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, April 30, 2004
GENEVA CONVENTION? WHATS THAT? For more on civilian contractor involvement in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal (see below), here is an article from The Guardian. We may not be reading these details in the domestic media anytime soon: after all, CBS sat on their photos for 2 weeks at the Pentagon's request. (Thanks, qB!)
3:10 PM
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The kitchen is clean, laundry done, computers backed up, oil changed, bags packed, plants arranged in one place to make it easy for my friend who offered to water them. So I must be ready, right? Actually, it feels that way. I am ready, and looking forward to both familiar and unexpected places and events. One of those will be our first experience with Canadian dental care. J. has decided to have his surgery and implant preparation done in Montreal, after receiving two totally conflicting opinions - I kid you not - from local endodontists. One sent a report to our regular dentist showing the tooth with a large "X" over it, and the abscess clearly marked, recommending surgical extraction as soon as possible. The other (who had done the original root canal) said he could see no sign of continued infection, and that he'd see J. in three months for a follow-up. The first said the root seemed fractured and the canals incompletely filled; the second said the tooth was intact. This would be funny if it weren't so painful, as they say.
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Susurra and others have been blogging about recent developments in Iraq and asking how people are dealing with their frustrations and anger. It is truly frustrating. I spent two years doing everything I could to try to prevent the war and the kind of atrocities we are seeing in Falluja and at the prison. I've spent another year using my blog to try to help myself and others live in a world where violence is committed in our name, and despair and hopelessness loom ever larger. Now I'm about ready to get back out onto the street corner with my sign: what shall it be this time? How about simply, "Enough is Enough". But instead I am leaving for Canada, and a different political climate. This is not an escape, but it always gives me a greater perspective. There will be different films shown, to audiences with a different political temperature; the headlines will be different, along with the comments and concerns of people we meet. I hope to talk to the group of fine people we met two years ago at the Montreal Women in Black demonstrations against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And when I get back, I will again do something more tangible and public here.
Right now I think all of us are in different places on that line between self-preservation and public outrage. Some of us feel numb, some express a lack of surprise. As for me, I will never cease to be shocked by human capacity for violence and atrocity. Last week I saw not only the prison photos but a four-page series of eye-witness photos from the streets and make-shift hospitals and morgues in Falluja. I didn't make it through the second page. I'm not one who can live with phrases like "there will always be wars" or "it's nothing new". While I agree that both statements are true, without people who stand up and shriek with outrage, or quietly commit parts of their lives to waging peace, there would have been far more wars and a future without any hope at all. If we are not surprised, we still must be shocked, and allow that shock to motivate us into action. Are we going to be people who are "shocked" at Janet Jackson's tits, or at dead children and flagrant abuse of prisoners?
What does no good at all is preaching to the left. If you want to do something, talk to people who don't agree with you, write Congress to get off their fat, special-interest-rich tails, and pressure the American media to cover the deteriorating situation in Iraq as vividly and fully as it is being shown to the rest of the world. The media is key, and has been key all along, to whether this administration gets away with murder or not.
Today, the prison scandal is the lead story on the BBC. It was mentioned as an aside on CNN and CBS, and not on any of the other major online network news sites I checked this morning; the media pegs us as people who are far more interested in Michael Jackson's day in court. But you know what? I think they're wrong about that. There was no mention on The New York Times. They got a letter from me.
(Blogging may be spotty for the next few days as we get settled, then I?ll be back.)
Thursday, April 29, 2004
The fire department wouldn't let us have a bonfire today - "too windy" even though the air was absolutely still in the village - but we pulled all the silvery-grey, dried stalks of Jerusalem artichokes on the bank, and cleaned up the vegetable garden, and I held the extension ladder while J. cut a big, overhangng branch out of the apple tree. All day long the whir of the tape backup system ran in our ears, copying hundreds of gigabytes of data, while I attended to totally analog chores like cleaning out the refrigerator.
This evening after dinner we went over to our neighbors' for a goodbye glass of wine. It was the first day wam enough to sit outside at night, so we reclined on our elbows in their backyard, under the tall spruce trees, drinking one bottle of good wine, and then another, while the planets and stars made their appearance in the heavens. I hadn't watched the stars come out for a long while - not since last summer - and it was magical to see them materialize one by one, until they populated the sky, and then were gradually covered by thin high clouds. Our neighbors are from Iceland, and they said that Icelanders get into some sort of cocoon-like sleeping bag affair, lie in a snowbank, and drink beer while watching the stars in the middle of winter. Sounds good to me. City nights won't be like this, I reminded myself; we won't see these stars again until we return home in June.
10:33 PM
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Wednesday, April 28, 2004
My father-in-law was already exhausted when we arrived for lunch. I was carrying a vase full of yellow blossoms. “Forsythia!” he said, his face lighting up as he struggled out of his chair to go into the dining room “It must be spring.” He had told me last week that when he first came to America it was winter, and in the spring, in New York, after that first long lonely winter, the forsythia bushes suddenly bloomed and he couldn’t take his eyes off them. “They’ve always meant America to me,” he said, smiling to himself, remembering. “Beautiful!”
Today, though, all his ninety-five years were showing. His blood sugar, which has been high, had plummeted, and he said they had stopped hsi medication and told him to eat sweet things: he had lentil soup, and then a plate of mandarin orange sections and strawberries. “I don’t understand it,” he said, and when he got up to get some water we decided to talk to the nurse on our way out. We went up to his apartment but left pretty soon after searching through piles of magazines for the latest New York Review of Books, with an article he recommended to us. He had an Arabic lesson to give at 4:00 pm. “Sleep,” we said.
“I have to,” he replied.
Later I did errands: a new pair of jeans, some toiletries, socks, and a mini book-light for late night reading, since we won’t have a second room to go to. There’s a pile of carefully-folded clothes in the bedroom, awaiting my duffle bag, and a growing pile of books, some associated with my writing project, along with a French dictionary and phrase books in French, Arabic, Farsi and Chinese. I considered taking my neglected knitting project and haven’t decided: will it be a distraction, or will I be glad to have it? The knitting bag is definitely going: it was a present from a friend, bought for a few dollars in Cambodia from the woman who wove it, and it’s perfect for market shopping. I think of that woman every time I use the bag and her comment to my friend: “Thank you very much, that is my treasure for today.” One day’s income, greatly appreciated, about equal to what I’ll pay for a couple of avocados, or a mango.
Downstairs, dahlia roots are soaking in a bucket of water and will be potted tomorrow; I put out two other pots for sweet pea seedlings that a friend will tend for me. Leaving my garden at this time of the year is the only wrenching part of this trip. Everything is so fresh, new, eager to thrive. I’ve done what I could, knowing I’ll come home to chaos, and flowers overrun by goutweed, but the garden is always in my head and my heart, ever willing to be considered and walked-through, whether from the perspective of February, or a city apartment.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
My restless sleep pattern is continuing. I fell asleep at 10:30 and was up at 12:30, went to the couch, and slept fitfully until 3:30, when I went back to bed. I’m worrying about several things, all of which loom larger in the middle of the night, like shadows cast by objects familiar during the day. At least, once I leave here, some of those things will recede because I won’t be able to do anything about them. But the dread I’ve felt all year about mortality is all too portable. All other fears seem manageable intellectually, but not that one, tied as it is to factors totally beyond my control and fueled not only by the turn into my fifties but by a spate of illnesses and deaths among family and friends. What have been underscored, and what I haven’t faced squarely, are the strength of my ego-attachments, and the weakness of my faith that this dread reveals. How interesting it is that I believe in judgment, but find it so difficult to believe in eternity. I do feel responsible for my actions, and even though I would live the same way, I think, and make similar choices, I know I have believed that I’d be held somehow accountable – whether by God or by the laws of karma - ever since I was a child. Judgment isn’t the problem, though. I don’t spend my nights wracked with guilt; I know I try very hard to do the right thing. It’s the possibility of extinguishment that haunts me, the loss of that most precious attachment to my consciousness, as well as the loss of all that is familiar and dear. And yet I would tell anyone else, with certainty, that death is not forever, that it is a transition – to something unknown, certainly - but to something. I believe so strongly in the power of love and in what we are called to do here on earth; I believe in grace and have felt it countless times in my own life. Yet I come face to face with this wall of my own doubts. I thought, naively, that I'd already dealt with this. But it seems this is what I’m being asked to confront: more deeply, and head-on.
In a few minutes I need to prepare the service leaflet for today’s interfaith prayers and figure out a reflection or a reading. I’m cleaning out the freezer and took out two big containers of soup for our communal lunch. Because some of us are Muslim, we always have vegetarian soup; one container is carrot/tomato, but the other is split pea with ham. Being very careful to use separate spoons as I heat the two pots, I’ve been mulling whether it is all right to take the split pea soup or not, and decided after three years we know and trust each other enough that the Muslims won’t be offended. If they are, I will have learned something else that I needed to know.
Yesterday I made a to-do list for the trip, including a long list of what to pack. “I’m going to have to take a box of books,” I told J. “Sorry.”
Later: As it turned out, I decided not to take the split pea, and instead made a quick pot of red lentil soup. We met, had our service, prayed for peace, ate a good, simple lunch of soup, bread, cheese and fruit. I did the dishes while J. dried plates and silverware and put things away in the church kitchen. A light rain began falling as we drove home, and I looked out the window at the budded crab apple trees and the New England houses with their daffodils and forsythia bushes. It was beautiful, quiet, idyllic. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” I said.
I’d be a terrible Muslim and a terrible monk; repetition eventually drives me nuts. Ever since I was small, I always had a hankering for the strange food, the different person, the odd color, and most especially something different to do: something that would shake things up in my predictable world. It never got out of hand; I wasn’t a rebel in the classic sense. But I find sameness, eventually, more stifling than comforting. Paradoxically, perhaps, my spiritual life has been a way of coping with the sameness and the constraints that life imposes. I’ve found that one good aspect of repetition is that it creates a framework against which you can see yourself change. A meditation practice can be boring, just as liturgy can be boring. Work can be boring, and so can a long-term marriage. There are some limitations I willingly accept – loyalty and faithfulness to my partner, for one. The need to work hard and steadily in order to have financial security, as well as some freedom. Responsibility and commitment to friends and family, and certain organizations and institutions. Discipline and practice moving along side-by-side with creativity. I know that sometimes these things will feel exciting and joyful, and sometimes they’ll feel dull and nearly lifeless; this is reality. I also know that sometimes it’s important to be jolted - to experience a seismic shift – in order to see life and self afresh.
The place I live now is one where many people come to retire, or to find a lifestyle that is predictable, clean, pleasant, ordered, safe, white, liberal, Christian and…”nice”. When I moved here, back in 1976, the place was a lot more raw around the edges. Now it is, as someone at our lunch remarked, “a nice small town in Connecticut”, except that it’s a couple hundred miles north. A while ago a journalist wrote a series of newspaper articles skewering life and attitudes in the flagship town in our region, which he never named except to call it “Nicetown”. People were outraged, but they could hardly argue; he had it absolutely pegged.
I’m tired, I guess, of niceness in a world which is anything but. It’s time for a jolt that lasts longer than a weekend in the pulse of Manhattan; it’s time to immerse myself in a totally different environment and see if I can adapt, and see what it teaches me about myself and about this place that I’ve called home for nearly thirty years. Like a turtle, I know I carry my most essential “homeness” on my back and can’t shed it, even if I should want to, but I want to know what it’s like to swim in salt water rather than fresh.
On the other hand, all the solitude I’ve ever found was right here, which tells me that it is something I carry with me, too. Solitude is more a potential than a place; I just think the press of patterned behaviors and the weight of responsibilities have shoved that potential somewhat into the background lately. And I am rarely alone. Being alone – alone in the house, alone in nature, alone in a cathedral or a café – is a prerequisite to contemplation for me, and those opportunities are exceptionally rare in my normal life. Because of the way I’ve lived, I’ve learned how to pull a cloak of solitude around myself, even when I am not physically alone, but I think I yearn for an easier time of it.
We’ll see: we’re about to live for a entire month in one room instead of nine, but in a large city where one can either lose oneself in the crowd or find intimate, anonymous places in which to be alone and undisturbed. The seismic jolt is coming.
Monday, April 26, 2004
RED AND BLUE AMERICA Highly recommended: a three-part series from The Washington Post on the ideological and cultural polarization of America, and, by extension, the American electorate. The first installment is an overview. Today's article is a visit with a "red" (conservative Republican) family in Texas; tomorrow's will be with "blues" (liberal Democrats) in San Francisco.
8:24 PM
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In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor. We are the ones who are supposed to be poor; well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lived in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious-looking anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter. And I thought of Gethsemani where we are all steamed up and get our meals, such as they are, when meal time comes around, and where I live locked up in that room with incunabula and manuscripts that you wouldn’t find in the home of a millionaire! Can’t I ever escape from being something comfortable and prosperous and smug? The world is terrible, people are starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan-mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. I’d like to ask them, what have I given up, anyway, except headaches and responsibilities?
Next time I am sulking because the chant is not so good in the choir I had better remember the people who live up the road. The funny thing is, though, they could all be monks if they wanted to. But they don’t. I suppose, somehow, even to them, the Trappist life looks hard!
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas. An entry from January 8, 1949.
It’s a grey, dark day here, and when we woke there was rain pelting against the roof. It’s let up now, and in the bathroom the rainwater is slowing sliding down the incline of the skylight, blurring the silhouettes of the bare-branched treetops. This is the sort of weather that has been depressing me all through the late winter, but today it seems almost indescribably beautiful. It is practically the last day for bare trees; leaf buds are swelling on all the red maples and the honeysuckles are already covered with a cloud of pale green. On the apple tree outside the bedroom window, drops of water hang from the ends of each black twig, daring both gravity and time.
In less than a week, we’re heading to Montreal to live for a month. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a city in my half-century of life. We’re going as a change from the life we’ve led here, from the house we’ve inhabited for more than 25 years, from the rural countryside, from the particular web of responsibilities and patterns we’ve woven. Besides being urban, Montreal is an international city: proudly and gracefully maintaining its French heritage and a broad ethnic and cultural diversity despite its proximity to the United States and the English-speaking provinces of Canada. It is a mere three-and a half-hours from here, and a world apart.
We’ve been thinking of this month as an experiment. After several years of weekend trips and the occasional week-long stay we want to find out what our commitment to this city really is: how much do we really like living there, and what might that mean for our future? This is what I thought the month was going to be about: practical matters, finding out how we felt, considering some changes and potential investments at this gently teetering point of midlife.
Strange, then, that on this wet dark morning I felt, for the first time in several years, a strong call to contemplation. Could it be that part of this journey might be a sort of retreat, bizarre though it seems to retreat to a city? And yet I feel the call so clearly, bidding me to use the coming time and change of place not for distraction and escape, or merely for outward life decisions, but to learn something inner and as yet unrevealed.
For those who believe in God and believe, further, that She has a sense of humor, consider the idea of moving a writer - especially one steeped in the ultimate contemplativeness of rural Vermont life, complete with clapboard-clad house and vegetable garden, and a pervasive silence punctuated only by bird and cricket - to the bustle and endless distraction of a city of three million souls for the purpose of contemplation. Funny, even preposterous. But that’s what may be happening. I’ve been on this winding, unpredictable, and largely dusty spiritual path for long enough now to recognize the changes and imperatives when they come - and for the most part, they have come like this, of the blue.
What immediately fits is the fact that contemplative solitude, for me, is actually easier to find in the city. Having lived my entire life in the fishbowls of small towns, where I cannot step outside my door or buy a bag of carrots without running into someone who knows me, the anonymity of the city is a huge relief. It creates a sense of freedom that is impossible for me here. Perhaps because of living so many years in the country and close to nature, solitude, for me, is not dependent on silence, but on being removed from the obligation to talk, interact, and plan. And yet, being a social creature and a moderate extrovert, and knowing that my husband – the opposite - likes to take off for long periods of photographic exploration on his own, I’ve been a little worried about having to deal with too much solitude during an entire month of urban living. “Use it,” I hear now. “It’s a gift.”
This morning there’s much that I don’t understand. Is this simply an emotional reaction to the Merton I’ve been reading – the kind of excited, creative impulse I often feel when reading or seeing something that inspires me, but which afterwards reveals itself as just that – a kind of steamed-up excitement that quickly evaporates when I steps out into the daily reality of life? Or is it the real thing, which, if I follow it out, will lead me somewhere I’m meant to go? And in that case, what was that decision to pick up Merton during Holy Week? How do we ever know these things? All I know is that certain books have leapt off shelves into my hands for years, and changed me, and changed the course of my life and my thinking. What I suspect is that in this case, choosing to read this particular volume of Merton again was a sign that I was entering into a psychological place that was receptive to contemplation. What I didn’t do was connect it to the upcoming travel. And whether that happens or not depends on my assent to the invitation.
(I'm planning to keep a journal over the next five weeks and to blog pieces of it; this is the first installment. Please don't stop talking to me, though!)
Sunday, April 25, 2004
My parents came to visit this weekend, and we had a good time. In addition to the usual conversation, cooking, eating, and a little shopping, we had a Ukrainian egg-decorating session, and watched two movies in the evenings: Master and Commander, and the new Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton romantic comedy for the reading-glasses generation, Something's Got to Give. Enjoyed both, although I had to shut my eyes during the shipboard surgery scenes in Master and Commander. I've never read the O'Brian books, having gotten a bit turned off by some over-enthusiastic Anglophile fan-friends of mine, but the movie piqued my interest through the terrific characters and by bringing up a lot of esoteric sailing questions (how many replacement sails did those boats carry, anyway?) Any of you read them? Comments? My favorite part was, of course, the Galapagos sequence. Chris, wouldn't a nice, big, gentle tortoise be a great addition to your growing menagerie?
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On Saturday, Denny wrote about hearing a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at St. Paul's Cathedral in London one July Fourth, and today he wrote some thoughts about our military personnel. These posts jogged a couple of memories for me. First, I know exactly why Denny got disoriented getting off the Tube at the stop for St. Paul's because the same thing happened to me the first time - you'd think the cathedral would be right in front of you, and it is, sort of, but you can't see it. He said he asked directions from an old man selling newspapers, and when the man asked him if he was American, he said yes, and the man said, "Happy Birthday."
I've had similar experiences in London with older people for whom WWII was still the defining event of their lives. What I heard in their voices and saw in their faces was totally undeserved gratitude to me for being American. The memorials to Allied servicepeople killed in that war are in many places in London, but nowhere so poignantly as in the chapel behind the high altar at St. Paul's, which was rebuilt after German bombing.
My father was a tank driver in WWII, and he crossed the Channel to land at Normandy the day after D-Day. He had been in London briefly, and then was in engagements in France, Belgium, Germany and Poland, including the Battle of the Bulge. He was eighteen years old, the son of a small-town Methodist minister. Like Denny, he came home. A number of his friends didn't. If he hadn't, obviously I wouldn't be here.
Anyone who reads these pages regularly knows my feelings about war, but I want to make clear that one reason I hate it so much is the price that young people are asked to pay by serving in the world's armies. I know a little bit about this because of growing up in a houseful of adults who had all been profoundly affected by WWII. I couldn't agree more with most of Denny's reflections about the sacrifice these young people are being asked to make; and frankly, if the leaders who've sent their nations' youth into battle throughout history had had to make those sacrifices alongside them, we would have had a lot fewer wars. We talk about governments going to war because they can rely on stockpiles of armaments, but less is said about the way they have always relied on the supply of young human beings, without whom armies would be impossible.
In that back chapel in St. Paul's, there are stained glass windows honoring the Americans who served and helped save Britain. There is also a huge book in which are written the names of the 28,000 identified American soldiers who were stationed in the United Kingdom for a time and died in its defense. You can ask to be shown any name. I looked at that book, and I wept for a long time.
There was a lot more to that old man's "Happy Birthday" than mere hospitality; I'm not sure it's something that we can even comprehend from this distance of time and experience.
Poppy Frills
