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, December 06, 2003
SNOW
We woke while it was still dark, and I got up to prowl around a bit. When I came back to bed J. asked if it was snowing yet. "I think so," I said. "The skylight is covered, and it's very still." When light came, our world had turned white overnight. And suddenly, it also felt warmer. This always happens. During the first really cold days of winter, when the ground is bare but frozen, the house feels absolutely frigid, and neither of us can warm up. Then, when snow falls, it's as if it insulates everything. I don't understand this; maybe someone can explain it to me. The thermostat reads exactly the same.
Today I went out to get the mail in my black faux fur hat, pink frou-frou scarf, jeans, and my black down jacket. There was quite a wind, and snow pelting down, but it felt terrific. Looking over the bank at the river, I saw the first frazzle ice floating rapidly downstream, like irregular sheets of translucent plastic laid on the leaden surface of the water. The beaver dam has partially washed out in the recent high waters, but below me I could see ice forming behind what was left of it. The snow -- small icy flakes -- landed on my cheeks and filled up my collar below the scarf. Walking back up the hill in four inches of snow reminded me of a recurrent dream I have where I'm walking in sand or snow, and my legs won't work at all. This wasn't that hard, but it required some effort.
Right now, beyond the window, the snow has turned to fatter flakes coming down at a steady 45-degree angle from went to east. Almost no traffic is moving. Trees, hedges, branches, roofs are iced like gingerbread; there is no color at all except for the black of trunks, windows, rooflines; the rest of the world is white.
When you've lived in this kind of climate all your life, you can usually tell how long the snow is likely to keep up from the texture, the way it is falling, and the silence or lack of it. This snowfall is going to last all day.
12:54 PM
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HOW CAN WE KNOW THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE? More on writers and their lives: A review of a new biography of Yeats, from The NY Times William Butler Yeats made such charged and explicit use of his life, his passions, his philosophical searchings, his country and causes, and even his failings — no major poet of our time has done it so passionately and few have ever done it — that a biography could just about be constructed out of quotations.
So, almost, could the review of a biography. Starting, famously enough, with "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Or less famously, with Yeats's remark that "poetry is born out of the quarrel with oneself."
And a remarkable post, amandhla, from nehanda dreams, about AIDS, Africa, and the human need for love. Amandhla means power in zulu.
8:46 PM
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Thursday, December 04, 2003
OOh, some disagreement over the Joy Williams quote in my last post. Good! It's such an interesting assertion she makes. Is it intended to provoke? To be taken less-than-seriously? I see two questions underneath, quite salient for writers who blog: 1) what do we, as writers, want to reveal? and 2) how much does the reader want to know about who we are?
Still quite cold here, snow, ice, shivering in the night. In ten minutes I have to go out to choir practice. It feels like an effort, that winter-kind of effort, of bundling up in layers and wrappings and running quickly to the car, across the road, into the church -- and then listening to everyone else talk about the weather. But once we start singing, it's always all right.
I've been playing the piano more lately. Twenty minutes, half an hour late at night. Bach, mostly, and some modern pieces composed by a friend. I'm out of practice. Still, it feels good to have the keys under my fingers, and time disappears.
6:42 PM
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Wednesday, December 03, 2003
I AGREE
"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent upon the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close." - Thich Nhat Hahn
I DON'T AGREE
"The writer is an exhibitionist, and yet he is private. He wants you to admire his fasting, his art. He wants your attention, he doesn't want you to know he exists. The reality of his life is meaningless, why should you, the reader, care? You don't care. He drinks, he loves unwisely, he's happy, he's sick ... it doesn't matter. You just want the work - the Other - this other thing. You don't really care how he does it. Why he does it." - Joy Williams
Tuesday, December 02, 2003 ECOTONE post for December 1, 2003: “Preserving Place”
For many years I’ve puzzled over the fact that some of us seem to bond with certain places, almost as if a certain landscape, certain paths, certain moments we experience within a place become imprinted upon us forever. Like parents and children, some of us bond fast, and some not at all, and some of us bond to a particular place while others are more egalitarian, spreading their affection and care evenly over all of nature.
I care deeply about the entire natural world, especially the wilderness. But there is one place on earth that seems to have a special hold on me: the land of central New York State and the area around the lake where I grew up, and my parents still live. Driving into the region, there’s a point when I feel instinctively that I'm "home". It’s something about the geology, the particular glacial understructure of the land, combined with its agricultural history, that give rise to the openness of the fields and woods and pastures that roll over the low hills, and cause streams and rivers to flow in the valleys. The lake itself is a small glacial lake of irregular shoreline. My grandfather, his business partner, and my father bought the lake and the surrounding land in the late 1950s and divided it into lots for development. Gradually houses and cabins were built on the lots, but the developers had the foresight to establish a Lake Association whose responsibility was preserving, as much as possible, the quality of the water and the character of the lake. Motorboats have never been allowed, and there are rules for what can and can’t be built, and where, and what can happen on the shoreline or in the water itself. Over the years the lot owners, a mixed-income community of people who now mostly live there full-time, have been pretty consistent in preserving the quality of life and at least sections of natural habitat, despite the construction of homes.
I remember when there were almost no houses on the lake. I was very young, and we’d go up on weekends with a picnic and sit on the shore, fishing, or make a bonfire for warmth in the evening. My grandparents built a cabin, and next to it my father and mother built, with their own hands, the house where they live today. I carried rocks, spread tar on the concrete foundation walls, climbed on the roof, found fossils and just-hatched snapping turtles in the excavated earth. While the adults worked, I explored every inch of the land near the lake and across the road in the woods. I knew where the deepest blue hepaticas bloomed in early spring, and the respectful distance to keep between myself and the weasel’s home so that he would come out, in his brown coat in summer and white in winter, to stare back curiously at this large fellow animal.
I’ve never owned a piece of land, except for the in-town lot where our house stands. In recent years, though, I’ve come to think more and more about the lake house and the woods I hope I’ll someday inherit. During a recent visit back there, I asked my father to show me the map of the undeveloped lots across the road, and then we walked along the boundaries. There were two lots, inaccessible, that had been held by other people for a long time, and during the past few months my father was able to buy them. Now the property is contiguous. It’s not large, but it is the longest stretch of undeveloped property near the lake, and it backs up on cultivated fields that are unlikely to ever be subdivided. My father told me that if I ever needed money in an emergency, there were now several excellent building lots. I’m grateful for that. But my real desire is to care for and preserve this land forever.
As I’ve thought about writing this piece, Thoreau’s phrase “In wildness is the preservation of the world” kept coming back to me. This little spot on earth is barely wild, and it may only be special to me and a few other humans, but I know that I am meant to take care of it, and to take my turn in caring for the lake itself. “In wildness” is its preservation, but also mine. I know that a part of me – perhaps a far larger part than I even realize – would die if the woods turned to grass and human dwellings, or a new generation of lot owners voted to allow motorboats and chemical weed control.
The reason for this is that wildness does not only exist in nature, but in us. We are wild too, living in bodies made of stone and earth, star and water. Our souls remember the connections, even as our minds forget; we dream of water, and branches, and sky.
Monday, December 01, 2003
I was hoping to write an Ecotone post tonight for today's topic, 'Preserving Places". But after a day of writing other things I haven't got it in me, or rather, it's in my head, mostly, but my hands are unwilling to type it out until they and the head that animates them have had some sleep. Instead, I'm going to drink some tea, curl up in bed, and finish The DaVinci Code, which I've been devouring in big fiction-starved gulps since Sunday.
One of the best parts about blogging is coming across posts that just knock the wind out of me with a perfect phrase or a completely new idea, or make me look at myself in a totally different way. Tonight I loved Nick's latest commentary on blogging and poetry at fait accompli, and M.'s reflections on things we want to, but will never do at Mint Tea & Sympathy. At a blog that is fast becoming a new favorite, Yellowslip's prose seems like it gets more numinous every day.
And qB at FrizzyLogic, who insists she isn't that good a writer (she's not only an excellent writer but photographer to boot), wrote a personal essay on the birth of her own blog that was so sensitive, so close to the bone, and so beautifully written I read it aloud to my husband after reading it twice myself.
We're huddled in bed now with two blankets, a quilt, the heating pad and two warm laptops after a day when the sky first emitted little pieces of ice that lay on the pavement like a shower of 2-carat diamonds, and then rain, and then little opaque white pellets, and then snow, all separated by periods of brilliant sunshine. The coming of winter is painfully unpredictable here in New England, and you never know quite what it's going to be like, or how long it will last, or in what shape you'll emerge on the other side. Not unlike the birth of a blog.
10:07 PM
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Sunday, November 30, 2003
THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT The Annunciation: the angel Gabriel (left) speaks to Mary. From a 6th century Ethiopian manuscript in the British Library.
I love that pointing finger - and what is Mary doing? Embroidering, maybe? It's worth searching on "annunciation" at the British Library, and comparing the 48 returned images. In nearly every case, the same subject - the angel Gabriel giving the news to Mary - is rendered in a culturally consistent manner for the audience of the time, with the pair dressed as medieval British royalty, for instance. This is not art history news, of course, but it never fails to amaze me, when, in all likelihood, Mary was a poor Palestinian girl, not unlke those of today, who would have been fortunate to have a pair of sandals and a warm cloak.
Advent, the Christian season of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, began today. Many people (including a number of Christians who see it as the sacred equivalent to the secular run-up to Christmas) don't know it is meant to be a season of atonement and reflection, not unlike Lent. Today our choir sang the great Bach chorale, "Wachet Auf!" or "Sleepers, Wake", which begins "Sleepers wake, for night is flying,/The watchman on the heights is crying/"He comes, prepare, ye virgins wise..."
I like the Biblical story of the wise and foolish virgins, the first who trimmed their wicks and kept their lamps burning, staying awake to meet their bridegroom, and the latter lazy ones who slept through the night and missed him. Jesus told this parable as a warning about his unannounced appearance on the day of judgement, but it's also just so human. Every year when this story comes around again I smile to myself: are we ever prepared for what will come, be it love, or death, or the many messages we are meant to hear and act upon throughout our lives? As the preacher said today, thank God the wake-up call doesn't only come once, but continues throughout life, so that we have many opportunities to hear who we are called to be, and finally take it to heart.
One such contemporary call is from Natalie d'Arbeloff at Blaugustine, who reminds us continually that "another world is possible". If you haven't done it yet, check out her Bloggers' Parliament and the responses of many readers.
Another wonderful Advent gift comes from Heather at Soul Food Cafe, who has prepared a virtual Advent Calendar, with one 'door' to be opened every day beginning tomorrow, Dec. 2, through Dec 26. Like everything at Soul Food, this is a labor of love packed with good writing, thoughts and ideas both for making this a rewarding an fruitful time, and especially for navigating the sometimes stormy and difficult waters of the holiday season.
5:47 PM
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