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, January 17, 2004
ICE ANGEL
I was a little surprised to find her on my window this morning. She's melted in the time it took me to download the file and write this post.
9:44 AM
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Friday, January 16, 2004
Last night I went out to choir rehearsal at 7:00 pm. I bundled up in two sweaters, my down parka, a furry (don't cringe, it's fake) hat, insulated gloves, and wrapped a scarf around my face. The snow crunched underfoot as I scurried to the garage; when I started the car, even though it had been inside, it protested mightily, and hadn't fully warmed up by the time I reached my destination ten minutes later. My fingers were icy on the steering wheel, and it was hard to gather up my music and lock the car before rushing across the parking lot and the busy street to the church.
We are a hardy bunch, this choir, but a lot of people hadn't made it to rehearsal, due to illness or car trouble, or the need to stay home and take care of their woodstoves. We stood around in the choir room, blowing on our hands, shivering, and stamping feet to get the circulation going. After a hard but rewarding practice grappling mainly with the intricacies of Mozart's Laudate Pueri and a modern piece we're singing for an upcoming ordination, The Day King Uzziah Died, our director let us go half an hour early. I put on all my layers again and stepped out into the even colder air; nothing, not even a lifetime like mine spent in this godforsaken climate, prepares you for the shock of air hitting your cheeks at 10 or 20 below zero, or the way the first breath enters your nostrils and immediately freezes every available hair inside. And yet there is something glorious about it: pure, clean, crystalline and elemental. I walked quickly across the street, trying to be fully aware of all the sensations presented to my body by an environment so hostile and yet so beautiful, yet knowing I could not survive for many hours in it without shelter. Thinking hard about those who were struggling with that reality this night, I got in my car and started home.
In the King Uzziah piece, its text taken from Isaiah, there is a vision of heaven, with God on a throne, surrounded by thousands of angels, and one of the seraphim in flight, carrying a burning coal which he places on the lips of the prophet. Turning onto the back road and heading home, I looked up at the inky black sky and few stars shining overhead, and for a moment I could almost imagine flying angels carrying hot coals in outstretched tongs, through a freezing night, over the dying souls of people desperate for warmth.
4:49 PM
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For today’s ECOTONE topic, “Place: Coming and Going”, I decided to post this excerpt from a journal I wrote during a trip to London in 1998. There are fifty pages of journal in-between the sections headed “Going” and “Coming”, and, as it turned out, I didn’t make it to my planned destination of Canterbury at all. However, the project envisioned back then continues in other forms, including writing about "Place" for the Ecotone.
GOING
December 14, 1998. In the air. Water. Below me, the world has become nothing but water, clear blue stretching to the horizon, where it is met by sky. White clouds, water in another form, ridged like mountains, float above the surface of the Atlantic. The coast of New England curves away in the distance, all details of human habitation lost in the atmospheric perspective which fades everything to a uniform pale blue.
We've never taken the morning flight to Heathrow before. It is a spacious and comfortable 777, perhaps two-thirds full. As we climb to cruising altitude, the BBC World Service news plays on the flat, individual video screen mounted on the seat in front of me. We watch President and Mrs. Clinton disembark in the Middle East to make his historic visit to Palestine; in Washington, the House is beginning its impeachment debate, with a vote expected on the floor on Thursday. Clinton looks grim; like us, he is escaping.
--
The alarm rang at 3:15 a.m. I woke to find J. turning the electronic clock in his hands like a pro-hominid discovering a transistor radio for the first time. "How do I make it stop?" he moaned, still asleep, before realizing the sound wasn't coming from the clock at all, but from the tiny travel alarm on the nightstand.
We left at 4:00, the cold air on my face removing the last traces of sleepiness. As we drove away, the only light in the village was a small pine tree at the end of our street, completely encrusted with white Christmas lights.
In the blackness, devoid of stars or moon, I found myself noticing glowing things: reflective bands on the village fire hydrants, the white dividing lines on the highway curling off in the east, and the gleaming guardrail-markers, long strings of pearls for the sleeping giantess whose dark curves define this rising, falling landscape of mountain foothills.
As we left what I think of as home territory -- the outermost towns where people known to me, from work or church, lay sleeping -- a tiny reclining crescent moon appeared through a break in the clouds. Ten miles later, the clouds had disappeared and the sky was alight with stars in winter constellations: the Big Dipper, upside down to the left of the moon; on the right, Orion's foot balanced on the horizon, his bow pointed skyward. For miles at a time, not a sign of human dwelling, just the deep, dark Hansel-and-Gretel woods on either side of the road. We watched carefully for moose. Suddenly, I saw a shooting star, and then another. While I looked out the side window, J. saw two more. In the hour between 4:00 and 5:00, we counted ten, finally spotting them simultaneously. The last one fell all the way from the zenith, blazing a hot trail across the black sky.
Tonight the stars remarked to me, matter-of-factly, "We're here all the time, you know." I realized how I never imagined them being there during my waking hours: obscured by daylight, but shining behind the sky all the same. Somehow, I imagined the stars disappearing and rising like the moon. Why is it that so often we must travel away from the familiar to discover, with a jolt, truths that have been with us all along?
Near the Massachusetts border we left the dark wild landscape for good. As always, I found myself recoiling at the bright toll-plaza lamps, the tall signs for petroleum companies, the billboards, the sprawling malls, franchise motels, fast food establishments. I tried to imagine living in these faceless communities, and could not. "Well, what are you doing?" I asked myself. "You're leaving to spend two weeks in one of the largest cities in the world." But it's not the city I despise; there, at least sometimes, building has been concentrated into one plot of earth, and, in the city-center, planned for centuries. In London, great visual beauty, vigor, and individuality co-exist with the garish and vulgar, and generally win out. But in the suburbs of southern Massachusetts and Connecticut, what I feel most is the waste -- beautiful land chopped up as if it were an inexhaustible commodity. The natural landscape is often obliterated; you literally cannot see the forest for the signs. What does this do to people? Still north of the Massachusetts border at 5:15 a.m., traffic was already greatly increased and the driving aggressive. My sense of being a special traveler through a dark night of shooting stars disappeared with the dawn; we became simply one of a thousand cars hurtling toward their destinations.
6:00 p.m., London time. The sun has just set, the gold light fading from the wings of the jet and the pink that rimmed the horizon now a deep blue. I'm waiting to see my stars again -- for the second time in eight hours.
Across the aisle, a British mother who preceded us at check-in tries to sleep. Her little son, with his perfect, round, serious face, has clutched a floppy-eared bunny ever since I spotted him, seated on a pile of luggage, near the baggage counter. His was the first British accent I heard today, his clear little voice piping up to say, "Oy cahn cahdee moy rahbeet eento de plane moyself, cahn't oy?" Another mother, in a white sweater with a fanny pack worn frontways (who invented those awful things?) just walked down the aisle with her child on a leash. The first little boy, rabbit in his arms, watches them pass with silent solemnity, but I detect shock in his eyes.
Most of the passengers are watching in-flight movies; some work on laptops; some sleep or read. I'm willing to bet, however, that I'm the only one with her nose in Chaucer.
Part of my plan this trip, if possible, is to go to Canterbury. So the other night, at home, I pulled my volume of Chaucer's tales off the shelf and read the first page of the Prologue:
And specially, from every shire's end In England, down to Canterbury they wend To seek the holy blissful martyr, quick In giving help to them when they were sick.
Chaucer's pilgrimage began in Southwark, a very old section of London across the Thames from the Tower, at an inn called the Tabard. He began writing the Canterbury Tales in 1386; it was still unfinished at his death in 1400. At that time, Richard II was King. When Chaucer died, just one year short of 600 years ago, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first of the great writers to lie in what became known as the Poet's Corner.
Our last visit to London ended in Southwark; this year's plans are not so much a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, but an acknowledgement of these yearly visits as a personal pilgrimage, or, perhaps more accurately, a quest whereby I am gradually piecing together bits of myself. I told J., my first-generation, Armenian/Arab husband, that whenever I approach England I feel that I am coming home. "I know you do," he said, smiling at me. It took me two trips to realize this, two more to begin to see and write the outlines of a story which began centuries ago.
My earliest immigrant ancestors sailed for America from England almost exactly one century after Chaucer's death. For five hundred years, except for my father's service in the Second World War, no one returned across the Atlantic. Yet when I step off the plane, enter the crowded train from Heathrow to London, and set foot on the city streets, I am conscious of entering a familiar gene pool and a common heritage of manner, custom, interest and sensibility, almost too subtle to describe, that has somehow been kept alive in my family through generations lived out in "New" England and "New" York. It strikes me as incredible that this should be, so much so that I feel bound, by the great privilege which has fallen to me, to search and decipher, contemplate and record.
I try to bring to this task all my accumulated experiences, but am continually conscious of beginning again at the beginning. How, for example, has it taken forty-six years of my life to read Chaucer? Last night, back home, I was laughing out loud as I read his descriptions of his fellow-pilgrims in the Prologue. Yes, there were terms I didn't know. What was a Pardoner, a Summoner, a Reeve? But the footnotes explained what was unfamiliar. Far more astonishing is Chaucer's voice, which rolls effortlessly out of the fourteenth century to meet my twentieth-century ears with humor and immediacy. I am cheating by reading the Penguin edition, a modern translation of the original Middle English, but it's probably the only way I would read the work; so far, on the plane, I’ve devoured eighty pages and am captivated.
COMING
1:30 am. In the air. Somewhere below is the coast of Greenland and the city of Godthab, near its tip. I'm listening to Haydn's Harmony Mass on the in-flight radio and sipping a paper cupful of extremely strong tea I procured from the flight attendant in the rear galley. "If you don't like this I'll make you a new pot," he said, and it is pretty strong stuff. J. is trying to sleep and that's good, he has 2 1/2 hours of driving after we land in Boston.
Mrs. Marazzi interrupted her late lunch this afternoon at the hotel to say goodbye to us. We kissed on both cheeks; I complimented her on the staff, and told her my only wish was that the sitting room had a piano, that I couldn't wait to get back home to mine. "We used to have one, a big one," she said, "but we had to get rid of it because the guests complained." I'm sure they did -- a piano would carry loudly through the hotel’s pressed-tin ceilings and thin walls. Unlike last year, when I couldn't bear the thought of going home, today I felt a little sad but basically contented. We know, now, that we'll be back. But more important, London comes with us; I've figured out how to assimilate what happens to me here and allow it to remain in me back home.
I'm gradually learning how to live the hours of my everyday life as a journey, even though, from the outside, the days and their pattern may appear routine. Each time I sit down at the piano or in front of a blank sheet of paper, I walk into that world-between-worlds, the tunnel that leads from the departure terminal into the aircraft with the ability to fly wherever it wants. It has taken a long time for me to see this. Living in this way, each day becomes an adventure within the self, accompanied by the sum of all of one's previous experiences and whatever guides we ask along: Chaucer or Calvino, Bach or Bob Dylan.
But this journey also exists alongside the paradoxical, parallel realization that no journey is necessary -- that we have already arrived at the only destination worth approaching, that all one needs is contained in each particular moment -- moments that, ironically, often appear to us when we are traveling.
On his blog, Never Neutral, Ernesto Priego wrote a response to Nick Piombino’s post on “Blogging and Narcissism”, which said, in part:
I also wrote my post thinking that my writing (or this blog's writing) should bear (or does indeed bear) the work of mourning of not being written for someone in particular... If blogging could be considered as the work of mourning of writing, the blogger, the writing blogger, as Sontag's artist, would be an "ideal sufferer", a mourner…
While it is true that blogging -- still a lonely activity, as writing itself -- has made possible a contact with other writers and readers that before internet technology was unthinkable, blogs remain quite isolated from the rest of the world…
We are always mourning one absence or another. Writing, as a technology "under the sign of mourning," is a way of working-through and as such a way of becoming…
I respect Ernesto's take on writing and think it may express the feelings of many writers. For me it's very different. I write because it makes me happier than if I don’t write. I write because I can’t help it. I write because it’s creative, and interesting, and makes my mind work, and a busy, engaged mind makes me feel more alive. I write because writing makes me think about both the particular and the universal; it requires me both to know myself, and to consider “otherness”; rather than isolating me, it makes me feel more connected not just to people but to everything that is out there for my mind to observe, mull, and translate – haltingly or delightedly - into words.
I don’t write for any “ideal” reader; I don’t know who that could be. So there is no sense of absence; I am here, I write first of all for myself. A quite successful filmmaker and author once told me, “Whatever you create, you had better do it for yourself and not for the world, because nearly all the time you will never get the “reward” you may be subconsciously seeking.” I was a lot younger then, and his advice struck me as stark indeed. It has also proved to be both true and helpful, and I often recall it when my ego-needs have crawled up to sit, staring demandingly at me, from the top of my work.
That doesn’t mean I don’t desire and love feedback, and even more, that irreplaceable sense of touching someone else’s spirit. I blog because blogging makes me happier than other forms of writing do, mainly because there is more opportunity to know that has happened. But that doesn’t mean other forms with less interaction aren’t valid or important, or worthy of my best effort.
Recently I had an article published in a well-respected religious journal. It was, for me, a milestone of sorts. My e-mail address was published with the article. I got precisely three responses from people who weren’t my friends (and hadn’t, therefore, received the notice I sent out), and one of those was a furious rant against the “blasphemous” opinion I had expressed. Almost any day, through Cassandra, I get more (and far nicer) responses (and thanks and affirmation) than that. But you just don’t know; you don’t know, as the Buddhist saying goes, “when one word of yours will become a ferryboat for someone.” I’ve heard occasionally, out of the blue or by coincidence, from a stranger who was deeply affected by something I wrote. Art is like that; acting autonomously, anonymously, its effect is often personal and unknown, seeping into the groundwater of the already flowing life of reader, listener, viewer, only to emerge much later in a spring somewhere far from the source. That we may play such an unknowing role in someone else’s life is part of the miraculous power and generosity of creativity. I think, as writers, we need to trust this and assent to it, to follow our gift as best we can, and allow ourselves to communicate not only with the known reader who affirms us but the unknown reader who never will. I find nothing to mourn in that.
Monday, January 12, 2004
REQUIRED READING For WRITERS
Blogging and Narcissism, by the brilliantly perceptive Nick Piombino at fait accompli (and no, you aren't an automatic narcissist just because you blog).
Meditations on Life & Writing, a newly-discovered blog for me. Angel V. Shannon's writing about writing, specifically about finding her voice and the will to persevere, is inspiring, unaffected, and true; see especially the entry for Dec. 6th, "Giving It Up".
AND A REMINDER: The topic for January 15 (this Thursday) at the Ecotone Wiki is "Place: Coming and Going". Why not write and post a response? And no, the entry below is not for that topic, although I guess it could be.
If you click here or on photoblog in the black box, you'll be able to travel with me in pictures out the eastern side of the New York State Thruway and up toward New England.
Human pathways often follow on top of one another; Rt. 20, the old east-west road across New York State, followed one branch of the Cherry Valley Turnpike that the early settlers used to travel west from Albany. It was superceded by the Thruway, slightly to the north, which follows Mohawk River valley and the Erie Canal. The towns along both of these roads are, for the most part, relics of bygone days when travelers came through and industries, now defunct, were healthy. Old factories stand empty; the weather blows through the mortar cracks in the old brick houses and snow bends the backs of barns, claiming a few more each winter. The old tourist attractions, like Howe Caverns, Petrified Creatures, and the Herkimer "diamond" mines stay open but attract few visitors, and motels and local eateries, long since closed, weather into strangely retro reminders of the forties and fifties: "Kathy's Home Cooking", "The Drake" with its home-made lifesize cut-out duck in front, the famous "Teepee" on Rt. 20, or the more generic signs reading simply, "Hamburgers" or "Ice Cream", on the outskirts of town after town.
The first time I remember these roads, I was a little girl and we were going to Maine; I begged to stop at the Teepee and I think we did. Now, so many years - nearly fifty of them - later, it's a relief to pull into one of the rare towns that had enough money, natural beauty, foresight and attraction to remain a thriving destination - Cooperstown, say, or Saratoga Springs. The allure of economic health and cultural diversity remind my of my own life choices, as does the decay elsewhere: except for the people, who remain friendly, warm, chatty and generous through good times and bad, much of what I remember as wonderful feels abandoned, boarded up, or greatly changed. People have forsaken the downtowns for malls, the local country inns for franchises in the small strips outside bigger towns. Mansard-roofed and brick- or clapboard-fronted downtown blocks have been lost to fire and neglect, but rarely restored or replaced except by cheap imitations cloaked in T-111 and adorned with neon and plastic, leaching the downtowns of vibrancy and integrity.
The land, however, endures. Like a woman with good bones, age and change haven't make this rolling land less beautiful. A few more houses and double-wides here and there balance the old flat-roofed Italianates fallen into ruin: but beyond them continue the shapes of the hills, the calmness of the valleys, the openness of the pastures where you can climb through the corn stubble along a hedgerow and watch steaming manure being spread on a snow-covered field below, or see the breath of the cows crowded around the hay bales in a barnyard. The land softens the unfeeling crush of time.
2:56 PM
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Sunday, January 11, 2004
This was the view that greeted me when I came upstairs this morning at my parents' house. That venerable maple tree stands guard over the point, jutting out into the lake, where my father built their house. The tree is a home for innumerable birds, squirrels, insects - I even found a tree frog on it once - and in the autumn casts a glowing light over the water and into the house before shedding its leaves like golden foil onto the waiting earth. Back in the fifties and sixties, heading down the bank toward the ice on an aluminum flying saucer with a closeline-rope handle, I collided with that solid trunk more than once.
We had a long ride back home, with a stop for a Thai lunch in Saratoga, New York, but didn't hit snow flurries until we were in a high pass over the Green Mountains. To our great relief our house was warm and the hot water heat still running through the pipes. Some of our friends and neighbors weren't so lucky.
In the next few days I'll post some pictures of the trip across rural New York State.
7:22 PM
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