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.
What I want from my experience of writing is to discover what I want from life and writing and what I want to have with and from others. Not to proclaim it: to discover it. It goes without saying that approaching art this way means keeping this an open question. This is difficult living in a culture like ours, but not impossible, with more than a little help from my friends.
I just realized that what you are getting at about objects also has to do with the idea of the materiality of the "book" and how that connects with materialism. I have always been troubled by the materialistic aspect of culture and the whole book culture, and the culture of competition and the frequently artificial creation of reputations is part of all of this...[read more]
People have asked, OK, so what books did you buy yesterday?
Two books: Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hanh, and Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, by the late Shunryu Suzuki. I've been wanting to own the former for a while, and was delighted to find the latter, since Shunryu Suzuki's famous Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was a seminal book for me. I didn't know anything else of his had been collected or published, but there were two relatively new books in the store, both posthumous collections of Suzuki's dharma talks and sandokai (question-and-answer sessions). More on Branching Streams soon, I'm sure.
For now, here is the beginning of Living Buddha, Living Christ:
Religious Life is Life
Twenty years ago at a conference I attended of theologians and professors of religion, an Indian Christian friend told the assembly, "We are going to hear about the beauties of several traditions, but that does not mean we are going to make a fruit salad." When it came my turn to speak, I said, "Fruit salad can be delicious! I have shared the Eucharist with Father Daniel Berrigan, and our worship became possible because of the sufferings we Vietnamese and Americans shared over many years." Some of the Buddhists present were shocked to hear I had participated in the Eucharist, and many Christians seemed truly horrified. To me religious life is life. I do not see any reason to spend one's whole life tasting just one kind of fruit. We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions.
Professor Hans Kung has said, "Until there is peace between religions, there can be no peace in the world." People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result. The second precept of the Order of Interbeing, founded within the Zen Buddhist tradition during the war in Vietnam, is about letting go of views: "Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others' viewpoints." To me, this is the most essential practice of peace.
I wrote a long piece about the current debate within Anglicanism, but decided not to post it, because I don't want to engage in political debate in this blog. However, I do want to say I am appalled and saddened by the conservatives who threaten to walk away over the issue of ordaining a homosexual bishop who is honest enough to admit his orientation and lifestyle.
None of us knows the whole truth. Until we die, our choice here on earth is to love one another, or to be divided: Jew against Muslim, Sunni against Shiia, Catholic against Protestant, Anglican against Anglican, atheist against believer. I wish we could all take Thich Nhat Hanh's words to heart.
5:08 PM
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Thursday, October 16, 2003 Autumn in Hanoi by Pham An Hai, 2003, oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm from Contemporary Art in Vietnam, via plep
Autumn in Hanoi looks beautiful but cold. Autumn in New England has been magnificient. And, sadly, it is ending. Last night we had a rushing gale that shook the windowpanes with wind and lashing rain, and this morning, when the skies cleared, many of the leaves were on the ground. Late in the afternoon I drove north, taking in the last of the spectacular scenery: deep blue mountains in the east outlined against a grey sky below white clouds, with blue patches and a brilliant sun in the west; fields of intense chartreuse; trees of orange, red, and gold; the river reflecting the drama of the sky. I was filled with many thoughts as I drove, and although the scene was breathtaking, I didn't feel peaceful. For some reason I decided to drive two more exits north and then turned around in a small village (by small, I mean a general store/post office and five or six white-framed houses, with hardly a cup of coffee to be found). I stopped the car, tried to make a phone call ("No Service", the cell phone screen informed me), and turned around. Heading up the hill out of town back toward the interstate, I saw a small sign: "Meditation Cushions and Gifts". There is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in a nearby town, and part of my brain had considered stopping there, but I didn't have time. I did, however, have time for a look at this store, so I turned around again. As soon as I pushed the door open and heard the tinkling of the temple bell, I knew it was a fortuitous decision. The store was bright, filled with the smell of sandelwood incense and the sound of running water from a little fountain. Cleanly handmade shelves of light pine held teacups and pots in celadon and blue, brass incense burners and bells, brocade runners and garments, meditation beads, incense, sumi calligraphy supplies, music, the company's signature zafus (meditation cushions). And arrayed on tall shelves all along the back wall were hundreds of books on Buddhism, meditation practice, and related subjects. I browsed for a while while conversation drifted in from the zafu production crew working in an adjoining room, and finally went to the counter with two books.
I headed back onto the highway through two slanting, towering cuts of black shale that I had drawn from memory in charcoal many years ago; they had seemed then, and seemed again today, to represent the psychological walls we sometimes face in life: walls that Buddhism showed me were of my own construction. How curious that this unexpected discovery had turned into the destination of my journey today! My own zafu had come from this place, by mail order, years ago, and it seemed that I was being told, gently but firmly, that perhaps sitting back down on it might be a good thing to do right now.
7:51 PM
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Wednesday, October 15, 2003
This is a contribution to the ECOTONE Topic for today, "Place Names".
Odysseus lashed to the mast while tempted by the Sirens (on a red-figure vase in the British Museum)
PLACE NAMES Listening with rapt attention to my mother reading a child’s version of The Iliad and The Odyssey, I couldn’t have predicted that the nine-year-old girl I was then would grow up to study classics – or, for that matter, give a “virtual place” someday the name The Cassandra Pages. Place names are supposed to tell us something about history, but how often does our own history get caught up in theirs? In my case I think it did, to some extent, giving me a tacit permission to do something out-of-the-ordinary with my life, and to identify with a history that went even further back than the colonial and Indian names that also made up the map of my childhood world.
It’s impossible to ignore the native American legacy in central New York. The beautiful Iroquois names that trip musically off the tongues of local people and confound newcomers -- Susquehanna, Chenango, Unadilla, Chittenango, Canasawacta, Oswego, Sacandaga, Canajoharie, Skaneateles (give up? you say “skinny-AT-las”) – are just one part of a local culture that has never moved very far away from woodsman lore and craft, hunting and fishing for food more than sport, and interest in early history, artifacts, and antiques.
The Dutch colonists gave their own names to the early settlements in the Albany region (Rensselaer, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Watervliet), but as you move west in the state, they give way to British place names brought by settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut who were moving westward (Hartford, Norwich, Oxford) and names that commemorate famous American colonial figures (Hamilton, Madison, Herkimer). The area I grew up in was still “frontier” at the time of the American Revolution; in fact when I was in Cooperstown a few weeks ago I saw an exhibit commemorating the 225th anniversary of the infamous Cherry Valley Massacre. This 1778 raid by Indians on a frontier settlement occurred about 40 miles east of my hometown, which in turn wasn’t settled until 1792.
But in addition to the native, European, and early American place names that surrounded me as a child, there were the classical ones: Utica, Syracuse, Cicero, Ithaca, Marathon, Homer. (William R. Farrel has recently written a book called Classical Place Names in New York State: Origins, Histories and Meanings. I haven’t read it yet, but I know some of these names are traceable to Simeon Dewitt, who was Surveyor-General of the State of New York (ca. 1789) and owned of a good deal of land in the Syracuse/Ithaca area.)
The Homeric names my mother was reading to me rang a bell: they were words I’d already heard; towns I’d visited, and somehow that made the Greek stories not only alive and real, but made me a participant in them. I wonder now if that was a subtle influence on me, a little added permission granted by the gods for a bookish, country girl to feel connected to classical history and literature. Of course, my family’s bookshelf had more to do with it, as well as the fact that I had a great-aunt named Minerva -- but the weaving of Ariadne-like threads was never more apparent to me than the momentous day I first opened my copy of The Iliad in a university Greek class, in Ithaca, New York. They wrap me still: here in my office I can look up at a framed page from an early printed edition of The Odyssey -- or reach out my hand to hold an Iroquois axe-head, polished and black, that my grandfather dug up in our garden, on the floodplain of the Chenango River.
4:55 PM
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Tuesday, October 14, 2003 Henri Matisse, The Green Romanian Blouse
I've had a cold or flu, and have been spending quite a bit of time on the couch. Thank God for my laptop and our wireless network! And also for books. One thing I read was "Matisse and Picasso" by Francoise Gilot, who lived with Picasso for many years, is the mother of his children Claude and Paloma, and a painter and writer in her own right. Along with her book I've been looking at several comparative volumes devoted to these two giants. They were far better friends than I had realized: competitors, to be sure, but friends who always kept aware of what the other was doing, and who visited each other for long conversations. Picasso once told Gilot, "When one of us dies, the other will have no one left who understands," and indeed, Picasso was devastated by Matisse's death.
Gilot is a good writer and she has an excellent memory; she also admired Matisse enormously and got along very well with him. In contrast to Picasso, Matisse was gentle, kind, and much more secure; they were both men who loved life but certainly expressed it in different ways.
In art, truth and reality begin when you no longer understand anything you do or know and there remains in you an energy, that much stronger for being balanced by opposition, compressed, condensed. Then you must present it with the greatest humilty, completely white, pure,candid, your brain seeming empty in the spiritual state of a communicant approaching the Lord's table. You clearly must have all your acocmplishments behind you and know how to keep your instinct fresh.
Love...sustains the artist. Love is an important thing, the greatest good which alone lightens that which weighs heavy and enables to bear with an equal spirit that which is unequal. For it carries weight which without it would be a burden, and makes sweet and pleasant all that is bitter. --Henri Matisse
Monday, October 13, 2003 A second reason why the holiness of life is so obscured to modern Christians is the idea that the only holy place is the built church...St. Paul, preaching at Athens (said): "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands..." Idolatry always reduces to the worship of something "made with hands," something confined and with the terms of human work and human comprehension...(but) God is not to be fenced in, he is the wildest being in existence. --Wendell Berry
Yesterday our parish congregation moved back into a newly renovated, added-onto church building. It is quite grand and glorious. The sanctuary itself seems more airy, lighter, and more open, and there is a new organ and lots more room for our choir in the chancel, and a big gathering room, and new offices and meeting rooms, a fine kitchen, and Sunday School rooms, all sprinkled and lighted and bright with paint.
I was on the vestry (that's the elected governing board of an Episcopal Church, made up of lay people) during the years when we were trying to decide whether to build this, and why, and how much to spend. The project was pushed forward by a priest and some wealthy parishioners whose values and theology I did not share, and at the end, I was one of two people who voted against the project. There were parts of the project I felt were very much needed, but many I thought were superfluous luxuries. With war looming in Iraq, Palestine bulldozed into ruins, American inner cities fille dwith drugs and hopelessness, and an entire African continent dying of AIDS, I felt a million and a half dollars elsewhere would represent Christ a whole lot more. I said I believed that our church needed to think about its values and purpose rather than its appearance: what were we doing to welcome others in, and what were we doing outside our own doors to alleviate suffering and hardship? Other parishioners agreed with me, and I felt it was important to represent a strong dissenting minority in the final vote.
But we have a new facility now, and I am able to celebrate it along with my friends, while mourning the wrenching times our parish went through during this period, and the good people we lost in the process. We now have a new priest-in-charge whose theology and style could not be more different from his predecessor, and a national Church that has endorsed ground-breaking inclusiveness.
Ironically, the Gospel reading yesterday was the parable of the rich young man, who is told by Jesus that what he needs to do to inherit eternal life is to sell everything he has, give his money to the poor, and follow. In a fine sermon, our priest spoke of the need to rejoice in what had been accomplished, to give thanks for all the people who had made it happen, and then to immediately begin thinking about the opportunity we are being given to use our bountiful resources of time, treasure, and talent to do God's work in the world. With his leadership, rather than clergy who set obstacles for laity with liberal visions, we are likely to be able to do that.
So today I was fascinated to find Fred's reference to a new essay by Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" - ostensibly a Christian environmentalist's call for responsibility, but actually a much larger call for renewal of Christianity in general. Berry uses the pulpit as a soapbox here, and he thunders like an Old Testament prophet - sometimes too much for his own credibility or good, in my opinion. I doubt that you'll agree with all his points; I certainly did not. But the crux of what he says is both profound and crucial, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has been turned off by Christianity's history of complicity with the Powers that Be, and their destruction of the earth and its creatures.
7:51 PM
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... the images express humble values which some of us still hold in high regard: a simple lifestyle in rhythm with the environment where common sense is the rule of order. However fleeting, these values and the 'Old Florida' of my childhood, and my ancestors, still exists. --Carl Gillette
I'm not the photographer in the family, but if I were, I might do a series on the signs that announce homegrown vegetable stands, not to mention the stands themselves. The topic could be expanded to "lemonade" and "honey" and even "worms and crawlers", or the ubiquitous "FREE" announcing, in New England at the end of summer, a pile of large long green objects better known as zucchini.
The way we go into Canada takes us past huge flat fields where the main crop is corn. Most of the farmers grow some sweet corn as well as "cow corn", for feed, and nearly every farm has a sign announcing "mais sucre" either in words or a picture of a golden ear of corn, or both. When I was back in central New York I noticed a lot of similar signs, all handpainted, including my absolute favorite, a painting of a giant potato with two stars on either side, and the name of the farm family. No word "potato" at all.
I suppose, as someone who's always been interested in type and lettering, there's an inherent fascination with signs themselves, but the real reason I find these icons compelling is what they say about the underlying local culture. In rural areas where people feel secure with themselves and their neighbors, there's a looseness and unselfconsciousness about the signs people make. As soon as people feel they're being judged by others who have more education or more sophistication, they tend to clam up verbally, and they stifle their native expressiveness, at least in public. How sad that is! How much cultural vitality we lose in the process, and how many creative people who were never shy before find themselves tongue-tied and slack-handed when homogeneous mass culture descends with its rulebook of taste.
Around here now, we have "farmer's markets" on Saturdays - real farmers, to be sure, trucking in their perfect produce for city people to buy. They become a tourist attraction, with pumpkins and cornstalks artfully arranged: a photo opportunity. Driving through Woodstock, Vermont, recently, I could barely get through town for the busloads of leaf peepers oohing and ahhing over baskets of apples and gourds under tents on the village green. Having just come from truly rural farm country, where the symbiotic relationship between tourist/urban sophisticate and farmer does not exist, it suddenly struck me as not far from the spectacle of Maasai dancing for tour buses in Africa and offering their beaded jewelery for sale. Like the photographer, Gillette, and his pictures of rural Florida, I am aware of something that's dying, not only for economic reasons but because local people are no longer comfortable with who they are when cultures collide.
7:06 PM
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