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, October 31, 2003
Tomorrow morning we're heading to Durham, New Hampshire, where Gene Robinson will be consecrated Bishop of New Hampshire on Sunday. J. and I are doing a photo-essay project on the transition and consecration, and all the attending controversy (I love how the British say "conTROversy). I've never experienced quite this mixture of joy, liberation, pain, sorrow, upheaval, beginnings and endings all twisted together around an institutional event. None of us know quite what will happen on Sunday. Those of you who pray - please pray for all of us.
On Monday, insh'allah, we will head up to Montreal for a week of vacation, regrouping, and editing time. I plan to be blogging at least intermittently, so please keep checking, and I hope to post my impressions of the consecration, as well as a piece for tomorrow's Ecotone topic, "Coffee Shop as Place". If you'd like to join in, just post a link to your response at the Ecotone Wiki.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
It's a half-hour of in-between time; I just finished changing my clothes so I can go out tonight, my work is done enough that I can leave, but there's twenty minutes before I need to. It's a quiet evening here tonight, dark early because of the time change, cool but not cold. This room is bright with warm incandescent light on books and wood and the red rug, but I stood for a few minutes in the window, looking out at the night beginning to fall over the village. The tree branches are mostly bare now, stretching their twiggy fingers against the sky, more themselves than ever. How do trees have so many branches, and sub-branches, twigs and twiglets? So many leaves, now fallen, so many buds already beginning the long wait that will take them through frost and snow and the icestorms of early spring to become the next crop of leaves. The trees are beautiful tonight: silent, inky black, dignified. The sky -- a perfect bowl of liquid light, without a single wisp of cloud, shading from deepest blue at the zenith, to apricot, to rose. There is the moon, a waxing crescent, and reddish Mars, in the east; the trees, mostly maples and oaks, a Norway spruce all the way across the block, in silhouette; the white-clapboarded houses; a picket fence; a neighbor's porch-light spilling onto his yard, shining the fat pumpkin on the porch steps. Not much traffic, no children, no cats. Just quiet, waiting.
5:33 PM
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Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Poor people in Lahore, Pakistan, use handouts of milk to break their Ramadan fast. From "The Day in Pictures" at the BBC.
RAMADAN MUBARAK, RAMADAN KAREEM
At our interfaith gathering today we talked about Ramadan. I asked my Arab-speaking Muslim friends a question I'd been wondering about: when do you say "Ramadan Mubarak" and when do you say "Ramadan Kareem", since people (both in person and in the comments here) had used both. They told us that the word "mubarak" is used in a congratulatory sense for many occasions - a wedding, a birth - as well as for Ramadan. It's a general greeting for good wishes. "Kareem" has more of a meaning of "blessed", so if you want to say something a bit more religious, wishing someone a "blessed Ramadan" rather than just a "happy" one, you'd use "kareem".
One of my friends also spoke about taqwa , which is the state one wishes to be in as he or she approaches God during Ramadan. He remarked how difficult this word is to adequately translate into English, and later wrote me an e-mail that suggested "a state of wonder, dread, and reverence" all at once. He's right - this is untranslatable with a single word, although "awe" probably comes closest - but what a powerful concept.
There was a new couple with us today. Both had spent much of their adult lives in the Middle East. B. had lived in Afghanistan for 22 years, and I. had taught English in Turkey, Iran, the UAE, and Pakistan. I noticed that when B. spoke about Ramadan, she said "Ramzan". Nancy Gandhi, at Under The Fire Star in Chennai, also had a post recently about Ramadan on the Indian subcontinent, and my intrepid friend LanguageHat then explained the D/Z thing. Take a look, it's fascinating.
qB at FrizzyLogic has an excellent recent post going into greater depth about Kandinsky and the reasons for his sensitivity to other art forms:
Kandinsky had a form of synaesthesia, specifically, the neurological condition where sensory input to one sense also produces a response in another sense. In his case, seeing sounds, for instance music, as colours...
A very different take on the moon from Tony Anthony at Beneath Buddha's Eyes (post of Oct 20)
Conscientious linked to Susan Sontag's acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade). I've read far less of Sontag's oeuvre than I'd like to admit, but I admire her writing and thought a great deal. This speech, about the "great divide" between Europe and America, is really an essay that touches on some of what we've been discussing here, especially the links between literature and activism; it's well worth your time.
A good deal of my life has been devoted to trying to demystify ways of thinking that polarize and oppose. Translated into politics, this means favoring what is pluralistic and secular. Like some Americans and many Europeans, I would far prefer to live in a multilateral world --- a world not dominated by any one country (including my own). I could express my support, in a century that already promises to be another century of extremes, of horrors, for a whole panoply of meliorist principles --- in particular, for what Virginia Woolf calls "the melancholy virtue of tolerance..."
The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the "intellectual ambassador," the human rights activist --- those roles which are mentioned in the citation for this prize, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more skeptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support) the right thing...
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted --- made cynical, superficial --- by this understanding. -- Susan Sontag
And finally, the culinarily-adventuresome should not miss Mary's answer to my question of "what is Kedgeree..." -- her recipe is at Mint Tea and Sympathy
The Cassandra Pages had a banner week last week, with a record number of comments, in particular. I also had some off-blog correspondence with readers, one of whom brought up my previous comment about not wanting to talk about politics on the blog, and I wanted to elaborate on that a little.
Prior to starting this blog in March, 2003, I had spent much of the previous 2 1/2 years writing about politics and working on peace and justice and anti-war efforts. I ran an e-mail listserve about Middle Eastern politics and American foreign policy that attempted to provide background, historical information, and some cultural and religious understanding in addition to a weekly editorial commentary and links to the best articles that week from the world press - especially including articles from non-Western sources. This was a pretty consuming task, in addition to my professional work, but I loved it. I was also organizing and leading a monthly interfaith gathering for prayer and discussion (which I still do), and participating in Women in Black, and going to many, many lectures, films, demonstrations...
But after the war in Iraq and the triumphalism of the Right, and blindfolded acceptance of administration policies by so much of the population here in America, I began to burn out. My views didn't change, of course, but I had to take a break. and I also needed to step back and ask what was happening to me - what was my responsibility to my own gifts that I had pressed into political service, but which were really meant for other areas of endeavor? I hadn't written a poem or personal essay that wasn't political in two years. I hadn't made a painting or done a drawing. I needed to try to rediscover my own center and recharge myself, find some joy in the middle of so much world pain. I was depressed, discouraged, frustrated, and I needed to take care of myself.
To some extent that meant going deeper, not escaping, although trying to escape was always tempting.( I recognized that real escape was impossible.) I wanted to get back to my own touchstones of art, literature, music, and nature, and to writing about the human spirit in relationship to those things. When I eventually started the blog and saw it begin to take shape, I gradually realized that this kind of work is crucial for my own emotional and intellectual health, but it's also another way to be political. Our ignorance of one another leads both to self-centeredness and arrogance; it breeds fear, and fear breeds violence. Building cultural bridges, opening up opportunities for dialogue, and concentrating on what we all share as human beings, rather than what divides us, is essential not only for our own souls but for the future. The lessons I'd learned doing interfaith work could be expanded into a larger sphere.
The flurry of passionate, searching comments last week indicates to me not so much that we need to talk politics, per se, as that many of us need to talk about how to protect our own tender, hurting spirits while discussing what we can do to be compassionate, creative, engaged members of the human race. I have no problem discussing that here; I just don't want to use this space to do what I was doing before - political reportage and specific commentary - others are doing that very well. Please feel free to say whatever you want to in the comments, however. I don't want to censor what is said there - within reason, of course! - and I actually feel honored that the discussion of late has been on such a high level. We have an international community of readers here, and that's part of the beauty of it - we need to be able to share our perspectives openly and learn from each other and I'm very grateful for your participation.
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." -- the current "thought for today" from the spirituality section of The Times of India.
10:31 AM
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As you'll read in yesterday's post, Ramadan will begin soon. If you're interested in how the sighting of the new moon is calculated, here is a website that has lots of details about it. There's also a lot of other information, such as "what does the Qu'ran say about the moon?" and "What does the Qu'ran say about astronomy?" We owe a great deal of our early knowledge of astronomy to Arab and Islamic astronomers, whose interest in studying the heavens was motivated, at least in part, by the Qu'ran itself.
"In the creation of the heavens and earth, and the alternation of the night and day, and the ships which sail the seas to people's benefit, and the water which Allah sends down from the sky -- by which He brings the earth to life when it was dead and scatters about in it creatures of every kind -- and the varying direction of the winds, and the clouds subservient between heaven and earth, there are signs for people who use their intellect." (Qu'ran, Sura 2:164)
12:29 AM
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qB at 
