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
Friday, August 01, 2003
TREES: Ecotone Topic for August 1
Birches. Photograph by J.
I live in a forest. Anyone who doubts that should fly over northern New England: you can’t see the people for the trees. When visitors arrive from un-woody places, like England, or our new neighbors from virtually tree-less Iceland, they are overwhelmed by the omnipresence of trees, and the way the forest dominates not only landscape but life. We heat with wood, build with wood, boil tree sap into syrup; smell wood being cooked into paper and sawn into boards, wait for lumber trucks and trees being skidded out of the forests, watch rivers of yellow tree pollen flow in the streets after rain, see trees breathing their oxygen back into the clouds. Our world here is green, and blue, and more green: Ver-mont was aptly named.
In a city we find ourselves one among many, and so the woman in the red dress, or the man who sings out from his newstand as you pass it each day becomes a focus. Here there are too many trees to comprehend, and so it’s the white pine standing taller than all the rest that captures your attention; or the grove of thorny locusts above the riverbank, knarled and conversant like old souls. I could write in a dozen directions about trees, but for today’s topic I’m just going to offer an essay I wrote several years ago about a tree that shared my place on earth for many years.
While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. Wordsworth, “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”
The big willow is being cut. I’m upset about it, know it has to be done, but it’s such a great and beautiful tree, worthy of being mourned. I’ve looked up into its branches for twenty years now, especially on summer evenings, when the only light was from the moon, to see stars shining through the leaves so far above my head, and fireflies dancing among them. It always felt like its own world, up there, in the bowls formed by those great dark branches, populated by things of the air and heights. A pair of orioles nested in the tree each spring, serenading me as I turned over the first soil in the garden; later their purse-like nest swayed above me. And it was home to many smaller birds: chickadees, nuthatches, warblers, feeding no doubt on a vast colony of insects. Kneeling next to the garden beds I’d feel drips of water raining down on me all summer, even during dry weather, and wonder whether willows really wept, if that was how they got their name. Branches fell continually, especially in spring storms, and I used the long supple tender ones to make woven fences and supports for herbs and other plants. It was a high-maintenance tree for us, and we didn’t even own it, but I never minded. I drew it many times, painted a watercolor, wrote a poem --trying unsuccessfully to capture that mysterious, secret world suspended in the sky.
When this hill was a pasture, a stream flowed between our property and the neighbors’, and along its banks a line of willows grew up. Ours was the first house cut out of the farm proper, near the turn of the century. Over the last twenty years, the hillside, divided and subdivided, became house lots. The willows -- streambank trees, never intended for shade -- were left in one back yard or another, sending their shallow roots into basement walls and dropping branches each spring. Homeowners, sympathetic at first, grew tired of taking care of the trees and worried when major damage occurred in thunderstorms. It’s understandable. But as is always the case, it doesn’t matter that the trees were here first, that we are, in fact, the ones who have encroached on them.
Last night, after dinner, the chain saws in the neighbors’ yard were finally silent. I went out on the back porch and looked over at the willow. The tree stood there still, its great wide crown shorn, one main trunk remaining with all its branches and leaves, the others amputated into huge logs that lay around the base. It was a horrible sight but heroic in a way; the tree, still alive, retaining something of its nobility and the strength emanating from that huge solid trunk, easily five feet in diameter at chest height. Yet it was doomed; this would be its final night, the last time those branches reached toward sunlight, leaves stretching a few new millimeters in length. I came back upstairs, drew a basin of water for the dishes, and started to cry, filled with sorrow for mankind, for being alive at a time and in a culture which values the safe, the cheap, the fast solution: whatever fits easily into our lives and causes the least inconvenience. I cried rueful tears for myself, made so sad by a tree -- how out of step I am, and how painful it is to stubbornly refuse the cries of a culture that would gladly give up Bach for the sitcom-of-the-moment; where artists, musicians and poets eek out a living and developers get rich.
I’ll remember the willow best on those nights, years ago, when I was trying to figure out if God existed. After I’d meditated for an hour, the incense burned down to ash, candle extinguished, I’d come out into the night, and to my polished mind, open, newly innocent, every sensation appeared fresh, important, astonishing. The Milky Way had never seemed so vast, the air so exhilarating, the snow under my feet so white. And there the willow loomed: hugely alive, pulsating with being-ness and a quality of home that strangely did not feel closed to me. I stopped trying to paint it or write about it, but just stood there, night after night, as if it were part of the meditation ritual; looking up, not thinking, I let it tell me whatever it had to say.
7:43 PM
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
The ECOTONE topic for tomorrow, August 1st, is "Trees" (or "Trees and Place"). Please consider writing an entry on your blog and posting a link at the Ecotone Wiki.
7:25 PM
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A raznochinets* needs no memory – it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.
Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time
It’s been fascinating to read everyone’s comments and advice about book accumulating… er, collecting. And if anyone wants to know why keeping a journal is worthwhile, this is an example of how it forces the real issues into the light. Underneath the stories of my father-in-law, and my friend and his painful book divestment ordeal, lurk my own conflicted feelings about being 50 and facing two potential paths: getting rid of “things” in order to be more free, to travel light…and wanting to collect certain things I haven’t had until now. So I’m thinking today about what that really means to me: whether those two paths are incompatible or not, and what choices are right for my heart and spirit even if they aren’t necessarily practical, or even particularly logical.
It’s true that I don’t want to be burdened with material possessions; we’ve made conscious efforts to get rid of things that we don’t need. A major hoe-ing out of our attic and closets two years ago was a big step in that direction. Our house is fairly large but lacks efficient storage space, which contributes to clutter…but I sort of like a semi-planned, aesthetic clutter and find it much more comforting and liveable than a minimalistic living space.
But when it comes to actual things, what do I care about? Paintings, photographs, certain talismanic possessions – a cup, a chair, a textile - that remind me of family or friends, or places we’ve been. And books. I’ve sometimes made myself think, “If there were a fire, what would I save? If I had to move to just a room or two, what would I want with me?” And as hard as it is to weed through these things – the bed you’ve slept and loved in; the furniture that reminds you of your childhood; the curtains that have shed their soft rose glow to countless mornings – it’s the art we’ve made ourselves and the little quirky, often value-less but irreplaceable reminders of other times and other people that I’d most want to have.
Books can be bought again, I suppose, but what makes them special to me is the way they mark out my entire life – the life that is really me. Books tell far more than an array of clothes or music or credit-card receipts: no wonder the government wants to access our library records. If a perceptive, patient person were to study my shelves I think they could reconstruct my identity with considerable accuracy, odd as it is: all the twists and turns are there, the hopes, the passions, the origins and detours as well as the constant threads.
Cull? What exactly are we excising when we cull, oh, James Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, or The Leonard Cohen Songbook, from 1970, or Charles Goren's Point Count Bidding, even though I might never open any of them again? There's Aristotle's Physics, and nearby,The Tao of Physics, and Calculus and Analytic Geometry, and a copy of Heidi given to my mother by her grandfather in 1931 that I can remember being read aloud to me. One story follows another: a month, a week, a year out of a life. Faces, tears, caresses.
There aren’t that many volumes in the house right now – maybe two thousand – we’ve been frugal and kept a lid on our tendency to buy books before anything else – although I’d hate to say how many times we’ve come home from a trip with suitcases filled with exactly that. The reason I’m thinking and writing about this is that right now, I want to buy more, at the same time as I’m trying to relinquish other kinds of things. I guess I needed to admit it.
Maybe the thing to do is put up some more shelves.
*raznochinets - an intellectual who is not associated with any of the principle social classes, such as the nobility, priesthood, merchants, etc.
5:07 PM
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Wednesday, July 30, 2003
From the exhibition On the Ground by Galina Lukianova, Krasnogorsk, Russia
BOOKS
We had new friends over for dinner last night, and as we walked around the house I was noticing how there are books…everywhere. And what’s strange about that is that I’m not a book-collector, really, not the way some people are. Although J. and I both love books we try to buy only the ones we really want to have, for keeps, or books we need professionally or for reference. The trouble is that we still have nearly every book either one of us has ever owned, and the shelves are full, so the overflow has gone onto tables…beside the bed…well, I’m sure this is nothing new to most of you. The question in my mind today is how to manage it.
For quite a few years we’ve had a feebly-enforced policy of one-book-in, one-book-out. We did a one-over-lightly shelf-purge, and that helped, but we need to be much more ruthless. J. built me two beautiful bookshelves for my office, and they’re full now too – how did that happen? – beside me here are my references books: foreign language dictionaries, annotated Bibles and parallel New Testament, style guides, and above and beside them the books on spirituality and religion, histories of Christian Europe and the Middle East, my small collection of Thomas Merton. On the other office bookshelf are poetry books, essays, and philosophy, mythology, my old Greek books, and Shakespeare, along with the book arts, design and calligraphy. There’s a pile of books I’ve borrowed from friends, and another pile – the Polish one – from the university library. I’d like to own at least half of these last – but there’s no room on the poetry shelves. The rest of my books, far more numerous than these, are upstairs.
I remember talking about German philosophers with my father-in-law one afternoon in his second-floor study. His library was arranged in tall bookshelves on two sides of the room, and we sat on a blue velveteen sofa with the afternoon light spilling in over our shoulders onto the gold-and-blue oriental carpet in the center. “Sometimes I just come up here and sit with them,” he said, gesturing with a smile toward his books. “I don’t know what it is, this contentment. I don’t even need to take down a volume, I know them all by their bindings.”
When he moved to a retirement home at age 92, there was no question of priorities: furniture was expendable, the books were going with him. My sister-in-law bought matching bookshelves and lined his new living room and study; the carpet went back into the center of one room along with the velveteen loveseat and the bust of Socrates. Today when we visited him, he was sitting amid his books, many strewn on the floor or on tables, with the door to the balcony open so he could see his tomato and parsley plants, and the hummingbirds buzzing in and out of his feeder.
Another friend of mine is getting ready for such a move, at a considerably younger age, and the other day he wrote: “I got talking with an old book dealer and agreed to show him my first editions, so I'm hauling them off the shelves and feeling I'm amputating myself at the knees.”
I wrote back, in alarmed capitals, “DON’T DO IT!!” He didn’t sell much, but the visit from the dealer left him shaken and depressed. I can well imagine why.
With all this in mind I look around and wonder what should stay, and what should go… or whether, maybe, I could fit one more shelf in somewhere.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
I'm preparing this morning for a monthly interfaith service for peace that I lead - it will be today at noon - and came across a few quotations that I'd like to share:
It is clear that peace is as fragile as the human condition of which it is a part. temptations abound to lessen its realization. Not least of which is the ego that seeks its own power, and the greed hidden in its shadows. Albert Huerta, S.J.
If you want peace, work for justice. Pope Paul VI
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. Martin Luther King
Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess, All went together to seek a bird's nest. They found a bird's nest with five eggs in, They all took one, and left four in.
I grew up as an Elizabeth in a household of Elizabeths. For four generations, women in my direct maternal ancestry had been named either Mary Elizabeth or Martha Elizabeth, and given variations of the middle name as nicknames, so the nursery rhyme above was very familiar to me. I was always "Beth", but I got called "Elspeth" and "Bess" on occasion, and formally always used "Elizabeth". My mother remained "Martha" ; my grandmother was "Beth", and my great-grandmother had been "Libby" or "Lib".
Although this part of the family had been in America for generations, there was a definite anglophilic streak, and it gave me an affection for Elizabeth I, for whom I think we were all indirectly named. My own grandmother was a true matriarch and a determined feminist, and often got called "The Queen" for the imperial manner in which she wielded her thimble and needle while expounding on some subject, or the more subtle but very effective ways she kept the family in line. In her bookshelves I found echoes of Tudor England: the wives of Henry VIII, biographies of Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon, as well as Shakespeare's tragedies, sonnets, and histories. We weren't latter-day royalists - far from it. But there were definite ties: we were Anglican, England was a touchstone, and there was always tea and a tin of biscuits at 4:00 pm.
I found out today, through mysterium, that this year is the 400th anniversary of the death of Elizabeth I, and spent a little time looking through the exhibitions surrounding that commemoration. I was struck by these two depictions of the beginning and end of Elizabeth's long and remarkable reign, and by some of her own words that have survived:
WRITTEN IN HER FRENCH PSALTER, 1554-5 No crooked leg, no bleared eye, No part deformed out of kind, Nor yet so ugly half can be As is the inward suspicious mind.
and these lines from her speech to Parliament (1559), when they challenged her about remaining unmarried and childless:
I have already joyned my self in Marriage to an Husband, namely, the Kingdom of England...And do not (saith she) upbraid me with miserable lack of Children: for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are Children and Kinsmen to me; of whom if God deprive me not, (which God forbid) I cannot without injury be accounted Barren. ..And to me it shall be a full satisfaction, both for the memorial of my Name, and for my Glory also, if when I shall let my last breath, it be ingraven upon my Marble Tomb, Here lieth Elizabeth, which Reigned a Virgin, and died a Virgin. (from Primary Sources: Tudor England)
Comments "Please do!" is what I most want to say. Visits to this site have increased dramatically over the past three or four weeks, so I know there are a number of people reading it regularly. I'd love to hear from you, either in comments or by e-mail (click "write to me" at left). We've had some very interesting discussions in the comments threads since I added them to the site, so I simply want to encourage people to read them, and invite everyone to participate. My interest in blogging really comes out of a desire to encourage conversation, and to keep learning as well as writing. I'd also especially like to hear what you find interesting (or not) among the subjects talked about here. A big thank you to everyone who has been commenting, and to those who haven't -- please add your voice!
Polish Poetry Bibliography There's an updated, growing, decidedly incomplete bibliography of books of and about Polish poetry on the "book notes" page (see link at left). Suggestions for additions are most welcome.
Blogroll Additions Please be sure to visit the three blogs that are new to my blogroll (but not to my reading - I'm just slow at getting them up there): Creek Running North, the beautifully-written, wide-ranging journal of Chris Clarke, editor of Faultline, an environmental journal in California; London and the North, the photoblog/journal of "Coup de Vent", who divides her time between London and Yorkshire; and Soul Food Cafe, an exciting and encouraging site for writers, and about writing, that is the labor of love of Australian Heather Blakey.
4:55 PM
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