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, March 12, 2005
Tomorrow I'll try to take some pictures that show the incredibleness that's outside right now: at least a foot of new snow, so wet that it clings in great clumps to the tiniest twigs, forms great gravity-defying white tophats on every fencepost, every hosta-pod and dried black-eyed susan; and adorns the telephone wire with a repeated symphony of mounded crescents, waiting for a running squirrel or landing blue jay to knock them all off with one flick of a flailing high-wire tail.
It's as if our whole world were inside an owl's wing: muffled, soft, white, and - while the snow fell, which is did most of the day - slightly blurred. I watch from an upstairs window, my form a flash of bright color in a monochromatic world, if anyone were looking. But they are not; no one moves on days like this, not on a weekend, save for the occasional snowplow or someone heading out for a prescription, or the milk the baby can't do without.
I stay inside with my computer, my tea, my flute; we remove the old wax from the kitchen floor, do the laundry, make French toast, speak on the telephone. There's no point being miserable about it: warmth will come when it's ready, and we'll all get what we've been waiting for - even the male cardinal, chipping impatiently below the window, refusing to let up on his spring song.
9:44 PM
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Thursday, March 10, 2005 Spring Dresses, Montreal. I wish. We all wish.
READING
A book order arrived from Powell's today, adding to the bedside stack of reading material. For pleasure, and in addition to the Amin Maalouf novel, which I'm chipping away at, a few pages a day (the protagonist is currently at an entomology seminar in Cairo, talking about scarab beetles), I'm re-reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
In our quest to better understand our second homeland, J. is reading Two Solitudes, by Hugh MacLennan, a novel set northwest of Montreal, starting in 1917, and A Solitary Pillar, a history of the Anglican church in Montreal and the Quiet Revolution - the enormous socio-political change that took place in Quebec when the population shook off the domination of society and personal life by the Roman Catholic church.
From Powell's I received another Canadian book, Mordecai Richler's Oh Canada, Oh Quebec, written in 1991, and subtitled "Requiem for a Divided Country".
The other book is Arabic poetry; I'm trying to learn a little more about it and hoping I might be able to share some of it with my father-in-law, since reading is becoming very hard for him now.
8:54 PM
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Wednesday, March 09, 2005 Mes ami(e)s! YulBlog, the oldest known gathering of bloggers in the world, celebrates five years of blogging and camaraderie in Montreal. (article from La Presse, via Montreal City Weblog)
8:59 PM
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PROTESTANTS
Lately my father-in-law has been feeling much better; his new doctor has changed his medications and given him something for his persistent indigestion, and for the first time in years, his prodigious appetite seems to be returning. He came to the lunch table with a plate loaded with toast points and creamed chipped beef. “I know,” he said, grinning and setting to work with his fork. “I shouldn’t. But I love it, it’s one of the best things they make here.” He ate the entire plateful, and a big bowl of chicken soup, and drank a glass of sugar-free ginger-ale.
“What else can I get you?” I asked.
“Maybe something for dessert…my sugar is normal now! Hurray! The last time they tested it the woman said, ‘Go ahead and eat some dessert!’ So I’ve been indulging a bit. What do they have today…something other than cake?”
“Do you want some fruit? No? Do you like pudding?” I’d never seen him eat regular pudding, which is always served at there – vanilla or chocolate in sundae glasses with cool-whip on top, or in layers in parfait glasses.
“What’s the kind I like?” he asked.
“Rice? Tapioca?”
“Rice is all right, but no, I mean that kind made with eggs and milk that gets baked…”
“Custard. Or crème caramel.”
“Yes! Delicious!” he said, rolling his eyes heavenward.
“They don’t have that today, I’m afraid.”
“I know! Just get something else.”
We were at the end of the lunch hour and the pickings were slim; I brought him some red jello with cool whip and an orange slice on the top; he made a face. “I’ll take it back,” I told him. “There wasn’t much else.”
“No, since you’ve brought it I’ll eat it,” he said, taking the orange slice out of the cream and popping it in his mouth. He ate a spoonful of the wriggling jello, grinning as he guided the fork precariously into his mouth. "Was it you who told me this stuff is full of sugar?"
"No," J. said.
"Why not, if you know it is?"
"Because I think you deserve to have some pleasure in your life once in a while."
We began talking about a friend who was going back to Damascus soon to settle an estate; my father-in-law said how much he wished someone had been able to buy back the family home there. It had been a lovely home when they lived there, he said, before it was sold when his parents died, and changed into a multi-family house. He and J. had visited the old family house when they were in Damascus five years ago, and the pictures bore out his story; it must have been lovely, with a traditional central courtyard and a rooftop garden and grape arbor. “I still can’t understand why we never really knew our neighbors,” he said. “We lived right on the edge of the Christian section; the people next to us were Muslim but I never ever saw them.”
“Couldn’t you see them from your roof?”
“Oh no!” he said. “There was one room you could have seen into, but they had hung a curtain or something there so you couldn’t see anything. And several of the other families near us were Catholic, and we didn’t really mingle with them because we were Protestant. It wasn’t because there was any problem, that’s just the way it was. There were some Orthodox families who we did know; that’s because we had been Orthodox, before, of course.”
I was always amazed by those “of courses” that peppered his speech, just as they had the comments of my mother-in-law; implied in them was a whole world of knowledge we were supposed to have but didn’t. “Of course.” Of course – what?
“How did the break happen in your family – how did you become Protestant?” I asked.
“Oh you don’t know that story?” he said. “It goes back to my paternal grandfather. He was a rich man. In those days the Ottomans collected tax from every village, and they would go around and visit the villages and decide about how much they thought that village should pay. Then they asked people from the village to come forward and say how much they’d promise to collect, and the person who promised the most got appointed and paid to be the tax collector. And my grandfather was one of those people.”
“Weren’t they hated by the people?”
“Well, the Ottomans knew the people wanted to be able to go back to their villages, so they weren’t exorbitant about what they tried to collect. Anyway, my grandfather had gone on a journey to one of those villages, and on the way, he got typhus and died. They brought his body back, and my grandmother was in trouble – the boys were all small; she was pregnant with my father at the time and he was born after my grandfather died. So she went to the Orthodox Church for help managing things, and turned over the family’s finances to them to take care of. When it eventually came time for my father to go away to school, she asked for the funds, and the Church said, ‘Sorry, there isn’t any money.’ But there had been plenty of money. My grandmother was very angry and complained and said the money hadn’t been managed properly, and the Church fathers just threw up their hands and said, ‘Sorry,’ and she came back to the house and from that day forward we were Protestants.”
He shrugged and smiled, a little mischievously. “I always was very fond of the Patriarch though.”
8:26 PM
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Monday, March 07, 2005
I'm back in Vermont; there was another snowstorm today that we drove through, thinking it was going to be a not-fun ride, but suddenly, just after the border, we came out of it and there was sun and a beautiful late winter day. From what I heard during a phone call I made later in the afternoon, it seems the snow headed right up to Montreal.
I forgot to mention that yesterday in church the Prayers of the People were led by a native French-speaker whose voice I could listen to all day. (For you non-Anglicans, this is just about the closest we come to extemporaneous prayer - it's a section of the service where various people, usually grouped into categories (clergy, government, the sick, the needy, those who have died, and so on) are prayed for by name, and these prayers are led by a member of the congregation). One thing I especially like about the Cathedral is that the leader of these prayers each week seems to have considerable discretion about what he or she says; there's a wonderful Anglican informality - if that's not an oxymoron - about the variations in voices and personalities each week, while keeping to a fairly set pattern. Anyway, yesterday the leader reminded us that it was International Women's Week, and she invited us to remember especially the strong and important women in each of our lives. (Hearing something unexpected like this during the service has a way of undoing me; I was immediately moved just by the fact that women specifically were being singled out as worthy of prayer and recognition, since it is the first time in fifty years of church attendance that I ever remember this happening.) The leader went on to name some women who had "opened doors for all of us" - and it was a good list, ending with Rosa Parks - and there was time for all of us to think on our own lists. Mine is a pretty long and wonderful one.
When we went up for communion later on, something else extraordinary happened. The assistant priest, who is a woman, was giving out the bread. As she pressed the wafer into each person's hand, she began with the person's first name, if she knew it, and then said the traditional words "the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, given for thee" in the person's own language - I heard English, French and Spanish while I was up there, maybe she knows some others. It was special enough to be addressed by my own name, but the languages left me dumbfounded. She was so warm and so direct that even visitors who weren't known by name must have felt particularly welcomed. Now this, it seemed to me, was radical hospitality.
Liturgy can be used - and certainly has been used - to create distance and keep people squarely in their own little place; with some thought it can also be used to create a feeling of intimacy, acceptance, and community. How interesting it is that liturgy itself has been blamed and rejected for turning people off and away from the "traditional" church, with everything from folk masses to video screens and evangelical praise as substitutes, when actually the distance is created by people who want to maintain authority and power, or find it easier to hide behind "form" rather than letting their own humanity come through.
I've always liked the Anglican liturgy because to me it is poetic, beautiful, and comforting. Although we don't like to talk about it as "theater", much of it is theatrical. It also contains much that is symbolic: not just words and objects, but actions, movements, the management of participants and the way they are positioned in relationship to the congregation. Having watched this very closely for many years (being up on the altar, or "on stage", as a member of a choir gives you a good chance to observe and think about what's going on), it's clear to me that liturgy, in different hands and voices, behaves differently, and that people react to it differently too. And much is revealed.
9:08 PM
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Sunday, March 06, 2005
YEP.
This evening the radio announcer on Espace Musique tried very hard to explain in French that the next song she was playing was "Londonderry Air" - not "London Derriere".
8:54 PM
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I'm trying, but it's very hard for me to take a day off, even on Sunday: to turn off my more-or-less constant internal voice (which I can call my Yankee work ethic, or just plain old guilt, or, in my less charitable moments, determination heading in the direction of ambition) which tells me to be productive. Most days, from the moment I wake up to the time I go to bed, I am doing something: making food, writing, working, practicing an instrument or a language, helping out, listening, reading, getting some exercise. Even meditation can quite easily be fit into a category of "accomplishment": Excellent! I accomplished my goal of doing nothing! Ah, there are minefields everywhere. I used to be pretty hard on myself about this. Now, I try to notice, be gentle to myself about what I've noticed, and move on.
Lately - maybe for Lent? - I've been more intentional about trying to observe a time of rest on Sundays: deliberately not working, not pushing myself to use that day for formal work even though it's so good, because there won't be telephone interruptions. It's difficult, which tells me it's probably a good idea. As I watch myself struggle, I see things about myself that I didn't see as clearly before. I didn't realize how much my self-identity, and also my ability to let go at the end of a day, was wrapped up in being able to tell myself, "OK, you've done x,y,z." This doesn't mean I've been unable to see what's around me, or that I've descended into workaholism at the expense of caring for myself or others. It's more that, for the past year, because of life changes, I've just had so much to do, and so many different demands coming from so many sources, including myself, that the idea of consciously taking a day totally off from -- let's call it "accomplishment" - has seemed impossible. And of course, it's not.
I'm not at a place yet that feels like it's opening up into spaciousness, but I am beginning to sense some change.
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FREE TO READ
Today, after church downtown, I wandered around with my camera, and did a little bookshopping. For the first time, I went into the French language section of the bookstore and browsed around with intent to buy, and picked out a novel by a favorite author, Amin Maalouf: La Premier Siecle apres Beatrice. Maalouf is Lebanese, but he has lived in France a good deal and writes (I believe) in French as well as in Arabic. There is a great deal of Middle Eastern writing that has been translated into French and not English; one reason I'm excited about finally beginning to feel more confident in the language is that it opens up some of this work to me.
So I took the book to the cash register and the woman there (who looked as if she could be Middle Eastern in origin herself) took it and, opening up the book to the list of titles inside, said, in French, how much she liked Maalouf and pointed to another of his books - a volume of essays - that she had especially liked. She went on, and I didn't understand everything she said, so we switched back and forth between English and French while she rang up my purchase, and then smilingly said goodbye.
This small exchange is an example of what I find so amazing and so different about being here, compared to where I have lived before: 1) no one says or implies "why do you want to read a book in a foreign language?" 2) no one thinks "why do you want to read something written by an Arab?" 3) even though I have some difficulty speaking the language, no one thinks it's weird or inappropriate for me to buy a book in French; on the contrary, everyone here seems to be in some stage of learning other languages; 4) this society is openly pro-intellectual, not anti-intellectual. Reading literature is not frowned upon; on the contrary, you see people reading everywhere in this city, and it seems to me that they are very often reading literature or non-fiction. People walk down the alleys reading books. They walk between metro stations and up and down stairs reading books. They sit in the park reading books. I can't get over it.
Some of you, who have had to endure "what do you want to do that for?" comments from others throughout your lives, especially about your choice to be a person who reads and thinks, will understand why these differences matter so much to me.
3:25 PM
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