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 21, 2004 Ivy, who writes one of my new favorite blogs, Tonio, and others have been talking about authors giving readings, about stagefright, about how much talking the writer should do by way of explanation or introduction. It's all very interesting to me, since I used to have really bad nerves about reading and public speaking, but have (mostly) gotten over it just by dint of performing and reading again and again. I think maybe you just wear the fear out, or the kindness and generosity of strangers softens the edges enough that you can cope.
I remember being forced to enter a prize-speaking contest in high school by my social-studies teacher. We had to write, memorize and deliver a ten-minute speech from the assembly-hall stage to the entire student body. The topic was "What the Flag of the United States Means to Me", and the sponsor of this annual contest was the American Legion. Out in the back somewhere were judges who scored each contestant, and the winner went on to the county level. It was 1968. Great topic for those years, wasn't it? I have no idea what I wrote, but I remember practicing and practicing, feeling like I was preparing for my own execution. Right before the speech, I was walking down a school hallway and somebody opened a door into the side of my head. I stood in the wings of the auditorium, with an ice pack pressed to my ear, knees knocking, palms sweating, sure I would either throw up or faint. When it was my turn, I went out, gave the speech, didn't forget anything, and rushed off the stage in relief. An hour later, when everyone had finished, the judges announced the winner - it was me. I was in shock - that meant I had to go through it all again. At the county level, I started my speech and delivered the first paragraph, then two out-of-order sentences, and went mute. I stood in the center of the stage while my best friend and prompter tried to find the cue; it remains one of the longest pauses of my life. She finally whispered the right lines, I went into auto-pilot, finished and came in last.
Tomorrow morning I'm preaching at the 8:00 and 10:00 services in a friend's Episcopal Church, and actually looking forward to it. Preaching has to be one of the weirdest forms of literary performance; although I'll have my written text I'll try not to "read" it word for word but to use it as a guide. But you never know exactly what's going to happen with the spoken word, or so it seems to me. The audience is always different and impossible to judge beforehand; sometimes indifferent, sometime receptive, occasionally right there with you.
I'm very grateful when I get the opportunity to read my work or speak in public. You learn a lot about your writing in a very immediate way that isn't even apparent when you practice: the awkward phrase stumbles across the room; the uncertain statement sounds metallic and brittle when spoken; you inwardly cringe at excessive wordiness you never quite noticed, and fall into the gaps left in your logic; you trip over missing beats in the rhythm of phrases. It's humbling but illuminating, and still some dear person usually comes up afterwards and says something sweet, and if you've managed to reassemble your wits you can say a simple "thank you" instead of some self-deprecating remark you'll regret all the way home.
Friday, February 20, 2004 CORN SNOW forming on the porch roof
Awoke this morning in a very cheery mood. "I'll get the coffee," said J., emerging from our six-inch-thick down comforter and leaving me there to snuggle for a few more minutes. "Oh!" he said, passing unde the bedroom skylight that gives us a view of daylight sky to the south, and the moon and stars at night. "It looks like a summer day." "What do you mean," said the sleepy voice from the bed. "Hazy, a few high clouds, bright sun. Looks like it's about 70, and headed for a 90-degree and humid."
These are the kinds of mind-games we indulge in up here during February and March as insanity plays about the edges of our cooped-up, frozen consciousnesses. The actual temperature was 10 degrees, and from my window, as I sit as the desk with my coffee, already feeling my feet grow cold, I can see the snow-covered roofs and lawns that the skylight view hides. But in a way, he is right. The light is changing now, not just in duration but quality: brighter, higher, and a different color temperature. Maybe I wouldn't notice that as much if I weren't married to a photographer who talks about color temperature. But I find that we are highly sensitive to the most subtle changes in light, and in environmental sounds - and this is from a bumbling human perspective. How much more we would notice if we were finely-tuned, by habit and the imperative of survival, to our natural environment.
Yesterday morning, an unfamiliar bird sound. Just a few notes, and it was gone - but a redwing, I think. Something I haven't heard for many months, and may not again - he's very early. But the willows are turning yellow, and the snow is "rotting", as we call it up here - turning old and crystalized, breaking up into the granular spring consistency called "corn snow". It won't be long before the first sap buckets hang on the knarled old maples, and the frozen ground yields mud.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
A poem by Peter Balakian from Sad Days of Light. I found this one at The Legacy Project, which is a repository of visual and literary art created in response to the great losses of the last century. Balakian's book of prose, Black Dog of Fate, tells the story of how he finally pieced together his own Armenian heritage and the harrowing story of what had happened to his people. My mother-in-law gave us this book, in lieu of telling the story herself. It always reminded me of giving a child a book explaining sex when the parent cannot bear to talk about it, except that this book explains death. (Balakian is a professor of English at Colgate University, and he has also written some very beautiful and funny poems.)
For Grandmother, Coming Back
For the dusty rugs, and the dye of blue-roots, for the pale of red stomachs of sheep, you come back. For the brass ladle and the porous pot of black from your dinner of fires, I call your name like a bird.
For the purple fruit for the carrots like cut fingers for the riverbed damp with flesh, you come back.
For the field of goats wet and gray, for the hoofs and sharp bones floating in the broth, I wave my arms full of wind.
For the tumbling barrel of red-peppers, for the milled mountain of wheat for the broken necks of squash fat and full of seed, I let my throat open.
Several of you seemed interested in the Armenian heritage I mentioned in the last post. My mother-in-law was a refugee from the genocide in which her father and nearly all her male relatives were killed. She and her mother and two small brothers were fortunate to be helped by some American representatives of Near East Relief, who helped the family flee by boat to Alexandria where there were refugee camps. Her parents were both professional people who spoke many languages fluently and had some western education in Europe: her father was a doctor and translator and her mother a nurse. The father had been kept alive by the Turks for his usefulness as a translator, until one day when he was taken away and executed. There is only one picture of him that survived; my husband looks a lot like him.
In the family, we didn't talk about these things very much, mainly because my mother-in-law didn't want to instill hatred in her children by telling horrible stories of the past. Instead she would show me beautiful embroideries she had made or been given by the Armenian refugee women during those early years in Egypt, or make all of us feasts of food drawn from the cuisines of Armenia, Lebanon, and Syria. She was a very fine cook, and an articulate and literate woman, and finally wrote a remarkable memoir during the last few years of her life. She was a Quaker and always worked for peace, coming with us to Women in Black vigils in protest of the Intifada and the Iraq War even when she was too weak to stand.
With one of her granddaughters, she went back to her childhood home in Konya several years before she died. She said the Turkish hosts and bus drivers were lovely people, but no one knew or told the truth. Passing some landmark, she would say, "Wasn't there an Armenian church here once?", or some such remark, and the guide would always answer, "Oh, no, there were never any Armenians here."
Still, she loved the trip, and we all treasure a picture of her there with her beloved granddaughter, beaming, in a field of poppies.
8:54 PM
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004
TURKISH TEA at "Merveilles d'Istanbul"
My husband, who is half Armenian, finds it difficult to enter Turkish establishments, but as we walked into this tiny restaurant he said, "It's all right, I don't need to let the past affect everything about my life today." The restaurant was run by one man, working alone, and on the menu, which came to the table in a small, tooled leather cover, were many dishes my mother-in-law used to cook. We ordered two versions of kebab; cut marinated beef on skewers for J., and the ground, spiced lamb-and-veal on flat skewers for me. The wonderful kebabs came with a shredded carrot salad dressed with vinegar, a salad of lettuce and onions, and fried potatoes so good that we each saved them for last. But the best part of the meal was the tea; perfect, fragrant, amber.
Here is Osip Mandelstam, from his Journey to Armenia:
"The Armenian language cannot be worn out: its boots are made of stone. And of course its word is thick-walled, its semivowels seamed with air. But is that all its charm? No! Then where does one's craving for it come from? How to explain it? Make sense of it?
I felt joy in pronouncing sounds forbidden to Russian lips, secret sounds, outcast - and perhaps, on some deep level, shameful.
There was some beautiful boiling water in a pewter teapot and suddenly a pinch of wonderful black tea was thrown into it.
That's how I felt about the Armenian language." 8:14 PM
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Monday, February 16, 2004 The anti-Lebanon Mountains, Bludan, Syria, from a site (this amazing web!) devoted to longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae) of the West Palaearctic*, and accounts of expeditions to find them.
Last week, at the retirement home, my father-in-law slowly made his way to the table carrying a plate of food from the lunchtime buffet. "Ah," he said, sitting down heavily. "Chili con carne." To my surprise, the usually bland menu had included chili, and it was spicy.
"It's good," I said.
"Yes!" he replied, eating a big forkful. "I have such happy memories of chili con carne." He said the word as if he were tasting it, in his Damascene accent, more as if it were Italian than Spanish. I raised my eyebrows; this was not what I expected. "You see, we were in Bludan once, myself and two of my students" (he mentioned their names, both people we have met who are now old men) "and we had hiked up in the mountains all day long. We made our camp for the night, and made a fire, and one of them brought out a can of chili con carne and heated it over the fire. That was our dinner. And it was so delicious! So wonderful!" I watched him eat his chili against a backdrop of other white-haired residents, some in wheelchairs, in the bright light of a midwinter noon, snow piled against the windows outside. "Ah!" he said again. "It brings it all back. The smell of the bougainvilla, the clean air in the mountains. Our youth." In all our meals together over twenty five years, I never remember my father-in-law eating chili. We ate Middle Eastern food, or Chinese food, or more-or-less American food- under protest - like what he was served now nearly every day. I wish I had known. Food and memory are indelibly linked for him, and my husband and I know that the stories a meal sometimes triggers are no longer infinite. It made me happy to watch him, one forkful after another, eyes partly closed, remembering.
*in case you were wondering what the West Palaearctic is, as I was: "The eastern border is formed by the Ural mountains (Russia), and passes southwards through the Caspian Sea and the north-western part of the Persian Gulf; the southern border runs through the Sahara desert and integrates the massifs of Hoggar Kibo, Air, Tibesti and Ennedi as well as a large part of Saudi Arabia. Canary Islands, of course, are part of the West Palaearctic region too." This particular expedition went to Syria and Turkey, and there are some other lovely pictures.
I'm guest-blogging on GLUTTONY today, as part of the series on the vices at CommonBeauty - so I hope you'll go there!
11:03 AM
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Sunday, February 15, 2004
Back home, laden with baked goods from the Belgian boulangerie/patisserie we discovered down the block, and various Arabic breads from our favorite grocer. But it was not only the food that delighted my eye: above is a very small selection of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of fine and decorative papers available at Omer de Serres, a huge art supply store near UQAM (University of Quebec at Montreal). If you can believe it, I didn't buy a single sheet.
We hardly ever just take off on the spur of the moment, so this felt like a few stolen days in the middle of intense work. We slept and slept, in spite of a terrible bed that sank toward the middle both from the ends and the sides and was both small and short - the price of a last-minute reservation in the non-luxurious hotel we frequent there. We like it, though; as another guest told J., "I stay here because it's so close to all the art." The Place des Arts, Montreal's relatively new performing arts complex which also houses the contemporary art museum (this link wasn't working tonight; I'll check again tomorrow), is just a short walk away. The latter is one of our favorite places in the city, and we saw a fine show of political art by Dominique Blain. (It was, I have to add, not only political in content but good art as well; usually I would find such a show heavy-handed but she won me over.)
Has anyone seen a new Hungarian film called "Hukkle" (that's Hungarian for "hiccup")? Bizarre, original, and wonderful - but I'd love to hear what someone else thought of it.
9:39 PM
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