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.
From a letter by Wallace Stevens to Rodriguez-Feo, October 17, 1945, (collected in Secretaries of the Moon: the Letters of Wallace Stevens and Rodriguez-Feo: Your group at the Villa Olga absorbs me. Of yourself you say that you read and write and cultivate your garden. You like to write to people far away about such unreal things as books. It is a common case. I have a man in Ceylon with whom I have been exchanging letters for some years. He is an Englishman, an Oxford man and a lawyer, I believe, but actually he makes his living and the living of his family by growing coconuts at a place called Lunawila in the province, or parish, or whatever it may be called, of Kirimetyana. In the depths of his distance from everything he extracts, because he needs to extract, from poetry and from his reading generally far more than you and I extract from the things that we have in such plenty, or that we could have because they exist in such plenty near at hand...
This has left me very little space to speak of things that you have been reading. I think, therefore, that I shan't speak of them at all, but instead try to raise a question in your mind as to the value of reading. True, the desire to read is an insatiable desire and you must read. Nevertheless, you must also think. Intellectual isolation loses value in an existence of books. I think I sent you some time ago a quotation from Henry James about living in a world of creation. A world of creation is one of the areas, and only one, of the world of thought and there is no passion like the passion of thinking which grows stronger as one grows older, even though one never thinks anything of particular interest to anyone else. Spend an hour or two a day even if in the beginning you are staggered by the confusion and aimlessness of your thoughts.
Friday, May 09, 2003 A lamp outside Primo Levi's house in Torino (Ari Frankel)
A few days ago languagehat published a comment about an article by Mark Slouka in this month’s Harper’s. I read the article and have been thinking about it since. How do different people react to – and later describe -- the ultimate moment of facing death: their own execution that is commuted at the last moment? The author takes two examples, the famous self-described mock execution of Dostoevsky, and a similar event that happened to Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, to which the victims apparently reacted completely differently. How could this be? Were they both telling the truth? One of the author’s conclusions is that we come to such events already programmed; how we react, what we say, do, or remember is a product of who we were when we came to it. Dostoevsky could not help being himself (either at the time, or when recalling it); neither could Seifert, and neither can we.
Thus I read with special interest this transcript of an interview with Primo Levi, via Betacorpo during his “return” to Auschwitz in the spring of 1982, and thought perhaps it was characteristic of Levi to describe what had happened in terms of a strange breakdown in normal language:
“Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; The memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue... all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; We were like work animals. It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is 'essen' and it refers to people, and the other is 'fressen', referring to animals. We say a horse 'frisst', for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all.”
One thing that distinguishes human from beast is our ability to view our plight with detachment, and make choices about how we will act. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that our nobility as human beings depends greatly on the extent to which we are able to do that. Turn, then, to the front of the same issue of Harper’s and read the so-called “interview” of Jeremy Glick, author of “Another World is Possible” (Glick’s father was killed in the Wolrd Trade Center) by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, and consider “animalesque regression.”
I was also glad to see that Salam Pax is back, writing from Baghdad. Describing the events of the past weeks, he says:
Life has a way of moving on. Your senses are numbed, things stop shocking you. If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally.
To be a solitary but not an individualist: concerned not with merely perfecting one's own life (this, as Marx saw it, is an indecent luxury and full of illusion). One's solitude belongs to the world and to God. Are these just words?
Solitude has its own special work; a deepening of awareness that the world needs. A struggle against alienation. True solitude is deeply aware of the world's needs. It does not hold the world at arm's length. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
In the aftermath of Iraq and two years of intense involvement with peace work and trying to educate others about the Middle East, I find myself turning away from politics and struggling toward a new and different balance of priorities and energy. This has practical dimensions but is, at its base, a spiritual question. How do we live responsibly and without blinders, yet joyfully, gratefully, and sanely, in a irreparably changed world? No surprise that I find myself turning to Merton, who I've always seen as a kindred spirit and a help in difficult times. While living in solitude and vowed silence at the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, Merton was a passionate voice for peace and human responsibility during the nuclear arms race and cold war. His concept of the interdependency of action and contemplation rings true for me; what I've depleted over the past couple of years is my reservoir of sufficient contemplation and solitude to sustain the action. I have overdrawn my account. It's clearly time to go back and rediscover the spring, to drink deeply at the cool waters in the solitude of the forest, aware that my stay there is temporary...
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Outside my window, the familiar drone -- J. is mowing the lawn for the first time this year. "Got to do it, it's going to rain for the next five days," he said. I sympathized. Early in our marriage we used to tell everybody we were going to plant a forest of bonsai maple trees on our front lawn instead of grass. Now (more than two decades later) we almost enjoy mowing. I can say "we" with impunity because last summer I did the mowing, for the first time in my life, because J. was recovering from a broken shoulder (yes, skiing, yes he should have known better, yes it was a real pain, yes you don't heal up so fast when you're, umm, "older"). I'm feeling a little nostalgic for mowing today. But if it's going to rain, at least I can plant some lettuce.
Today at lunch with my father-in-law, we had settled down with our bowls of soup and chicken salad sandwiches from the buffet when one of the retirement-home attendants -- a large dark-haired woman in a bright apricot tunic and white nurse's pants -- began hitting the rim of a coffee cup with a knife. Thick institutional china doesn't make a very convincing ring, especially for hearing-impaired guests, so most people went right on eating and talking, but she persisted, stopping every now and then to inspect the poor cup, and adding, in a loud voice, "May I have your attention" over the banging.
"I want you to know about a very special event that's happening this afternoon," she went on cheerily, carefully enunciating each word, when saw she finally had a few listeners. "A local Girl Scout troop applied for a grant to get money to do a community service project with senior citizens. And they chose as their project to do an ice cream social with you people. So today they're coming here at 3:00 and there will be ice cream for you down in the gathering room."
"What did she say?" my father-in-law asked.
"This," I said, pointing to the orange tent card in the middle of the table, announcing the same event. I shot a glance across the table at my husband.
"Can you believe it?" he said, sotto voce. "What is the world coming to when Girl Scouts get grants to bring ice cream to a nursing home?"
"You've got me," I said.
"This soup is tasteless," my father-in-law announced. "Either our food is getting worse, or I've lost my appetite completely."
"It tastes like it wanted to become onion soup but stopped short," I said, and he laughed. I watched while he tipped the soup bowl and ate the last drops without satisfaction. Was this how Girl Scouts get merit badges for community service these days? Would they talk to him? Would they ask him how his reading of Qu'ran commentaries was going? I thought about how we had made homemade fresh strawberry ice cream last weekend and hadn't brought my father-in-law any - our guests had eaten it all - and how it was his favorite and I wanted him to have some even though he shouldn't eat much sugar. He's about to be 94, I thought. I want to see him take that first bite and smile and sit back happily and say, "Ahhhh! It tastes strawberry!"
"Well, if there's going to be ice cream I won't get any more soup," he said, and pushed his bowl to the center of the table with a sigh that seemed to empty his entire chest. "OK, time to go. Ya'allah!"
Mercury Transit Day
Today, the planet Mercury passed in front of the Sun and was visible as a small dark point. This kind of astronomical event is called a transit and for the planet Mercury, it occurs approximately once every 7 years. A Venus transit is much more rare: the last was in 1882 but we're in luck, the next one will be in June of 2004. I've only seen Mercury occasionally, very low on the horizon at dusk, so I thought the transit was really cool. Here's a series of images of today's event taken by the Mercury Transit Webcam. The one above, taken in 1999, is from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
A moment of happiness, you and I sitting on the verandah, apparently two, but one in soul, you and I. We feel the flowing water of life here, you and I, with the garden's beauty and the birds singing. The stars will be watching us, and we will show them what it is to be a thin crescent moon. You and I unselfed, will be together, indifferent to idle speculation, you and I. The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar as we laugh together, you and I. In one form upon this earth, and in another form in a timeless sweet land.
Satrapi's Persepolis has received a lot of commentary for its comic book style combining drawings and writing, while Nafisi's book takes on the unconventional subject of teaching Nabakov in Iran...
Nafisi describes her sense of detachment and helplessness during her years under the mullahs: "In Iran a strange distance informed our relation to these daily experiences of brutality and humiliation. There, we spoke as if the events did not belong to us; like schizophrenic patients, we tried to keep ourselves away from that other self, at once intimate and alien."
For both Nafisi and Satrapi—one a well-respected professor, the other a pampered schoolgirl—government edicts ravage external and internal life. Marji wonders how she'll ever become the next Marie Curie, while Nafisi's whole sense of herself begins to unravel:
"Now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional . . . as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe."
Farhad Moshiri at the Leighton House Museum Moshiri’s exhibition is a series of large-scale paintings on the simple vessel form “that have mostly one colour that he associates with a word, sentence or childhood memory: favourite juices (Ab Anar Tazeh – fresh pomegranate juice), fruits (Miveh va Tareh bar – sweet Isfahani melons or the grapes of Shahroud) and traditional dishes (Kaleh Pache). Sometimes he employs lines of juxtaposed texts, extracts of poems or vernacular words used in daily life in Tehran.”
Monday, May 05, 2003
I almost lost myself today. Off-center. Edgy. Over-emotional. But I did the smart thing for once (the stupid thing is to pick a fight with your spouse) and took myself off to the woods.
Our town has a tract of land given to it a decade ago; it's a heavily-wooded hillside with a cascading brook that flows through a mixed white pine and deciduous forest, into a small pond, and steeply out again to plunge down to the big river. There are trails for hiking in summer and snowshoeing or cross-country skiing in winter, but hardly anyone goes there, so you can be assured of having the mirror of the pond and the solitude of the woods pretty much to yourself -- which was exactly what I needed today.
This was my first visit to the woods this spring. Things are further along down in the valley where I live, but up on the hill, the forest canopy wasn't yet leafed out, and the ground was mainly brown with dry leaves, punctuated here and there by the fuzzy grey fiddleheads of cinnamon ferns, or the smooth dark green ostrich ferns that are gathered here by the basketful and sauteed in butter for an asparagus-like, system-cleansing spring tonic. I walked through the woods along the pools and singing falls of the narrow brook, on a cushioned path of pine needles, leaves, and the fallen red flowers of a thousand maples.
The path comes out along the edge of the pond on the far side, and there I settled down. Between me and the shore, shrubby lowbush blueberries were being coaxed to life by moisture and afternoon sun. Lemon-yellow trout-lilies swayed above speckled leaves. And sure enough, under the ax-hewn log bench, next to a perfect deer-track in the damp mud, the oval evergreen leaves of trailing arbutus spread in a thick mat, unaware of their status as a rare and local species, hiding their shy pale pink blossoms in clusters under the leaves.
I stretched out on my stomach and buried my nose in the sweet, faint scent of the waxy flowers, and then sat up to stare into the shallows. A school of tender, lazy bass, swishing their black tails, swam above a fallen tree. Overhead, a squirrel cracked nuts that fell through the bare branches, and a delicate wind sent shivering ripples skimming across the pond.
My breath slowed, and I felt my self return.
7:12 PM
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Sunday, May 04, 2003
Some blog house-cleaning this weekend. I've been meaning to update my list of links, and did: I took out the war blogs that I'm not reading anymore, and added some new favorites that enhance my life every day. If I had to categorize them, I'd say I'm leaning toward blogs that are mainly about the arts, literature, and honest reflections on daily life. Another criteria is that I'm mostly linking to blogs whose authors, like me, try to update nearly every day.
Today was what our choir director called "Saint Mozart" day. Organ prelude, postlude, offertory anthem and communion motet were all by Wolfgang. We sang the Laudate Pueri and Laudate Dominum from the Solemn Vespers, and although Mozart wrote them when he was still young, they look forward to the most dramatic operatic writing he did, as well as the Requiem. Terrific stuff. The Pueri is driving, emotional, rhythmically intense, and the Laudate Dominum, with one of Mozart's most famous melodies, sung first by a soprano soloist and then by the chorus, was just like the glorious spring day here -- leaves bursting out, intense green grass, bright yellow forsythia, a cloudless azure sky. I felt so fortunate to be singing music like this, with people I love.
Listen to Kiri te Kanawa singing the Laudate Dominum (scroll all the way down to song sample #3). Not my ultimate choice of performer for this piece, but I couldn't find an audio clip with Emma Kirkby or, even better, Elly Ameling...
7:21 PM
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