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, September 25, 2004
WEEKEND LINKS
At Zeke's Gallery, (the physical gallery is not far from where I live in Montreal (I haven't visited in person yet but I plan to on my next stay there, if I can) an interview with artist Chris Dyer, who paints fascinating and intricate paintings on busted skateboards. Lots of pictures of the art included.
"En ville, sans ma voiture": Wednesday was NoCar Day in much of central Montreal and in the Plateau. We were VERY sorry to miss this, but Blork has posted some great pictures, with a running commentary. Be sure to check out the photos of the tiny European electric cars and the police vehicle - no, they are not toys!
My biggest and most unexpected laughs this week came from the discovery of YarnHarlot, a terrific blog all about knitting written by a woman who is soooo funny. The link above is for a post on the saga of her Latvian Mittens. ("SMS", explained in an earlier post, is "Second Mitten Syndrome".) Maybe non-knitters won't enjoy the humor quite so much, but I truly understood the concept of rolling around in one's collection of double-points, hoping for a puncture wound, after a particularly horrible mistake-discovery. (By the way, she is a wonderfully skilled knitter, too.)
Writing, writing, writing. I've been determined to finish a chapter of the book this week, and today it bifurcated into two chapters. That's OK - I've seen it coming - and the result is a marked improvement - but it's going to be hard to finish both by Tuesday, although I've got a chance. I've never worked this concentratedly on a long piece of writing, and I wasn't sure I could. Now that it is actually coming together, making sense, and I can see the pages - virtual though they may be - accumulating, I am quite amazed. Maybe I can do this, after all.
In the middle of the afternoon, in need of a break for my weary eyes, neck and head, I made a cup of tea and went out to sit on the back steps and look at the garden in the fall sunlight. There's not much in bloom - sedum, and the last black-eyed susans and phlox, a few late roses - but it's pretty in a tangled, artfully disordered way. My gaze, though, settled on the grass in front of me. I rested the teacup against my cheek, feeling the warmth, and watched the green strands, grown tall on the cool northern side of the house. They were - dancing. In a breeze too imperceptible to toss a leaf, or be sensed by the tiny hairs on my arm, the long strands were swaying by the hundreds, the thousands. Beneath and among the grass, I could see the busy movement of ants hurrying on their tasks, and the occasional touch-down of a bee, the size of a helicopter in this miniature metropolis. Closer to my eyes, I saw further planes of existence, where gnats drifted on the same invisible breeze, backlit by the sunlight. It was a scene as fascinating as watching Manhattan from the top of those vanished towers, and for a short time my own existence vanished too, so caught up was I in the myriad lives before me, in their emerald city.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
I was proud to read this statement published by the members of the Anglican Peace and Justice Network, representing 23 Provinces of the worldwide Anglican Communion, who recently visited the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. They wrote that they were "inspired by the faith of the people in the diocese, while also being exposed to the draconian conditions of the continuing Occupation under which so many Palestinians live." The statement is worth reading as a succinct summary of the reality of the situation, the destablilizing role of the U.S., and a careful point-by-point recommendation of what needs to be done.
The members of the delegation are listed, and I was glad to see two familiar names: Ethan Flad, the editor of The Witness, which has published two articles of mine in the past year, and Nancy Dinsmore, who works for Episcopal Relief and Development in Jerusalem and was our contact when we were coordinating some relief funds for Episcopal hospitals serving both the Christian and Muslim populations in the West Bank. I had heard a few months ago that Israel was planning to deny visa extensions for people like Nancy. She has worked there for nearly ten years, and I hope this means she was somehow allowed to stay and continue her very important work.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
SISTERS OF MERCY Oh my. Leonard Cohen is 70 today. I have to say, I can't quite get my head around that.
Back in the summer of 1970, when the poet was not quite 36 and I was not quite 18, I had my first real romance. The guy in question was a year older than I was: a soulful, bearded Jewish radical who had a year of college under his belt. He was urban, stuck in our small town for a summer where his father, a businessman, had come to run a factory. I spotted him right away - who was this darkly fascinating guy in our rural, waspy town, taking photographs in the park with a cool Leica that hung from a woven, bright-colored hippie camera strap over his shoulders? It turned out we had a friend in common. We met. I was naive, bored, eager, nervous. He was bored, sweet, funny, a good teacher...
And among other things, he taught me about music. He had The Badge - he'd been to Woodstock. That summer he took me all the way to Utica to see the movie so that I could feel a little better what it had been like; see Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin; revel in the muddy utopian vision that Woodstock had been. I was in love; I tried hard to get it. He worked as a counselor and photography instructor at a summer camp, and on the hot humid nights he'd sometimes drive the forty miles or so to come and see me. We'd sit on the dock and look at the stars, and then come inside and play music in the dark: Crosby, Stills & Nash. The Band (his favorite). Sometimes we listened to the Firesign Theater. And, of course, Leonard Cohen.
It was all so bittersweet and doomed, right from the beginning, but that, of course, fit in with everything else that was happening to our world. Our parents looked on, too wise, knowing us too well, probably glad that the summer was as short as it was. They could see our lives stretching out in all their bright potential; we were caught up in our own poignant, tragic moment. The night before I left for college his father, who I liked a great deal, told me, fondly, "Knock 'em dead". I didn't know what to respond. I was so ready to go, and so miserable about leaving this first love - he'd wait for me, right? He'd be there at Thanksgiving?
We lay on his bed in the upstairs room, and listened to Leonard Cohen: Suzanne, Bird on the Wire, those ultra-cheery lyrics of Dress Rehearsal Rag - "Why don't you join the Rosicrucians/they will give you back your hope" - we knew them all by heart. He kissed me again and again. We cried. I left.
He broke up with me that fall. He had had a girlfriend in Washington all along; he went back to her; I couldn't believe it. I cried every morning of the first semester, and then, slowly, I began to get over it, to enjoy college, and even start thinking I might be able to knock 'em a little bit for a loop, if not so soundly dead as that prescient, entrepreneurial father had suggested. He was a kind man who had seen it all unfolding, and probably wished he had been young again too. He had spoken to my mother, who told me later that he'd said, worrying in his bearlike, warm, Jewish way: "She's a wonderful girl. And I'm a passionate man, and I know my son..."
We never got that far; he didn't need to worry. I wonder if his son has the same memories I do - all good ones, at this point, of a summer that couldn't have happened at any other time in history, and of our own young lives intertwined in the lyrics of those sad and exuberant songs. Sisters of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
O the sisters of mercy they are not Departed or gone, They were waiting for me when I thought That I just can’t go on, And they brought me their comfort And later they brought me this song. O I hope you run into them You who’ve been traveling so long.
Yes, you who must leave everything That you cannot control; It begins with your family, But soon it comes round to your soul. Well, I’ve been where you’re hanging I think I can see how you’re pinned. When you’re not feeling holy, Your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.
Well they lay down beside me I made my confession to them. They touched both my eyes And I touched the dew on their hem. If your life is a leaf That the seasons tear off and condemn They will bind you with love That is graceful and green as a stem.
When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon. Don’t turn on the light You can read their address by the moon; And you won’t make me jealous If I hear that they sweeten your night We weren’t lovers like that And besides it would still be all right We weren’t lovers like that And besides it would still be all right.
It's not tomorrow yet (see the previous post) and here I am again, NOT writing about politics. It's my birthday, as some of my friends have already noted in the comments, so first of all thank you - for the birthday wishes, and for making this past year so much more interesting and fulfilling and encouraging than it would have been without you. Right now I am full of cake and rather sleepy, and just wishing I could have shared our little party with all of you.
As elck wrote so marvelously in his Steinberg Variations, Bach's Chaconne in D minor is a musical touchstone. A few years ago, I encountered the variations on the Bach Chaconne by Ferrucchio Busoni, written for solo piano. A dear friend of mine had heard the performance of the Bach-Busoni on an international flight between Europe and the Far East. The pianist was Mikhael Pletnev, and it was a live performance - his astounding Carnegie Hall debut - which was fortunately recorded and released as a two-disc CD - the encores alone comprise the second CD. The performance begins with the Bach-Busoni, in which the piano states the theme simply - or as simply as a piano can, compared to a solo violin - and then proceeds to expound on the Chaconne, in homage to the Chaconne, in gratitude to the Chaconne, in wonder at the Chaconne.
After the flight, my friend - who is, like me, an amateur pianist and classical music lover - sent me the CD as a birthday present. I put it on, and listened. I had never heard anything in teh piano literature like this adaptation of the Bach Chaconne; I was transfixed; exhilarated, deeply moved; I listened again. To this day, I can't hear it without tears in my eyes.
What that piece represents to me is difficult to describe. The Chaconne in Bach's Second Partita for Violin is a sublime statement, pared down to its absolute essentials - one line of notes, stretching for some twelve minutes and a bit more. It is like pure light. Busoni's piece is a mirror reflecting that light, held at different angles: a mirror trying to explain what light means to it. To me, it is one of the most extraordinary attempts to show, in music, what a piece of music meant to another human being. And then there is the pianist who performs it: him or herself another mirror, reflecting again the original light, as seen in the mirror.
Some purists don't like variations, but I think they are one of the most wonderful forms in music, used to full advantage by some of the greatest composers. Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn come to mind, or Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, or Bach's Goldbergs, or the many, many variations of Mozart. When you try to play them yourself, the themes are revealed, inside out and upside down, major and minor, turned into waltzes, danced as gigs, squared up as a march. It boggles the mind, delights the heart, and strains the fingers; this is the human mind at its most inventive.
I once tracked down the score for the Bach-Busoni in Archambault, a big music store in Montreal, and took the sheet music over to a couch and sat down, reading it in my head. I knew the music well enough to be able to follow it in my head, but on a practical level it was utterly unplayable, or so it looked to me - making Pletnev's achievement even more astounding. Reverently, humbly, I put the music back in the shelf, to wait for someone far more skilled than myself; all I needed I had gotten: the mental image I carry with me still of the thousands of notes cascading over the pages, spilling their story of all the gratitude, passion, love, sorrow, joy and relinquishment a life could possibly hold.
The story of the Busoni arrangement of the Bach Chaconne reminds me, too, of what we sometimes do here: how one person's words - themselves an attempt to distill the ineffable into words, -inspire someone else to elaborate, or tell another story of their own, without taking anything away from the original. I loved the comment thread after elck's post: how some people had a great deal to say, some just a word, all those threads weaving together in response to something quite extraordinary we had read and shared, originally inspired by a work of Bach's that many, I am guessing, have never heard.
The more time I spend outside the U.S., the more of a shock it is each time we come back. We arrived at our house last last night, went to bed, and today one of my first tasks after reading the news - always cheery, no matter where you are these days - was to go get the mail and then go to the supermarket to get some food. Even in French Montreal, with its butchers, bakers, and chocolate-makers, there are supermarkets, and I do go to them sometimes. So this morning the Price Chopper itself was not the shock, it's more the vastness of the selection, and the fact that meat, for instance, is so inexpensive. You would never, in a million years, guess that people in the world are hungry or that there is anything but an endless supply of foodstuffs, by looking at an American supermarket. I've heard that people from Russia, for instance, want to go to an American supermarket as one of their first stops when visiting the U.S. What on earth do they think? What is it like for them when they go home?
And then there are the yellow ribbons on the cars, more every time. I restrained myself from making a collection in the parking lot. Then as I drove down the strip, i noticed that the sign at the seafood restaurant chain read: "Military Monday". What does that mean, I wondered. Special prices for ex-servicepeople? A percentage goes to the troops? Should I go ask? No, I told myself, just keep driving, go home, make yourself a cup of tea.
But good for John Kerry, to finally take a stand on the war. If he's going to go down, better to go down swinging, and to have the campaign be about something. And having it be about real issues is surely the only way he can win.
And I wish every American could have the opportunities I am having to talk to Canadians about politics. They are eager to talk, and enter the conversation not with the criticism you might expect, but a kind of pleading hopefulness that seems to say, "Please tell me there is some cause for optimism. Tell me that the America I have experienced and admire and care about hasn't gone to sleep or succumbed to paranoia. Please tell me that you see some glimmers of change." There is, of course, incredulity about American foreign policy and the ignorance of the electorate - but when I have these conversations I have the sense of talking to a deeply concerned friend who sees the fall off the wagon, the self-destructiveness, the acting-out and the torpor that come when fear takes over.
"What about the academics? The intellectuals? The students?" they say. "I've met such brilliant, sophisticated, world-conscious people who are American. Scientists. Teachers. Entrepreneurs. Artists and writers. Isn't there any organized opposition? Is it really all about oil? And what about Congress, don't you have a system of checks and balances? Why can't Congress pass a better energy policy? What about those gigantic cars? Why are Americans so protective of Israel? Are Americans really that afraid, even in small towns? Why? What about these 'gated communities' we hear about, is that really true?"
How do you explain these things?
It's fascinating, and quite sad to see the reaction when I am unable to be optimistic, at least in the short term, although I continue to believe - and say so - in goodness and fairness winning in the long run. I just wish everybody could experience this; it might wake more of us up.
And I promise tomorrow not to talk about politics.
