Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, April 12, 2003
My mother wrote a note today telling me that she felt thankful this morning when she got up "and looked out at the lake and the sun was shining and the mergansers were ducking and diving and I knew we would have a good breakfast". "Write something about hope and joy," she said, and she's right to remind me. So here is something.
I went out to the garden this morning, where the ground is actually thawed and the snow has departed. There were the first stiff shoots of chives coming up from the mud, and green leaves of thyme underneath the shrubby winter-killed twigs, and to my surprise after such a terribly cold winter I saw that my climbing yellow rose had made it through. My husband had pruned the crab apple and while I worked to repair the garden fence he walked back and forth carrying armfuls of long, thin apple shoots to the brush pile in back of the garden. 'You look like a peasant carrying the family's kindling," I told him.
"You might want to use these," he said, knowing that I sometimes like to weave fences and supports out of twigs, in short supply since our neighbor's big willow came down in a freak storm a few years ago. So I chose some whippy apple shoots and spent the next hour happily weaving some short border-edgings for the herbs.
Then I noticed a clump of green shoots coming up out of the compost I'd spread last fall. It was a clove of garlic that had sprouted; white roots already digging deep into the soil and brilliant green shoots reaching for sky. So I separated them and gave them a little plot of their own, between the garlic chives and the Persian marze. In my garden, brave volunteers who show up unexpectedly almost always get more than a chance to fulfil their destiny. Tomorrow, Palm Sunday, I'll dig the hyacinth that is also, against all odds and climate-zone charts, coming up in the compost, and bring it into the house, to wonder at this small symbol of resurrection and its sweet, unearthly scent.
9:54 PM
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"The United States, Great Britain and Iraq are signatories of The Hague Convention of 1954 for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict. This stipulates that mankind should prevent, make impossible, and sanction any state or group of states from destroying, damaging, and desecrating the monuments of culture in the territory of another state. They should also ensure that national agencies should, as far as possible, exercise continued protection and maintenance of such property."
And from the same issue, "The Cradle of Civilization" details Iraq's unique archaeological and cultural heritage.
In war, archaeology is a victim. In the face of military madness such as screened daily on TV it is as well to remind the leader of a new world power that he has launched a war on a people with a cultural heritage that goes back thousands of years. In the fragile remains of a pioneer of human civilisation in the "Fertile Crescent", and in the historic mediaeval buildings of Baghdad, lie the roots of Iraqi identity...
...The national museum, which boasts the country's largest archaeological collection, was also hit. We do not know how many pieces from the birthplace of Abraham/Ibrahim (among which is a 4,000-year-old harp) were safely in underground storage.
How many more historical sites are doomed? And do the invading forces care, in the theatre of war, whether a heritage will be swept away in the rubble? 9:04 PM
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Looters Ransack Baghdad Museum The museum's deputy director said looters had taken or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years. "They were worth billions of dollars," she said. "The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened."
Reporters who visited the museum on Saturday saw smashed display cases and broken pieces of pottery. Treasures at the museum date back 5,000 years to the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia, as Iraq was once known. It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing...BBC
More photos and descriptions of what was in the museum are here and here.
OK, this loss isn't comparable to loss of human life. But as a former classicist, this strikes me as yet another huge tragedy. And I'm trying, with difficulty, to understand it. It's one thing to loot government buildings and official's homes. But one's own culture, not to mention hospitals? I don't think we can blame anger at the regime: this has to be coming out of desperate poverty, where people who have had nothing for themselves for so long are now taking anything they perceive to be of value.
5:40 PM
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This stuff makes me crazy: How many coalition soldiers are either going to have to lie to themselves, or live with the knowledge that they killed essentially defenseless people who, like themselves, were following orders because it was the only choice they felt they had -- and we all knew this would be true from the beginning. This is one of the greatest sicknesses of war. As the Zen masters say, “One continuous mistake.”
“In one of the first insights into how the elite Republican Guard has acted during the war, [an Iraqi Republican Guard officer] said Iraq's military leaders only agreed to fight the war in the first place because, if they had refused, they would have been killed..."Every day, one, two, three. Every day one, two, three. Everyone he want to go, leave his gun and go away," he said... Speaking of the fear of Saddam Hussein he said in faltering English: "If they say to him we (do) not have power to face this army, it is not a good war, he maybe will kill him so they said 'yes' we will fight.’" BBC
Well, the sun is shining here for the first day in a long while, and the snow (again!) is almost gone. I'm going to go outside and repair the bamboo fence in back of my garden so some morning glories and scarlet runner beans can grow on it this summer.
9:29 AM
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Friday, April 11, 2003
Tiger Arabic calligraphy byHassan Massoudy (born in Iraq in 1944).
Interesting piece in The Independent about Ahmed Chalabi:
"For the Pentagon and its neo-conservative outriders, Chalabi is the future. For the State Department, he is a charlatan, the repository of extravagant hopes that will end in tears...Listen to admirers at the Pentagon, in the Vice-President's office and at their various cheerleading think-tanks around town, and he is democracy's truest believer, a noble exile who will be given a hero's welcome by his countrymen..." 5:48 PM
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Thursday, April 10, 2003
Long before I started blogging, the key Middle East issue for me has been Palestine; without a just solution, there is no hope for peace anywhere in the region. The right-wing gloating and triumphalism we've been subjected to today would be merely annoying if it weren't also so stupidly and so dangerously naive. At stake is not only a region in turmoil, but the very marrow of American morality.
As Gideon Levy points out in his cautionary editorial, "America is Not a Role Model: Every Occupation is Appalling" (Ha'aretz), America would do well to look at Israel's experience. We are now set on a course which could saddle us with a giant and totally unmanageable "West Bank" stretching from the southern border of Syria and to the Euphrates and beyond. Today's suicide bombing and the brutal murder of a western-leaning Shiia cleric are grave warnings unlikely to be heeded by the euphoric and driven neo-cons. Levy, who has been a consistent voice for peace, not only makes the point that America's action in Iraq legitimize Israel's behavior in the occupied territories, but that we should learn from Israel: occupation always corrupts the occupier.
"Those who trample human rights in Israel are having a field day: Look at the behavior of the Americans in Iraq, they say. Every time troops open fire at a checkpoint, every killing of a civilian, every picture of siege and plight, leads to merriment here. The United States, the cradle of democracy, the leader of the free world, is behaving like us...
...If there is one lesson Israel can impart to the Americans, it is that every occupation is appalling, that it tramples the occupied and corrupts the occupier. If the Americans pause for a moment to see what is going on in the Tul Karm refugee camp and in the casbah of Nablus, they will see what they will soon become. And if Israelis look at what is happening in Iraq, perhaps they will understand that it is not the Palestinians but, above all, we who have created the present situation.
An occupier is an occupier, whether he comes from a democracy that is two- and-a-quarter centuries old or from "the only democracy in the Middle East." 10:10 PM
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Dave Hunter writes: "It's amazing to me how I see images that they show on television of something that they think is wonderful, like a destroyed Iraqi tank, and all I can think of is the life that was stilled when the tank was stopped. It hurts physically, and a poem emerges…"
Commander Tarik
He looks at the haggard faces Of the young men The would-be soldiers Trusted to his leadership To fight a modern enemy With ancient weapons An enemy with night-time eyes And bombs that fall from nowhere Who rolls across their sands And offers burning instant death To all who volunteer to fight
He knows the wives and mothers Of the young men Waiting somewhere safe Trusting that their God Will grant their men A gentle place to rest forever But also hoping that this enemy Who seems to know no limit To his fearful deadly might Will somehow miss their warrior And let them see his smile again
He understands the devotion Of the young men Who will gladly die Beside him if he asks. He commands them To strip their uniforms, Take up sandals instead of guns And leave the other way to life While he sets forth in old armor To give one death for the illusion Of a squadron of dying men
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
After the gloating, the cheering, the killing and the maiming all I can feel is that the night is strewn with absurd
"This tangle of grey bodies is they. Silent, dim, perhaps clinging to one another, their heads buried in their cloaks, they lie together in a heap, in the night. They are far out in the bay. Lemuel has shipped his oars, the oars trail in the water. The night is strewn with absurd
absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth and in the hills the faint fires of the blazing gorse. Macmann, my last, my possessions, I remember, he is there too, perhaps he sleeps. Lemuel
Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with it
or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean never there he will never never anything there any more"
Steve Gilliard, whose excellent writing and cogent analysis I particularly appreciate, offers a balanced perspective on today's events in Baghdad in his 5:30 am post for Daily Kos.
"Remember, the Catholics were happy to see the British Army in Belfast in 1969. They were there to protect the Catholics from Protestant mobs. It only took weeks before the stones started flying...As I have said before, beating Saddam is the easy part. Bringing order will not be.
...The organized fighting may well be over, which is good. But just listening to the radio, I think Americans may well be in for a brutal shock in that getting rid of Saddam didn't solve the problem. Americans are not good with subtlities. We expect problems to be solved. Saddam gone. problem solved. Well, no. Saddam gone, different problems erupt. 2:05 PM
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Tuesday, April 08, 2003 St. Fiacre dreams of spring…
There were crocuses blooming a week ago…such is the agony and ecstasy of spring in New England. We gauge the progress of the season by watching “our saint”, as we call him, emerging from the snow. Often it’s unusual for his head to stay covered up the whole year, but this winter he was under close to three feet from December through March.
I never thought much about his identity until today, when I felt like maybe I should write something about him to go with this picture. This is a polymer bas-relief given to us by a dear friend who enjoys our garden. On the back the sculpture is labeled “St. Fiacre, patron saint of gardens”. He’s holding the Bible close to his ear, as if listening to a seashell, and down beneath the snow he’s leaning on a shovel.
It turns out that St. Fiacre was an Irish abbot who was born around the end of the sixth century and died August 18, 670. He was ordained priest but sought greater and greater solitude. Eventually he made his way to Meaux, where he was warmly received by St. Faro, who had affection for Ireland because of the blessings his family had received from the great irish saint and missionary Columbanus. Fiacre was given a site at Breuil, surrounded by woods, where he built an oratory in honor of Mary. He lived “a life of great mortification, in prayer, fast, vigil, and the manual labour of the garden.”
1:59 PM
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This poem came by e-mail today, written by my friend Dave H., a physician who has seen more than his share of human suffering. He and his wife have also traveled lightly and with wide-open eyes and hearts all over the world, and are filled with love and appreciation for diverse cultures and peoples.
He says, "You write beautifully and intelligently about a war that is so ugly and heartbreakingly incomprehensible. My reactions are far more visceral. I feel the images of death inside of me and they burn forth as short poems, usually during sleepless nights when I'm awakened by the nightmares of the pictures and tactics of death." I hope he'll send us more poems.
Morning Wars It’s in the morning When I just awake Her body close to mine Secure in our warmth Under soft sheets That the nightmares Of war rise up To terrorize me Half-dreams of burned And injured bodies Lying in lonely agony On cold concrete Or drifting sand Their only dream The hope for death To end the suffering 8:56 AM
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Monday, April 07, 2003
Today on my walk down to the post office I passed a rental house that's home to several Vietnam vets. I noticed that they had hung out a black "POW/MIA" flag in the last few days. These men all suffer from physical or mental disabilities related to their military service. Not one is able to work or drive, and none are married; they live here because our village is one of the only cheap places in this region, and this particular house is close to the bus stop. One man is in a wheelchair, another can barely walk. The most able seems to be a hefty Native American with deeply tanned skin, long jet-black hair held by a twisted bandana headband, and a penchant for sitting in a lawn chair with his chest bare even on cold days. The men spend most of their time, in good weather, playing poker in the sun and watching the traffic; they yell "Hey, babe!" at me when I wave at them from across the street. Yes, their identification with their veteran status includes a kind of heroism and pride -- what else do they have? I think any one of them would trade his current life for a second chance at love, mobility, work, and health.
It takes more than a uniform to change a person from "innocent" to "soldier", and their suffering from "collateral damage" to "heroic sacrifice". It is very, very difficult to turn without intense anger from a description of a young Baghdad boy who just lost both arms and is pleading, "Where can I get new hands?" to a photograph of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, smiling and relaxed, in their perfectly-fitted suits. I feel the same anger and sadness when I pass my neighbors and contemplate their irreparably changed lives.
In addition to the butchery we are inflicting on the Iraqi "military", when are we going to admit what we are doing to the poor and disadvantaged young people who enlist in our armies and get sent to our wars? When are we going to admit the horrible legacy that war visits on all human beings: soldier and father, mother and son, reporter and fruit seller, the child clutching her doll, the ninety-year-old grandmother who wishes she were blind?
7:32 PM
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Sunday, April 06, 2003
Photographs of Kaveh Golestan's funeral. I was struck by the one of two mourning women, surrounded by a wall of press photographers - not for the obvious reason of grief being intruded upon by the media, but by the space that did seem to surround the two women, a space created by shared grief and relationship, and, frankly, seemingly impervious to anything else.
3:21 PM
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