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, September 06, 2003
Yesterday I drove to New York State to visit my parents. Right now it’s early morning, and I’m still in bed, writing for a few minutes before the spoken part of the day begins. It was a beautiful ride down here, despite the six hours it took and the amount of traffic and late-summer construction. The sky was filled, all day, with huge cumulus and cumulostratus clouds, but giving them their scientific name takes away from their glorious mutability and beauty. The clouds were more than puffy summer cotton balls moving across a blue sky; they were dark grey underneath in places, sometimes extending in rows as far as you could see, othertimes built up to great heights, the sky always varied and dramatic above the blue mountains and green fields. The sun was obscured at times, and then broke through again and again to cast long shadows on fields, nearly chartreuse in the angled afternoon light, with their stacked, round bales of hay or towering stands of tassled corn.
I drove for a stretch along the Erie Canal and Mohawk River, lined with willows. There was a strong, gusty wind, which uncharacteristically whipped up the surface of the water, lending some drama to the usually-languid canal and flat midsection of the state. Further on, I drove along the ridge above beautiful Cherry Valley, site of one of the most murderous Indian raids of colonial times, noticing signs in the distance for the hugely successful Turning Stone Casino, in Vernon, run by the Oneida Indians. My parents ate there recently, with other curious friends. None of them are gamblers, but they wanted to sample the huge Vegas-style day-long buffet and the fancy buildings of the casino; I heard vivid descriptions of marble bathrooms and automatic toilets that retreat into walls, as well as the casino’s prices on gasoline and other commodities. A strange and ironic juxtaposition: the blood, arrowheads and memories held by these fields and valleys, and this new success story by enterprising Native Americans who, by now, understand the white man’s desires and vices well enough to successfully exploit them.
What I come away with is a sense of God’s absence for Rozewicz, rather than annihilation: an absence the poet laments and seems to explain first by God’s inability (or refusal?) to intervene to save human beings in the historical period just experienced, just as he failed to intervene to save Jesus. But God is also absent because he, the poet, voluntarily stepped away and became a creator himself – a poet.
Has Rozewicz lost his faith? I’m not so sure. I think he feels he has removed himself – through sin, through pride, through a worship, perhaps, of words that he doesn’t fully admit? - from a God who may have forsaken him, or at least is so remote as to be unknowable, but he also admits both God’s importance and his own ambivalence in a later poem, from 1988/1989:
Without
the greatest events in man’s life are the birth and death of God
father our Father why like abad father at night like a thief
without a sign without a trace without a word
why did you forsake me why did I forsake You
life without god is possible life without god is impossible
in childhood I fed on You are flesh drank blood
perhaps you forsook me when I tried to open my arms embrace life
reckless I spread my arms and let You go
perhaps You fled unable to bear my laugh
You don’t laugh
or perhaps You’ve punished me small and dim for obstinacy and arrogance for trying to create a new man new poetry new language
You left me without a rush of wings without lightenings like a field-mouse like water drained into sand busy I missed Your flight Your absence in my life
life without god is possible life without god is impossible 10:04 PM
|
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
POLISH POETRY VI 9.03.03
If the greatest question for critics following WWII has been whether there could be poetry after Auschwitz, a looming question for me has been the fate of God. Poetry continued, as art always continues wherever human being exist. But what happened to belief for these poets of Poland, raised in a strongly Roman Catholic environment among people of deep and simple faith, and then forced to experience not only inhumanity, but a sense of abandonment by that protective God of their youth? Can there be belief after Auschwitz? And if so, in what? How does this get expressed in poetry?
Not surprisingly, among the poets I’ve been reading so far, each individual has a different answer. None were unaffected, and spiritual matters figure highly in their work -- both in determining content, and in the poet’s voice, be it cynical, searching, bitter, existential, loving, transcendent – for we find examples of all of these responses.
Tadeusz Rozewicz, whose work we’ve been looking at most closely so far, speaks of both childhood and simple faith in the same breath. Both are connected with his mother, and both now seem irretrievable:
through the open door I see a landscape of childhood a kitchen and a blue kettle the Sacred Heart mother’s transparent shadow
the crowing cock in a rounded silence (from Doors, 1966)
“Doors” is a poem about the beginnings of sin. The first steps away from the simplicity and innocence of that kitchen are heralded by that crowing cock (a reference to the cock that crowed, as Jesus had predicted, before Peter denied him three times).
It would be easy to call Rozewicz an agnostic, or even an atheist, but I think his relationship to God is far more complex than that. As in Doors, religious imagery and themes appear continually, with Jesus and crosses/trees/thorns/crucifixion perhaps most frequent:
…a tree of black smoke a vertical dead tree with no star in its crown. (from Massacre of the Boys, Auschwitz,1948)
A wooden Christ from a medieval mystery play goes on all fours
full of red spinters
he has a collar of thorns and the bowed head of a beaten dog
how thirsty and starved this wood is. (Wood, 1955) (this is the entire poem)
There are many other references to Biblical stories and imagery including a poem about Job; another about Jesus writing an unrecorded epistle in the sand with his finger; and a powerful poem about the poet himself wrestling with an angel, like Jacob, which ends:
I caught him by the leg he fell on my dump under the wall here I am a manshaped being with eyes smashed to let in light.
(from A Fight with an Angel, 1959)
There are also personal “confessions” and musing about faith:
I don’t believe as patently deeply as my mother believed
I don’t believe in his altars symbols and priests…
I read his parables simple as an ear of corn and think of the god who did not laugh… (From Thorn, 1968)
And there are confessions of sensuality, carnal desire, and the choice to live in real time which take place in religious settings:
In a cathedral in the rose in lead your white nape hewn from darkness…
…a whisper floats up damp and warm form your interior it penetrates the conch of your ear (from “in a cathedral…”, ~1962)
or this:
honest her arse is more finely moulded than the dome of that famous cathedral – he thought – a splendid vessel temporarily closed
the souls must have been snatched up by previous generations and now one has to live as best one can shallowly quicker
Monday, September 01, 2003
ECOTONE TOPIC: Maps and Place
In my memory, there are always maps. There's the wall of topographic maps in my father’s office, the antique maps of New York State hanging on the walls, the intricately-detailed bird’s-eye views of central New York towns in the late 1800s, the blue school globe in my childhood bedroom – I can still remember the area in the Pacific that had rubbed off - the elaborate fold-out maps from National Geographic, the pull-down maps of the United States and the world hanging in every classroom, accompanied by long wooden pointers that made a hard rapping sound on the blackboard. Later there were specific topo maps for camping and hiking trips, and a boyfriend who sometimes seemed more in love with maps than with me, losing himself in the delicate green lines spread on his dorm room floor: a meditation and escape from the pressures of getting into grad school.
Maps have accompanied all the best road trips of my life, even when the point was to leave the mapped and predictable behind; maps were part of the anticipation, the planning, the excitement of imagining "I will be here – and afterwards, maps became part of memory: “I was there.” Maps settled arguments and solidified dreams; they taught me things I couldn’t see and made me want to see others. And, of course, they were beautiful.
Because I’m a designer, I’ve used maps in publications destined for other people, designed atlases, and even made a few maps myself. Nothing teaches you the real geography of a place better than drawing its map yourself, and nothing makes you more appreciative of the skill and judgment of people who do nothing else but map creation.
Maps represent a lot, but neither are they a place, nor a person; maps are merely tracks on a beach, an enigmatic, tantalizing trail. I wondered today what a map of my present life might look like. There would be an X for my house, with a garden indicated behind it, and some trees, and the street outside, and the field near the river and the grove of thorny locusts. There’d be the bridge across the river, and some roads, big ones and small, not too many, leading to the places where I buy food or go to sing, or buy books, or visit friends. Another X, maybe, for my father-in-law’s house, and my sister-in-law’s, and the church, and the homes of a few friends. Then there would be a road west – that one goes to some mountains and beyond them to the place I was born. And a road north, toward Canada. And a road south, to the big city. And one east, not taken very much, toward the ocean. What would they tell you, these trails across the horizontal plane of my earth?
Do I really exist in these two dimensions, these X and Y coordinates? No, but there’s no map for the rest of me: I can’t draw where I go through this machine, for instance, except to make an undecipherable cross-hatching of more two-dimensional lines, point-to-point. I can’t map for you my past or my future, the flights of my imagination, my dreams, the fragments of poems and paintings or where they came from, and where they go, like the morning fog. It might be better to make a map that shows this room: where I’m sitting with this computer by a southern window that looks out on the street, the place where I eat, the piano, the Druze chest by the door, the window out onto the garden…the location of the blue jay nest under the wild grapevine, the woodchuck hole, the wrenhouse, the yellow jacket nest under the tomatoes. I think it might tell you more. But, then, my map seems to be becoming words.
There's an excellent article by Charles Glass about Syrian politics and people's daily realities on the online archive of The London Review of Books.
Dr. Dean and Cherry Garcia: a city reporter tries to understand "Vermont Style" -- this story in yesterday's New York Times was very amusing to me, and probably confusing to others. Don't miss the accompanying multimedia slide show. (Thanks, E.)
Last night we saw a terrific movie: Real Women Have Curves, about the youngest daughter in a family of Mexican immigrants living in present-day L.A. Great performances, especially by the young lead actress, and a wonderful screenplay. For the past couple of nights I had been reading the current issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin, in which there was a stereotype-exploding article, "Rethinking the Melting Pot", by Daisy Machado, about so-called "Latino" culture in America. The author quoted a poem by Pat Mora, and it reminded me of the women in the movie:
Desert Women
Desert women know about survival. Fierce heat and cold have burned and thickened our skin. Like cactus we've learned to hoard, to sprout deep roots, to seem asleep, yet wake at the scent of softness in the air, to hide pain and loss by silence, no branches wail or whisper our sad songs safe behind our thorns. Don't be deceived. When we bloom, we stun.
