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, June 19, 2004
UPGRADED COMMENTING & A FEW COMMENTS THEREON
This afternoon I upgraded my HaloScan comment feature. The major change is that it will now allow 3,000 word comments rather than 1,000. I hope this helps. For those who aren't as wordy as I am sometimes and are surprised to be caught short, here or on other blogs, what you should do is swipe your comment when you've written a couple of paragraphs and copy it to the clipboard. Post the whole thing, and HaloScan will cut it off if there's an overrun. Then paste from the clipboard into a new comment box, delete the first part that has already been posted, and continue.
I don't think you will have to re-enter your email address and homepage; my apologies if you do. If anyone has problems, please let me know right away. It's important to me and to our conversation here that you DO enter either an email address or homepage; I am considering deleting comments that don't have at least one of those listed. (Any thoughts on that from other bloggers?)
Finally, if you write to me for the first time, please make sure to enter a real subject in the "subject" field of the e-mail header. If you don't, and my email program doesn't recognize your name, your message is going to go into the junk folder; not something I want to have happen!
4:52 PM
|
Friday, June 18, 2004 WALL, LOWER MANHATTAN
I'm not going to write anything else today, since I'm hoping others will read and add to the fascinating comment thread from yesterday. Thanks to everyone who has commented so far.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Yesterday I had an interesting discussion about politics and individual responsibility with a person who immigrated to this country from the Near East as an young adult, about twenty-five years ago. I was talking about the sense of responsibility I've always felt, as an American citizen, to try to speak out and change the government or governmental policies that I felt were wrong. I said that even though I had openly opposed the Iraq war, and Bush, the Abu Ghraib photos had really pushed me over some sort of moral edge.
"But that is Bush, that is this government," he said. "I don't feel personally responsible for what they do. Why do you?"
"Because it is my tax dollars that are being spent to pay those guards and feed those dogs," I said. "I am responsible, no matter how much I disagree. Everybody who pays taxes or stays silent is actually participating."
My friend didn't seem convinced. "I came here, my life is here," he said. "I can't move again. And we all have to pay taxes."
"If you were back in your native country," I then asked, "would you feel more responsible?" That country is not a democratic one. My friend thought, and said, upon reflection, that he didn't feel a sense of responsibility for the governmental decisions there either.
I can understand that: when people have no power to choose or change their government, and have to live with oppression, injustice, the imposition of arbitrary rules, censorship, the threat of sudden imprisonment, torture, and even execution, of course they are not going to feel responsible for the government. But it stunned me to consider that this same logic - and not mere apathy or self-centeredness, or even helplessness - may be what we're moving toward here, when we actually do still have a democracy of sorts. That people can accept that this is what governments do - but it doesn't have anything to do with me.
I'm not going to stop paying my taxes, but I do struggle with my complicity, not just by participating finally in the military machine, but in my affluent, western, fossil-fuel consuming lifestyle. I do feel responsible for the ways in which my life causes suffering for others.
Because of this conversation I've also been wondering how much of my sense of responsibility comes from the fact that large parts of my family have been American and civic- minded (as opposed to patriotic) for more than three hundred years; or my ingrained idea - whether it is civic fact or myth - that we, the people, actually DO have the power and responsibility to change what happens here; or whether I am mainly operating out of my Christian belief that oppression, injustice, and violence must always be resisted, non-violently if at all possible. I also understand that I haven't had a history of being oppressed or threatened, and that I am white, Anglo-Saxon, and a long-term citizen, and therefore in a privileged position to dissent and speak out freely - even here. Sad but true.
There's a big difference between identifying with a government, or even a country, and feeling responsible, either as a citizen or a human being, for what happens to the larger community and how it is governed. Or at least that's how it seems to me. But how do you feel, out there? Are these questions moral ones for you, or civic ones, or non-issues?
4:39 PM
|
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
ELEPHANT EAR in my back yard
This is a contribution to the June 15th ECOTONE wiki topic, Anniversary Place.
Happy Birthday, Ecotone Wiki! It's hard to believe that we launched this experiment in writing about place a whole year ago, but it is not difficult to remember the wealth of fine posts that have been written, the friends and connections made, the warm commentaries, and the hours spent contemplating the topics and trying to write something worthwhile in response. The Ecotone has, in the process, changed from an address in the ether to its own virtual place. It feels tangible because it is where I have encounterd real people who inhabit real places and imagine others, and it's a place where we have hashed out a new form of essay-writing in the blogosphere.
However it evolves or dissolves in the future, the Ecotone will always remain fondly in my writer's memory because it has prodded me into writing down many formerly inchoate thoughts about my own relationship to place. Much of my writing is about this topic anyway, but the Ecotone topics, with both broadly-sketched parameters or more specific focii, have forced a sharpened concentration into how I felt about, and remembered, different aspects of place - and that has been valuable to me, both as person and writer. They've given me an excuse to explore my childhood haunts in central New York, and contrast them with my adult home in northern New England, finding in the process new aspects of the girl who grew up somewhere inbetween. And now, finding myself drawn to a new, urban environment, I think a year of writing and thinking about place is helping me understand what's going on in our lives, and to sort through the emotional, as well as physical, ways that different places affect and change me.
But the most important gift I am grateful for on this Anniversary is the gift of so many new friendships. Good heavens, I can hardly imagine life before I knew Pica and Fred, Lisa and Chris and Jenny and Geoff, Numenius, Coup de Vent, Butuki, and Nancy, to name just a few of the place-oriented people I met first through the Ecotone Wiki. It has been a huge joy to see my old friend and correspondent "P." writing regularly here. And as the list of contributors has grown, I've been so happy to read new takes on place, and to encounter new parts of the globe through your eyes and your words.
What do we want to do in the next year? How can we increase our readership? I've been less regular in responding to topics lately because of other commitments, but I am no less enthusiastic than I was when we began. I hope other readers will suggest more topics, and that new ideas will emerge that will inspire us all.
Monday, June 14, 2004 " How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice masters. They form our contemplation. They instill us with virtue. They make us as stable as the land we live on. You do not get that out of a typewriter." Thomas Merton
Last Monday, J. and a friend and I walked through the block of SoHo and Tribeca (lower Manhattan) to pay our respects at Ground Zero. I don't know what I expected, but it was a more powerful and more moving experience than I had anticipated, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that you can't really "see" the place where the buldings were; what you see is emptiness. After walking through the vertically-lacked, visually-dense landscape of the city, any emptiness strikes you as strange, and this is a very large space where something huge once was, and is no more.
All around the WTC site are buildings in various stages of reconstruction or construction: cloaked in scaffolding, with workers perched on the fortieth, sixtieth floors like tiny, hard-hatted ants. Damage is still very much in evidence. The rebuilt metro/train station that one once entered beneath the Trade towers now teems with commuters, and the area surges with jackhammers, beeping backhoes, and construction vehicles of every variety.
I stood staring through the chain-link fence that separates the hoi poloi from the actual hole that is Ground Zero, and gazed at all this destruction and activity. I thought of the peope who died that day, about New York - my friends who witnessed the airplanes from their roof, others who ran through streets, covered with ash, trying to locate their children - about the families and the children and the valiant rescuers, the resilience and heart of this great city. But I also thought about everything that has happened since: the small window of hope, potential learning, and inter-cultural connection that was so quickly closed and all the lives that have been lost as a result, about a world that has become far more dangerous. It was impossible not to shed tears, and so I did; not sobs but the sort of tears that run down uncaring cheeks until they stop of their own accord. Nearby, my friends had their own private thoughts and remembrances, and I watched as one tourist family posed for a smiling picture, their backs to the site, and another stood looking into the abyss in stunned silence.
Afterwards we went across the street to Trinity Church, Wall Street, with its historic churchyard and chapel that has now become a shrine of remembrance, with displays and exhibits about the disaster. I sat in the church for a while, while a harpsichordist played and people in T-shirts and shorts milled around, taking pictures and chattering. this church - the oldest continually-used public building in America, where Washington once worshipped - no longer felt like a sacred place, while the graveyard, in its simplicity beneath centuries-old trees, with the WTC site beyond, felt totally holy.
