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, September 12, 2003 Roger Bissiere, Le Soleil (The Sun), 1960. Linocut printed in 8 colours from 3 blocks
A couple of orders for new (in some cases, used) books have been arriving. I bought my own copies of several of the Polish poets, the Elaine Pagels book, and then, at Powell's, found some used copies of three that sounded interesting: Rozewicz's "The Card Index and other Plays" (he is as well known for his plays and for his poems), and Zbigniew Herbert's "Still Life with a Bridle" (about 17th century Dutch art) and "Barbarian in the Garden", Herbert's essays on the art and culture of France and italy. he, apparently, is "the barbarian". And - synchronicity again - what is the first essay about? Lascaux:
Lascaux is not on any map. It does not exist, at least not inthe same sense as London or Radom. One had to enquire at the Musee de l'homme in Paris to learn its location.
I went in early spring. the Vezere Valley was rising in its fresh, unfinished green. Fragments of landscape seen through the bus window resembled canvases by Bissiere. A texture of tender green.
Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles...
I knew nothing about the painter Roger Bissiere. It turns out that he lived from 1888-1964, exhibited regularly at the Paris salons from 1919 on, painting in a Cubist style and then returning to Classical values. He was also a journalist, and wrote the first monograph on Georges Braque, and also published articles on Seurat, Ingres and Corot. There wasn't a lot of his work on the web, but I liked what I saw, especially this portrait and some later abstractions.
I’m working in bed on my brand new laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 600 and I love it, but that’s coming from someone for whom hardware is very much a tool and not a particular interest. J. really put it together for me, asking a lot of questions, and I have to say that I’m thrilled and grateful. My work involves increasing amounts of writing, interviewing, research, and the need for wireless access, and this is going to free me from being tethered to my desk. It’s also very powerful and has an excellent screen, so I can run programs like InDesign and work on it very easily. I can also stay in bed late, drink coffee, and write…well, that’s the fantasy!
Maybe you’d like to take a quick peek at my bedside table, all you out there who wouldn’t dream of opening up someone’s medicine chest or sneaking a look into their bedroom. Let’s see: this is going to be a long list, I’m not the neatest person in the world. OK. On the table we have Reading Lolita in Tehran, and on top of that, a red tomato-shaped pincushion, my transparent bug-green traveling alarm clock, and a Canadian “Asia Phone” calling card. A couple of pens, a smoky grey plastic barrette, two emery boards, a brass-handled rubber-tip gum stimulator, a bottle of skin lotion and another one of K-Y jelly. The rest, except for a box of tissues, is reading material: in a pile, a bunch of New Yorkers and Christian Centuries; a spiral-bound notebook; Volume Two of Richardson’s biography of Picasso; Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief; and Growing Shrubs and Small Trees in Cold Climates.
Lined up behind a red leather bookend that was always in my parents’ den, we have books partially read: the Beckett Trilogy, Textual Sources for the Study of Islam; Flaubert’s Sentimental Education; Arab Folk Tales; essays by Eqbal Ahmad; Homecoming, by Jiro Osaragi; Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter; Shakespeare’s History Plays; and Thomas Merton’s The Ascent to Truth. Under the tissue box there’s Ulysses (ever hopeful); A Dictionary for Episcopalians, The Chosen, and Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? All the Polish stuff is downstairs on my desk, but it used to be on this table too. On the floor – no books! congratulations! – a pair of cheap red Chinese brocade slippers, my black sandals, and a pair of blue transparent flip-flops.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL in 1959. From the Ratner Center collection.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, rabbi, theologian, and civil rights activist, was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. Last night I began reading a book of his collected essays entitled Moral Grandeaur and Spiritual Audacity. I was reading it in order to be able to moderate a discussion on Sunday, but the clarity and directness and relevance of his thought propelled me into a kind of theological devouring that's pretty rare, despite the large number of "spirituality and religion books" that pass across my bedside table.
And of course there is the synchronicity - that word keeps coming up - of finding the writing of this Eastern European Jew, a refugee who lost his mother, sister, and many other relatives in the Holocaust, just when I have been reading all that Polish poetry, mainly by Christians, and searching in it for answers to how people live and maintain faith in spite of senseless suffering. In fact, Heschel's clear explanation of what it means to be a Jew is one of the most enlightening parts of the book. And his impassioned preaching about our work in the world, our reason to be, reaches across all religious boundaries.
I have a feeling that I'll be quoting quite a bit here; for tonight, here's an excerpt:
The Bible is an answer to the supreme question: What does God demand of us? Yet the question has gone out of this world. God is portrayed as a mass of vagueness behind a veil of enigmas, and his voice has become alien to our minds, to our hearts, to our souls. We have learned to listen to every ego except the "I" of God...
On my road trip, I listened to a six-cassette tape of Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka as the child of Dutch-Ceylonese parents. He’s probably best known as the author of The English Patient. Eight years after that book won the Booker Prize, he published Anil’s Ghost, about a forensic anthropologist (a woman named Anil Tissara) working for a human rights organization who returns to her native Sri Lanka to investigate the “disappearances” in which thousands of Sri Lankans were tortured and murdered by the warring insurgents and by the government itself. Anil’s story is, in some way, Ondaatje’s story, and it is almost unbearably sad: as the book says, “No one could remember what the war was supposed to be about. The reason for war had become war.” (More on human rights in Sri Lanka)
At first I thought, “can I really stand this as my travelling companion?” But as the story continued, I began not only to be curious about what would happen, and to admire the writing enormously, but to respond to the book’s human, believable, lyrical, and beautiful aspects – it’s a hymn, in a way, to the ancient history of the country, and also to everything about the landscape and people that strike Anil’s senses as she returns with fresh eyes. I too was “going home” to a place that is quite different from where I live now, and filled with my own memories and ghosts. It seemed both odd and comforting to hear someone else’s story, from halfway around the world, for much of the book is personal, and much more involved with absence, dislocation, and return, than with war. It is, most of all, a book about “place” and its effect on personal identity.
Archaeology and ancient Ceylonese art are the other major themes. Along with Anil, there are three other main characters: the archaeology professor who becomes her investigative partner and guide; his brother and alter-ego who has no personal life but is a brilliant surgeon, working inhuman hours to save victims and sew up the wounds of war; and a native artist/craftsman who is one of a long line of eye-painters. I had never known about eye-painting, and when Ondaatje explained it, I gasped.
When the giant Buddha statues are carved and erected, the last task is for the eyes to be painted; only then does the statue become “alive”. There is an ancient ritual connected to this act; only certain masters are allowed to do the work, and they are dressed in particular clothes, surrounded by certain ceremonies, and perform the painting only at a particular time of day. Most importantly, once the painter has climbed the scaffold to the level of the statue’s eyes, he must turn around, and while his assistant holds a mirror, paint the eyes holding the brush behind his head, looking only at the reflected image. As in the Egyptian desert of The English Patient, the ancient stones of Sri Lanka are alive and filled with spiritual significance for Ondaatje. The whole book, it seemed to me, was another attempt to find meaning in the midst of senseless death and suffering: through love, through dedication to one’s work, through efforts toward justice, through art, and through simplicity of life.
I also have to say that I was stunned by the performance of the reader, the actor Alan Cumming; it reminded me how much I love hearing literature read aloud and how difficult it is to do well; this is a spell-binding rendition, eight hours long.
8:40 PM
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Monday, September 08, 2003
Corn defines central New York State in early September. The corn plants are taller than an NBA center, intoxicatingly fragrant with pollen, deep green of leaves and yellow-brown of tassels, undulating like ocean waves upon the broad valley floors, riding the curves of the hills, following the paths of streams, roads, woods, rivers. There are fields of blue-green cabbages, soybeans, potatoes, pumpkins, and green hay lying striped and cut, baled hay in great drying shredded-wheat packages dotting the fields, or stacked in piles near cowbarns. But the dominant crop is corn, around every bend in the road. It begins in people's backyards and stretches out to the horizon; in one small town the corn fields began on the edge of the sidewalk between two houses. In the evening, when the air is heavy and damp with humidity, you can taste the corn pollen in your mouth from fields two miles away. At night, raccoons and their young raid the corn fields, some never making it back across the highway. And in the morning you can hear the faint honk of geese, feeding in the same fields.
Coming home, I thought about how this landscape's smells, shape, and sounds are imprinted on my body forever. How does that happen, and when? Does it happen to everyone, even if we aren't conscious of it?
One morning, alone for a few minutes, I walked along the edge of the lake in my bare feet, feeling the warmth of the flat flagstones my father has placed along the shoreline and the dampness of the spongy sphagnum growing in the grass. I lay down on my back and shut my eyes, soaking the stones' heat into my back while the sun beat on one side of my face and body, and stretched out a hand, fingers trailing into the water. I felt myself floating into an indeterminate time: was I ten, or sixteen, or fifty? I knew that beyond my fingers, a sunfish would be lurking, curious, staring at my pale flesh. A large spider would be hiding in the stone wall. Overhead, a kingfisher was probably waiting to launch itself, screeching, across the water. These things hadn't changed. I was the one who had -- or maybe not. Maybe not as much as I thought, or feared. I opened my eyes, turned my head, and looked into the water. There was the sunfish, pale yellow and blue, holding itself still and gazing up toward my face, distorted by the surface. I wiggled my fingers. "Come on," I said, quietly. "They're delicious."
In the end, Rozewicz comes down on the side of earth and flesh, and praises that which he can: humanity, and specifically those human beings who continue in spite of suffering and calamity. His preference is never more clear than in the poem "Old Women", one of the most famous of Rozewicz’s oeuvre. It’s too long to quote in full, but here are a few representative lines:
old women are immortal
Hamlet rages in the net Faust’s role is comic and base Raskolnikov strikes with his axe
old women are insdestructible they smile indulgently
a god dies old women get up as usual buy fish bread and wine civilization dies old women get up at dawn open windows and remove the filth a man dies they wash the corpse bury the dead plant flowers on graves…
…their sons discover America perish at Thermopylae die on crosses conquer the cosmos
old women go out at dawn to buy milk bread meat they season the soup and open the windows
