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
Friday, March 12, 2004
Persephone Inspecting the Garden
One month ago, she ate the last of the pomegranate seeds on the way back from a trip to the compost bin.
Snow covered her path and the orange peels and eggshells lay frozen together on their bed of winter greens, but still she sensed a stirring underfoot and a warm, liquid rising in the tall willow as if to a shy face still unaware of its beauty.
Today, thin emerald blades of chives sprout brushlike, from bare earth; pale prepubescent nubs of rhubarb push forth, prepare to blush.
Kneeling down, she pulls the golden coverlet of straw from autumn’s last chrysanthemums, plunges fingers in the soft dark earth, feeling for the living stems.
Bending close, she listens in that space between the growing thing and earth,
The season changed today. No doubt there will be more snow, thick and heavy, demoralizing but fleeting, but today's sun and warmth - hot enough to feel here on my face as I type five feet away from the window and penetrating enough to send cobalt blue rays from the tulip-vase across the sugar bowl with its blue-tinged cubes, across the teapot, and onto my hand - have sent the snow into alarmed retreat and urged the first green shoots out of the frozen earth. I am euphoric.
Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk in the hilly woods nearby. "How was it," asked J. when I got back. "Nice, a little icy - but so dark!" I told him. He smiled. "That's your refrain these days," he said. "I should set up some lights and shine them on you." I smiled, wanly: "They have to be daylight lights." But today -- today dawned clear and bright, with the promise of real warmth. When J. came bringing me coffee - my eyes still tightly closed - I heard the swish of ski pants. "Ah!" I said, jumping out of bed. "Good for you!" "Can't resist," he replied. Shortly after he left we had a major power outage, caused by a squirrel, probably, scampering around the transformer on the pole outside the house. I conferred with my neighbor and stood outside with him for a while until the power company truck came, both of us relishing the rays of unfamiliar early-morning heat. "We have March sun in Iceland," he told me, "but it never warms you like this. It's just too... far away." Later I read and wrote, worked on my book-making project, made a light lunch, and then went back to the woods for another walk.
Today the woods were bright and airy, shot full of yellow light falling on moss-covered stumps and old stone walls and casting deep blue shadows on the receding snow. The path up the hill was treacherous so I climbed up through the trees, past a flock of lichens alighting like white butterflies on a decaying trunk; piles of deer scat in a stand of Christmas ferns; a fallen white birch, peeling pink and gold. The little brook sang, tinkling like glass on its steep descent to the still-frozen pond below.
The woods is mostly old white pine, beech, birch and hemlock, fairly open on the southern exposure and dense and dark to the north. In one spot, though, it opens up; the conifers are widely spaced, the canopy open. The forest floor here is covered with several species of Lycopodium (clubmoss), and a few little tree-like forms of princess pine stood proudly, emerging from the snow. Faded ochre leaves, bleached by the winter, clung to the beech saplings along the trail and lay scattered on the snow like so many golden coins. Imagine, I thought, being moved by riches such as these - leaves that even a starving woman couldn't boil for a stew, leaves stripped of every green cell, worn down to skeletons, and yet so beautiful in their varied colors of beige, gold, wheat and straw that I am lingering here like a guest at a feast. At the top of the hill, the deep woods begins again, and in the semi-darkness I found brownish-purple pyramids, two feet tall, of pinecone scales at the feet of the towering white pines - leavings from a winter-long banquet eaten high overhead. It reminded me of an old communion hymn that stuck in my head for the rest of my walk, and which I have no problem appropriating for the squirrels:
This is the hour of banquet and of song/ This is the heavenly table spread for me/ here let me feast, and feasting, still prolong the brief bright hour of fellowship with thee.
Is it spring that has loosed the tongues and brought forth the running sap to flow in our pens? There are jewels on the web today, please go and gather some for yourself:
There's Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner, having breakfast with newfound friend Clayton Olson at a cattle sale barn in Rugby, ND (?).
There's Dave at Via Negativa, hearing the tundra swans - my God, what a beautiful piece of writing.
And over at CommonBeauty, an epistolary treasure on the archaeology of childhood is being birthed - one of the most original and lovely collaborative projects I've yet seen on the web.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004 A cliche, I know, but they've been cheering me up all day and I wanted to share them.
4:26 PM
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Some Girls Want Out is an article from the London Review of Books by Hilary Mantel about "spectacular female saintliness", but in particular about female saints who starved themselves.
In this long, troubling, sometimes creepy, and fascinating article, Mantel considers women portrayed in four books, The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint by Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni; Saint Thérèse of Lisieux by Kathryn Harrison; The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty by Helen King; and A Wonderful Little Girl: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl by Sian Busby.
"Starvation was a constant in these women's lives. It melted their flesh away, so that the beating of their hearts could be seen behind the racks of their ribs. It made them one with the poor and destitute, and united them with the image of Christ on the cross... Like her medieval predecessors, Gemma Galgani received the stigmata, the mark of Christ's wounds. Like them, she was beaten up by devils. Like them, she performed miracles of healing after her death. When you look at her strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use to talk about her - through which discipline will you approach her?"
She tells of their lives, which are bizarre regardless of how you look at them, but then - and this is the truly fascinating part - considers "holy anorexia" in relationship to the anorexia epidemic of today -- what common factors might be at work? What options for control did these unusual women have, and why were they exercising them? Were these saints also trying to evade their sexuality and femininity? Why did the church find their actions so problematic, and why are we so profoundly disturbed by young anorexic women today while we allow young men to exert other kinds of destructive control over their bodies?
"Bell and Mazzoni demonstrate how potentially subversive Gemma's physical eloquence was. The saint first affected by the stigmata was Francis of Assisi, but it has afflicted many more women than men. It insists on the likeness of the believer's body to that of Christ. It argues that the gender of the redemptive body does not matter. It undermines the notion of a masculine God. It shows that Christ can represent women and women can represent Christ - no wonder it makes the church nervous. There is a trap the church has created for itself - it wants Jesus to have a gender but not sexuality. Under the loincloth of the crucified Christ, what would you find? Only a smooth groin of wood or plaster. His ability to love has to centre on some other organ..."
"Anorexia itself seems like mad behaviour, but I don't think it is madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, 'noli me tangere.' Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time..."
Perhaps not before-dinner reading, but I'd love to hear what other people think. As for myself, I've never been able to fast very much, and never had any urge to, but I am very fond of a young woman who struggled with anorexia throughout her adolescence. I don't pretend to understand it; all I could do was catch glimpses of possible reasons, speculate privately, and try to let her know I loved her for the unique beauty and spirit that she seemed to despise in herself. I recently read a memoir by an Episcopal priest about her own anorexia, and it failed to explain much beyond the fact that this young woman, too, hated herself. Mantel's well-written article gave me a new perspective; she asks more questions than she answers, and gave me a lot to ponder about women, our bodies, and the offerings we choose to make of them.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004 Ashura in Karbala. Photographs by Ali Khaligh from Kargah.com (some of these are pretty bloody, so be forewarned).
To better understand what you're seeing in these photographs, read Nancy's vivid description of an Ashura observance, at under the fire star.
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments on politics and Cassandra. I never had any intention of radically changing this blog, and your feedback reinforces that, as well as my own hunches about what people like and don't like about this site. I sure do love you and your honesty. Thank God for opinions and people who aren't afraid to express them!
I've been on a cooking binge, trying to stock up the freezer for days when I/we don't have time. This afternoon I made a big pot of beef and celery khoresh, a Persian stew flavored with turmeric, dried lemon, fresh parsley (tons of parsley), tomato paste, chili, and dried mint. It's very good; you eat it on rice with yogurt. And I made a pot of spaghetti sauce. And a lot of jasmine rice. Whenever I dip my hand into my small container of dried lemon, with its dark brown, uneven, somewhat soft and pungent pieces, I wonder if these lemons were spread out in the sun or on a radiator somewhere, the way Shirin talks about. "We picked them from the trees in the courtyard," she told me, "and set them out to dry. And then you crack them with a hammer and break them into little pieces." The flavor they impart is entirely different from lemon juice - dusky, complex, and very sour.
Yesterday's Fresh Airinterview with world religion scholar Karen Armstrong, about her new memoir, The Spiral Staircase. I've found Armstrong's books pretty dry, but this memoir of her life as a young nun and her dislocating re-entry into a world of Vietnam protest, hippies, and the Beatles sounds fascinating. As a young woman she was also diagnosed, after five distressing years, as having temporal lobe epilepsy, the same disease as Dostoyevsky - which can cause "religious" symptoms.
Neal Ascherson's riveting essay on Georgia (the one in the Caucasus), "After the Revolution", in The London Review of Books. Don't miss the part about the Dmanisi , tiny hominids who lived in what is now Georgia 1.7 million years ago.
Monday, March 08, 2004 GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE (across the Hudson River, just north of Manhattan)
One of my favorite structures, both because I think it's beautiful and because seeing it means you're almost there.
5:28 PM
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POLITICS OR NOT?
I'm curious - how do people feel about political discussions on this blog? (I know, it's my blog, but you are my guests, and we're into radical hospitality, remember?) I have no intention of making this a political blog, for reasons I've stated before, but occasionally there is something that I feel I want to say, or a pertinent link to share, especially when it has to do with the other topics that we frequently focus on here, such as religious pluralism or world culture. Some people have felt the need to apologize to me for making heated (well, not even heated!) remarks in the comment threads. You know, it doesn't bother me at all. If you were all here in person, we'd argue about all those taboo topics: religion, sex, and politics - but I doubt if we'd come to blows. Especially because the readership of this blog is quite diverse, I gratefully encourage and welcome all of your views, and all I ask is that people be respectful of one another, as you almost always are.
But how do you feel about the topic in general? As I told one commenter, I started this blog in reaction to my own burn-out after two years of intense political and peace work, especially regarding the Middle East. I purposely want people to come to The Cassandra Pages and find something that makes them feel better, not worse, and to discover kindred spirits who still believe there is value and hope in thinking, and art, and compassion for one another. On the other hand, I think we all are trying to grapple with today's world and trying to gain understanding and help each other through a very difficult time. So how do you feel about politics - do you want to see it here or not?
5:25 PM
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Sunday, March 07, 2004
It's been a long weekend. Friday night we curled up in bed and watched "Frida". Saturday, my usual housework day, I did everything I could: cleaned the bathroom, did the laundry and ironing, tidied up the living area and then spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen, making some food for the week ahead (some aromatic chinese beef spiced with star anise) and the meal for that night's dinner with three of our Muslim friends - salmon with a crushed cumin/coriander seed crust and spicy citrus salsa; a pilaf of kasha, onion, carrot and orzo; green salad; French bread; Arabic pastries from Montreal and Iranian ones that Shirin brought from Los Angeles, along with strawberries for dessert. J. made his mother's famous sambusek, deep-fried pastries filled with cheese, scallions, and parsley. The guests stayed until nearly midnight discussing Iranian politics, the Iraqi constitution, various Shii and Sunni beliefs about jinn, the spirits who gave rise to the term "genie", and telling hilarious jokes from Iran and Morocco. We also got into an intense discussion about Mel Gibson's "Passion" (which none of us had seen yet) and issues of language and authenticity in the Bible and in Muslim hadiths; at one point we had four different reference sources arrayed on the table along with the dessert as we looked for parallel passages in Luke and Matthew.
Shirin, who loves to laugh and tell stories, told about how one time when she had a cast on her arm she woke in the night and it itched so much she thought a jinn had gotten hold of her. She tried to pray, but found she couldn't say the name of Allah - it was like "the jinn had stopped up my mouth". She got really scared; they were living in a house surrounded by woods at the time, and jinn are supposed to live in the woods. Finally she remembered a sequence of chanted prayers that led up to the name of God again and that time she managed to get it out - and she said whatever was holding her tongue let go, and she was all right. "If it hadn't let go I would have gone crazy and I was worrying even then that my husband would put me in a home for insane people. See, I never would have met you!" she said to me, tragically. "What would you have done?" she said, laughing, turning to her husband.
"Kashke kashtan sabz nashod", he replied. "It's a Farsi saying, translated loosely as "I planted an 'if', and it didn't bloom."
Today - church and choir beginning at nine, then a drive to Concord for the formal investiture of Gene Robinson as the Diocesan Bishop of New Hampshire, taking over from the retiring Bishop Theuner. It was a very happy occasion, more of a family" affair for the diocese itself than the consecration was, with much less pomp, fewer media and security forces, and more personality - but by the time we got home, we were both very tired indeed. I'm hoping for a happier and more restful week to come.
