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, February 25, 2005
FLUTE
My parents sent me a package recently; I was in Montreal when it arrived here in Vermont and my neighbor kindly brought it in from the porch. Mom and Dad had said it wasn't perishable, but maybe wouldn't like sitting out in the freezing cold. I wondered what it could be.
When I opened the cardboard packing box, I thought I saw wood, but then I realized what I was seeing was a wooden-colored plastic box, about 18 inches long. I knew immediately what it was, and was completely surprised. Opening the latches on the case, lined inside with dark red velvet, I saw the shine of bright silver. My eyes filled with tears. Then I shook off the emotion and quickly pulled out the three parts and put them together. A flute!
My own old flute, that I played just about every day from fourth grade through high school, was an Armstrong - a sturdy student flute that had a good tone and a pleasing weight in my hands. My parents had bought it and a stack of music for $90 from my piano teacher; it had been her daughter's. I played it in my school's excellent band for many years, took it to college and played it occasionally, although by then I was starting to go back to the piano. After college I rarely picked up the flute, although I brought it with me when I moved to New England.
When my cousin's daughter decided she wanted to learn an instrument, her father asked me if she could borrow my flute; their family was short on funds for the instrument rental. I was a bit reluctant but said yes; music had been so important to me that I wanted to make sure E. could have the same chance. I sent my flute back home. Within a month I got a phone call - something had happened, the flute was gone, it had been "stolen" or "lost" from the band room. E., who was painfully shy, didn't make the call herself; as usual, her father covered for her. He was sorry, but there was no offer of replacing it, and my insurance didn't cover that situation. I felt pretty bad about it, but reconciled myself - I hadn't been playing, it was gone, that was that. It was just "a thing", I told myself, like the many other things I had lost in my divorce a few years before, and the best way to deal with its loss was to let it go and concentrate on non-attachment.
When I lifted this flute, a Gemeinhardt, from its velvet case and put it together, it had been at least twenty-five years since I'd played. I tried a few notes, a scale - it was pretty bad. But after fifteen minutes of fooling around, I was less appalled and more amused - the fingerings were still automatic, the breathing familiar, and there was even an occasional beautiful note. I was very touched that my parents had found this in an auction and bought it for me, and I was pleased to think I could take an instrument with me to Montreal; even if I wasn't playing seriously, it could be a meditative and happy break in my day.
What surprised me the most was the feeling of having the flute in my hands. It felt so - natural. I suppose when you've held and used something so much - especially something delicate and fragile, but that's also by definition an extension of your body - you develop a hand-object relationship that becomes instinctive. I hadn't held or played a flute for all those years, and yet my body knew just what to do with it. How strange, and how wonderful.
In the back of my music closet, behind the vinyl, I found a stack of old music: Handel sonatas, Bach, Faure. I play the piano much better now, and I recorded a few accompaniments to play along with. I've no illusions of playing the flute especially well again, and I don't have the time or energy to devote to it, but it's making me happy, and bringing back a rush of memories of a much-younger self; compressing time, and erasing years.
7:36 PM
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Thursday, February 24, 2005
BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS
I was very disappointed, but not surprised, to see tonight that the Anglican primates (38 archbishops from the world's provinces) meeting this week in Northern Ireland have issued a communique asking for the American and Canadian churches to "voluntarily withdraw" from a major joint body, the Anglican Consultative Council, between now and 2008, the next scheduled meeting of the Anglican church at large (the Lambeth Conference.)
What does that mean? It means that those two institutions are, in effect, no longer full members of the Anglican Communion. It means that the work of the Eames Commission (the Windsor Report) was largely wasted. It means that the traditionalists, led by the ultra-conservative African bishops, have basically prevailed. It means that Archbishop Rowan Williams has failed to provide the strong forward leadership many of us had hoped he would, caving in instead to the numerical majority, rather than following his own already-stated moral principles of inclusion. And it means that the Anglican Communion will probably split, and as far as I'm concerned now, that's fine.
There is no reconciliation possible when one party obviously has never had any intention of allowing anything other than its own position to prevail. The North American churches said clearly, "We are at a different place culturally; all we ask is that your respect us as we respect you; let's work together on the concerns that we share, which are so much more important for all of humanity." We have agreed for years to ignore African cultural practices, such as polygamy, which are not approved by the Church at large but continue to be practiced within African Anglicanism. But none of that mattered; tonight Primate Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the leader of the opposion, reportedly held a victory celebration. So perhaps it's time to walk our own path. I am only sorry that other western churches, especially the British one, don't have the courage to immediately join us. And I very much hope that both the Canadians and the Americans will stick to their courageous positions, and not backtrack in favor of the preservation of the institution, now that a split seems inevitable.
Meanwhile, if anyone would like a closer look at the "demon" in the eye of the hurricane, here is an excerpt from Bishop Gene Robinson's pastoral letter from this month's issue of the New Hampshire Diocese's Episcopal News. On the cover of the newspaper was a new logo, showing stylized hands holding a flame. It replaces a former logo, which Gene describes below:
I've been thinking about our own symbols here in the Diocese, and what we want to be communicating, to our own members as well as to the world. The symbol that appears on every piece of stationery, the doors of the Diocesan House, the New Hampshire Episcopal News, and every publication of our diocese is our coat of arms/shield. It is the face we give to the world.
Perhaps you've never given it much thought, but what does our coat of arms say about us to the world? In a time of war, our "face" to the world has arrows and a sword. In a time when we believe the Bishop to be a servant of the people, our shield displays a mitre bejeweled with precious stones. In an age when people are starving the world over, and the gap between rich and poor becomes greater every day, our "face to the world" looks like the coat of arms of a wealthy family. In these times which beg for our self-sacrificing love in the Name of Jesus, there is little in this coat of arms to communicate our warmth, our respect, and our love for all of God's children.
(he goes on to describe the new logo and what it symbolizes)...
Of course changing the logo from a bejeweled coat of arms to a pair of loving hands won't automatically make us the servant community Christ calls us to be. We have to work at that every single day. But the change might better remind us and signal to the world that our calling - and our intention - is to be God's loving hands in the world, empowered by the Spirit of the one who first loved us.
By all means, let's kick this guy out. He sounds really dangerous.
7:42 PM
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Wednesday, February 23, 2005 "May you live until the word of your life is expressed"
I woke this morning from a strange and disquieting dream that seemed influenced by the film "Burnt by the Sun"; I remember only the final scene of the dream, in which I saw a figure with an indistinct head walking on a downhill path through tall grasses. Suddenly a huge orange orb, made of some deeply-crinkled substance like those fold-out paper wedding bells or balls that are sold as party decorations, but more irregular, like a giant hornet nest, floated ominously and unstoppably down the path toward the walking person - and I knew that they would be annihilated by it.
I spent the next half hour lying in bed thinking about that movie and the end-time Russia it depicted - the country life of brief transcendent summers, jam and bread, vodka, men in white linen and women in white lace, little girls with hair ribbons at their temples. I thought about the epilogue to that movie; what happened to the general's wife and his daughter after his execution. Maybe I have been thinking about Stalinist Russia since seeing (yes, this is how my convoluted mind works) Julie Christie playing - yes - a grandmother in "Finding Neverland" last week. Or maybe it has been from living in a snowy, far northern city, with its slanting winter light and greyness punctuated by the occasional bright, knife-sharp day.
So I was happy this morning, and not altogether surprised, to find a rare new post from Idle Words, this time about a recent experience of reading Pushkin's Little Tragedies. I won't give away Maciej's wonderful story-telling, but just encourage any of you who care about Russian literature or the Russian language, or who enjoy good writing about writing and writers, to take a look.
My early-morning spin through the blogosphere gave me several more gifts, also on the theme of finding happiness despite obstacles of the world's or our own making (Pushkin, for example, was stuck in the country, prevented from reaching his fiancee by an outbreak of plague). Here is a beautiful post from elck, about finding joy, and here is another from Jake, following a workshop with author/priest/anorexia survivor Margaret Bullit-Jonas about the necessity of discovering our heart's desires, in which she asked participants to reflect on the post title, above. Jake ends with a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
There's a large food court in the Eaton Center, in the underground city, and we often go there for lunch after going to church at the cathedral on Sunday morning. There's just about every kind of food one could imagine there, from pizza to pad thai. We had spicy Thai food today, and took our trays to a quiet part of the court, which wasn't crowded anyway, near this old gentleman who was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, all with his hat and leather gloves still on. On our other side was a delicate brunette beauty, reading a book and eating a small bowl of Tonkinese soup, and beyond the old gentleman was a family - grandmother, father, mother and baby. While the father held the laughing baby, the mother spooned food into its mouth and sang (in English, of course)"Old MacDonald had a Farm."
Today we headed back down to Vermont, arriving at our house around 4:30 pm after driving through a snowstorm and a pretty intense wind. Our time in Montreal was content and productive: we got a lot of professional work done, and finally, with the help of some encouraging friends (you know who you are), I got back to working on my book. I realized I was scared, after nearly three months of not touching it, to pick it up again - would it seem like a total mess? Would I be overwhelmed with the amount of work left to do? Would it read badly? I gathered my courage, spent one whole day going through what I had written so far, taking careful notes, and then began writing. And I'm happy to report that it's not as daunting as I thought, and actually the time away gave me some needed perspective; I was able to see some structural problems that had been bothering me and figure out a way around them, and I also realized I could cut a whole section I had thought was necessary - it simply isn't. I feel so much better.
We're also making more friends. We had friends over for dinner on two nights, and we were invited out to someone else's house on another. All of that was just great; happy times, good food and conversation, people we liked very much. (It's a little tiring - people are just getting going here at midnight. Saturday night we went to bed at 2:00 pm; our whole schedule, especially on weekends, is completely different in the city.)
The possibility of great variety - what J. calls "bandwidth" - is part of what I find so compelling about living there. Yesterday morning we went to the cathedral, where the choral mass setting was a sublimely beautiful misse breve for treble voices by Gabriel Faure. Instead of a sermon, and as part of a study series for Lent, there was a very moving video, from the Canadian Anglican church's global relief fund, about AIDS in Africa. Afterwards, talk with new friends there about all sorts of topics - from life in Montreal's gay community to the complicated bureaucracy of the French hospital system.
We came home, worked, had dinner, began packing for our trip today, and then at 9:30 pm went to Cinema du Parc to see "Inside Deep Throat", a new documentary about the famous porn movie (shot for a cost of $25,000, it eventually grossed over $600 million), the morality war it ignited in the United States, what happened to its stars and director, and where the "sexual revolution" has ended up today. It was an excellent documentary which explores past and current American history and culture: the rise of the Religious Right and southern indignation at all matters sexual; free speech, government and censorship; personal styles of self expression; the way crime seems to inevitably follow money; the sad and often tragic lives of the people who get caught in the middle. And it also took an ironic look back at the strange cleavage that happened in the late 1970s and 1980s between the movement for women's sexual liberation for women, and the rise of a particular strain of humorless feminism which, although it was crucial in giving many of us the equality we enjoy today, was also a precursor to our stifling political correctness. The film includes interviews with all sorts of people who saw it all unfold - Helen Gurley Brown, Harry Reems, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Erica Jong, the late Linda Lovelace and her family, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer... the film's director, the Federal prosecutor who went after it, movie theater owners...I wonder what one of today's young people would think of all this: does it look like insanity to them, or a progression? As Dick Cavett says in the film, isn't it amazing that a sexual act that turned an entire nation inside out is now not even considered to be real sex by many young people?
8:05 PM
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BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS
