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 26, 2003
At the weekly peace vigil yesterday I was talking to a friend and fellow organizer who is a Korean war veteran. He always wears a “Veterans for Peace” hat and carries an American flag, along with a sign reading something like “Resist Facism” or “No Empire”. He’s a great guy. Anyway, we were talking about what to do next, where to put our energy, about the 2004 elections and a bunch of other topics, and waving at the few cars or pedestrians who honked or said thank you to our dwindling band. As we were taking down our signs and rolling up the banners, another one of the demonstrators, also a very intelligent, committed guy, came up and said he was really disturbed by the flag. My husband and I had to go, so we reluctantly left the two of them engaged in a more distressing discussion than any we’d had with passers-by.
In the car I said I was really running out of steam for this, and said it certainly didn’t seem necessary to start taking each other apart too. J. agreed and said he thought everybody was really tired out. Fried, actually.
I asked what he thought we should do, and said I didn’t feel demonstrating was effective anymore, but that I didn’t have the energy or the conviction to immediately switch over to the upcoming campaign. I want to feel like a human being again, I said. To have a life. To get out in the garden. Be creative again.
He said he thought we all desperately needed to take a break and take care of ourselves and try to recoup some energy.
The two of us had hoped to go up to Canada this weekend but couldn’t swing it -- too much work and too many other obligations -- but today, even though it was clammy and wet, we took off around 11:00 am and drove south, the long scenic way, to take some photographs. Last week we had spotted some beautiful newly-plowed fields, but it had been both dry and bright that afternoon, and the sinuous, alternating bands of earth and inch-long new green hay didn’t have enough contrast. Today, though, they were gorgeous. Low grey clouds trailing wispy tails dragged against the hills. The rain was slow, light, and persistent, the kind that makes large droplets form along every horizontal branch and hang there forever, swelling impossibly against the force of gravity.
It’s the last week of late winter, when you can still see deep into the woods, where thin birches punctuate the grey pages of deciduous forest and the hazy red of swelling maple buds. The river was high, rushing in foaming cascades above emerald-green rapids and then flattening into sheets and slow whirlpools out where the fast water met the deep. Beyond the river bank, the plowed, striped field stretched for half a mile, clotted earth soaking up the rain.
I stood on the bridge and breathed, listening to the water, the rain, the crows in the pines. J. was a small dot beyond the line of dreamy trees at the end of the field. Spring in New England is like the droplets on the trees – a kind of suspended animation, waiting -- waiting -- until the one day when everything bursts and the whole landscape is suddenly alive with pale, tremulous green. But now, as in November, it’s like a tapestry in the Cluny: muted shades that appear grey,mouse-brown, rust, lavender, and olive at a distance, but up close are woven in thin threads of magenta, violet, chartreuse, gold, slate blue and chocolate. In winter I feel like a sharp-edged shadow moving through monochrome. In summer, just one of many bright flashes. But now and in late autumn, I somehow long to be a small furry animal, non-descript and anonymous, or a sharp-eyed falcon watching from a tree: merging with the silent last days of pregnancy and the mystery of Persephone’s return.
Two Glasses by Josef Sudek "Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings...to capture some of this - I suppose that's lyricism." Josef Sudek
Conscientious has a post today on one of my favorite photographers, August Sander. While looking at the links for Sander, I eventually got sidetracked and then lost in the poetic images of another favorite, Josef Sudek. Sudek was apprenticed to a bookbinder prior to WWI, but he lost his right arm while fighting and photographing on the Italian front. He was forced to give up bookbinding and subsequently devoted himself to photography.
Here are more images of city and water; cathedrals (he photographed the reconstruction of St. Vitus cathedral in 1928, these may be that series), and still lives and landscapes (with a bio). He also did some astoundingly beautiful panoramics.
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Thursday, April 24, 2003 Self-revelation and the Self Revealed I’ve recently been following a discussion about personal truth as it is expressed in the supposedly autobiographical web log medium. Posts by languagehat, burningbird, Jonathon Delacour, Caveat Lector , The Happy Tutor and others, and the associated comment threads, discuss whether a blog should be totally honest and self-revelatory, or whether a certain amount of “fiction” is permissible. The discussion is both from the point of view of blog writers themselves, and also about our expectations as readers, not only of online journals but of essays and various forms of “creative non-fiction” and autobiography where the line between personal truth-telling and fiction is sometimes blurred. One of the examples that’s received a lot of attention is a vivid incident in an autobiographical Annie Dillard essay about a cat with bloody paws jumping up onto her chest – which the author later admitted hadn’t really happened to her.
My own plunge into the blog world is, I think, merely an extension of my life-long habit of journal-keeping and correspondance by letter with various friends, and, more recently, the writing of essays. I’ve always written as honestly as I could, and can’t imagine doing otherwise: it would feel like a betrayal of myself and the people who seem to trust me to be telling the truth. And the reason I write in these mediums is, in fact, both wrapped up in a desire to share my life and in a quest for greater self-knowledge, whether by working out my thoughts on paper or, better yet, through exchange and questioning from those wonderful “others” who are willing to enter into the dance, often for the same reasons.
Of course, self-identity is the ultimate slippery fish…there’s the question of whether we can ever truly know ourselves, or if that “self” is merely an unknowable collection of all the ideas of our self held by others (explored to its extreme by Luigi Pirandello in his One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand). Nevertheless, some of us feel compelled to try, and for many of us the blog is a far better medium for knowing and being known than the silence of a private journal.
I don’t have a problem with self-invention per se, and certainly not with fiction. But I do think fiction is fiction and honest autobiographical writing is something else. My problem is with deception. If somebody’s telling a highly realistic personal story that is, in fact, a yarn, fine, but I guess I want to know that. For me, writing autobiographically in a public forum, rather than in a private journal or a letter to a close friend, has a lot to do with trust. It’s a contract of sorts. What does it do to that trust-relationship if and when the blog medium becomes rather suspect because a lot of people are writing quasi-autobiographical blogs? On the other hand, I think people have a creative right to write however they want.
In examining where my biases are coming from on this, I wonder if one factor is just age. Many young people easily accept and champion pluralistic ways of being, including self-invention and re-invention, and blurred or changed identity, sexual or otherwise, in ways that had barely surfaced when I was young. They also strike me as being far more comfortable with moving in and out of fantasy realities and the so-called real world, and the internet affords a medium for these explorations. It makes me wonder if personal truth and self-expression actually mean something rather different to some of them. I’d be very interested to hear if anybody else has thoughts on this.
Another other big factor is cultural. I grew up in an extended family in a small rural town. Everybody knew everything about everyone. A good part of your perceived identity was well-set before you were even before you were born, just on the basis of what people thought about your family. The town was a fishbowl where nobody could get away for long with much deception, and in my household of four adults to one child – me – I quickly learned that I couldn’t get away with much either. It was a lot easier to tell the truth and trade a certain amount of privacy for the benefits of being trusted as a member of a group, whether that meant the family or a wider community. My alternative realities were found at the piano, or in the woods, or in a pile of books up in my tree house, or simply in an increasing habit of inward reflection. We were all pretty much stuck with ourselves and each other; nobody went anywhere: cities were scary, and few people I knew had lived elsewhere or traveled much at all.
In that town I had known kids who tried to cheat in school or adults who had been whispered about for having an affair, but it wasn’t until I went away to a big school that I ran into people who had actually invented a whole new identity. There were a couple of students I knew well who, it eventually turned out, had fabricated entire parts of their past, out of insecurity, the desire of sympathy, or just in order to impress the rest of us. They did get away with it for a long time, but when the truth came out, of course it backfired miserably.
Jonathan Delacour’s discussion of Shishosetsu, the Japanese tradition of autobiographical novels, gives a fascinating glimpse into a different cultural approach. As I’ve gotten to know more about Middle Eastern families and societies, it’s clear that the individual’s right of self-determination and identity there is generally subordinated to the collective good of the community (this is true both in Islam itself and in secular Arab and Persian society) Families operate very differently than in the West (sort of an extreme version of my very old-fashioned home town), with the entire concept of privacy being colored by religious, societal and family expectations. So how has this affected people’s writing about themselves?
Yet Iranians, who have been fascinated with Western literary traditions for the last hundred and fifty years, have basically turned their backs on autobiography. Paradoxically, if autobiographies are expected to offer a certain self-reflexivity, whereby the self is a problem unto itself and thinks about itself, Persian literature abounds in that feature. Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, not only allowed radical breaches of public convention and formality but also demanded intense forms of self-meditation. If autobiographies are expected to provide a certain self-glorification and self-congratulation, then again Persian literature contains generous supply of that mode of discourse. Rajaz-khani, for instance, is the ritualized boasting of heroes in epics, and the takhallos tradition allows for the poet’s open expression of self-praise and self-satisfaction. Despite these traditions, Iranians have suppressed or subverted the uninhibited, unformulaic, public disclosure of self.
Many factors may have contributed to the paucity of this literary genre. Its absence is perhaps the logical extension of a culture that creates, expects, and even values a sharply defined separation between the inner and the outer, the private and the public. Perhaps it bespeaks a mode of being and behavior that is shaped, or misshaped, by varying degrees and types of censorship, both external and internal. In short, it could be one more manifestation of strong forces of deindividualization, protection, and restraint.
“Save face,” “protect appearances,” “keep the face red with a slap,” and many more common proverbs are still in abundant use and practice in Iran. These proverbial admonitions highlight the overriding concern for maintaining respect and self-respect. Shame rather than guilt is a major consideration, explaining in part why there is no tradition of confession, in either its catholic sense or its secular, modern counterpart, psychotherapy. In fact, both practices are considered less as a means of gaining relief than of courting trouble by exposing the inner self, which preferably should remain shielded and sheltered, to be revealed only to the angels Nakir and Monker after death…
No self-concealment, however, can be complete or permanent. Perhaps the harder the individual’s attempt to conceal the self and deflect intrusions, the stronger the impulse of the society at large to uncover and expose what it considers private… The ideal Islamic state, for both men and women, is a covered one… 2:08 PM
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A friend writes from West Sarawak (Northern Borneo):
This is a wonderful place. It's 50 percent Muslim, 25 percent Christian, and 25 percent Chinese. Tomorrow I'm taking a run-down bus and a boat to Bako National Park, home to the probiscis monkey and about 25 varieties of pythons. Also the raffesia plant, about 30 types of pitcher plants, and all four types of orang-utangs.
It is close to 100 degrees in the shade, humidity is about 90 p.c. I'm exactly 2 degrees north of the equator. The winter monsoon ended last month, flying in here on the puddle jumper from 10,000 feet up the Sarawak River was swelled with water colored like a caffe latte with just a tad extra milk in it.
Last night I found a Arakanese (mix arab-hindu) restaurant with the local dish called ''black beauty''--i.e., giant mud crab with jasmine rice on the side, cooked in a sauce of local Sarawak green and black peppers.
Today is Monday, and after flying out of Kuala Lumpur, I lost track of the time. I thought today was Easter Sunday but that was yesterday, part of the reason is that I am now 15 hours ahead of you and I just let go in this place. The war is a million miles away, even though this is a Muslim country, by and large, the people are very laid back. My cabbie from the airport said, ''we are that way, Malays aren't Arabs.'' In Perak state, PAS, the radical Islamic party, rules. They want an Islamic state with cutting off of hands and the rest. The rest of Malaysia isn't buying it. 9:20 AM
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Tuesday, April 22, 2003
And the Fundamentalists Radicalize Each Other... During a dinner with Muslim friends at the height of the war, the host mentioned to me how uncomfortable he was with the idea of Franklin Graham’s army of evangelical Christian proselytizers, quivering with anticipation under the banner of “humanitarian aid”, on the Iraq/Jordan border. “After all,” my friend pointed out, “This is the man who said "The true God is the God of the Bible, not the Qu'ran." and called Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion. I think maybe we have grounds to question his motives.”
Then last week, in a shameless display of ignorance and insensitivity (or was it just arrogance?) who was chosen as the main speaker at the annual Good Friday prayers at the Pentagon? None other than Franklin Graham.
Maureen Dowd, caustically lampooning the Pentagon planners, writes that Graham spoke after Christian singer Kenna West serenaded the group with a rendition of “There is one God and one faith." When Muslim groups objected, saying this appeared to be a tacit endorsement by the Pentagon of Graham’s position, “Mr. Graham asked for a photo op with Muslim Pentagon employees.” They declined. Gee, I can’t imagine why.
Cringing, I told my friend, “Can you imagine how awful it feels to have my religion co-opted by the likes of Franklin Graham?”
“Sure,” he immediately replied. “How do you think it feels to have my religon co-opted by Osama bin Laden?”
In Iraqi Artists Get A Clean Canvas (Washington Post), a Baghdad gallery proprietor and a gathered group of 100 Iraqi artists and writers talk and worry about the future.
…"It's the Mongol invasion all over again," Khalil said, sitting with his friends, Salman Radi, a sculptor, and Saad Hadi, an art critic. "The first thing I want is for the Americans to leave," he said. "They came to liberate us, we thank them, now they should go."
"There may be gratitude for overthrowing Saddam, but the fall of Saddam is not the end of the story," Hadi said, shaking his head in agreement. "The chains we had were of iron. Now they may be of silk."
As he spoke, Hadi looked down at a book on the table, shaded by a palm tree. It was a tattered work on Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims, written in 1901 by Julius Wellhausen and translated into Arabic. Like many seated at the gallery, Hadi had been taken aback at long-banned Shiite celebrations that have drawn hundreds of thousands this week to the holy city of Karbala…
"Religious extremism is the biggest threat," Hadi said. "It will come to the surface…"
"For decades, we were used to watching ourselves. Now you can think with words," said Mohammed Thamer, a poet. "But to talk loudly and to think loudly takes time. Freedom needs practice, and it takes practice to be free."
To Thamer and his friends, sharing sweet lemon tea, the shadow of Hussein still loomed large. He remained, in spirit at least. Some of them joked that the statue pulled down in Firdaus Square after U.S. forces entered Baghdad was, in fact, a fake.
"I don't believe Saddam Hussein's gone," said Mohammed Rasim, a painter. "He's like God. Not because he's good. But whenever we opened our eyes, we saw him, his picture, his sculpture, songs about him, poems about him. He was everywhere, even in dreams." 3:08 PM
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Monday, April 21, 2003
It was just about impossible to choose one image from eye caramba e-zine. This one is by Ukranian photographer Sergay Solonsky. via consumptive.org
kabutar ba kabutar, baaz ba baaz under the fire star is a promising new blog from Chennai, with some very good writing, a beautiful look, and an interesting mix of posts. The author, Nancy, writes, "One of the few Hindi / Urdu proverbs I learned in class was: Ek anaar sau bimar. One pomegranate cures a hundred ailments."
Recognizing the word "anar" from Farsi, I repeated the proverb to my pomegranate-loving Persian friend, who said, "It's Farsi, all of it. ek=yek in farsi means one; sau=sad means 100; bimar=bimar means sick. See all is Farsi with different accent!"
When I wrote back to under the fire star, I mentioned how Urdu seems to be a sponge for words from other languages. Nancy wrote: "Urdu is full of Farsi and Arabic words. In fact, I learned one more proverb which I believe is pure Farsi -- birds of a feather flock together:
jins ba ham-jins parvaaz; kabutar ba kabutar, baaz ba baaz: kind with like-kind flies; pigeon with pigeon, hawk with hawk. 4:51 PM
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"To the ordinary man or woman, it seems a hopeless task to influence the policy of the government. But to express the desire for peace effectively, it is essential to show that, whatever the nominal issue, you will oppose any and every war thatt he folly of government may be tempted to provoke. Nothing less drastic can be expected to stand firm against the excitement which the approach of war inevitably produces. If the friends of peace are to be politically effective, they must be unwilling to listen to arguments tending to show that this war is unlike all other wars, that all the guilt is on the other side, or that the millenium will come if our side is victorious. These things have always been said at the outbreak of war, and have always been false." Bertrand Russell 11:43 AM
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Sunday, April 20, 2003
He is Risen by Dr. He Qi (Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China). He talks about his beginnings as a painter of religious subjects:
"One day I happened to come across a very old copy of a magazine which contained a picture of the painting "Madonna and Child" by Raphael. I was extremely moved by this painting. At the time of the Cultural Revolution the atmosphere was one of struggle, of hatred, of criticism. All around you could only see images of struggle and criticism. It was hard to find any images of peace. ..After this, I did portraits of Chairman Mao by day and then, late at night, I did some copies of the "Madonna and Child," both sketches and oil paintings..."
It's been a long day. We sang two big services this morning and then went to lunch at a friend's and talked and talked, mostly about politics. Now the sun is just setting, and even after two cups of strong tea I'm sleepy. I'm also ready to get back to regular life after this Holy Week/Easter marathon when, as a choir, we have more responsibilities than any other time during the year. And to be honest, I have trouble with Easter, like many modern-day Christians, which perhaps makes me want to slide over it quickly, to move on so that I don't have to dwell on my doubts. There has always been good company for me in that, even 2000 years ago!
I learned something today: the empty tomb of Jesus was discovered by women, but one reason they were not believed was that women, under orthodox Jewish law of the day, were not considered legal witnesses. That's interesting, because one of the charges leveled at Islam is that the testimony of women and men are not considered equally; more female witnesses are required than male ones in an Islamic court of law. But the fact that Jewish women were considered the same way tells us that this inequality was cultural: yet another manifestation of patriarchal, tribal society that underlies the Judaeo-Christian heritage as well.
