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 27, 2004 MY THERAPY
Singing has to be so good for you. In London on vacation I sometimes went to church at St. George's Bloomsbury, a historic, rather square Nicholas Hawksmoor structure now hemmed in by the neighboring buildings and very much in need of the restoration work that has recently commenced. It's an (hush!) Anglo-Catholic parish with a good organ, some of the finest plasterwork in London (also in need of restoration), a very formal liturgy, and a small local congregation who are responsible for maintaining their building. I was there on several Christmas mornings, leaving the hotel when I heard the bells tolling a quarter hour before the service, freezing during it with my feet on the cold stone floor, and lingering afterwards for mince pies and mulled wine.
St. George's doesn't have a choir, or didn't then, but they had an excellent organist and a woman soloist with a fine voice who served as cantor. During one of my visits I went up to the organ loft afterwards to say hello to the musicians, who were glad to talk to an American singer-visitor. Joyce, the cantor, told me she also gave singing lessons to war victims. It turned out that she meant men who had been wounded or gassed in World War II, and had breathing problems as a result. "So I have them sing," she said. "Some are in wheelchairs. It's so good for them, good for their lungs, and good for the whole body and spirit." What a practical British solution, I thought, betting this sturdy, down-to-earth woman was very good at it. I doubt we'd think of that here.
Often on mornings like today, when I'm in an intense choir rehearsal, breathing deeply and singing with my whole body, next to my friend Anne who is doing the same, I think of Joyce and her students. Having done this my entire life, I know she's right: it's therapy to sing, and privilege, and hard work, and often sheer joy. (DO try this at home the next time you feel sad: turn up a favorite CD, and belt it out!)
MOVE OVER, CALIFORNIA! Spring is springing even in New England. (The rest of the landscape today is mostly mud.)
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Last weekend I finished the first novel in Anatoly Rybakov's trilogy about life in Russia under Stalin, "The Children of Arbat". The always-astute Language Hat observed that Rybakov's work may be "more worthy than artistic" and now that I've read one volume, I'd have to agree. However, it WAS worth it to me to read this account, which must be largely autobiographical, of a young man's falling out of favor with the Party, his exile to Siberia, and life among the rough peasants and petty bureaucrats where no one could be trusted. Meanwhile, back in Moscow, his group of male and female friends begin their post-school lives.
What fascinated me were (not surprisingly, I guess) the struggles of people living under impossible situations to maintain their humanity, dignity, and sense of enjoyment of life; their desire for relationships; their varying degrees of integrity; their attempts to circumvent and manipulate a corrupt system to their own benefit; and their interpretations of what is moral behavior. Halfway through the 650 pages I said, "No way am I going to read the rest of these," but when I finished (at a rather fast, ignore-the-subtleties clip, I admit) I was wavering. We'll see. The writing really is not artistic; there wasn't a single phrase that was memorable or quotable, but I will remember the characters and their lives and I find myself wanting to know what happened to them. The authenticity comes through.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
My eyes are burning from a day glued to the screen. We've got a five-hour interview with the Bishop tomorrow, and I'm trying to prepare not only the questions but a redundant digital recording system. Working with sound is new for me, after years and years of visual work. I find I like it - maybe it's the music thing coming out in a different form - but it presents new technological challenges and there's a lot to learn. Today I was testing three different types of microphones and setting up profiles to avoid clipping and capture the best quality recording. Then there is the editing part...interesting, frustrating. I lost an entire hour and a half of work inserting text markers into a sound file because I didn't save it correctly, for example. Well - I won't make the same mistake again!
If anyone has questions they'd like me to ask Bishop Robinson, I'd love to hear from you. I expect to be talking to him a lot over the next few months, and your input could make this a stronger project with much broader appeal. What's interesting to you: Episcopalians or not, believers or not, astute social critics all? What sort of topics would make you want to read a book about him? Feel free to comment here or to send me e-mails.
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Tonight, though, it's Bach. We're singing Cantatas 131 (Out of the Deep) and 118 (Jesu Christ, My Lord and Life) on Sunday evening and are NOWHERE NEAR ready with #131, although I bet it will come together tonight. It's going to be a workout, especially for the tenors and basses who have a complex cello-like running line in two of the movements. We sopranos have it easy, just getting to sing the chorale over them. Our director explained that this work is "Baby Bach" - J.S. when he was only 25 years old. He wrote it (like much of his vocal music) very instrumentally, i.e. using voices as substitutes for instruments. Well and good for musicality and overall effect, but hell if you're a soprano trying to sing a violin line, or a bass trying to be a cello. Still, there is nothing like working on Bach, and few things in life are as satisfying as the moments when all the difficulties begin to smooth out, and the music emerges in all its beauty and power.
4:49 PM
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004 NEW SNOW
Well, I can't deny that it's pretty!
. . . . .
There's a miniature rose bush in my window, next to the basil growing strongly under plastic. The roses are yellow, and tiny, and they make me happy every time I look at them. It's sunny today, and in spite of the new snow I feel more cheerful than I have lately. Yesterday was a grim day, one of those where I felt like I was losing my equilibrium completely and falling into the abyss of gloom and self-pity. Roaming the blogosphere, I know I'm not alone in this; the assassination of Sheik Yassin seems to have pushed a number of us over the edge. (It's made for some good posts though - dale's recent one on anger in particular.)
Yesterday was also the day when I sent out reminders for our monthly interfaith prayers for peace. I wrote something about how it was important to gather and to support each other right now, and got back a note from one of my Muslim friends, who is the prayer leader for the local Muslim community. "Please do not be sad over the world situation," he wrote. "Remember that God is able to change it at any moment, remember that it is all a test to see who are the righteous and who are the unjust people."
I was touched by his concern for me, even though I find it hard to believe the same way. I'd like to, because I want to believe that there will be a reckoning someday, and that the perpetrators of violence and destruction -- those who are unjust, greedy, and those who misuse power, will be held accountable. I want to believe that there is such a thing as justice. And all our religious systems seem to have some sort of ultimate justice or balancing system built into them, whether it is karma or a Day of Judgement. (I also recognize in myself that this desire to explain the inherent unfairness of life is utterly human, and if carried to an extreme can be, in itself, vengeful).
What I find most useful in my friend's view, and that of other Muslims I know, is the underlying thought that obstacles and suffering are challenges, and that what matters is our response to them. I can lose myself in anger or despair, or I can pick myself up, again and again, and try to understand, grow; be a loving, hopeful, and grateful person despite a chaotic and painful world.
Some days, it's the hardest possible thing. It's "lack of control" that usually sets my own spiral into motion. I can't change the government by myself, can't turn back the clock, can't take away pain, death, loss, and fear even from those I love the most. But what I can do is love harder and more fully - both others, and myself. I can be grateful for the freedom to still use my pen and my voice, but I can also notice the roses, plays some music, make some food and share it. I can refuse to be terrorized and hopeless-ized into losing my own humanity.
Other peoples, who have lived with suffering, hardship, and lack of control a lot longer than we have, in the quick-fix-it West, are much better at this. I think of Rosewicz's "Old Women", just doing (there it is again!) what needs to be done. Or this stanza from Zbigniew Herbert's "The Ardennes Forest":
push away leaves: a wild strawberry dew on a leaf the comb of grass further a wing of a yellow damselfly and an ant burying its sister a wild pear sweetly ripens above the treacheries of belladonnas without waiting for greater rewards sit under the tree
. . . . .
(A note to Ernesto of Nearly Neutral, I'd like to write to you or comment but there's no email address...?)
10:13 AM
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Monday, March 22, 2004
CONFESSION
I pulled out my folder of the Village Poems and went through them all - there were 29 of them, written in 1997 and 1998. I'd marked 16 as being "OK", 3 to be cut, 10 in need of editing, and that was just about right, except that the 16 are OK and the other 13 need to be deleted, not edited. They did "lack artistic merit" - although most of those dogs hadn't gotten sent in with my ill-fated grant application.
It's so good to go back to old work and see it afresh, because not only do you see what was wrong, a lot of the time, you also see yourself with new eyes. I was sort of shocked at how truly lousy the bad poems were, and even more so that I could have thought they were salvageable at the time. But there were others that I liked then, and still like now, and a few that were just asking for a little love and attention. They made me recall a particualr time and frame of mind, like looking through old snapshots. I had thought maybe I'd write some more of these, now, but I don't think I can or should - what I wrote now wouldn't fit, and these poems form a group and a moment in time, both mine and the village's. There's something that feels true about them still. In a recent comment, Dave wrote how he wished there was more emphasis on collections and groups of poems, and I agree with him. They often tell us more than the one individual poem, because poetry flows out in the context of a life. Re-reading a lot of Akhmatova lately, from different periods of her life, has reinforced that conviction for me.
Today was very cold with a stiff wind, and when I went for a mid-afternoon walk I saw and felt the same things I had written about in this poem seven years ago:
Plate Glass Window, Facing South
On a six-degree day when the wind scouring Main Street sets my shoulder against the storefronts,
I look into Denise’s window and there a spray of orchids looks back at me --
each an extravagance of white-est ruffles round a crimson throat, tilting their heads this way and that --
a cloud of schoolgirls from a place where live oaks grow, and people eat black beans and sit in jazz clubs,
listening to a woman singing stories, moving her dark bare arms languidly against the night.
Sunday, March 21, 2004
I'm blushing here from all the lovely things people said while wishing Cassandra a happy blogday. Thank you, and thank you for reading what I write, and coming back again. I still think it's crazy and amazing that anybody does, and that blogging is one of the best things I've ever decided to do.
SNOW SQUALL, 4:45 pm.
Now, back to serious stuff, and the quote from Friday.
I sort of wish the author had left it with "Do!" rather than "Do more." The point, I think (and the reason the quote struck me) is that we all have so many excuses for not doing the work: meaning the writing, the paintings, the music, learning the langauges... whatever. So help me God, I have written more in the past about why I wasn't creating than about any other subject. I know what is meant by not-doing, the excuses are all there in my own handwriting, and I also know what it feels like to want to create not just one good piece of writing, but a body of work that represents this one human life. And there's only one way through that, and it's to buckle down and work, write something every day, for yourself, because it matters to YOU.
Part of it is the mileage that you have to put in to hone the craft. Part of it is gradually finding a voice, and learning how to hear the sounds that don't ring true. Part of it is figuring out what you really want to write about, confronting what's really inside. Those processes never end. But there is also a point when it comes back to not-doing - letting go. The few times I've really been in a different zone, where the work flowed effortlessly, almost as if somebody else were guiding it - those times are when I've let go and wasn't thinking too much, although it's not like thought totally stopped. You prepare and prepare, and then once in a while, you get to let go and let it flow through you. The watching "You" simply steps aside. Can't describe it. Others have tried. But all agree that you can't get there without practice, and you can't "will" it to happen again.
Of course we have to think about our work, and of course we have to practice, and of course we have to stop and contemplate, and to simplify our lives so that we have a chance of focusing. Constant "doing" isn't the point. But we'll never get anywhere if we don't DO.
The paradox is that the DOING is often more important that what is done. Still, I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that the poem, the painting, the novel, the composition - these are worthy goals. It sometimes seems that the new political correctness in the blogworld is to say that "process" is more important than anything else when in fact we are trying to avoid our own non-doing, or our fear of failure, and trying to appear non-competitive or non-accomplishment-oriented. The fact is that many of us want very much to write, and to write as well as we can. And we have advantages many writers through history have never had - a medium that encourages daily practice and experimentation, and offers feedback and friendship. Seems pretty lucky to me.
MY THERAPY
