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, May 03, 2003
Fruit vendors in an alley. Guangzhou (Canton), Guangdong, China From a gallery of pictures taken mainly in the Qingping market, "the most famous and bizarre in China, full of strange foods, animals, and animal parts for sale. There is a saying: 'the Cantonese will eat anything with four legs, except the table'." Scroll down and see the pictures of two people sorting dried sea horses, with a huge bunch of eels or snakes hanging behind them.
I have a friend in Beijing who has been writing to me about the effect of the SARS epidemic on herself and her family. At first she described it as "a snake without shape scrambling in the brush". More recently she wrote:
"The situation is serious now and we have to stop to work tomorrow. Now all the school has closed. Many people stay at home. This morning when I drive to work, the street is so easy to go!. But I don't feel terrible as before. I am experiencing all of this and become still. There is a long days we will have, we will not work until 8, May. So I am planning read some books. It is a good time to me to read. That lets me in peaceful when facing SARS.
Up till now, nobody is ill in my family. So I dare say we are okay. But I dare not say we will be all right tomorrow or next tomorrow. Nobody know when who will be affected. However, I finally feel peace in my heart. I begin to read and recover to a simple life. I like it. Maybe it is a good thing to us, to human being--the disease attack us--we find a balance in our immunity - in our social life - in the economy, political, environment, in our mind. Facing it, I begin to find courage return to me. If I were weak, I should be dead, if I am strong enough, I shall not be damage, and if my child is strong enough, she will be not affected. We will be okay. When we face war, face disease, we must be in strong minded to it, or, we will be the failure."
Studies and conclusions about treating SARS with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM): The combined treatment of traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine have proved quite effective in Guangdong Province…Many TCM experts argue that the SARS patients mostly develop a symptom of heat toxin accompanied by dampness within their bodies. These two elements have combined to impair the lung qi or the vital energy in their lungs and fluids quickly. According to doctor Jiang Liangduo and Zhou Anping from the Dongzhimen Hospital attached to Beijing Chinese Medicine University, traditional Chinese medicine can help a lot in the prevention and treatment of SARS by improving the body's immune system and mobilizing every positive factor in the human body to fight against the disease. "The prescription we write out for prevention is kind of an antipyretic - fever-reducing - method, to help restore qi, promote the natural flow of bodily fluids, and drive away the dampness," said Jiang. from China Daily
The May Queen, Julia Margaret Cameron, an illustration from Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" and Other Poems, London: 1875.
True Victoriana. "Why so tragic?" I wondered, looking at Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph. It sent me back to my volume of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and this early poem in three parts. In the first, a young girl asks her mother to call her early, for she's going to be the Queen of the May. In part two ("New-Year's Eve") she is dying, and longing to see another flower before she departs. The final stanzas take place during 'the bleating of the lamb" in another spring, as our heroine who thought "to die before the snowdrop came, and now the violet's here" finally bids farewell to life and her family.
Last May we made a crown of flowers: we had a merry day; Beneath the hawthorn on the green they made me Queen of May; And we danced about the May-pole and in the hazel copse, Till Charles's Wain* came out above the tall white chimney-tops... Tennyson, The May Queen
It all seems maudlin and silly now, but when I was little my great aunt Inez used to read me Tennyson and I loved it, because she did. Our favorites were the Idylls of the King and The Lady of Shalott, equally tragic stories that were naturals for Cameron to illustrate. My aunt Inez, a teacher of history and lover of literature, was born a few years before Tennyson died, in the early 1890s. People she knew and loved had died exactly this sort of slow, fading, lingering death, always at home, surrounded by other women. In my household even half a century later, there was an undeniable Victorian atmosphere perpetuated by my grandmother and her sisters, strong-minded women who knew how to use a bit of tragic effect to good advantage, as well as to pull out a good quote whenever they needed one.
On May Day, my grandmother and mother always encouraged me to make May baskets woven of colored paper, which I then filled with daffodils and candy and hung on the door of a chosen "secret beloved". The trick was to knock and then run away and hide before the person answered the door. They were supposed to see the basket, come and find you, and reward you with a kiss. I can still remember my heart pounding as I hid behind the barberry bushes waiting for the boy across the street, three years older than I was, to open the door and find my basket. Which he did. And then chased me, and kissed me. Victoriana has its thrills.
*Charles's Wain (Old English, Carles waegn) was a popular name for the constellation we call the Big Dipper. A "wain" (wagon) is a farm cart (as in Constable's "The Hay Wain"). The Charles in question may be "Carl", or Charlemagne, or "churl" (from Old Norse).
3:18 PM
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Thursday, May 01, 2003
Yesterday, after lunch with my 94-year-old father-in-law, we had a long discussion with him about Arabic. He’s currently reading a six-volume commentary on the Qu’ran, and it has him so excited he can’t sleep. He’s not Muslim, but he has been a scholar and teacher of Arabic literature and Middle Eastern history all his life. In a moment of candid humor he recently said, “If you speak Arabic, you’re a Muslim.” He didn’t mean it literally, but culturally: that as a Middle Easterner and native Arabic speaker, it was impossible not to be influenced by Islam and its Holy Book.
The commentaries are arranged with quotations from the Qu’ran on the left, and the commentary on the right. “You see,” he showed me, “when he’s quoting the Qu’ran, the Arabic contains all the voweling. That’s because it’s a sin to make a mistake when reciting the Qu’ran, so the voweling is written out to make sure you can read it correctly. Over here,” he swept his hand over the righthand page, smiling, “there’re no vowels - you’re just supposed to ‘know’.”
He told us, “When a person memorizes the entire Qu’ran it is a big occasion, and everyone celebrates. There are young children, maybe 8 years old, who can do this. It’s a big deal because then you can sit with the elders and correct them when they make a mistake. And because the Qu’ran is considered to be perfect, it’s your duty to correct a person if you hear them making an error. I’ve been in halls where the Qu’ran was being recited and somone stands up in the back and says, “Excuse me, that should be…!”.
He went on to talk about the root verbs in the language. K-t-b, for example, is the root meaning “to write”. “Kitab” is “book”. “Maktab” is “school”. “Katub” is a big or famous author. Kataba, with a long “a” after the “k”, means “to correspond”, and “muktaba” is correspondence that goes back and forth…
why didn’t I start this twenty years ago?
The other favorite subject for our discussions is food. Here is a visit to a Syrian restaurant in Cairo:
The troubled times the Middle East is witnessing augur nothing to be jubilant about. I wish I had seen Baghdad before its destruction. I hope I will see other Arab cities before they are dealt unexpected blows. The only thing I can do for now, however, considering budgetary and time restrictions, is sample the food of the country I currently fear for the most. That's why my friend and I drove through crowded and driver- unfriendly Mohandessin streets trying to locate Abu-Ammar, a Syrian outlet of a certain reputation...
I guess living in Yellow Knife would be a lot worse, but people really get stir-crazy in northern New England in the attenuated frozen-mud period we call spring. Mike Perkowitz's photos of Japan were just the ticket this morning (via Conscientious). The inscription on the fountain reads: "I learn only to be content."
Joerg also has a link to the work of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, founders of the German school of Sachlichkeit, translated as "objectivity". The couple has spent thirty years photographing industrial objects such as water towers and nuclear power cooling towers. But is the mere depiction of realism the aim of the Becher's years of work?
They are not cropped, not manipulated, not fictional in any way. These documents present a true and accurate account of the industriality of post-war Europe and America as embodied by its architecture. Perhaps. Unlikely.
Women and War, a book and photographic exhibition by Jenny Matthews. Another portfolio is on today's BBC front page (scroll to the bottom). The woman in this picture is from Sierra Leone.
A Refusenik Speaks Monday night we went to hear a presentation by one of the Israeli refuseniks, Stav Adivi. He is actually the highest ranking military reserve office to sign the "Courage to Refuse" statement, and is currently on a tour across the United States speaking to primarily Jewish audiences. Adivi, a solemn man who rarely smiled, made it very clear that he is not a pacifist. He described himself as a Zionist and nationalist. "I wear the IDF uniform; I've been in the military for over 25 years; I would not hesitate to defend my country if it were attacked by a neighbor." He admitted that he has been on the other side: "I've participated in settlement building; I've participated in house demolitions. I simply came to see that the occupation was immoral, that we were humiliating people, and the violence was coming out of our own actions." He believes the occupation is counter-productive to the safety, security, and future of Israel.
When asked by someone in the audience what advice he had for the United States in Iraq, he said, "Don't repeat our mistakes. Leave as soon as you can." He said it is simple: occupation creates resentment. Resentment breeds hatred. Hatred turns into violence. When the occupier feels threatened, they begin to erode the human rights of the occupied people, and you are caught in a cycle of escalating violence. "And occupation always ends up corrupting the soul of the occupier," he said. "Then those people re-enter society, and they bring these experiences with them."
"For us," he said, "the 1967 war has never ended. I hope that the United States will not still be at war 35 years from now."
Monday, April 28, 2003
Love, from seed to seed, from planet to planet, the wind with its net through the darkening nations, war with its bloody shoes, or even the day, with a thorny night.
Wherever we went, islands or bridges or flags, there were the violins of the fleeting autumn, bullet-laced; happiness echoing at the rim of the wineglass; sorrow detaining us, with its lesson of tears.
Through all those republics the wind whipped – its arrogant pavillions, its glacial hair; it would return the flowers, later, to their work.
But no withering autumn ever touched us. in our stable place a love sprouted, grew: as rightfully empowered as the dew.
Well, it was a restorative weekend. Yesterday's outing in the rain spurred us on to another adventure today. After looking at zoomed-in regional topographic maps last evening we "discovered" a section of rapids and falls in the river that we'd never visited before -- and it turned out to be spectacular. You have to walk in from the road and the falls aren't visible from any place other than this particular access point. Fishermen know about it, and canoeists and kayakers. There were rising water warning signs on trees along the trail, and we passed memorials to two of the many people who have drowned here -- one carefully chiseled into a boulder that also wore a small flag and a photograph of the man held down by a small rock, from a few years ago; the other a dark slate headstone bearing the name of a nineteen-year-old Maine man who died here in 1895.
With the river running so high and full, we could hear the roar long before the water came into view. We sat up on a ledge and ate our lunch without talking, mesmerized by the water. Below us, a few patient fishermen were casting into the pools under the falls for northern pike and perch. While we were there the weather broke and a high front rolled in from the west, bringing white clouds and a blue sky and turning the foaming cascades so dazzlingly white it was hard to look at them.
The rock in our area is mostly granite, with wide veins of milky quartz. My backrest up on our lunchtime ledge was a perfect little chair of white quartz. The water-polished rocks that make the falls are a deep grey with occasional crystals of pink and rust, and they're as beautiful up close as they are at a distance. Above the flood line, every surface is encrusted with moss and greyish-green lichens, and in the woods the ferns are starting to send up tightly-curled fiddleheads, each like the carved end of a green violin.
I found a purple crayfish claw, and rescued a tiny-scaled silver minnow stranded in a rock pool above the receding water; it blinked its bright eyes at me for a brief moment in my palm, and then flashed back into the river.
Back home, the day got warmer and warmer. The poolish (yeast sponge) for the bread I had started before yesterday's expedition had bubbled away in the refrigerator overnight and this morning. While the dough was rising indoors, I got the compost bin moved to its summer location and planted some spinach and baby bok choy. Then we ate outdoors for the first time this season -- hot crusty bread with salad and grilled teriyaki chicken -- while a pair of tufted titmice hopped in the tree overhead. Heaven.
The bread is a whole wheat and unbleached-white French country-style round loaf from the best bread cookbook I've ever used, Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker (not available at Amazon). You need to bake it on tiles or a baking stone in a very hot oven with a steam-pan or frequent misting, but it's worth the trouble. I go for months without baking bread, because in recent years it's become easier to get really good bread here, but it definitely worked today as part of the take-care-of-ourselves plan.
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