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, March 06, 2004
A photo journal following two Iranian Shiia pilgrims during their stay in Karbala, Iraq, from the BBC. Karbala is second only to Mecca in holiness to Shiia Muslims. This couple had gone there for Ashoura, the commemoration of the death of Imam Hussein in 680, a grandson of Prophet Mohammed. (Hussein's tomb is in Karbala.)
I came to Karbala six months ago, at the first opportunity after the war, with my two sons," Mohsen said.
"That time we crossed the border illegally, walking eight hours across mountains, guided by people smugglers.
"This time we travelled here more comfortably by bus. The border is open to Iranian pilgrims during Ashoura. You don't even need to show your passport."
From Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo) an analysis of the difference (little) a Kerry presidency would make in the Middle East:
Kerry asserts that, "history and our own best interests demand that the United States maintain a steady policy of friendship and support for Israel." In December, he lambasted former front- runner Vermont Governor Howard Dean for proposing that the US adopt an "even-handed" approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tellingly, Kerry said that, "Every candidate who aspires to be president should know that Israel is a democracy and our closest ally in the region."
For Kerry, the burden of renewing stalled peace talks does not rest on Ariel Sharon, who "is willing to make peace" but does not "see a committed partner in peace on the Palestinian side". He believes, instead, that the violence is triggered by "militant Palestinian groups bent on destroying the peace process," rather than by Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza.
With this understanding of a cycle of Arab aggression and Israeli self-defence, it is only natural that Kerry insists that "Palestinians must stop the violence -- this is the fundamental building block of the peace process." After this step, Israel should "alleviate hardships on the Palestinian people", a move which evidently does not involve dismantling the separation wall or the vast majority of settlements.
Chernobyl
From Conscientious, a remarkable, raw tour of Chernobyl today by a Kawasaki-riding young Russian woman whose attitude toward risk is as worth reflecting upon as the images she shows us. (Be sure to keep clicking "next" at the bottom of each page.)
The word CHERNOBYL scares holly bijesus out of people here. If I tell someone that I am heading in "dead zone"... you know, what I hear.. In best case- "are you nuts?" My dad used to say that people afraid of a things which they don't know. Dad is nuclear physicist and he also says that of all dangerous things he can only think about one, which is riding on fifth or sixth gear on my bike. In any way, dad and their team work in "dead zone" for last 18 years. They doing researches from the day when nuclear disaster happened. The rest of guys in a team are microbiologists, doctors, botanists.. etc. I was 7 years old back then... 5:10 PM
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GRAND CENTRAL STATION, from the outside
Well, it had to happen eventually - I kind of crashed yesterday. This has been such a stressful and hectic period, and yesterday the tiredness and disappointment and anger all added up to a miserable afternoon, and a non-restful night. Arrayed around the edges of my consciousness was a jeering line-up of doubt-devils, taunting me with "You'll never write a book without that deadline!" "It's too late for this subject anyway!" and "Nobody else will want to publish it!" Today, however, I feel like I'm getting back on track, and realizing that one way or another, I'll find the right project and the right focus. In fact this morning I thought, wryly, how good it was that none of those pitchfork-jabbing comments had been "Ha,ha, and guess what? Your writing is no good!" Progress! I think I've vaporized that one.
Nobody's mood is being helped up here by the weather, which is uniformly grey, drizzly, and clammy-cold. It's just about the ugliest time of year too, with the mud, road sand on the rotting snowbanks, splashing mud puddles, and a winter's worth of debris emerging from underneath the snow. March is a season of enduring, and of hopes raised and dashed and raised again.
But realizing that I suddenly have the prospect of some TIME is quite astounding. Last night I went to choir rehearsal for the first time in three weeks and started catching up on a folder-full of new music, including a Bach cantata we're performing at Evensong at the end of March. I also not only stepped foot in my studio, but did a pile of ironing that had accumulated in there, dusted off my bookpress and sewing-frame, and began work on a small handbound book. I've been playing the piano - Bach and Mendelssohn - a little every night this week, and knitting an inch or two on my grass-green Gansey, now almost two years in the making. I know I won't keep all these activities up, but right now they are absolutely restorative. And tomorrow I intend to get back to writing about something other than myself!
I took far too many pictures in New York; in a day or two I'll post some to the photoblog part of this site. I hadn't been in Grand Central Station for a long time; it was shiny, squeaky clean with newly-added (I think) gigantic American flags. For those who haven't seen the many movie scenes shot here or had their own romantic encounters, "meeting by the clock in Grand Central" - that's it, in the center - evokes memories of a lot of leaping and crushed hearts. Overhead is a big dome painted with the constellations. And the Oyster Bar was on strike.
EAST 42nd STREET
That's the Chrysler Building rising above the reflective surfaces of other skyscrapers on East 42nd Street as we headed out of the city. At the end of this street is the East River, and the United Nations Plaza.
8:16 PM
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Why, oh why, didn't I take my camera with me to the polls yesterday? We went to vote around suppertime. In our town, voting is held in the high school gym, which you approach along a sidewalk lined with candidates and their spouses and friends, holding handmade posters and coffee cups, trying to keep warm. Yesterday was a pretty nice day here, so the dozen or so campaigners weren't bundled up beyond recognition, and we shook hands and greeted neighbors on our way into the polls.
The school gym is a typical one with bright fluorescent lights, a hardwood floor, and blue-and-white banners for each year's basketball teams hung on the walls. It smells of sweat and wrestling mats. The bleachers were folded up, and the voting booths set up in a long line against one wall, side by side, rickety aluminum legs holding the shelf inside, and faded red-white-and-blue vertically striped curtains, hip-length, on a rod at the top of each booth. The voter checklists were arrayed on tall, slanted plywood display boards, and members of the Board of Civil Authority were stationed at several strategic places in the alphabet, ready to check us off. (This voter checklist is the only official place where my last name is the same as my husband's - why, I can't remember.) "Democratic or Republican ballot?" they asked, after making a pencil mark next to our names. "Democratic," we replied, and went to the table where we were handed three ballots - a lavender one for the presidential primary, orange for local elections, and tan for the school board. Most of the local contests had only one candidate listed for each office; for "lister" - the folks who determine the assessed value of each house for the town's grand list - there were no candidates at all, just a write-in space. One of our neighbors was running - passing out blue cards with his name on it in the gauntlet outside the gym - so we wrote him in.
When I came out of my booth there was a long line of voters waiting to feed their ballots into the electronic vote-counting machine. A young woman, holding her little girl by the hand, took the place in back of me in line. "What are we doing, Mommy?" the daughter asked.
"We're taking our ballots and waiting in this line so that we can put them in the machine."
"What's a ballot?"
It looked like a pretty good turnout. I always like seeing who shows up; there were quite a few people we know, including old-timers coming out of the woodwork, and many we don't. The woman in front of me, in a cabled handknit sweater, was talking about her woodstove, and how if she were single she didn't think she'd have one. In front of her was a young man in a Harley-Davidson motorcycle jacket and a black kerchief, carefully arranging his ballots.
As we left the gym an elderly friend came in from outdoors. "Clyde is running out of cards," she said. "Are there any more lying around in here?"
"There were some in this garbage barrel," I told her, not admitting that was where I had put mine. "Here, let me scrounge for some." I bent over and riffled through the contents of the big trash barrel, near a table where young girls were selling Girl Scout cookies. I pulled out all the blue cards I could find while J. looked on, amused.
"Here," I said, handing her a handful of cards.
"Great!" she said, with a big smile. "That will hold us for a while."
Out for a drive, midday; nearly 50 degrees here. These were the first sap buckets I've seen this year, hanging on some old maples near the road, with a russet-colored farm horse nearby, staring at me. I also had my first mud-driving of the year, when I started up a dirt road and wisely turned around before I couldn't. No one who hasn't experienced "mud season" can imagine it: frozen roads turning to mud, sometimes a foot or more deep, with ruts that freeze overnight and thaw to create mires that one can only navigate by getting a fast running start and hoping for the best.
Half of me is still in the city; this juxtaposition is pretty extreme. On Sunday afternoon we walked down the street to the congregational church parish hall, where there was a retirement party for our postmaster, a woman we've known for years. It was real small-town Americana: fifty people sitting uncomfortably on chairs around the edges of the room, awkward and funny speeches, a surprising poem from a shy woman, a spontaneous song, a tribute by the guest who had flown in all the way from Wisconsin, the red-white-and-blue crepe paper decorations, the little American flags on the tables, the sheet cake - half cake and half icing -made by a local person in the form of a big letter with stamps and address and cancellation, the church ladies patiently waiting in the kitchen doorway for the speeches to be finished so they could pour the coffee. It was good to be reminded that people can be simple and sincere.
I'm tired. But it has been good to have a little time to knit and play the piano. Last night I played through Bach's First Partita, not particularly well but enjoyably, and tonight played partway through the Second. My fingers feel stiff and my technique, such as it is, is rusty, but the feeling and the pleasure are there. I wonder why I go so far away from music sometimes, when every day has fifteen minutes that could be devoted to the oasis that it creates, but music itself contains the answer: it is the silences between notes that make music come alive.
10:44 PM
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Sunday, February 29, 2004
THANK YOU
Could anything be more heartening than having a group of supportive friends like those of you who have written and commented in the last few days? Or could there be a better reason for taking the high road? The only better thing would be having a big party with all of you there. Thank you so much.
If I had a trumpet, I'd play you an extended riff, like the music that wafts out of The Blue Note, maybe the most famous jazz club in Greenwich Village. Our close friends live around the corner. When you come out of the subway onto West 3rd, you pass the handball courts and the parking garage, and then the clubs start, along with the neighborhood groceries and little restaurants. Unlike 42nd Street, uptown, where the dealers and hookers and bums have been shoved out and replaced by cops, here the Village seems unchanged. Late Thursday night, after our meetings, we were glad to come downtown to more familiar territory, where improvisation is favored over strategic decision-making, and raw art still an appreciated currency.
I'm so relieved! There will be a five-second delay in the broadcast of the Oscars so that any unexpected indecency can be scrubbed. For the British take on our foolishness, read No sex, please, we're American from today's BBC.
10:09 AM
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