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, February 14, 2004 Remains of a dim sum lunch (in Montreal again).
12:01 PM
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Friday, February 13, 2004
I’ve appreciated the recent, thoughtful entries on “envy” at CommonBeauty and a related one about competition and generosity by Chris at Creek Running North. Writing about my recent good fortune was something I did here with a little reluctance, because I know that although the congratulations are absolutely sincere, some may hide a “what about me?”
To be honest, if I had read here, a year or two ago, about somebody else’s book finding a publisher, I would have felt envy or worse, as well as feeling happy for my friend. Having spent most of my adult life in the arts of one sort or another, I’ve gotten used to rejection (and still hate it) as well as understanding my own mroe or less constant desire for approval and encouragement.
Two things rise to the surface. One: we all have to get to a place where we are creating for ourselves, and satisfied to do that even if the big doors never open. The work is far better that way, and you have a chance of staying both sane and decent. Two: Mixed feelings about other people’s success are normal and to be accepted, and then let go, like the thoughts that arise in meditation. “Oh yes, there that is again. OK. Back to my work.” I often think of an artist whose wife, years ago, was doing far “better” in the art world than he was, and had just gotten a big show somewhere. Some one of us asked him how he felt about it, and he answered, “This life is so difficult for any of us. As an artist, I just try to think, ‘her success is my success’.” I thought that was rather remarkable, because I knew he really meant it.
I’ve always wanted to write a book, and one of the best parts about this project and its horrendous deadline is that it will force me to actually do it. It will require a lot of discipline, and no time for self-doubt, and that’s going to be good. But I doubt that the writing itself will be as satisfying as what I do here, mainly because the audience will be much more anonymous and distant, and yet I will have to write for them. It’s a different thing. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I will have this place to talk about what it feels like in the process. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Thank you all for your encouragement and loving comments; I'm really pretty overwhelmed by them and very, very appreciative.
It was a long, interesting, productive day. The editor (I liked her) has gone back to Manhattan after getting a little hit of New England - we took her to a beautiful converted mill overlooking a river for lunch, and at the end of the day drove her up onto one of the ridgelines that gives a view of the mountains and snowcovered fields stretching in every direction, bordered by deep, dark evergreen woods striated with thin white birches, with a weathered barn thrown in every now and then. She was speechless. "Do you feel like you're driving through a postcard?" I asked. "I do!" she said. "I really do."
The meeting part was good, and very helpful to me - we went over the entire outline in detail, chapter by chapter, talking through issues of content, order, pacing, voice, and emphasis. We talked about the book's audience and how to deal with such problems as "Episco-speak" (the specialized lingo the church uses for practically everything - which can feel anything but inclusive to non-members). Over lunch there was a long, as-yet-indefinite discussion about the title (any ideas??). We talked about design, and how to integrate the photographs with the text. And we left the schedule discussion for last, but the final deadline will be around July 1. We'll be going to NY in a few weeks to give a presentation to a large group during their twice-yearly review of upcoming titles.
Deep breath... pending a contract, seems like the project is on its way. Don't worry, though: Cassandra is a top priority and will not be going away. And I need you all to see me through this.
Tomorrow I have a big meeting. An editor is flying up here from New York to meet with J. and me about doing a book on Gene Robinson. We've been talking to the publisher and editor by phone and e-mail for a couple of weeks; their entire editorial board has read our proposal, outline, and one chapter, and they want to go ahead. So this meeting is to talk about editorial content and make sure we all feel like we can work together; if all goes well we'll go down to New York later to negotiate the business side and meet the other people involved. Tomorrow's meeting was supposed to be last Friday, but the plane ended up circling overhead in a snowstorm for an hour and then was diverted 150 miles away. We managed to get through the weekend without messing up the house...
It's a beautiful morning here, but it has taken me an hour to get cheerful. ("Why?" you ask. "Are you nuts?") Well, part of it is that I am not at my best in the morning. It takes me a long time, sometimes, to make the transition from sleep to being awake, and after a somewhat restless night I often feel dogged by unremembered but uncomfortable dreams, like ghosts pulling at the corners of my clothes. Today I think there was some of that, but going deeper I also detect anxiety. It's not the meeting itself, which I'm actually looking forward to a lot; I've had enough years in business and performance to be able to handle meetings and presentations, and I'm anxiosu to meet this editor and get to know her. I'm not really worried about my ability to do the writing and research, although the deadline they're proposing is daunting. I want to do it; this is a chance I've been waiting for for a long, long time.
What I sense is more a kind of fatalistic dread that something will happen to make the project impossible; I'll get sick, some tragedy will befall my family -- that sort of thing. Stepping back from this I see that there's no rational reason for this anxiety, and that it is a product of my spinning mind - just the sort of thing that meditation helps us to see and to stop. As the vestiges of sleep leave me, and the sun brightens on the clouds and the snow-covered rooftoops outside, and I write here to you, I can feel my natural optimism and equanimity returning. I know that no matter what happens, all will be well, and I'll find a way to handle it. I can even pinpoint some of the cause of this sort of existential anxiety, which became worse for many of us, I think, after September 11th. It's rooted in lack of control: tragedy, falling out of the skies upon unprepared souls, followed by wars we were powerless to stop, cloaked in a disguise made of lies. In these years there have also been a disproportionate number of personal sadnesses and losses. On the other hand: new friends, new-found means of communication and encouragement, new places that I love, greater confidence and appreciation of what writing is and can be for me, well apart from any sort of commercial "success", greater awareness of my own strength and ability to handle adversity. It is so important to keep one's head on one's shoulders and not to lose oneself. It's important to wake up.
9:30 AM
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EXTREMISM OF DIFFERENT KINDS
France about to vote on headscarf ban. This article has reaction, pro and con. My personal view is that this is a very big mistake, setting a dangerous precedent in Europe. (via BBC)
The pilot, whose name was not released, asked Christians on Friday's flight to raise their hands. He then suggested non-Christians talk to the Christians about their faith. He went on to say that "everyone who doesn't have their hand raised is crazy", passenger Amanda Nelligan told CBS news.
"He continued to say, 'Well, you have a choice: you can make this trip worthwhile, or you can sit back, read a book and watch the movie'," she said.
Sunday, February 08, 2004
Yesterday we saw the movie Himalaya and I was stunned by it - both visually and by the story. Have any of you seen it? In the morning we had been at the ordination of an Episcopalian priest, a beautiful ceremony full of color and spirit and sincerity, and in the afternoon, this movie took us into a Tibetan Buddhist temple where the monks in red robes were chanting, prayer wheels were spinning, and offerings were being placed on the gold feet of the Buddha. Worlds apart, and yet the essential desires were so much the same; it really felt like one continuous human expression. The movie is much more than that, although human beings and their relations to the divine is a major theme.
I've been having a conversation with Dale over at vajrayana practice that has been more interesting than anything else I can think to write about today, so I'm going to quote some of it, and commend you to Dale's original posts. On his blog, Dale has been writing, in part, about identity; both the way we are known by others, and the ways in which we "know" ourselves. He said, in (very small) part:
I am also a prudent, even calculating, man, the sort who hedges his bets, keeps his insurance up to date, and carefully chooses when & where to come unglued. It's just a story. All these characterizations of myself are just stories. "Essentially unknowable" -- you are so right -- not only because even the paltriest of us is too large to fit into any story, but also because there's nothing essential there to be known. The wind blows through us, whether we acknowledge it or not, and what it blows through is air.
I replied: I think most of us want to be known down to our deepest core by *someone*, and some of our greatest sadness and frustration comes from the near misses and the fleeting true connections that we would so much like to freeze, like a movie segment, and play over and over. And then there are the moments when we actually know ourselves (or is it when we finally forget ourselves?) and everything falls into place, timelessly. But most of life isn't like that; most of the time the wind is blowing through a self we can't see or pin down, and others certainly cannot although they do try, fixing us in roles shaped by the partial truth they can see, and by their own imaginings and desire.
As I get older I find myself more interested in what happens in the spaces between people. Love, for instance, or compassion, or moments of real listening. I think these things are real and eternal, even though they pass through our insubstantial and changing selves, and hover between us like smoke.
Dale wrote back:
We get things so completely backwards, so often. Taking this body and this identity for permanent, and the moments of connection as ephemeral and unreal. Exactly wrong. Its the moments of connection that move beyond us. Buddha Shakyamuni's long gone, and so is whatever notion Siddhartha Gautama had of who he was when he lived in the palace: but his love for Ananda is still echoing through the world. And that's just one we know well enough to name.
My daughter wrote recently, for school, about our read-aloud time, over the years. Remembered books I'd long forgotten -- Pig William must be from fifteen years ago, now. We went through MIddlemarch, Ivanhoe, pretty much all of Dickens's and Tolstoy's novels, Wodehouse, Douglas Adams... "Reading time" has faded away -- but I was astonished, delighted, humbled to learn how vividly that time, & the sharing of those books, lived on in her. It's the connections that are real.
I wonder what you think? Feel free to join the comment thread over at vajrayana instead if you go there to read the original posts, since this is really Dale's topic.
