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, June 11, 2004
I read the recent reports about the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib prison with great sadness, wondering how many readers realize the double horror this abuse would cause in a Muslim prisoner. Of course snarling dogs can be terrifying to anyone. But for a Muslim, dogs are also haram - unclean, forbidden by the Qu'ran. A practicing Muslim would never have a dog in his or her house, or allow it into their yard, let alone keep one as a pet. Muslims are not only unused to being around dogs, but if a dog touches them they are supposed to wash their body and change their clothes. Numerous insulting epithets in Arabic refer to people as "son of a dog" and worse; it's one of the worst things you can say to someone. I also remember the reaction about Saddaam Hussein's fancy pet dogs, when his palace was occupied, and a horrifying story in the New Yorker about women prisoners - Kurds - who he had captured in years past: they were able to look out on the prison yard and see their sons' bodies being torn apart by dogs: not only did they not get a proper Islamic burial, but their bodies were defiled and dismembered. People remember these stories. Like that action, I am sure the use of dogs by U.S. troops was deliberate, designed to humiliate and defile Muslim prisoners as well as to intimidate them. This would be entirely obvious to a Middle Eastern audience, but is probably unknown to all but a few Americans. All we hear is that the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners is forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
3:47 PM
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Thursday, June 10, 2004
INFLATABLE WORLD On West Broadway, way, way downtown
I've got so many pictures from last weekend I guess I'll post some without too much commentary. But more New York stories tomorrow, and globally-appreciated fireflies for tonight (see below).
8:28 PM
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Wednesday, June 09, 2004 A cloth of darkness inlaid with fireflies; flashes of lightning; the mighty cloud mass guessed at from the roll of thunder; a trumpeting of elephants; an east wind scented by opening buds of ketaki, and falling rain: I know not how a man can bear the nights that hold all these, when separated from his love.
From Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara's Treasury, translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls, via under the fire star.
Late last night, in the dark muggy heat, I went out and sat on the back porch, watching the fireflies dance in the trees. There were a great many of them, and I was stunned by the fact that it was already June, and the fireflies were out, and the peonies and poppies in bloom, and somehow I had missed an entire month. There was something that felt very unnatural about this, and I finally decided it was that I have never missed a month of growth and change in my own garden before, and hadn't known how connected I was to that rhythm until it was interrupted. It felt so strange to walk out and see hundreds of fireflies instead of noticing the first one, and then a few the next night, and a few more the next. Neither had I noticed the first buds on the peony bushes and watched them swell each day and turn from hard green balls to silken, nearly-bursting spheres of brilliant red and pink cradled in green. Perhaps I wondered, plaintively, how all this could have happened without me! But it was more, I think, a sense of receiving a gift I hadn't worked for: the garden, fully formed, blooming, alight with fireflies. Time, then, to stop analyzing and simply be there: a pair of eyes.
On Sunday morning, early, we got up and had a complimentary "cafe/croissant", as the French call it, in the hotel breakfast room, and then set out for a walk in the neighborhood. We went over to 6th Avenue, and stopped for a minute at St. Vincent's Hospital, where all along one side of the building there is still a long display of photographs and messages about people missing from the 9/11 tragedy. If you remember, St. Vincent's was the closest large hospital where everyone was mobilized to accept the ambulances of casualties - the ambulances that never came. I was surprised at my emotion at the sight of the faces and names: my eyes instantly filled with tears, and I felt a sob rising in my throat.
Across the street from the hospital is a small, empty parking lot with a chain link fence, next to a ceramic shop. After 9/11, the proprietor invited people from all over the world to make tiles with their own messages about the event, and has hung them on the fence - hundreds of them - where they remain today. The naivete and simplicity was very affecting. I found I couldn't look at them all, it was too much, but I came back later, alone, and read the messages and thought about all that has happened since, and what it must have been like to live and work right here. In addition to the square white tiles with painted pictures, there were red hearts for each of the children who had died, and angel tiles for the various organizations who had helped and sustained losses, and white dove-shaped tiles, and a couple of messages to viewers asking them not to take anything away from this display, except hope.
Later J. and I went across the street and had two slices of New York pizza, which is the best anywhere, in a hot busy shop where Dylan was playing on loudspeakers and you couldn't get decaffeinated coffee but you could get a pizza named after Bette Midler, or Diana Rigg, and the proprietor wore a Yankees cap and spoke Spanish.
Our first night in New York we went out with friends to a restaurant in Chinatown, one that specializes in Peking duck. New York’s Chinatown is very large and growing at the edges; it’s a wonderful, sensory-filled place to walk and, of course, to eat. On this busy Saturday night our party of eight people arrived in three groups, with one cluster of us getting there first. All the waitstaff was male, but the restaurant was presided over by a middle-aged woman, a veritable dragon lady with short cropped hair and a formidable demeanor. Our friend had made the reservations ahead of time, and on the phone the woman had insisted on a credit card to hold the table and told her that she would charge the card an additional $10 for every person in the party who failed to show up! Incredible! I could sort of understand it, though; there was a steady stream of hopeful customers coming into the crowded restaurant and forming a line right next to the tables of seated diners; all the waiters were moving at double-speed; the din of the kitchen and talking patrons was deafening; in this city where every inch of space is at a premium, they needed to turn over the tables fast and keep them completely filled. That’s the thing about New York. You can get anything, and you can get the best, but everybody is wound very tight, and everyone is competing for their own morsel. That human energy, animating the densely packed, person-dwarfing verticality of this astonishing piece of steel-, concrete-, and glass-encrusted real estate, is what gives the city its vibrant, palpable, unique excitement, and it creates people who are gritty, tough, animal-aware, competitive and huge-hearted. Those who survive and thrive become the typical New Yorkers: that particular breed of people for whom no other place on earth could ever really measure up and be called “home”.
The dragon lady refused to seat us until all the people in our party had arrived. But eventually we got in, famished by then at the sight of platters of fragrant duck being whisked onto each white-clothed table, and proceeded to have one of the best Chinese meals in my memory, crowned by a crispy-fried whole sea bass.
In spite of the fact that we had gathered for a memorial service, the whole weekend was an extraordinarily happy time. As I looked at J.’s photographs today, I remarked, “We all think of ourselves as kids still – and act like it too - but look at us, we’re all middle-aged!” One of us had said something about that, looking through old picture albums – “How is it possible that this much time has gone by?” In the rooms and streets we moved through together were the memories of different pairing of people, of old relationships and new ones, of parents who were once young and now had died, of the next generation of kids who really were kids and probably thought of us the way we once thought of the older generation, as incredible as that seemed. One of us, a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, had come all the way from San Francisco where he now lives; another woman had come back to New York after living in California for a while and seemed like she was going to stay. We, the stable couple from the idyllic countryside, were singing the praises of the city and had just made the decision to buy a place in Montreal while all the incredulous New Yorkers were pining for some rural quiet; the daughter of our friends was about to go off to a camp in Maine for the summer. It all underscored how we tend to want what we don’t have, and how much easier it is to appreciate the place you are visiting, and to see it with fresh eyes. Walking to where the car was parked after our Chinese dinner, someone joked, “Is it all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge?”
‘Well, we could walk across, it’s beautiful at night,” said someone else.
“That’s funny,” said one of the New Yorkers, who has traveled all over the world but lived in the same apartment in lower Manhattan her entire adult life. “I’ve never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in my life.”
After brownies and ice cream back at our friends’ Greenwich Village apartment, we decided to try to get some sleep before the events of the following day. The memorial service was going to be held at 1:00 pm at the Salmagundi Club, an artists’ club that is an old New York institution, just north of Washington Square. “By the way,” I asked. “What are people wearing tomorrow?”
“Whatever,” said our host. “Remember - this is downtown!”
We've been in New York for the weekend; I'll be posting parts of my journal and some pictures in the next few days.
NYC, Sunday, June 6: It’s a drizzly morning in New York; from the fifth floor of this Greenwich Village hotel I can look out over the tops of the street trees at the rooftops of lower Manhattan, the brick walls of the toney residences that line this quiet street, the elaborate carved cornices, terracotta chimneys, and rooftop water towers. I can also observe the life of the birds who live, unconcerned, in this world above the street. Yesterday, after checking in, I watched out the window for half an hour while J. seaerched for a parking place. It amuses me that the street trees in this expensive neighborhood are sumacs and box elders – garbage trees back home – but tough enough to thrive in little soil and city air. I’ve always thought sumacs were pretty anyway, and from above they’re especially so, lending a somewhat tropical air to the view, with their delicate, articulated fronds of leaves and pale yellow, just-emerged flower heads. There’s a family of crows two streets over, engaged in a perpetual war, it seems, with blue jays, and many sparrows and pigeons flying between the roofs and perching on antennas. This morning a light rain is falling on the treetops, making them appear even fresher. It’s quiet, and beautiful. Or it was quiet until the church bells at the Episcopal Church around the corner on Fifth Avenue started playing hymns. Now the bells are sounding over the roofs - it’s the great Celtic hymn known as "St. Patrick's Breastplate" or “I Bind Unto Myself This Day” – accompanied by the rush of traffic on the avenue and an occasional taxi horn.
But at ground level Manhattan is Manhattan, and there is nothing like it. The contrast to Montreal is stunning, even funny. “Landing” on the streets here after a fast drive down is like hearing a sudden blast of rap music from new neighbors in the apartment above and realizing this is going to be your reality. Everybody here has attitude – even the bums. Everybody’s watching out, scanning the environment; everybody’s out for him or herself. I think the vibe even filters down to the animal world; yesterday afternoon, in front of a pushcart labeled “Crepes and Empanadas” – in itself a wild merchandising concept – we watched a black pigeon swaggering down the sidewalk, cocking his head now and then, a dude pigeon if I ever saw one. All he needed was a thick gold necklace.
It’s finally dawning on me that what it comes down to is that I love the country – real country – and I love the city – but I detest the suburbs. I can’t stand the destruction and erosion of rural-ness that suburbization represents, yet that’s what’s happening back home. Driving through the endless suburb that is eastern Connecticut yesterday, I felt almost physically sick. We stopped for gas and a sandwich near Danbury, CT, and I went in to the bathroom while J. filled the tank. This is one of the largest filling stations I’ve ever visited – we often stop here because it’s slightly cheaper than the others. There are TVs in the bathrooms, and there are TVs at each of the huge array of self-serve pumps, just in case you get bored. J. and I ordered a sandwich from the Hispanic woman at the counter of the all-night convenience store inside, and sat down at the counter which looks out a big plate-glass window at the pumps, and the parking lot, and the asphalt stretching as far as you can see. It was a kind of sado-masochistic moment, I suppose. “What would it do to you to live like this every single day?” I wondered out loud. The people didn’t look happy; they looked dazed, overweight, mechanical. When we got up to leave, a car horn was bleating repeatedly; it was a Jaguar parked just outside the door, with a perplexed owner trying to figure out how to turn off the horn.
But the city is different: Manhattan, from the first pulse, is like no other place in the world. We checked in, unpacked quickly, and set out down the final few blocks of Fifth Avenue and across Washington Square. Everything was in bloom; lovers were kissing in the park; hippies played guitars; chess hustlers waited for games; a tall girl with severe black bangs and high heeled sandals walked two whippets on legs as slender as her own. And meanwhile, the traffic swirled around the park in a blue of fast-moving yellow and silver; horns blaring; brakes squealing; ambulances in the distance.
J. shook his head and remarked, “This city makes every other city look like a tea party.”
