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 31, 2003 Today, the first without rain for a week and a half, I was able to get out into the garden. We have a persistent weed here – its real name is goutweed but J. insists on calling it kudzu, after the rampant southern plant – and during the rains it grew as wildly and suddenly as a young girl who overnight becomes lanky and langorous, occupying entire rooms with a new presence too large even for herself.
Goutweed, especially in its variegated form, is sold as a ground cover in garden centers here, tempting me to accidentally spill a bottle of herbicide over the entire display, or put up a sign saying, “purchase at your own risk.” Only the sturdiest perennials, those that are close to weeds themselves, can compete with it: gooseneck loosestrife, mallow, the coarsest daylilies.
So each year I set out to free the peonies, the struggling biennial foxgloves, the lilies-of-the-valley and Japanese painted fern from the insidious roots of their co-inhabitant. Once, in an energetic young fervor, I dug up the entire perennial bed, set the plants aside, and sieved all the soil to remove every last bit of regenerating goutweed root. The next year it simply thanked me for loosening the soil by putting on an even more splendid display. I put down landscape fabric and mulch. Under it the weed sent out long underground runners, white as Golum, and cropped up luxuriously in every available opening.
Now the gardens have tripled or quadrupled, and I have given up. I spend large amounts of time pulling and yanking, cursing and grudgingly admiring this plant’s tenacity. Shunryu Suzuki’s words, “a weed is a treasure,” perpetually arise in my mind as I fill yet another wheelbarrow with torn leaves and stems, most without any root system at all. I realize that in some small part of my heart, I have actually come to love this weed that is determined to share my space – or which, perhaps more accurately, yields a share of its space to me. We have, whether I like it or not, a relationship, and I have much more to learn.
One thing might be to use it as a poultice for my aching joints. This entry on Goutweed is from Botanical.com, A Modern Herbal: "The generic name is a corruption of the Greek aix, aigos (a goat) and pous, podos (a foot), from some fancied resemblance in the shape of the leaves to the foot of a goat. The specific name (Aegopodium podagraria) is derived from the Latin word for gout, podagra, because it was at one time a specific for gout...It was (also) called Bishopsweed and Bishopswort, because so frequently found near old ecclesiastical ruins.
Medicinal Action and Uses: Diuretic and sedative. Can be successfully employed internally for aches in the joints, gouty and sciatic pains, and externally as a fomentation for inflamed parts...The roots and leaves boiled together, applied to the hip, and occasionally renewed,have a wonderful effect in some cases of sciatica.
Culpepper says: 'It is not to be supposed Goutwort hath its name for nothing, but upon experiment to heal the gout and sciatica; as also joint-aches and other cold griefs. The very bearing of it about one eases the pains of the gout and defends him that bears it from the disease.'
"Grandfather?" Bronze model of a human head, Iron Age, about 50-20 BC; From Welwyn, Hertfordshire, England
To the Victors Belong the History Books
I always thought I was descended from Anglo-Saxons, but a new genetic study shows that my ancestry -- and that of a majority of those of British heritage -- might actually be Celtic. Not only did the Celts dominate Europe in the centuries before the Roman invasions, but their genetic stock seems to have survived far more vigorously than that of later the invaders. What didn't survive was their version of history, "because they saw writing as a threat to their oral tradition". Well, no wonder I like singing Cwm Rhondda...
History books favor stories of conquest, not of continuity, so it is perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans who invaded Britain. The defeated Celts, by this reckoning, left their legacy only in the hinterlands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout the British Isles..
British historians have generally emphasized the Roman and Anglo-Saxon contributions to English culture at the expense of the Celtic. A recent history of Britain, "The Isles" by Norman Davies, tried to redress the balance. The Celts were ignored, he noted, in part because no documentary histories remain, the Celts having regarded writing as a threat to their oral traditions. Generations of historians saw British history as beginning with Roman invasions of the first century A.D. and indeed identified with the Romans rather than the defeated Celts.
"So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land," Dr. Davies writes. The new survey indicates that the genetic contribution of the Celts has been as much underestimated as their historical legacy.
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth must be uninhabited... Perhaps my best years are gone... But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.
Oh, Beckett sure knew how to talk about those thoughts, didn't he? And he's always comforting to me, maybe because he just says it, puts it out there --age, anxiety, drool, stumbling, pain, confusion, longing -- and says, "yes, and I'm still here." I was just writing to a friend about mid-life angst, and how 99% of mine centers around my creative life, and whether or not I put enough emphasis on it, and made the right choices -- all of which were based on the hope that there would be a lot more years after midlife when the focus could gradually shift. There's no indication that this won't be the case -- but as we all know, no guarantees either.
I suppose I'm thinking more about this this week because of the memorial last weekend for one of our parents. But we also just learned of the death of a friend our age, an artist, and though it was expected, her death is still a shock and an affront to the natural order.
The deal in my early years was that I didn't have the fire Beckett talked about. What I had was natural ability, desire, technique -- but technique doesn't make art. I actually had to unlearn a lot of what I had thought was important, stop hiding behind skill and intellect, and search inside myself before anything authentic emerged.
It's curious: we lose the precious, primitive spontaneity we have naturally as un-formed, un-taught children, and spend years trying to recapture it, or to integrate its vague memory with technique, mind, teaching, observation. And then when we can finally see something, when there's fire inside, we sense the brevity of time.
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Wednesday, May 28, 2003 Iranian Women: a photo exhibition from Nafise Gallery, Iran
Strict Dress Code for Summer: Iranian conservatives crack down on looser interpretations of women's clothing: Clothing shops and factories have been given a written order to stop producing clothes that stray from the strict female dress codes... (BBC)
This is not Living (Hay mish Eishi) A new film by a Palestinian woman is winning awards. Al-Ahram Weekly talked to Alia Arasoughly about her film, which describes the lives of eight women - all known to the filmmaker - during the current Intifada.
As a growing number of Palestinian filmmakers are lending their gaze to events in their own country Arasoughly's film may mark a fissure with the rest. Here one encounters voices that are left unheard in the barrage of imagery that the collective consciousness has come to associate with the occupation and its discontents.
At a time when occupation has been commodified and aestheticised through the depiction of Hizbullah militants, screaming children and grieving matriarchs, Arasoughly's film pays tribute to a group of unheard voices -- those of middle-class women -- that do not gravitate toward any sensationalised pole. These are exceptional women only insofar as they face exceptional circumstances.
"I wanted to tell the stories of women like me, productive women who had lives of their own, women who had struggled to create a professional identity for themselves that has been erased by the war. " 4:57 PM
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Today the city of St. Petersburg is celebrating its the three hundredth anniversary. Legend has it that on May 27, 1703, Peter the Great stood on the future site of his city and mused,
“From now on we shall threaten the Swede And here a city we shall found To spite our overweening neighbor. Here it has been ordained by nature To cut a window into Europe, And gain a firm foothold by the sea.”
The other night I read a new translation by Peter Norman of Pushkin’s long poem “The Bronze Horseman”, which begins by sketching St. Petersburg’s history, as quoted above, and goes on to tell the story of one young Yevgeny and the great flood of the Neva in 1824. Here is the poem’s third stanza:
Alexander Pushkin THE BRONZE HORSEMAN
I love thee, creation of Peter, I love thy stern and graceful view, The imperious flow of the Neva, Thy embankments clothed in granite, Thy wrought iron gates in tracery, Thy translucent dark, the moonless shine, When in my chamber I am writing, And without a lantern reading, And the vast buildings all asleep On the deserted streets are clear And bright the spire of Admiralty, And without allowing the murk of night To mount into the gold of heaven, One dawn hastens to succeed another, With hardly half an hour of night. I love the windless air and frost Of thy cruel winter season, The dash of sledges by the broad Neva, The cheeks of girls, brighter than roses, The brilliance, noise of balls and chatter, And the hiss of foaming goblets, And the blue flame of the punch At the bachelors’ hour of feasting. I love the military liveliness On the playing fields of Mars, The monotonous magnificence Of the mounted troops and infantry, The tatters of those trophy banners, Waving in their orderly array, The lustre of those brazen helmets, Shot through from side to side in battle. I love thee, city filled with soldiers, The smoke and thunder of thy forts, When the northern empress bestows A son upon the royal house, Or Russia celebrates once again, When victory is won against The enemy, or breaking through its Dark blue ice, the Neva bears it out To sea, exulting at the scent of spring.
This translation is from Leopard IV, “Bearing Witness”, an anthology published by The Harvill Press, London, in 1999. It’s hard to find Pushkin in English, and he is supposed to be notoriously difficult to translate. I couldn’t find a reference to Norman’s poetry translation of Pushkin in book form, although I did notice that his translation of Akhmatova’s journals has recently been published (can't wait!). Here’s a collection of Pushkin’s poems by another translator, and here is The Bronze Horseman read aloud in Russian by Laura Paperno.
The Sevan Monastery (c. 874) At this point the configuration of Gokcha forms a strait some five times broader than the Neva. The magnificent freshwater wind would tear into the lungs with a whistle. The clouds moved with a velocity that kept increasing by the minute and the incunabular surf would hasten to publish by hand in half an hour's time a plump Gutenberg Bible under the graveling glowering sky... Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time "Journey to Armenia: Sevan"
Yesterday we celebrated the life of my mother-in-law, who died on December 31st. She was born into a Christian Armenian family in Konya – the city of whirling dervishes - around 1914, and was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Her father and all her other adult male relatives were killed by the Turks. As well as I knew her, for 25 years, much of this remarkable, elegant, educated, generous woman remained an enigma to me. Until the last few years of her life she chose not to speak much about her early experiences. “I didn’t want my children to grow up to hate,” she said. She herself was a Quaker, committed to peace and non-violence. Even during this past year, when she had become very fragile, she sat with us at many anti-war demonstrations; her presence always encouraged me, and brought me close to tears.
At the memorial celebration yesterday the spare, light-washed Quaker gathering room was packed with people who she had touched, and many of them shared their memories. Afterwards we feasted on tiny spinach and lamb pies, beautiful cookies, cheeses and grapes, and a mountain of fresh strawberries piled on a huge blue-and-yellow majolica platter that always hung on her wall. The tables were covered with her best linens, intricately but subtly embellished with Armenian beige and grey embroidery and elaborate drawnwork, and there were big bouquets of the kind of flowers she loved: deep blue irises and salmon-colored quince blossoms. Afterwards the family came to our house for dinner and more memories, and this morning after breakfast everyone dispersed, back Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, California. We're exhausted, but happy. She hadn't wanted us to do anything, but I hope she would have approved.
Geghard Monastery The oldest chapel is about 8 metres square. Monks lived at Geghard since the 4th century, in cells cut into the rocks.
I’ve never been to Armenia; I hope someday my husband and I can go. Today I’m thinking about a picture of my mother-in-law standing in a field of Armenian poppies. She loved color, and flowers, and beauty of all kinds. That picture was taken on a trip she made to her birthplace with a granddaughter several years ago. In Konya she searched in vain for traces of her people. “On this corner was the Armenian church,” she said. “This section was once all Armenian.”
“No,” the Turkish guides repeated. “No, no Armenians ever lived here.”
At yesterday's service that granddaughter spoke about this trip. "All the time we were there she kept saying the same thing," she said. "Nothing. Nothing."
Geghard Monastery: The Main Hall. The churches and the monastery date from the 13th century.
The Armenians' fullness with life, their rude tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to anything metaphysical, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things - all of this said to me: you're awake, don't be afraid of your own time, don't be sly...Wasn't this because I found myself among a people who, though renowned for their fervent activity, nevertheless lived not by the clock in the railway station nor by that in some institution, but by the sundial such as I saw among the ruins of Zvarnots in the form of an astronomical wheel or rose inscribed on stone? Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time "Journey to Armenia: Sevan"
The pictures in today's post are from a favorite site, Avantart. Browse the author’s “Armenia” section for her photo essays and haunting music from Armenia, some of it recorded in the chapels you see here.
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