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, November 22, 2003 One of Maya Lin's original drawings from her proposal for the Vietnam Memorial.
Last night we watched a documentary about Maya Lin, the architect/sculptor who created the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. I've admired Lin for a long time, not only for her vision but for her sheer courage at standing up to huge pressure and criticism when she won the design contest (out of 1,491 entries) for the Vietnam memorial at the age of 20, while still a student at Yale:
"It was while I was at the site that I designed it. I just sort of visualized it. It just popped into my head. Some people were playing Frisbee. It was a beautiful park. I didn't want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don't fight with it. You absorb the landscape . . .
"I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it."
How many of you have been to that memorial? I've gone a couple of times, and broken up each time despite my determination not to. It was the same, watching the film last night, and seeing veterans and their families standing, weeping, touching the Wall, as well as other people, like me, whose worldview was shaped by growing up during that war. Part of the brilliance of Lin's design is the way that you, and the world of trees and grass around you, are reflected in the black granite surface of the Wall, behind the litany of names. No monument with heroic mounted generals, this. The reality is inescapable: we were all in this war, we are all part of this list of names.
Reading the news I have to wonder if we have learned anything. It certainly seems that the people today wielding power have not; they are cut out of the same cloth as all rulers who have impoverished their people throughout history, and sent their young men off to fight in their wars of empire. But although it may not be apparent yet, I think people, even in this myopic country, have learned a few things. They're less trusting and more cynical about the government, and less tolerant of casualties. And I doubt they would ever accept a draft again - a draft of which we've heard the first rumblings this week. Those of you in other countries may wonder what it would take to wake this country up. That's one thing that would do it. Mounting casualties and an unwinnable war are others. Those of us who lived through Vietnam haven't forgotten what it was like.
Enough about politics! There's a pound cake and a loaf of date-nut bread in the oven, chicken marinating in a lemongrass/fish soy/brown sugar/lime/chili sauce, cilantro waiting to be chopped, and jasmine rice that needs to soak. Outside the window, the sky light is fading in that brief moment between dusk and the emergence of the first stars. As I wrote to a friend, last night the Pleiades hung over the house like a brooch pinned on velvet, Orion stretched his bow, and the Milky Way spanned the sky. Tonight should be the same. I can neither read the stars nor see my reflection in the black surface of the heavens, but it always feels as if, somehow, I'm meant to.
5:00 PM
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Friday, November 21, 2003
ILLUSION?
Our beautiful world. This is Karaj, Iran, in May. From Tehran24 (photos of Tehran everyday, and an archive of other locations in Iran.)
Thursday, November 20, 2003
MR BUSH GOES TO LONDON
Yes, I know, I have repeatedly said this is not a political blog, but its hostess is actually extremely political; she's just trying to stay sane by writing about other things. So today, while our dear president is in London hiding behind unprecedented security, and Istanbul, among other locations, is exploding, let us at least join our British friends in solidarity with their protest.
Visit Coup de Vent at London and the North; she is at the demonstrations and has been posting some of her always-excellent pictures.
Blaugustine is also at the protest - no pictures yet, but I am sure she will be writing an account.
From The Guardian, 60 letters to President Bush from British and American citizens (via Conscientious).
1:07 PM
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Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Most of my blogging time today has gone into a discussion, both on- and off-blog, of yesterday's post. So I'd like to call people's attention to the comments from yesterday, especially to the questions raised by Dale's provocative note:
Sometimes I think of the destruction of everything unmarketed and authentic is a calamity. But sometimes I think Capitalism's doing us a huge (unintended) favor: showing us the impermanence and artificiality of all worldly things. This world ain't home, and nothing makes that point more clearly, to me, than water-features and fake barns. Ludicrous attempts to make artificial homes: but not much more ludicrous than my own attempts to make my mind at home in this life. What are my attempts to surround myself with approving friends and reassuring books, but my own mental water-features and fake barns?
What do you think? Is the world "home", or are all worldly things artifical and illusionary? And depending on where you come down in that argument, what is our responsibility?
7:02 PM
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Tuesday, November 18, 2003 ECOTONE TOPIC for November 15
How Visitors Affect Your View of Place
My earliest memory of being “visited” was a parents’ day in grade school. My parents were in our classroom, sitting along one wall near my regular seat, when I opened my flip-top desk. My father gasped. Loudly. I, of course, immediately turned bright red, and wanted to sink through the floor. He was right – my desk was a total disaster. But it was, after all, my desk. And because it was mine, and not connected to my room at home, I’d thought of it as private, not subject to the “pick-up-your-room” comments that were commonplace back in our house.
Housekeeping never did become a major priority in my life, although I like having things neat, and wish they were neater than they usually are. I did learn to pick up after myself, and am glad my parents dinned this concept into me. But I’ve always made a preferential choice when it comes to prioritizing housework, and my intellectual or creative life. It wasn’t a far step, therefore, from my second-grade desk to my adult kitchen. Shortly after I had married, I once spotted my new mother-in-law’s car pulling up outside. I quickly shoveled all the dishes from the sink into the oven, and went to calmly greet her at the door.
I do often see my personal space through the imaginary eyes of impending visitors; the cobwebs and dust become suddenly visible as well as the clutter and neglected tasks: the tiles that never made it up on the kitchen walls, the unsanded floorboards, the peeling trim on the doorframes. But I made a decision long ago that if people didn’t like me for myself, they weren’t going to be swayed by an impeccable house, nor did I want them as friends if this was how they were going to judge me.
It’s different, though, seeing the larger place where you live through people who come to visit, especially when you live in a postcard like we do. Visitors come here wanting to see the autumn leaves, or New England villages with white church steeples and narrow-clapboarded buildings; they want ducks on a river, and Christmas trees and sleigh rides; they want to drive through covered bridges and stop beside slightly ramshackle red barns with a thin heifer or two in the pasture – or, better yet, a flock of sheep - fenced in by old stone walls. Like most people who live here, we have a little “tour” that includes such sights, and satisfies guests that they’ve seen the real thing.
What they don’t know, and don’t want to know, is that in a neighboring town there is just one working farm remaining, compared to dozens a couple of decades ago. Or that the farms, residences, cemetery and dairy that lined the road between here and the university town exist now only in memory. I’ve watched them disappear, one by one, eaten up by bulldozers and their spawn: condominiums, dental offices, mail-order warehouses, upscale nurseries and farmstands bursting with pumpkins and cornstalks, a centralized elementary school. This is the new “New England” reality for the suburban and city people who move here, wanting their own piece of the country and bringing urban values and expectations that contribute inexorably to the diminution of rural life. For them a myth has replaced history: “new” stone walls, “water features” that imitate waterfalls, fake barns, pseudo-post-and-beam office buildings with white vinyl siding. A little further out into the country, new “colonial” homes sprout on five-acre sub-development plots, and older, gracious homesteads are turned into “gentleman’s farms” with Jacuzzis in the master bedroom suites, and horse barns for thoroughbreds instead of plowhorses. They exist not to impress the locals -- that would be absurd – but to impress a new crop of visitors from the city or suburb, and to convince the owner that he or she has finally “arrived”.
The disappearance of authenticity and its replacement by shallow, Disney-land theme-park imitations, no matter how expensive or detailed, makes me exhausted and sad. These concepts of “place” are dependent on the judgments of others: the visitor. They are something we can pursue if we read the right magazines, or acquire if we have enough money. They’ve become part of a marketed reality.
Maybe that’s why I like my virtual place, my blog. Here I can be fat or skinny, pimply or beautiful, neat or slovenly, and you won’t know or care. You will know, I think, if I’m telling the truth, if I’m speaking with integrity, if I’m revealing my heart. There is no authority that determines what my blog should look like, no design avant-garde to set artificial standards of chic-ness. You come here, or don’t, based on the content and based on how coming here makes you feel. It’s free, and pretty real: no games. I like that.
Last night I had a dream in which I discovered a box with small, non-identical partitions wrapped on their vertical sides with shiny red paper, and inside them were small Capuchin monks wearing robes and those tight brown medieval caps with a chin-strap, sleeping. They were somewhat like little squirrels. But this was a scary dream, and I don't remember why, although in the night I swore to myself I would remember and write it down.
8:55 PM
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WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE DOING HERE?
Poetry Chat and Blogging: Nick Piombino writes about the differences he sees between conversations in a particular poetry chat room, and blogging.
While you're there, read Nick's fascinating comments on a recent article in the London Review of Books (which I haven't gotten to yet) about Montaigne:
In discussing Hartle's book, Colin Burrow makes a point I liked very much. In saying that he feels that Montaigne is definitely not a philosopher, he makes the point that "...This does not mean, however that the *Essays* should be regarded simply as autobiographical writing. They are much more than either philosophy or autobiography, and should be thought of as belonging to a form of discourse which is more or less unnameable (unless one names it the essay), in which what is said is much less significant than the process by which it is said, and in which the movement of the mind matters more than the propositions that are advanced.
And then you might check out the speculative musings at commonbeauty about the desire for a new writing form:
I feel stirring within myself the beginnings of a manifesto, a call for a new kind of writing, maybe even a new arm of publishing that is devoted to excellent writers whose literary devotion is to a more modest project (and yet, less modest) than that of the novelist: mapping the peregrinations of their own minds.
Sunday, November 16, 2003 Untitled photograph by Naghmeh Jaberi, Iran, from her photo essay on the lives of women in Iran's northern provinces near the Caspian Sea.
The Ramadan dinner was a delicious adventure in Persian cooking, with fragrant chicken in turmeric, a beef and sabzi khoresh (stew of beef and green herbs), and jasmine rice with saffron, barberries, orange peel, slivered almonds, and pistachios. Then came dessert, a special and traditional saffron-flavored and colored pudding served with Iranian cookies and tea. That was when one of the guests started to talk about religion and engage the Muslims in theological debate. It gradually became apparent that he was a born-again, fundamentalist Christian (an articulate, seemingly affable and worldly man in his seventies) whose purpose in accepting the hosts' generous invitation for a special dinner was conversion.
I have never felt closer to my Muslim friends; I was appalled, embarrassed, and ultimately very angry at this man's behavior, despite the fact that we were all trying very hard to be cordial, patient and polite. I wanted to protect my friends from what felt very much like violence and great disrespect; as a result I'm sure the evening ended with him being sure I was as far from salvation as the Muslims! Thank God we have been having real interfaith dialogue, based on finding common ground, and have become good enough friends that this won't erode all the trust and friendship that has been built up over a long time. But when I called the hostess afterwards to apologize and commiserate, I couldn't deny that this was the sort of belief held by many people in the American administration today.
Before dinner, I joined the magrib prayer. My friend Shirin and I were side by side, and I felt that she was really praying for us both, since I don't understand the Arabic she was reciting, but I go through the postures with her. We both like doing this; we feel very close despite all the cultural and religious differences. I was thinking of all the Muslim friends I've been privileged to know through this relationship, especially people who have been in our local community for a year or two and then moved elsewhere or gone back to their original countries. I remembered their faces and manner with great affection. And then I felt a wave of longing for our world, for the ways in which we fail to make these bridges, to know each other as human beings, to love one another and strive for peace. I found myself asking for the strength to keep doing that as much as I can - and I was surprised to find easy tears running down my face.
When I opened my eyes, the others had gone back upstairs, and Shirin's husband was putting a new log in the woodstove at the end of the room. He looked at me with kindness. "May your prayers be answered," he said, and I thanked him, hoping the same.
It had been a much more religious experience than I had had in church this morning.
10:00 PM
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After spending the morning in church, we're off to a Ramadan party this afternoon with our Muslim friends. I just called to ask what time they break their fast, and what time the prayers are, because I wanted to join in the prayers. Magrib, the late afternoon prayer, done at the time when the sun sets, is at about 4:25 today. My friend told me that they would be breaking the fast (with the traditional snack of dates) a little earlier, and then praying.
There's an interesting language aspect here - note that the word "magrib" is the same as "magreb", like "the Magreb", or the North Africanan states such as Tunisia and Morocco. This was where those in the original Arab world of the Middle East saw the sun setting, and thus it became the name for the coinciding prayer, one of five prayers performed every day. Maybe a native Arabic speaker can further illuminate this word for us.
In the meantime, here is a link to a fascinating account of an evening of prayer during Ramadan in Iran, by a Christian woman who, like myself, was trying to learn more about Islam.
