Midori Snyder's Blog

Lyrics to Byker Hill

Imanges of Mongolian Rider and

I love this poem by Cesare Pavese.

Traveling is a brutaality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. 

You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky -- all things tending toward the eternal, or what we imagine of it.

It is quite true that ever since my children and grandchildren started swirling around my ankles, I have had few opportunities to gather my broken thoughts and write about where I am today. To begin with, I am older, but I still love to write and publish novels and short stories. Even now, I am working to create a new story for Dagar, one of my favorite characters from the Oran Trilogy. I have given him a huge task to travel from the lowlands of half a dozen countries and wild habitats all the way to Mongolia. I am hoping, too, that Dagar himself will transform from the goat herd he once was into a grown man, tall, handsome (of course), and god willing, with children of his own. Maybe three or four children. Ok, I have a long way to go following Dagar's journey. But if Dagar's journey appeals to you, don't hesitate to let me know. What would you like to know about Dagar's journey? Feel free to let me know. Text me, or send me an email reply.  Or use the comment box below. 

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I have been blogging at this location for the last fifteen years, and it is with pleasure that I continue to do so -- but perhaps with a much-changed mission. When authors I know first started blogging, it was a way of communicating with people. I look back at the posts from five-six years ago, and I am surprised to see how many comments there are, sometimes a rich ongoing discussion inspired by something in my post, or sometimes an exchange of very useful information. But such a community is rare now on a blog. We have switched our allegiance to Facebook, where an announcement of a post does not actually mean someone will follow the link and read it. Still, they will express approval for the general idea by clicking the "like" button. And then we move even farther out, to a mere 280 characters in a tweet, to announce our blog post and receive a few "hearts" and maybe a re-tweet -- but still rare responses on the blog itself. Those kinds of conversations are pretty much over. When I went down my list of bloggers, I was surprised to discover how many had packed it in for the elegant, quick-release variants of Facebook and Twitter. And then there is Instagram, where the totality of an idea must be summed up in perfectly constructed images and hashtags.

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Don't get me wrong -- I am not really complaining, just observing the transition and what it means for dinosaurs like me who still love to blog, even if it is for an audience of one. When I started blogging, I did so for the Journal of Mythic Arts and the Endicott Studio. We wanted to be a resource of myth, art, and folklore goodness. We wanted to share the wonderful work done by so many talented people. So, the posts were always aimed outward. When we archived The Journal of Mythic Arts and the Endicott Studio, blogging finally shifted to the personal. I set up my blog, In the Labyrinth, in 2007 and wondered where it might take me.

What I discovered was a profound shift -- from promoting others to promoting myself and my work -- and it took a while to figure that out. How much personal information to share, family photos, events, favorite meals -- all the early posts that now seem so much better suited for Facebook. And somewhere along the way, I also wanted to review books I loved and write short critical essays on literary culture, folklore, my writing, and what inspired me. I am pretty eclectic, I know that -- a magpie who is happy to post on the intellectual roots of Garcia Lorca's "Duende" to theatrical work with trance-inducing masks, to Medieval bad-boys who wrote pornographic poetry, deconstructing a brilliant sentence by Joseph Conrad, Balzac's treaties on Coffee drinking (which bordered on the hallucinogenic), Russian artists, Medieval Manuscripts and Irish poets, and The Voynich Manuscript. I do try and promote my work by sharing my research notes and excerpts, my struggles sometimes with getting a story right, and the ever important announcement of a completed new work.

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I understand that I am writing a journal, and that actually pleases me. I am less concerned with how far a post of mine travels, but rather that I can call up the evolution of my ideas over time -- a long time -- and revisit past ideas���a body of my thought. But...in the interest of not feeling quite so lonely, I go every day now to other people's blogs that I find interesting, and I make a point of responding to the posts, asking questions, and sharing my thoughts on the subject where appropriate. I am planning once a week to share the best of the blog posts for the week that I found, and I encourage you, if interested, to visit them and respond.

Art credits: The inestimable Edward Hopper.

My mother's husband Enver -- a wonderful gardener and activist for green spaces in Toronto where they lived for many many years, has created this beautiful green and living memorial for his wife and my mother, Jeanette. He petitioned to have a sugar maple tree planted along the public walkway (where he walks every day) and added a plaque at the bottom of the tree in honor of her. How awesomely romantic is that? The tree will be such a source of pleasure for people for years to come, providing sweet sticky helicopter seeds in the spring, green shade in the summer, and fiery leaves in the fall. Just so happy to see this...and hope I can get up there before too long to visit. 

This has long been on my wall and everytime I glance up an see it on my bulliton board I recite it to my self. 

"Some white academy of grace

Taught her to dance in perfect ways:

Neck , locked as lilly, is not wan

On this great, undulating bird.

Are they indeed your soul, those,

As frantic as lace in a wind,

Forever unable to fly

Frome the beauty of you body?

Andif they dance, your five white fawns,

Walking lawns of your spoken word,

What may I do but linger

My eyes on each luminous bone?

Your hands are musci, and phrases

Escape ypur fingers as they move,

And make the unmappable lands

Quiet orchestra of your limbs. 

For I have seen your hands in fields, 

And I called them flutted flowers

Such as the lily is, before

It unleashes its starwhite life:

I have seen your fingernail

Cut the sky

And called it the new moon.

Her iron beats

the smell of bread

from damp linen:

silver, crystal

and warm white things.

Whatever bird

I used to be,

hawk or lapwing, tern, or something fierce and shy--

these birds are dead.

I come here

on tired wings.

Odours of bread...

I love this wonderful scramble of cats! Particularly as I am allergic to cats, I can at least enjoy seeing them on the blog.

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This has been such a fertile time looking toward the past. Daily, thanks to my cousin Earl (an excellent genealogist), another chapter in the narrative history of my family opens up. I should write a novel -- well, maybe stories about my family. Here is a bit of news that Earl sent me this morning about Madeleine Brittman, my paternal grandmother, born in Paris to Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents:

Over the years, I tried to find Madeleine's birth in Paris in arrondissements 4, 8, 9, 10, & 11 on the right bank and 5, 14, & 15 on the left bank before I struck gold last week with 18. Montmartre - the 18th - is in the furthest district due north in Paris and includes Sacr�� Coeur Basilica...When your grandmother was born there in 1904, Montmartre was "the" hotbed of artistic activity; home to Picasso, Gris, Modigliani, the Nabis, and, of course, writers such as Apollinaire and Jarry, the Naturalists and the Symbolists. -- The 18th wasn't the traditional district for immigrants or provincials unless they had Bohemian souls. --- It's fascinating to think about your Romanian great-grandparents living there at that emotional time!

Indeed. My grandmother was one to take chances even when the habit later warred with her desire to be a model bourgeois matron. She had an affair with a married man who lived nearby and gave birth as a single mother to my father, Emile. She was brave. I try to imagine her in that Bohemian world -- before she married my grandfather -- wanting to make something of her life that was very different from her six sisters, who would remain in France within the close-knit family while she ventured forth.

But she was also indomitable -- the youngest of seven sisters, she fled France under Vichy (they were Jews) alone with her two children and came to the States to find her American husband. Years later, after the divorce (she never remarried), she settled in a tiny, tiny Los Angeles apartment (complete with a Murphy bed) and was a governess for Liz Taylor's children (taught them French), and later worked as a receptionist at a doctor's office. She worked into her 80s and saw a doctor only once after 1935, after a minor stroke at 85. She lived well into her 90s, had her hair done regularly (ala Nancy Reagan -- whom Madeleine pronounced as "Tres charmant." Politics just wasn't her thing!), and never, never, never lost her thick French accent or her peculiar habit of transforming French into English with startling results. She once told me that she had made a "raped carrot" salad for a luncheon (her Frangelized version of the French "carrots rapp��," meaning grated carrots). She walked almost five miles daily and revealed to me that her good health was due to her being a "street walker."

But can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? The moment when everything changes, and you know that you will be profoundly different in the future, your life as you once knew it would be over. My father Emile was born in Paris -- his father an American ex-patriot, and his mother a beautiful young Jewish woman -- anxious to leave her working-class origins behind her. They lived in a fashionable area of Paris, and my father and his sister Rosine studied ballet at the Paris Ballet Opera House. By the time he was a teenager, my father was on his way to becoming a principal dancer.

Then WWII happened, and the Occupation of France in collaboration with the Vichy Government happened, and my father's life as a dancer was shattered. They were Jews and were no longer welcomed at the Opera House. For the last six months of his life in Paris, not one friend would speak to him -- they would cross the street to avoid him for fear of his pariah status rubbing off on them. My father rose early in the morning before curfew and slipped through streets unseen to be first in the bread lines.

My Grandfather had been out of the country on business when the Germans invaded and could not return to France. But he could provide the children with American passports through the embassy. My grandmother and the children traveled to Portugal, where they were promised passage on a cargo ship, the SS Excambion, that was carrying several dignitaries (Madame Curie's daughter on her way to try and convince the US to enter the war on behalf of the Jews, and Isaiah Berlin and his future wife) and many Jewish children traveling alone to relatives in the US.)

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The photo above is a still from a short film of the refugees arriving in NYC in January 1941. Someone sent me the link to the movie, knowing my father's history, and asked, "See anyone you know?" In the opening shot, two young teens turn to face the camera, and there they are -- my father at about 15 and his sister at about 14. Later in the film, there is a close-up of the two of them leaning out to take in the sight of NYC and the Statue of Liberty. (If you click the link, you will see the short film.)

This moment was very important to my father; he spoke of it often and included it in his poetry. So how amazing is it that some 80 years later and 29 years after his death, this film surfaces, and I can see him again as a young man leaning into the sun, into his future? Yeah, you know I cried when I saw it.

I love this photo of my father, most likely taken by his wife Eva. 

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