladle into heated bowls; serve sprinkled with shredded Parmesan or Mozzarella.

So, we celebrated St. Cecilia’s Day. And discovered just what kind of music people find uplifting. Which was interesting.

My choice was Gershwin tunes, which cheer me because they speak of twenties glamor and New York sophistication. Even ostensibly sad pieces like “Not For Me” or “The Man I Love” seem locked into a nostalgia for an era which, strangely enough, I never knew. I guess they also remind me of “When Harry Met Sally”, and movies with Gene Kelly or Fred Astair, which also seem timeless and cheerful.

For John, it was jazz, everything from Dave Brubeck to Charlie Parker. Plus a burst of joy in the form of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, the overture, which paints a picture of dawn. It is reminiscent of the section in “The Wind in the Willows” where Rat and Mole, up all night looking for a missing baby animal, stumble upon an island of reeds on which, to their great awe and amazement, they find Pan himself, playing his reeds as the sun rises. Pure magic!

Paze, on the other hand, played everything under the sun, from Donovan to John Denver, from the Beatles to Glen Campbell to Judy Collins–most of it music from her childhood car trips. Plus music from “An American in Paris,” with Gene Kelly.

Devon, for her part, sang a song–”Part of Their World”– from her Disney Princesses CD, since the CD wouldn’t work on our player. She managed the difficult words and odd tune very well while standing on her chair, blushing. She also serenaded us with a guitar she made out of a bunch of elastic bands and a styrofoam tray.

All in all, it was quite wonderful. We played the music as loudly as we wanted, despite the fact that Devon was upstairs later on, sleeping. She didn’t wake up, either. Thanks to everyone who came and/or brought music.

Just a little note to my guests for Sunday:

Don’t try to pick your favorite piece of music to bring. Bring as many CDs as you want, choosing them on the basis of ones that cheer you up. Okay?

In this bleak month of no holidays, everyone I know is depressed by the endless rain and lack of sun. We need to do something cheery, n’est-ce pas?

We could just celebrate “Festivus” and be done with it, but I have decided to celebrate St. Cecilia’s Day, which is Nov. 22, just about the time that the Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving, the lucky sods (those pilgrims knew how important it was to get together to eat and enjoy each other’s company in the midst of November!)

St. Cecilia was a 5th century martyr who, it is said, either while listening to the organ or playing it herself ( there are two versions of this tale) during her wedding, prayed to remain a perpetual virgin. God granted her wish. On her wedding night, she managed to convince her husband, a Roman nobleman, to let her remain a virgin. She also converted him and his brother to Christianity, which was still illegal in Rome at that time. They were all caught and martyred. First her husband and brother in law were beheaded. Then the officials tried to kill Cecilia by putting her into a bath and increasing the heat and steam. When that didn’t work, they beheaded her–or tried to: apparently her head hung on by threads, long enough (3 days) for her to give all her money to the poor.

In medieval times she was made the Patron Saint of Music , it is said, because the musicians’ guild needed a new saint. The organ makers in particular liked the idea that she hadn’t died when the hot water was piped (get it?) into the bath. They voted for her. The musicians also wanted a female saint. They had previously had David, the biblical shepherd, but they liked the idea of a virginal beauty, rapt in music, as their patron. She also was much better as an image of the musician than Job, with all his blisters, boils and such, who was also proposed as saint, mainly because one line in the Book of Job says that he played music while suffering.

In any case, from the 1500s onward, St. Cecilia’s Day was celebrated with music and food.

In the 18th century, John Dryden wrote a poem , “Ode to St. Cecilia,” which is too long to quote here in full. This is just an excerpt:

Orpheus could lead the savage race;

Enchanted by the lyre.

But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r:

When to her organ vocal breath was giv’n,

An angel heard, and straight appear’d,

Mistaking earth for heaven.

As from the pow’r of sacred lays

The spheres began to move;

And sung the great Creator’s praise

To all the bless’d above;

So when the last and dreadful hour,

This crumbling pageant shall devour;

The trumpet shall be heard on high -The dead shall live, the living die,

And music shall untune the sky.

Those are the last 16 lines, enough to illustrate - one trusts - how potent a musician Cecilia came to be in the millennium and a half after her death in the 5th Century.

And it’s true that music is a consolation in times of depression or gloom, It can lift our mood, give us distraction and in general cheer us up, even in November. Thus I am having a St. Cecilia’s Day dinner on Sunday Nov.19th, and asking my guests to each bring CDs of their favorite music. They should be prepared to say something about the music and/or composer, to introduce the rest of us to both. And I am cooking Chicken Tetrazzini, a dish named after a famous 19th century opera singer.

This is spoken by Heracles’ old father at one point:

“Our lives, old friends, are but a little while,/ So let them run as sweetly as you can,/ And give no thought to grief from day to day/ For Time is not concerned to keep our hopes/ But hurries on its business, and is gone.”

I must say this rings a bell for me. (And it sounds a lot like Omar Kyhamm, doesn’t it? As in:

‘The bird of youth has but a little time/To fly, and lo, the bird is on the wing.”

Have been reading “Heracles,” a little-known tragedy by Euripedes, for my Greek Drama course. It’s quite interesting, and quite a change from the plays of Sophocles and the other playwrights.

In the original myth, Heracles/Hercules, the strongest man in the world, is struck by madness sent by the goddess Hera because he is the child of her husband Zeus and a human woman, and Hera always punishes Zeus’ lovers and their offspring rather than her husband. While mad, Heracles kills his wife, Megara, and their three little sons. Afterwards, to atone for this awful act, he performs the Labors he is famous for.

In Euripedes’ play, Heracles does the Labors first, to clean up Greece, like some US marshall cleaning up the town of Tombstone. When the play begins, he is coming back from his descent to Hades, land of the dead, where he has gone to rescue Theseus, King of Athens (who foolishly was led by his sophomoric friend Perithous in a foolish attempt to kidnap Persephone, Queen of Hades and bring her home, and was stuck down there, unable to return to earth). To his alarm, he finds his wife and sons about to be killed by the tyrant who has taken over Thebes after the death of Creon, who fears them because they might take over the kingdom when they grow up. Heracles promptly kills the tyrant and everyone rejoices. It looks as if the play is over.

THEN, at his moment of triumph, he is struck mad by Hera and kills his wife and children.

The murders are, of course, performed off-stage, but we get a vivid description from a messenger. His words are a kind of play-within-a- play, and are both touching and shocking. Heracles is stopped from going on to kill his human father (well, the man he has treated as father, even though Zeus is his real father) by the goddess Athena, sent by Zeus, who hits him on the head with a rock and knocks him out. (Why Zeus couldn’t have sent her earlier and prevented Heracles from killing everyone in his family is never questioned.)

When Heracles comes to, he is horrified to discover what he did in his fit of madness. Suddenly, the strongman and hero, part god, part man, all his life different from ordinary men, is reduced to the level of a suffering human, and in this case, it is not because of some error he made in the past, as it was with Oedipus and so many other protagonists in Greek drama. His is not responsible for his family’s murders, and yet he feel of course that he is, since his hands did the crimes. He is ready to kill himself out of regret, guilt, grief and hopelessness, when Theseus turns up to thank him for rescuing him.

Theseus appears in several plays as a kind of saviour figure, constantly looking beyond the surface ‘pollution’ of such figures as Oedipus who have done unthinkable things, and offering to befriend them, even if they are considered pariahs. Here, when he learns what Heracles has done, he offers to take him to Athens and cleanse him (as he did Oedipus) and says that any honor he (Theseus) has accumulated from killing the Minotaur he will give to Heracles.

Heracles doesn’t cheer up at this, but he is profoundly grateful. He stops ranting about his guilt, draws himself up nobly, and accepts this offer. When Theseus tells him that, after all, the gods are fickle, that they commit adultery and are dangerously fickle, Heracles suddenly speaks from his new-found insight into cosmic matters. He says that he doesn’t believe that the gods commit adultery and do these other things. If there is a god, he says (interestingly using the singular, a strange thing for a Greek to do at this time of many gods), that god must be perfect and would not do such things. No, he says, he has been afflicted merely by Chance, by ‘Necessity’.

In saying this, he is rejecting Hera’s status as Zeus’ wife or as a goddess and reducing her to the figure she becomes for the Romans and the later medieval Europeans, Fortuna/ Fate, whose wheel of Chance puts people on top of their game, or rolls over them, quite whimsically. He is, in effect, tackling the problem of why bad things happen to good people, and saying that Fate strikes, giving us pain that is undeserved, and that all we can do is act nobly and courageously in the face of such occurrences. “Only cowards despair”, he says. “The brave man lives on, grasping what hope he can muster.” Then he praises the goodness of friendship and love, which can see us through the disasters that afflict us, and goes off to Athens with Theseus.

It’s an extremely moving play, with Hera’s action angering viewers and forcing them to not only feel sorry for Heracles, but agree with him about how awful it is to be the victim of Fate. It is also a kind of statement against the gods, by a playwright who was disliked by Athenians as a result.

As an atheist, I go further, of course, and wonder why Heracles doesn’t reject Zeus, or ‘god’ as well; after all, if there is only one ‘perfect’ god, why didn’t he stop Hera/Fate from doing such horrible things? But this is the big question in life, isn’t it? if there is a God, why does he allow terrible things to happen like war, plagues, earthquakes, typhoons, etcetera. Christians will say that God made humans with free will, and that they use free will to do good or bad things, and are often responsible for disasters (not fixing the dikes, for example, to sufficiently withstand Hurricane Katrina). And with these occurrences, as well as with natural disasters, God is apparently ‘testing’ the people who suffer from them, to see if they can rise above these awful experiences and still stay faithful to God. Somehow, this comforts them, I guess because it suggests that someone is in charge; that what has happened is not just random, that it has a purpose.

The biblical Job is often referred to by Jews and Christians when bad things happen to good people. Job is the wealthy man in the Old Testament Book of Job who was so pius that Satan challenged God to harm him as much as possible, just to see if he would curse God. So God kills Job’s children and his cattle, blights his crops, and afflicts him with boils all over his body, then waits to see what Job will do. Job does not curse God, but does question why God has done these things to him. God answers ‘out of the whirlwind’, rebuking him for even asking, and saying ‘Who are you to question my acts? Were you around when I made the world, filled the seas with fish, etcetera?” Job grovels sufficiently, and then, we are told, God rewards him by giving him new children, cattle, etcetera. As if that would make up for the ones who had been killed!

This story always strikes me as terrible, yet it convinces many Christians. Some even say that God never gives people afflictions that are too great for them to bear. This is such an awful idea that I can hardly see straight when I hear it. What kind of deity would do such a thing to test faith in himself? If a king did awful things to his subjects, just to see if they’d remain loyal to him, we’d call him a monstrous egotist and tyrant. The ‘fact’ that God made the universe and so on only makes his awful deed worse, since it proves he is capable of anything and therefore could prevent plagues, wars, earthquakes and floods if he wanted to. That he doesn’t do so makes him an unspeakable monster. It’s because I didn’t want to be allied with such a monster that I finally decided to become an atheist.

So I am in awe to see a 5th Century B.C. Greek dramatist who is breaking away from the superstitious belief in gods who afflict out of jealousy, who is admitting that many things that happen are not the result of human error (what Shakespeare and other Christian dramatists and critics would later call the ‘fatal flaw’ in character, but which the Greeks saw a simply a grave error), but just happen. Euripides doesn’t go far enough, but he at least tries to see past gods as an explanation of evil. For this I respect him.

Finally! Americans have shown what they don’t like about the Bush administration and have voted Democrats in wherever they could! It was great last night, watching the returns on CNN, and keeping my fingers crossed for the Democrats’ taking over the House and the Senate. As of today, they rule the House and are one seat away from ruling the Senate, pending a recount in Virginia. Yay!

Today, listening to Bush on NPR as he announced that Rumsfield is out, I was happy to hear the nervousness in his voice. During the subsequent question period, he sounded very nervous indeed, and no wonder, since his questioners didn’t give him a break, but asked all kinds of touchy questions that caught him in previous lies (like his saying last week that Rumsfield would be staying). Bush claimed that he knew last week that R. would be leaving, but hadn’t found a replacement for him yet, therefore answered that question that way “so as to pass over to the next question,” but again and again reporters questioned him on that matter, trying to get him to say that he had lied, or that he was doing all this because of the outcome of the election. He showed his potitical skill in being able to joke and admit he had been ‘whupped’ in the election, but his voice was uneven, his sentences fragmented, his asides nervous and strange. AHa!

Yet he still insists that he will stay in Iraq until the soldiers can come home victorious. He will not budge. We’ll have to see if this will indeed be true as he comes under Democrats’ pressure. I can’t believe that he will just remain static for another two years. Maybe the man who’s replacing Rummie will change things a bit.

On a completely different matter, before taking up my seat before the tv., I joined John to go to the catering company just four doors down from us, where we were part of a class on cooking Tuscan food. It was a very pleasant, although expensive ($130) experience, with a friendly group of about 10 (including one other male), and with delicious food. I was interested in the workings of a pasta machine, which I was told costs only about $40, and impressed by the ease by which noodles can be made with it. But to get the pasta dough silky and malleable you require a food processor, I was told, which is a drag, for they are so expensive.

We learned how to make Osso Buco, which is veal shank stew that melts in the mouth. And a delicious fettacine entry, plus bruchettas and something called ‘little oranges’ that consists of arbrio rice, breadcrumbs, and beaten egg, rolled into balls, and then lightly fried. Our meal ended with a custard that was wonderful and rich. John and I basically waddled back home after that and duly took Tums. I expected I might have nightmares of the ‘I ate too much rich food’ type, but instead dreamt that I was wrapping things I found around the house and putting them in a box for a poor family. What a waste of dream time that was! But at least it wasn’t a nightmare, and rounded out a very pleasant day.