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.
Sainteros writes: “In the case of the Polish experience, I wonder if geopolitics has more to do with it than faith,” mentioning how many times the country has been invaded. He goes on to say that he appreciates the poetry of Adam Zagajewski (as I do), and notes, “There's something of the bittersweet in him, too, but his faith, albeit a very abstract one, seems strong.”
My own tentative theory is that people who have been under personal and cultural oppression react in two general ways. One is in the direction of bitterness, cynicism, nihilism – I’d even go so far as to label that way “dark” – and the other direction is toward realism colored by love: i.e., trying to find light in suffering thorugh awareness of love, beauty, timelessness. Perhaps these are simply the ways of the pessimist and optimist, but I suspect it goes deeper than that. And both find common ground, and blurring of boundaries, through irony and humor.
Today I found some essays on polish culture that look excellent and I’m looking forward to reading them this weekend. In the meantime, here is an offering from the contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski:
Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve Let the radiant thought last in stillness though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves Knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth The stature of a man is still notched high up on a white door From far off, the joyful voice of a trumpet and of a song rolled up like a cat What passes doesn't fall into a void A stoker is still feeding coal into the fire Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve On a hard dry substance you have to engrave the truth --Translated by Renata Gorczynski
What I’m interested in exploring -- in the expressions of all cultures and individuals -- is how we find meaning, and how a particular world view develops out of that search for meaning. Here, for example, is a fascinating comment from Zagajewski:
I will never be someone who writes only about bird song, although I admire birdsong highly - but not enough to withdraw from the historical world, for the historical world is fascinating. What really interests me is the interweaving of the historical and cosmic world. The cosmic world is unmoving - or rather, it moves to a completely different rhythm. I shall never know how these worlds coexist. They are in conflict yet they complement each other - and that merits our reflection.
I became curious about Eastern European post-war art, and Polish art in particular, when I first came across the sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz many years ago – but except for the poetry of Milosz, which I admire, I haven’t done much about pursuing this subject. Lately, though, I’ve been looking at some post-war Eastern European photography, and right now I’m reading “View With a Grain of Sand” by Nobel winner Wislawa Szymborska.
It’s rough going. Some of the poems – most of the poems – have passages, phrases, that are striking and luminous. What I’m having trouble with is the tone, which veers off into the dark, the biting, the cynical. The poems I’ve read so far aren’t hopeless or despairing, nor do they dwell onlonging, resignation, or even sadness. They aren’t even nobly bitter. Instead there is a sense that the writer feels tricked by life – as if she came into the world expecting something else, and got this instead – the ability to see beauty and joy, and yet she’s learned not to trust them. The bitter pill, the deception, the double-cross – is always in her vision.
Is this a failed Catholicism, I wonder? I’ve wondered that before about certain art from this part of Europe: a sense of abandonment, of promises unkept: God is still noted, but like a father who deserted his family. Older but wiser, the child now views the world with cynicism. It’s certainly one very understandable way to react to devastation and a post-modern, post-Christian world. I think it disturbs me first becaue it goes against my own nature completely (I’m with the Warsaw street sign above!) but more so because I fear this type of insidious cynicism and darkenss creeping into American culture during the next few decades.
Szymborska’s poem “Seance” is about chance meetings, coincidences:
Happenstance twirls a kaleidoscope in its hands. A billion bits of colored glass glitter. And suddenly jack’s glass bumps into Jill’s. Just imagine in this very same hotel. I turn around and see – it’s really her! Face to face in an elevator. In a toy store. at the corner of Maple and Pine. but the poem ends:
We want to shout: Small world! You could almost hug it! And for a moment we are filled with joy, radiant and deceptive.
This morning, the crystalline song of an oriole drew me onto the front porch. The bird was singing invisibly from the top of a tall maple tree, a block in front of our house, singing its fast-beating heart out, serenading the neighborhood with music as beautiful as anything nature or human could conceive. Each year a pair of orioles makes their home near our house. I'm usually in the garden, working, and suddenly overhead, there is the song, and I say ahh, they're back, it's summer. Orioles are aggressive and fast, and I think of them inhabiting and singing from the tallest trees. But we often see them in the garden, like robins, foraging for food; when we had a cat I held my breath and told her I'd wring her furry neck if she ever brought one to the back steps.
A few weeks ago I saw the pair tumbling through the branches of the apple tree, screeching at each other, free-falling, it seemed, over and over, in a brilliant flashing of black and orange. Was it a mating dance, or actual anger? Now we hear them chattering and singing, and see them dashing through the trees, but I haven't yet spotted their deep nest, swaying like a Victorian purse from the tips of a supple high branch, waiting for the wind to rock the babies into adulthood and song. One day, just as suddenly, they'll be gone.
To the Tune of "Joy in the Oriole's Flight"
The dawn moon begins to sink, and last night's mist dissolves. Speechless, I toss on my pillow: my dream is of a return to fragrant grasses and my thoughts cling, cling to them. In the distant sky, the geese call once and are gone.
The orioles cry, then scatter, leaving the last of the blossoms to decay. I'm terribly alone in the deep court: do not let the last of the red petals be swept away but leave them for the dancing girls to step on as they walk home.
In a time of drastic change, one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. What really matters is openness, readiness, attention, courage to face risk. You do not need to know precisely what is happening or where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope. In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love.
Sunday, June 01, 2003
My morning began with Monteverdi - our choir sang one of his wonderful, bright motets as an offertory - but my gardening plans were washed out by yet another rainy, cold afternoon. So J. and I headed south, down toward the "land of the flatlanders" (that's any state below New Hampshire, Vermont or Maine) to do some long-overdue shopping at a...yes, it's true...mall. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I drove and J. took pictures. In the stormy light, the green was so intense you could taste it: a veritable salad bowl of green, uninterrupted by habitation, power lines, billboards, industry. But suburban life appeared soon enough. After weeks of slow meandering around the same paths I always follow at home to buy food, pick up the mail, go to business apointments, and visit friends it was hard to acclimate myself to the 70 mph speeds and aggressive driving, but that was nothing compared to the sensory assault of the mall. "Why does it smell like a new car in here?" J. asked.
"Because the whole thing is made of plastic?" I suggested.
When J. and I met up after an hour for a cup of coffee and something to eat, we both sat down with our tray full of plastic and paper and heaved a simultaneous sigh. "It's the noise," he remarked. "There seems to be a competition in here about who can make the most noise - visual, audio, whatever. It's like it's supposed to make you want to buy things, but actually it just exhausts you."
And the colors: for weeks, I've been hungrily eyeing the subtleties of natural color as spring suffused our black-and-white landscape. In the mall today, I was stunned by the garishness of the colors, the cheap chemical dyes used in so much clothing, and the screaming colors of signage and packaging. And in turn, I was taken aback by my own sensitivity to it. Am I that out of touch?
I like cities. It's the suburbs and unrestricted development that saddens and grates on me: the sameness of the franchises, the prepackaged desire; the programmed Pavlovian response designed to make a whole lot of people want cheap, poorly-made stuff they don't need, and spend hours of time wandering around an entirely artificial landscape in a daze. We did our shopping, and went home after two hours.
There's a point on the way where the landscape -- until then a corridor of buildings giving way to meadows and woods, then giving way to forests on either side of the road - suddenly opens up and we could see the mountains, slate blue in the distance, below fast-moving storm clouds, and in the near distance an unbroken range of green forested hills, white pines rising above the deciduous canopy, the trunks of paper birches punctuating the relentless green. "Ah," we both said. "Ahhh."
9:21 PM
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