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 20, 2003 Stonehenge. Photo by J.
ECOTONE TOPIC: MYTHIC PLACE
Driving out of London, the detached brick houses and backyard garden plots gradually give way to countryside. Sitting on the wrong side of the little rented car, I watched out the window while my husband, happy in the left-handed world of British motoring, drove west. Lulled by the rhythm of the rolling grassy land - undulating, calm, with hardly a tree -I suddenly sat up, astounded. There it was, in the distance, rising all alone from the Salisbury Plain. My skin contracted into gooseflesh.
This was more than twenty years ago. When we finally arrived at the site, we parked in a lot that had been cleverly designed to the left and below the highway, so that buses and cars would be largely out of sight when you were viewing the stones themselves. We also arrived in the days when you could walk right into the circle of stones. To our surprise and relief, there was no American-style souvenir shop, full of plastic monuments sealed in snow-globes, or reproduced as inflatable life-size replicas. You just walked up some steps, onto a gravel walkway set into the grass, and there you were.
It was a grey, misty English day: perfect for seeing this place that I had wanted to visit my entire life. I hadn't known what to expect; what the scale would feel like, or how the site was situated in real life, not just in pictures; whether it would have power once I actually stood there. And to this day, I can't really describe what I felt. I remember that the stones weren't as big as I had thought they might be, but feeling dwarfed by their massiveness as much as their height. I remember the quiet, and the strangeness that emanated from the juxtaposition of the vast horizontal plain, and these sudden, standing stones, arranged in a way that felt both supremely human, and supernatural. I felt like a visitor in a place I didn't understand, but ought to, on some long-forgotten level. I remember wonder, awe, and mystery, and the sense of a tenuous line stretching from myself back into ancientness, beyond the power of any tools I could summon, beyond language, experience, or reason.
As we stood there and moved around the stones, we heard a low thumping in the earth, far away, and then the unmistakable rumbling of airplane engines. Low on the horizon and then quite near, flew a large military transport plane. We watched as this plane, and then another, and another, moved ponderously in the grey sky through the voids between the stones, while the deep thumps of test-bombing continued in the distance.
It was 1982, during the Falklands conflict, and Maggie Thatcher had the RAF at the ready. Strange. When my father had heard we were going to Salisbury, he told me about being stationed nearby on maneuvers before crossing the channel during the Normany invasion, and how he had once driven his tank through the cobblestone streets of the medieval city. I watched the planes, and thought about him.
We left the site and continued on to the city of Salisbury, where the spire of the cathedral also rises above the landscape. We walked up the same cobblestone streets my father remembered, crossed the cathedral grounds, and entered. The interior was cold, stony, damp…and lovely in the early afternoon light. We walked around quietly, reading about the site's Norman origins, and the cathedral’s founding in 1220. There were ancient woolen banners above our heads - tattered and faded - and the sign beneath told us, incredibly, that they had been brought back from the Crusades. Nearby, the effigy of a Crusader knight lay above his tomb, and close to him, the body of a Saracen who had been brought back from the Middle East. So not much had changed. My husband and I looked at the tombs, and then at each other.
"My relative," I said.
"And mine," he replied.
Read other responses to "Mythic Place" at the Ecotone Wiki.
AFRICAN ART, 2:00 a.m. Maybe we blogging insomniacs should establish a 2:00 am chat room. I was owl-ish last night, up on the couch in the living room/library, surrounded by books but unable to sleep. My usual pattern, if I'm going to be restless, is to sleep three or four hours, then be awake for one or two, and finally go back to sleep. Sometimes I use the laptop, but more often I try to meditate, or read. Last night I delved into a book on African art that I bought a few years ago at MOMA: CloseUp: Lessons in the Art of Seeing African Sculpture.
I've looked many times at the stunning photographs in this book, but never read the accompanying essays. Last night I read the first one, by the book's highly-accomplished photographer, Jerry Thompson, who talks about how he "sees" these sculptures:
My knowledge is on the level of servant's gossip - overheard conversations of curators and anthropologists, plus what I have been told in order to make the needed pictures. I know from experience that no amount of careful looking can supply basic information that is lacking...on the other hand, no amount of information can substitute for close looking.
Thompson, however, knows a great deal. He speaks about how we have gotten to such a point of subjectivity in our Western way of "looking", and yet tries to bridge the inevitable gaps by going to the heart of the emotional response many of us have to African art:
These figures seem to be about something they have some kind of content which, whether threatening, reassuring, exhilarating, hostile, disgusting, or too unclear to be classified, has a hold, or exercises a power not on our formal or aesthetic sense alone, but on some deeper sense... Force may be seen as a power larger than the individual, power that comes form somewhere else and passes through the individual, even through the organs least involved with consciousness and will.
Yoruba Sculpture, a tour from the Met, gives an excellent introduction to African carving.
7:29 PM
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Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Well, there is certainly no impetus to write about the weather here today - sleet and freezing rain on top of snow. I can hear J. outside, chopping channels in the ice so the driveway won't flood and form a skating rink.
So it's back to Milosz. The poems I'm reading and re-reading now are mainly post-1995, some quite a bit later, and they are poems of an elderly man who is looking back and remembering; looking for answers and often not finding any. He's sometimes preoccupied with memories of women he knew, women he loved, women he only saw for a moment, such as a singer in a cafe, but remembers vividly: "No trace of her or of that cafe/And only her shade with me, her frailty, beauty, always."
Of all his concrete memories - the wine and the food, the beaches and architecture - it seems to me that the memories of women are the most poignant. And as a woman, this gives me pause when I think back and wonder about how I might be remembered by men I've known. Men aren't always this honest, or this vulnerable, but I suspect that Milosz is revealing something more universal than I realized. Here is:
GATHERING APRICOTS
In the sun, while there, below, over the bay Only clouds of white mist wander, fleetingly, And the range of hills is grayish on the blue, Apricots, the whole tree full of them, in the dark leaves, Glimmer, yellow and red, bringing to mind The garden of Hesperides and apples of Paradise. I reach for a fruit and suddenly feel the presence And put aside the basket and say, "It's a pity That you died and cannot see these apricots, While I celebrate this undeserved life."
Commentary Alas, I did not say what I should have. I submitted fog and chaos to a distillation. That other kingdom of being or non-being Is always with me and makes itself heard With thousands of calls, screams, complaints, And she, the one to whom I turned, Is perhaps but a leader of a chorus. What happened only once does not stay in words. Countries disappeared and town and circumstances. Nobody will be able to see her face. And form itself is always a betrayal.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
A while back I was exploring the post-war Polish poets, and I've been thinking of getting back to that. Yesterday I got out my volume of Czeslaw Milosz, maybe subconsciously hoping to find something that would make sense of the bloodthirsty vengefulness of our world as it rubs its cold metallic hands against this season of peace. Maria at alembic was apparently thinking the same way, and she found a very apt expression of this weariness and lack of historical perspective in a poem of Zbigniew Herbert, which I commend to you.
Milosz has a lot to say, and like many of us he is not always consistent in how he views life. Toward the end of his collected works, there are two contradictory poems that he intentionally pairs because they represent this dual nature - the one a response to a woman who criticizes him for concentrating on beauty and finding meaning in the concrete reality presented to his senses at a particular moment. The other is a more inner, angry response to the brutality, suffering, and forgetfulness of the world.
The split felt very familiar.
Those poems are too long to quote here, but here are two short ones that lean toward the concrete:
DECEMBER 1
The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season. A blue ouline of hills above a fertile valley. It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns. A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees. Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leaved birches. In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon. I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy And the visible world is all that remains.
IN COMMON
What is good? Garlic. A leg of lamb on a spit. Wine with a view of boats rocking in a cove. A starry sky in August. A rest on a mountain peak.
What is good? After a long drive water in a pool and a sauna. Lovemaking and falling asleep, embraced, your legs touching hers. Mist in the morning, translucent, announcing a sunny day.
I am submerged in everything that is common to us, the living. Experiencing this earth for them, in my flesh. Walking past the vague outline of skyscrapers? anti-temples? In valleys of beautiful, though poisoned, rivers.
Monday, December 15, 2003 Cross-country skiing nearby
Thanks to all of you who commented on the last post about handling Christmas with sanity and grace. My true confession: I love Christmas, and always have. At the heart of the celebration are all the best characteristics of human beings: love, generosity, selflessness, joy. It's not the idea that's the problem, it's the implementation - but I was so confused about this that for a long time I thought I hated Christmas. We used to make most of our gifts (including elaborate sewing, knitting, baking, and woodworking projects), sent handmade cards with an original photographic print and a personal note, decorated our indoor tree with handmade ornaments and an outside one with popcorn and cranberry and peanut-butter-stuffed pinecones for the birds. We had the neighbors in for a get-together, organized caroling in the neighborhood for the elderly shut-ins, and sang in the choir at all the extra services, getting home at 1:00 am on Christmas Eve just to rise blearily the next morning and cook a big noontime dinner for the whole family. I'd often end up in tears, or get sick. Such a pile of beautifully-wrapped, non-commercial good intentions: it makes me exhausted just to think about them. And to think that we blamed our fatigue and burn-out on the prevailing commericialism in the society!
After realizing the holidays were making us miserable, for several years J. and I left the country at Christmastime, saving our pennies and flying to England where we spent a very quiet holiday in a London hotel, spending long hours in the British Museum and galleries, walking up Fleet Street to Evensong at St. Paul's, and often having a sort of camping-out Christmas dinner in our room.
During those weeks, I'd stand on the steps of the National Gallery as the sun set at 3:30 pm, gazing out over Trafalgar Square and the huge Norwegian Christmas tree with its lights sparkling in the falling dusk. The solitude and dislocation I felt were immense, but so was my sense of happiness in this city that became a second home, and my gratitude at being able to be somewhere else, knowing it was teaching me things I needed to learn. I saw that I had been trying to recreate the feeling of "perfect" Christmases of my childhood, to erase change and loss, to arrest time. I saw that my natural generosity and creativity had become somewhat confused with egotism and perfectionism, and that I'd become a slave to a list of "shoulds" that no one was imposing except myself. I realized that I could do less - a lot less - and be loved just as much.
Last night we had the first neighborhood Christmas party we've hosted in more than ten years, and it was a lot of fun. I bought most of the food instead of cooking for days. We don't have a tree; in fact the house is decorated with a few fake pine garlands with lights and pinecones, little feathered birds and red ribbons. It looks nice. Most people on our list are getting books as gifts, and I doubt if we'll be sending very many cards at all, now that we talk to everybody by e-mail throughout the year. I'm looking forward to singing, and to celebrating with our families and friends in a low-key way.
We had another big snowstorm last night. It's going to be a white Christmas.
