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, January 01, 2005
Happy New Year, everybody!
We got to bed at...um...4:30 am, and were back up around 10:00. I feel surprisingly good, considering. Last night we went to a party - our first party in this city, really - heavily weighted toward Montreal bloggers, where we met some great people (of course! they're bloggers!) and a most excellent yellow cat.
One of the people I met was a young Chinese woman who came here several years ago from Beijing, studied at McGill, and decided to stay. She's fluent in English and Chinese, of course, and becoming fluent in French. We talked for a long time about many things, especially about being only-daughters with close relationships with our parents and a great love for where we came from, who have traveled far from our childhoods and now put a lot of effort into understanding those gaps and bridge them, both for our own sakes and those we love. We found out we shared a lot, in spite of being from nearly opposite sides of the planet, including, I think, a certain gentleness and kindness of nature, curiosity, and a determination to choose happiness while keeping our eyes wide open to the darkness and light of the world. It was a good meeting to begin the new year, and created a kind of stillness of heart in the middle of a very fun party with great food, freely-flowing wine and loud, happy, bilingual conversation.
Toward the end of our conversation, we talked a little about Chinese calligraphy, and she told me a Chinese proverb about the importance of writing. "We say," she said, "the palest ink is stronger than the brightest memory."
Friday, December 31, 2004
update: Jan 1 - all is fixed, J. did it, and is collecting real kisses.
HELP?
After the initial enthusiastic announcement, I've realized that my site feed is not updating properly. I got so frustrated trying to figure out why that I finally put in a note to Blogger technical support, but haven't heard back yet. Does anyone out there have experience with this that they can share? I think I've taken care of all the obvious reasons...like making sure the damn thing is actually enabled. Your help will be warmly welcomed, and rewarded with virtual kisses.
The magnitude of the southeast Asian disaster is too great for me to write anything more about it. Have so many people ever left this world in one day before? What is the possible response, other than tears, and an attempt to help? I think of friends who often travel there for work; of friends whose families live there; of books read; of paintings and photographs of idyllic paradises and sandy beaches - everything that is exotic to a person who lives in the company of ice and snow - and of poverty, rickety dwellings, and difficult and often dangerous lives. And then all thoughts return to the images of parents weeping over small bodies, of wailing faces turned toward the sky. There simply aren't words for any of this.
The other appropriate response, I think, is to reconsider our own lives - both the fragile ice on which we slip, and the solid land that feels secure. All of it is life, and we know the one because we know the other. Walking yesterday into the park, I quickly realized that underneath the several inches of snow was glare ice - sheets of rain that had fallen and frozen on absolutely everything. I had to adjust and walk carefully, but I know basically how to do this, having lived in this climate all my life. I walked past the two hockey rinks made of "boards" set up right on the ground and flooded when the weather got cold enough. Out on the ice, some skaters were practicing their footwork and shots, while another boy skated strongly with a shovel, pushing aside the new snow to make a good surface. In the next rink, a family was just leaving, carrying their skates with laces tied over their shoulders. It was just after noon, on a brilliantly bright, perfect winter day, and parents began coming into the park, tugging their little children behind them on sleds. Children ran happily; couples walked arm in arm, bundled behind scarves or fur-edged hoods. I walked over to the lake and down the walk that encircles it, just as I did so many times in the summer. Eager skaters, more sure-footed than I, ran down the icy path. People in skates walked easily down the snowbanks toward the frozen lake, leaving thin herringbone tracks. Two girls skated and talked, animatedly waving their skate guards int heir hands. A woman sat on a bench, smoking, and then got up and glided effortlessly onto the ice to join a throng of other skaters -- from tiny children to old people, all relaxed and totally at home on the ice, no one showing off -- just, in that typically Canadian laid-back way, enjoying themselves. It was... beautiful, and something I had never seen: so many people out in a far-northern city park, embracing winter, revelling in it. Remembering my youth skating on a lake, I longed to run over to the park building and rent a pair of skates, but I was already cold and knew I wouldn't have stayed for more than fifteen minutes more. (I also imagined, too painfully, what it would feel like to fall on that hard ice, which I'd be sure to do - if and when I do try it again, I will go with more padding on certain parts of my body, and hope I don't break a wrist.)
As I've worked here today, occasionally braving the anguished words and images flooding blogs and the media, somehow the images of the gliding skaters have helped me: their frictionless motion a surprise that belies our usual earth-trapped plodding; their joy in a frozen world a reminder that delight is far more often nature's gift to us than sadness.
Several readers have asked me to enable an XML feed; I've finally done it. Sorry to have taken so long on this. The address is http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/atom.xml; you can also click on the Bloglines subscription button in the left column.
Monday, December 27, 2004
I'm so horrified. It's as if we can't even take a breath without another, amplified example of terrible suffering in our world. The BBC placed the death toll at 23,000 this morning. 23,000 souls! And so suddenly. The magnitude of the tragedy is incomprehensible.
The report explained how a tsunami is created: that after the ocean floor is displaced vertically along the fault - which was 1,000 meters long in this case - the huge waves are created. in deep ocean, they can travel at speeds up to 500 km/hr. When they near the shore, the waves slow down and are compressed upwards to tremendous heights.
When I was in grade school, I read a book for young people about a tsunami. It was The Big Wave by the novelist Pearl Buck, who had become famous for writing a book which seems ironically titled today, The Good Earth. I can still see the pictures in that edition of The Big Wave, and remember how I felt, as a landlocked girl who had experienced no natural force greater than a blizzard or crashign thunderstorm, at discovering that such a thing could happen. It was around the same time when my parents gave me another book about the ocean - a young people's edition of The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, which begins:
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea. many people have debated how and when the earth got its ocean, and it is not surprising that their explanations do not always agree. For the plain and inescapable truth is that no one was there to see...
I've never lived near the sea, but those two books formed an early and lasting impression of the ocean's geology, complexity, and the interdependence of human and ocean life. Every time I've travelled over the ocean or stood at its edge -- or, rarely, entered into its salty, throbbing water -- awareness of that awesome power has always been hand in hand with its majesty and hypnotic beauty. The ocean frightens me far more than a dark forest full of sounds and rustlings, and my heart goes out to the people of Asia whose are now suffering so terribly. A friend in Japan suggests contributions to Doctors without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres; it is one small thing we can do that will help get aid to the people quickly. But nothing can bring back the lives that have been extinguished by those waves.
