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, June 21, 2003 Pica and Cassandra dual-blogging at the Ecotone Wiki
On Friday, it was a great treat to welcome Pica from Feathers of Hope to our house and garden. Although we both had created entirely different mental images of each other (she had imagined me with long, straight, dark hair) we felt an instant bond and the afternoon flew by much too rapidly. Pica, a lover of calligraphy and the book arts, is the only person in recent memory to have exclaimed over the pen collection in my office, or who's wanted to see my calligraphy and book binding. But she is also a birder par excellence; over lunch in the back yard she stopped and remarked, "Ah, a Carolina wren!" just by hearing the bird's call. I know plants, but I don't know many birds by sound alone. In the photo above, we're making a dual post on the Ecotone Wiki in my office; that's Pica on the left and me on the right. Visit Feathers of Hope for Pica's take on the day.
Today we had an entirely different visit, from an old photographer friend we hadn't seen in twenty years. I don't think I would have recognized him by sight. It wasn't until I got up and was rummaging around in the kitchen, overhearing snatches of conversation about cameras and technical photographic matters between him and my husband, in voices that were entirely unchanged, that I sensed the time warp.
8:56 PM
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An endless rain is just beginning. Into the ark, for where else can you go, you poems for a single voice, private exultations, unnecessary talents, surplus curiosity, short-range sorrows and fears, eagerness to see all things from all six sides.
Rivers are swelling and bursting their banks. Into the ark, all you chiaroscuros and half-tones, you details, ornaments, and whims, silly exceptions, forgotten signs, countless shades of the color gray, play for play's sake, and tears of mirth.
As far as the eye can see, there's water and hazy horizon. Into the ark, plans for the distant future, joy in difference, admiration for the better man, choice not narrowed down to one of two, outworn scruples, time to think it over, and the belief that all this will still come in handy someday.
For the sake of the children that we still are, fairy tales have happy endings. That's the only finale that will do here, too. The rain will stop, the waves will subside, the clouds will part in the cleared-up sky, and they'll be once more what clouds overhead ought to be: lofty and rather lighthearted in their likeness to things drying in the sun - isles of bliss, lambs, cauliflowers, diapers.
Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Personal journal, Japanese side-sewn binding with hand-painted/hand-printed cover papers, 1994
I'm psyched - tomorrow, Pica from Feathers of Hope is coming by for a visit. We've never met, so we're both looking forward to matching reality with our digital impressions of one another. She's out on the east coast visiting family and friends, and taking a swing through our region. Exciting! Bloggers meet in real life! Pica and I are both designers and lovers of the book arts; we recently shared notes about skivving* leather for bookbinding...definite esoterica, but frustrating as hell if you've ever tried to do it without a master bookbinder standing over your shoulder.
The book above has a Japanese sewn binding that uses cloth and thread rather than leather and glue. In this kind of binding, the trick is to avoid stabbing yourself with the stiff sewing needle and getting blood all over your pages during the final operation - I never got very good at it, but enjoyed the process a great deal, and have been thinking lately about doing some more. (I must have surgery on the brain today, after spending part of the day waiting for my husband in the dental office while he had a molar extracted -- yowch!)
(*Skivving is the process of thinning the edges of the "wrong side" of the leather used to make a book's spine. You must use a very sharp, special knife. If you go too far, you'll tear or rip the leather. Not far enough, and the exposed edge will be unsightly and thick.)
"The writer is something of a shape-changer and trickster, someone a little more treacherous, eccentric, and unpredictable than she at first appears, because she is continually buffeted and transformed by an inner life invisible from the outside. She may speak to you in complete sentences about what her day was like, but inside another life is being lived, one full of beauties and monstrosities, upheavals and transgressions." Eric Maisel via whiskey river
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
I wish I could have shared this glorious summer day in New England with all of you. It was dry, perfectly temperate, and except for a fine dust of tree pollen in the air, absolutely clear. Blowsy white clouds drifted overhead in a cerulean sky, and in the garden, orange Oriental poppies held court in front of deep purple lupine. The peonies, Siberian iris and highbush cranberries are in full bloom, and the budded roses just beginning to show color. Wait a few weeks, and we'll be sweltering in humid 90-degree days, unable to sleep and taking three showers a day. But today -- today was perfection.
Weeding in the back of the garden, I somehow worked myself underneath a thick stand of hollyhocks so that my head and shoulders were actually inside a small chamber formed between their stalks. And suddenly I remembered myself as a little girl, in the hiding spot I used to play in under my grandmother's snowberry bushes and honeysuckles. What was it? I wondered. Surely not the size of things - here I was, like Alice, all grown up and far too big to fit into this child- or cat-size space. But the memory was intense and persistent, so much so that I relaxed and tried to stay in my cramped spot as long as I could. Finally it came to me: it was the silent, cool smell of the damp, rooty earth, in contrast to the fragrant, pollen-rich, smell of summer air, sun-baked leaves and warm soil -- a smell secret and unusual enough to have triggered a certain synapse, and unlocked a door of memory.
9:25 PM
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Monday, June 16, 2003
A little housekeeping this evening. I've deleted links to some political blogs I'm not reading, and added three new favorites. Beneath Buddha's Eyes is the personal journal of writer/photojournalist Tony Anthony; it is written with great honesty from the heart, doesn't shy away from difficult subjects, and is visually stunning. Mysterium talks about culture, especially in New York City, with excellent links and includes some good poetry by the author himself. And Whiskey River is a daily compendium of quotes and clippings; many recent ones have been about the art, craft, and agony of writing and have been much appreciated by this reader. All are worth your time...
I'll be adding some additional place blogs over the next day or two. The first collective Ecotone blog was terrific and contributors wrote some remarkable and diverse posts; check it out at the Ecotone Wiki.
9:13 PM
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Today some of us are writing collective blogs on the topic “How I started thinking about place – and why I started writing about it”. You can read others at the Ecotone Wiki, and I encourage you to do that; there are some fine writers and thoughtful place bloggers out there – not just from America, I might add - and this is our first effort to blog collectively.
Wally with Diamond, Beaver Meadow, N.Y., c. 1900
Somewhere in the family photo archives, there’s a picture of my grandmother, my great aunts Inez and Minerva, my mother, and me - as a little girl - prowling through the underbrush near a small creek. It was taken during a family picnic in Beaver Meadow, New York, in the mid 1950s.
The photograph above was taken half a century before, in the same place. That’s my great-grandfather with his horse, Diamond. On the back of this photograph of her father, Inez wrote, “I read Dickens’ History of England under the tree at the far right, and under the tall elm, my cousin and I had our wilderness camp in ‘Indian country’.”
Beaver Meadow is a tiny hamlet in the hills of central New York. It hardly exists anymore, except as a crossroads, but that’s where some of my ancestors settled. The picnic I vaguely remember must have been one of the last times we visited the family farm. My grandmother reluctantly sold it not long afterwards – the family had moved “into town” years before, and her parents had died. But all my childhood I heard about that farm, and Beaver Meadow, from people whose lives had been shaped by that particular place with its trees and hills, the rhythm of the farm and the seasons, the neighbors, the pets and livestock, the secret hiding places of children. It was simply their way of thinking about identity – that you belonged to the place where you lived and knew it intimately, because it was worthy of your attention, study, care, love, and memory.
This older generation passed their love of place on to me, even though their notion of “place” become larger after they moved down into the broad valley of the Chenango River, exchanged horses for automobiles, began to travel, and saw the world expand through two world wars. “Place” was a fluidly expanding and contracting concept: it might mean the America written about by Willa Cather – the Plains where one great-great uncle had gone to settle - or the southern cities of Tennessee Williams that my grandparents visited on their road trips. A different kind of “place” also existed vividly for all of us in far-flung books and in imagination: thus my great aunt’s History of England, read under a tree in the pasture, and her imaginary childhood “Indian country” beyond. But just as easily, it could turn into my little patch of mint under the grape arbor behind the barn, where a wolf spider lived; or the fur-lined rabbit nest in the perennial bed, carefully protected by my grandfather.
When I was twelve, my great aunt Inez, who was a history teacher without children or grandchildren of her own, gave me a book of stories she had written about her childhood back in Beaver Meadow. Even at twelve, I understood that this was more than another installment in the collection of American history books she had already given me. Of course I didn’t appreciate what she had done until much later, when I had moved pretty far away myself and was starting to think about my own identity and where it had come from. When I re-read her stories and journals after her death at 88, I also found a long, evocative description of life on the family farm in the 1880s, written by her mother. My own grandmother, who wrote me letters about her garden until she was 90 years old, and my mother, who just sent me an email about finding gooseberry bushes in the woods across the road and with whom I’ve prowled countless woods and shorelines, also conveyed the same messages about the importance of place in the midst of chaos, confusion, and change.
It’s taken me a while to begin the grasp the nature of the torch I’d been handed at age twelve. I eventually discovered that the point was not to go back to Beaver Meadow and retrace my heritage, or even to write in the same descriptive vein about my adopted home in New England. It was to enter as seriously into relationship with my particular place in time and space as these women had, to learn from it, and to find my own ways of passing it on. What they had done was to capture the beauty of lives lived simply and attentively, and in doing that to tell me, “Here is something that will see you through”.
I write about place, in both a particular and a broad sense, because I’ve realized that I was given something precious that most people in our culture simply don’t have. A sense of deep connection and belonging -- to nature, to place, to the mystery of existence and creation: these are our birthright as human beings. There is no greater evidence for me of the alienation of modern life than the fear most people have of nature, co-existing with an equally intense sense of hunger, longing, and homelessness. As we’ve paved over our meadows and plastic-wrapped our foods, we’ve obliterated the paths designed to take us back to our origins and the truth about ourselves; we’ve encapsulated our souls. The enormous sense of loss I feel, observing the changes in attitudes and destruction of the environment that have taken place since my family left the farm in Beaver Meadow, is nothing compared to the collective loss I feel for the souls of humanity.
And so I write about place in the hope of awakening that inborn spark of recognition; of de-mystifying the web of connectedness between 21st century humans and the living earth; and of perhaps offering a safe passage, comfortably cushioned with words, into silence, wonder, and love. Without those, I don’t think there is much hope of awakening a sense of responsibility toward this fragile earth.
