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 20, 2004
IT'S CASSANDRA'S BLOGDAY
...and she wanted to thank you all for a wonderful first year.
4:34 PM
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Friday, March 19, 2004 "The problem is never what you are lacking. Label it time or money or equipment or patience or even sanity. Label it whatever you wish, but these are not your problems. Your problem is not doing. Some of the world's greatest masterpieces were done by the broke, the insane, the overworked, the bored. The only difference between you and them is they did it while you only think and talk about it. Do more."
The forty degrees today looked warmer than they were when I ventured out for an early-afternoon walk. It's still grey and bleak; the time of year when people start going bonkers in earnest. But they must be doing it indoors; I was the only person out on the village streets except for a tall girl shuffling slowly ahead of me. She had dark uncombed hair, pretty and straight, falling down her back over a bright yellow parka, and she wore long jeans wet at the bottom from being dragged along the street, and heavy black shoes. I caught up to her at the end of my block while listening to the flock of redwing blackbirds in the trees. "Hi," I said, smiling and sneaking a quick glance at her face as I went past. I had expected -what? - a sullen teenager with the dull-eyed, defeated look so common in this town of poor families and early dead-ends. But she smiled back at me with bright eyes, if a little sad, behind wire-rimmed glasses. "Pick your feet up, girl!" I wanted to say. "Come on, let's go look at the beaver dam!"
What was bugging her, I wondered. And why wasn't she in school? Over twenty-five years we've witnessed so many tragedies among the kids of the village - bright, attractive kids who ended up pregnant, married and parenting too young, penniless, tough, defeated. There was one suicide, several prison sentences, too many early pregnancies to count. Some of the kids are here only for a year or two, visiting a parent after a divorce. Others are kids we've known from stroller to bike to first hot-rod. We give them candy on Halloween, buy calendars and gift-wrap and popcorn for their school projects, give an odd job now and then -- and see them in the supermarket, years later: still the same bright glance, the happiness at being recognized even though they get silent and downcast the minute you ask how they're doing. And then there are some who escape, who by sheer force of will or luck or talent get a chance to do something else. I wanted that for this girl, a stranger I'd never seen here before. Who was she?
I crossed the street and went halfway out the bridge over the river. The water had receded enough to reveal the beaver dam again; I couldn't see any evidence of post-winter repairs, and water was streaming over at a fairly good clip, but the basic structure was still holding firm. I watched for a while, hoping to see some movement, but there was none today, just a pair of mallards lazily enjoying the calmer water behind the dam. I glanced back at the street, hoping the girl might be curious enough to be watching. No sign of her. So I went on down to the post office through the road salt and muck on the sidewalk-less side of the road, sorted the mail, and headed back up the hill. There she was, coming back around the block from the other direction. She looked up and smiled again, and I listened to her feet shuffle into the distance. Next time, I told myself. Next time I'll have a little opening, and can say something. They're like wild animals, these kids. You have to go slow, and pray there will be a little bit of time.
. . .
As I was walking, even before I saw her, I was thinking about a series of poems I wrote about this village several years ago. They were simple poems, using plain language, and I wrote them to try to tell people that they, and this place, were just as worthy as any other place on earth. I applied for a state arts council grant to publish them and give a few readings, and I got turned down. The poems "lacked artistic merit", I was told. At the time, that made me mad - who the hell was that board of academic judges to say that to anyone? - but it also hurt, and I put the poems into a folder and never did anything with them except read some at a reading, once, where people picked them out as their favorites of the night. I believe in simple poetry - which Chinese poet used to read his poems to his cook, and if she couldn't understand them, he threw them out? - and I believe in the power of art to lift people up and make them see their worthiness. So I was thinking about getting the poems out and publishing a chapbook, and just leaving a stack of them in the post office. Maybe I need to write one more poem before I do that, and hand a copy to that girl.
I've spent much of the day researching the money trail that finances the Christian Ultra-Right. I started out to track the funding for the AAC, the conservative Anglican group that opposes gay marriage and gay ordinations. But the trail also leads to highly-funded, long-standing efforts to eradicate Darwin from school curricula, stir up extreme homophobia, influence elections through voting-machine technology, and, of course, affect US governmental policy. It was fascinating, but I found the characters extremely unsavory, and the connections between individuals and organizations way more complex than I had thought. Thank God these ReCons (Reconstructionists) are more marginalized so far than the NeoCons. Still, their influence is widespread and well established within this administration - a major reason, in my opinion, for immediate change.
But the snow is melting - YEAH! - and I'm glad I get to go sing Bach tonight.
Here are some unrelated but interesting links from elsewhere:
HAY FEVER IN JAPAN Butuki writes about spring pollen and sneezing in Japanese.
Interesting for the science as well as the history: Teeth Unravel Anglo-Saxon Legacy (BBC). Researchers ...looked at different types of the elements strontium and oxygen in the teeth of 24 skeletons from an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire that spans the fifth to the seventh centuries AD. These types, or isotopes, of oxygen in local drinking water vary across Europe and locally within the British Isles. ...This characteristic isotope composition gets set in people's teeth before they are 12 years of age, and can therefore be used by scientists to pinpoint a person's geographical origin.
Lunch with my father-in-law today. Snow. In the dining room of the retirement home, we sit down over bowls of chicken gumbo soup, salad, plates of chipped beef on toast. I hear the elderly women talking about their green sweaters, green socks, green pants. "My great-great-grandfather was Irish," I hear one woman tell the young hostess. The artificiality and forced cheeriness of the holiday depress me, but I try to shake it off. This is a day when my father-in-law can't hear; we repeat everything three times, trying different versions of the same thought hoping he'll be able to pick up some key words and get the gist of what we're saying. When he hasn't heard something, he just says, "Yes."
"Is it St. Patrick's Day today?" I ask.
"I wouldn't know," he says, tucking into his soup. He has taken a big bowl of soup, chipped beef, and a plate of watermelon.
"What do you think of Kerry?"
"He's all right. He's saying the right things."
We're silent, trying to think of things to shout at each other.
"See that woman over there?" he says. "She's the richest one here. And she's moving out. She decided to move into an apartment in town."
"Does she have care-givers who will live-in with her?"
He shrugs. "For the rich, it's not a problem."
"There's a hint of bamia in this soup," he says. "What's bamia?"
"Okra," I tell him.
"Yes," he nods.
When we're finished, we head for the front door and see three green balloons, all different, tied together with shiny ribbon. "Someone is having a birthday," my father-in-law remarks.
"I think it's for St. Patrick's Day," I tell him.
"Oh," he says, indifferent. "I wouldn't know."
. . .
Back at home, the afternoon light is brilliant off the new snow; my eyes tear up and sting. I put my hand under the plastic that covers the basil seedlings on the windowsill; it's hot under there, moist. The rosemary tendrils lean toward the light. Oranges, limes, the cobalt blue napkins, the warm old dyes in the carpet all struggle against the pull of the white-washing light. I feel the room tipping toward the window -- floor, walls -- sliding southward toward the light, toward the dazzling death-throes of winter.
I retreat to the couch and a volume of Zbigniew Herbert:
the women on our street were plain and good they patiently carried from the markets baskets of nourishing vegetables
"There was an article about Beirut in the Times," my father-in-law had announced this noon. "Terrible. Just like before. The rich are living like kings, and the poor like dogs. Eventually, there will be another revolution." He shakes his head, and then remembers something. "In Damascus there were people we called the Basket People. You found them in the markets. They wore baskets, you know, two of them with a yoke around their necks. You'd buy whatever you wanted and put it into the baskets, and then for a few coins they would carry it wherever you wanted them to go - all the way across the city. One of them carried my piano once. Imagine someone in this country carrying a piano on his back! But they would just pick up anything, get it settled on their back and ..." he waved his hand, sending the remembered peasant off on his task. "Their legs were really powerful."
"Who were they?" we asked. "Were they Muslims?"
"I don't know," he said. "They certainly weren't Christians. Probably Muslims. They were the poorest of the poor. I didn't know them. I knew only that they were... useful."
the city stands over water smooth as the memory of a mirror it reflects in the water from the bottom
and flies to a high star where a distant fire is burning like a page of the Iliad
(quotes from Zbigniew Herbert's "Three Poems by Heart" from Elegy for the Departure.)
8:16 PM
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Tuesday, March 16, 2004
PLEASE VISIT
CommonBeauty's letter-invitational on The Archaeology of Childhood:Injury ends today, with letters from qB, yours truly, and CB.
Meanwhile, we are waiting for a late winter storm to hit: 6-9 inches of snow predicted. The entire day has been silent, grey, and empty. Before a rain, or a midwinter storm, there is silence, and a sort of excited, pregnant suspension, but not this sense of emptiness - of all the air being sucked out of the world. What is it - the change in pressure? I wonder about the physicality of reacting to natural phenomena, because I sense that our bodies have lost the ability to translate the signals we receive, unlke the birds and squirrels. Instead, I find myself doing a mental inventory - eggs? milk? bread? rice? - and once I satisfy myself that our food stores are sufficient, settling in to wait.
6:59 PM
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Monday, March 15, 2004 ECOTONE TOPIC for March 15: SPIDERS
Charlotte probably gets the credit for making me into a spider protectress. I read E.B. White’s classic at an early age and have ever afterwards identified all spiders with the heroine of that book. My mother, though, was their advocate in real life. She taught me to be a friend of all creatures, and showed me that they all have their place. “It’s more scared of you than you are of it” was the way I was introduced to snakes, snapping turtles, spiders, and even wasps and bees. “Let’s just be quiet and watch it for a little while.” As a result I don’t remember ever being especially afraid of anything I found in nature; in fact I was surprised and affronted the first time a bee stung me. I learned to be respectful, yes; but scared, no.
We lived in a rambling old house with a large spider-harboring attic and spider-friendly gardens; I often woke to a lawn covered with dew-studded “fairy” webs. In the summers we went to our unfinished camp on the lake where for years we were mere visitors amid the fauna who really lived there. Our lake house always had spiders in it. They were mainly allowed to stay put, in the bathroom or the damp downstairs, or were escorted gently outside. That’s my policy today, too – we’ve had a resident spider (or its progency) in the bathroom for years, and my often-unused studio has many more, their egg-cases hanging in the corners. I don’t remember most of these spiders as individuals, but there’s one who remains stickily in my mind.
She – let’s say it was a she – lived under the dock. This was cohabitation, when I was eight or nine, because I lived on top. The dock was long, maybe fifteen feet, and six sturdy feet wide, and it stretched out into the lake from the shore, supported by several posts sunk into the lake bottom. The water at the end was well over my head, so diving and jumping were safe, and there was sun on that end nearly all day long. It was a fine place to fish, worm-can at one’s side; or to play with dolls, or sunbathe with a book, and later in my adolescence it was a place for solitude and daydreaming, or lying on my back at night, gazing at the stars.
But when the sun baked down on the dock, midday, all you had to do was swing your head over the far edge to find yourself eye-to-eye with the other inhabitant: an enormous black spider with hairy legs that would go scurrying through a crack into the darkness beneath the dock. She rarely came up onto the top surface, and although all the kids who swam there knew about the spider and had varying degrees of, shall we say, familiarity with her, no one deliberately splashed her or tried to knock her into the water. That seems strange to me now; maybe we knew the adults would have been angry at us. But perhaps she was preserved because she did scare us a little, and provided part of our fun.
Almost every time we swam, one ritual was to dive underneath the old metal barrels that supported the far end of the dock, and come up into the small dark place underneath. There was two feet of headroom in which to breathe, and another foot on either side of one’s shoulders, but it was quite dark, with a little light filtering in through the cracks in the decking and between the barrels, and the water was always still. That was an advantage, because it meant you could see very clearly all the way to the bottom. Small fish frequented this place too, moving their blue-tipped fins slowly in the water. And – there was always the spider. Finding her was the challenge of going under the dock, and while you were there, treading water and looking around for a glimpse of her hairy legs, a sunfish or rock bass was likely to come up behind you and take a nip of your tender, pale, young back. We worried about eels – although I only saw one there in all those years – and snapping turtles, who kept their distance. So in reality, it was just the spider: slightly menacing; annoyed but not enough to relinquish her territory;, an adult-substitute of sorts in this child-world where we were utterly free; a reliable constant from season to season.
“I see her!” we’d announce, and, mission completed, swim back out into the light.
Read other stories of spiders and place at the Ecotone Wiki.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
PLEASE GO VISIT ...CommonBeauty's series of letter exchanges about childhood which continue today. I'm the second guest, writing a response to Tom of The Middlewesterner about growing up in farm country and about a childhood injury.
AND A THANK YOU ...to everybody who wrote and surprised me with comments on yesterday's poem. It's an experiment for me to post poetry, which I haven't been writing at all lately. I'm much more confident in my prose, probably because I've shared it much more. This poem was several years old and I was very curious if it would meet with silence or comments. So thank you, maybe this will spur me on to write and post some more (sometimes I think I only write poetry when I'm unhappy, so a different impetus would be good!)
2:54 PM
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