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 29, 2003 Just because it's beautiful.
After being in a place that feels like pure Americana for a few days, today I feel like I've been around the world. First there were the blogs to catch up on, and world news. After lunch J. opened a beautiful heavy pomegranate for us, filling a bowl with the glistening, crimson seeds. Then tonight I made tadik (Iranian rice with a crust) and a chicken stew with cilantro, and afterwards we watched a Vietnamese movie called "Vertical Ray of the Sun" - a most beautiful film, full of color and sensitivity, especially toward its women who move through rooms of yellow, pale blue, green and red; prepare vegetables and exotic fruits in leafy gardens; drink tea; care for children; worry; make love. What startled me most about it was the realization that I had no idea of what city life is like now in Saigon or Hanoi; my images of Vietnam are frozen in the 1960s and 1970s, and they are almost all desperately unhappy images of the countryside.
Perhaps this virtual travel to warm places is also a last refuge against the winter, which has come to beat against the windows, chilling our house by the hour until now we are ready to crawl into bed and huddle under the comforter. There have been high winds all day, and snow squalls; back in central New York, my parents report that six inches of snow are on the ground. I'm not ready!
Today, glad for their company, I paid some attention to my plants. A few inches from my hand, the Christmas cactus is in full bloom. On the windowsill, a crown of thorns, and next to them on a table, an overgrown jade plant and my rosemary bush, steadily shedding leaves as it tries to adjust to being indoors. On the coffee table there's a new addition, a big cyclamen filled with blooms so deep pink they are almost red. In a landscape that is about to become monochrome, color is imperative.
9:59 PM
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Friday, November 28, 2003
For the first time since my aunt died, several years ago, my family had Thanksgiving dinner over at the farm where she and my uncle always lived. Uncle Lee is 80 now, still strong and vigorous. He ruefully said he “didn’t work much anymore” but his self-definition apparently doesn’t include the fact that he goes to the barn every morning at 3:00 am for the first milking, and doing a good part of the plowing and planting every summer, as well as overseeing the whole operation. When I was little, I remember seeing his father, at about the same age, heading out to the barn every day in his denims and railroad hat.
The farm has 160 milking cows and a number of young heifers, and many, many acres of fine, productive land. The talk at noon ranged from recent equipment purchases, to methods of storing corn, to the recent tragedy of a neighbor who had lost a barn and 50 head in a terrible fire. One of my uncle’s hired men had gotten trampled by frightened cows. I asked how badly he’d been hurt. My uncle, a man of few words, said, “He said he remembered seein’ one hoof comin’ down on his chest.” Then he added, “When I first saw him his eyes were pretty glassy.”
“How’s he doing?” we asked (the fire was two weeks ago.)
“Oh, still kinda sore. But he’s workin’.”
“Well, what about that time you fell into the heifer pen?” someone asked. My uncle laughed and shook his head. “Oh yeah. You see all those hooves. Hurts quite a bit when they come down on ya.”
We were fifteen for dinner, and we ate in the lace-curtained living room on my aunt’s antique flow-blue china, with oval-framed photographs of my cousins hanging against the flowered wallpaper, and a picture of the farm cows on top of the television. Afterwards I washed dishes in the kitchen with my cousin’s wife, looking out the window through a lilac bush to the barn where the hired men had already arrived for milking. I dropped a white mug into the heavy aluminum pot we were using for a dishpan. It read, “Oneonta Feeds: We Love Your Cows.”
A white-and yellow barn kitten with a hurt paw limped across the lawn in front of the old chicken-shed. I had gone out earlier, stopping to play with this thin kitten, who had runny eyes and fleas but a sweet disposition, and then stood in the milking parlor for a little while to watch the big cows and the hired men and listen to the whoosh of the milking machines.
“Is this the full circle?” I wondered. “Have we gone back to the farm?” Every Thanksgiving of my childhood was celebrated in a nearby town, in the house where my parents and I lived with my grandparents, who had moved from the family farm in Beaver Meadow several decades before I was born. Now we were back on a farm, and I was soon to be in the “great”-generation when my cousin’s daughter has the first child of the next generation in February. Washing the old blue plates, and my grandmother’s silverware, I listened to the young people chattering in the next room, and remembered how old I had thought the great-aunts and grandparents were when I was young. Now, it’s me, and that's all right.
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Usually the lake where my parents live is covered with flocks of Canada geese and, if we’re lucky, their snowy cousins, during the Thanksgiving holiday, but a combination of efforts by residents to dissuade them (boats “manned” with fake humans made out of flannel-shirted hay bales with pumpkin-heads) and fewer nearby fields planted with corn seem to have kept the flocks to a minimum this year. Because I’m a visitor now, I miss hearing their cacophony as we go to sleep at night, and watching their slow, gliding, effortless descent, feet extended: air meeting water.
Yesterday, instead, we watched a small group of mergansers playing on the lake, red heads disappearing beneath the water, white breasts flashing as they displayed and fluffed, “standing” on their feet on the surface, and then great gleeful splashes and trails as they ran and chased each other on the surface. How earthbound and heavy they made me feel!
Often the lake freezes this week, and overnight the geese are driven from the wide black expanse of the nighttime water to a diminishing open area in the center. When the flocks leave, the weak or sick geese are left behind, huddled miserably on the ice at the edges of open water, trying to gather enough strength to go south with their companions. Most do, but one or two don’t, becoming prey to illness and cold and hunger, or, rarely, surviving on corn scattered by residents. The warmer winters of late, though, have kept many flocks right here, feeding in the open, cut cornfields and spending nights on the river. Tomorrow, driving home, we’ll see more flocks, swirling like low, inky brushstrokes over the Mohawk River and Erie Canal.
Yesterday we all walked along the old railroad right-of-way in back of the woods my parents own. Behind the woods is a field, planted to alfalfa this year and cut in late summer, and beyond the field, the Chenango River. When I was here in the fall I walked over to see the beaver dam that had stopped the flow from the lake to the river. Yesterday the water level in the swamp was much lower, and water flowed over the former dam – but two small trees in the swamp seemed to have been felled recently by strong beaver teeth. It was a great walk, in the bracing air, with many stops to look at dried, split milkweed pods shedding their silvery air-boats, or pick up nuts beneath the big shagbark hickories on the edge of the woods.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
I'll be on the road today but should be back here tomorrow. One thing I've been thinking about, as I've considered Thanksgiving this year, is how grateful I am that I started this blog and found (or was found by) all of you.
We're all pioneers in this medium, and the growing pains we experience - the fits of doubt, the frustrations with the technology and its misuse by the unscrupulous, the occasional outbursts or hurts, the insecurities caused by comparing oneself with others, the obsessions with "stats", the sad silence when a favorite voice goes away, the feeling that maybe we should be doing something else - something "real" - with our time and talent - all these, I think, are just hardships on this wagon train over the divide between old ways of communicating and distributing words and ideas, and the new.
I've always felt the vague vestiges of pioneer stock in myself, in a particular stubborn determination to not only stick with something difficult, but to see over the next ridge. I hardly thought blogging would be that sort of a journey, but I rather think now that it is. I know it is exciting, and for me at midlife, it may be a riskier venture than putting my energy and precious writing time into traditional publishing ventures, but I am tired of that world: tired of the slowness; the predation of artists' time, ability, and emotional stamina by non-artists who control choice and distribution; the need for "credentials"; the domination of ego, fashion, and connections; the limited and limiting definitions of "success".
Ideas have so much life! They are free! They come with being human, and we're meant to discover them, express them, share them freely. What is the purpose of writing, anyway, if not to reach out into that abyss of silent space that is the perceived distance between human beings, and suddenly find another hand touching yours?
10:48 AM
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Monday, November 24, 2003 The Pleiades. Photo by Matthew Russell
"If you want to tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars." - Jack Kerouac (via whiskey river)
8:58 PM
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My father's road likewise led far away. The only things he saw in the world were plants and whatever had to do with plants, and he would say all their names out loud, in the absurd Latin botanists use, and where they came from - all his life he'd had a passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plants - and their popular names, too, if they had them, in Spanish or English or in our local dialect, and into this naming of plants he would put all his passion for exploring a universe without end, for venturing time and again to the furthest frontiers of a vegetable geneology, opening up from every branch or leaf or nervation as it were a waterway for himself, within the sap, within the network that covers the green earth.
Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni
I went to bed last night with "The Road to San Giovanni", the only volume of Calvino that I own. Re-reading the title essay, a memoir about Calvino's father, it struck me again as one of the most perfect essays I've encountered: it's like an apricot plucked fresh from one of his father's trees. What makes Calvino's prose so luminous? How can he write sentences that go on for a page and yet feel -- I searched for the word and he supplied it in the remark below -- weightless?
... my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language." (from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988)
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