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
Monday, April 05, 2004
Last night I finished Michael Ondaatje's memoir of his childhood in Sri Lanka, "Running in the Family". It's a strange book, rather experimental and somewhat rough, like pages out of a personal journal; here a remembrance, there a poem, a sketch, an essay. Once I stopped trying to make it be a totally cohesive piece of writing, like his other books, I relaxed and enjoyed it, much as I enjoy all the personal writing we do here.
There is one section that's all poetry, and of these poems, I especially one called "The Cinnamon Peeler":
If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe under rain gutters, monsoons.
here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbor to your hair or the crease that cuts your back. This ankle. You will be known among strangers as the cinnamon peeler's wife.
I could hardly glance at you before marriage never touch you - your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers. I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them over smoking tar, helped the honey gatherers...
When we swam once I touched you in water and our bodies remained free, you could hold me and be blind of smell. You climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter. And you searched your arms for the missing perfume
and knew
what good is it to be the lime burner's daughter left with no trace as if not spoken to in the act of love as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.
You touched your belly to my hands in the dry air and said I am the cinnamon peeler's wife. Smell me. 8:29 PM
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We had a procession with palms today, too, but I never got any because I showed up at church just as the procession was beginning - I'd forgotten to change my clock. This is what happens when you don't listen to much radio or watch TV. We had a very quiet day yesterday, didn't go out at all, and in the morning it never even occurred to me that this was The Day. In fact, walking up the hill to church in time for - I thought - choir practice at 9:00 am, I saw a lot more cars parked than usual and said to myself, "Oh, the 8:00 service must have run late." Even when I entered the building and saw people in the sanctuary I was still in that mindset - but then I heard the processional chant begin in the parish hall, looked up and saw the cross and acolytes at the head of the procession, and said to myself, "Oh, shit!" I rushed downstairs, grabbed my music, threw on my robe, and met the procession just as the choir was heading into the church. My seat-mate, Anne, gave me one of her patented Looks, and said "clock trouble, sweetie?" in-between words of the processional hymn. I rolled my eyes, and we were off down the aisle.
Shirin came to church today because she was curious about the Christian observance of Palm Sunday - "You really mean it starts happy and ends up sad, all in one service?" she asked on the phone. As a Shiia Muslim from Iran, she is used to passion plays - nowhere in the world is there a greater re-enactment of religious grief than in Iran during Ashoura, the observance of the martyrdom of Hussein that began the Shiia/Sunni split. Today she saw the congregation and clergy come into the sanctuary carrying palms, re-enacting Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, and then heard Luke's version of the passion story in a dramatic reading.
After the service she stayed for the coffee hour, and then we left the church together. "It was very interesting," she said - a comment that can mean many things. We've known each other long enough now to appreciate our traditions, understand the differences, and not need to explain too much. I knew that a lot of today's service would have been anathema to a devout Muslim, which made me appreciate her presence, interest, and friendship all the more.
One major difference between our cultures is the sense of Western self-determination versus Muslim/Middle Eastern reliance on God's providence. I've gotten so used to this that I automatically add "Insh'allah" - "God Willing" - to any phrase expressing future expectations when I'm with Shirin. As we left the church today, we walked past a choir member sitting on a bench waiting for her husband. I said, "See you Thursday night."
"Definitely," the choir member replied.
"Insh'allah," said Shirin, under her breath, and we both started laughing, and laughed all the way out of the church.
Mikhail Pletnev is playing the Chopin Scherzo no. 4 in E major. It's the live recording of his Carnegie Hall debut. J. put it on and we listened to the incredible Bach-Busoni Chaconne in D minor that begins the two-CD set; I've heard it many times now and it still gives me goosebumps: no one should be able to play like this. Then the Beethoven, Piano Sonata no. 32. We were lying on our bed, and J. rolled over and put his head on my chest and fell asleep. I listened more intently and appreciatively than usual, but somewhere in the second movement I fell asleep too, and woke up to applause. I gently lifted J.'s head, whispered to him to go back to sleep, and came out here to the computer. Now the Scherzi are ringing in the background; it's a brilliant performance. A dear friend recommended this CD to me after hearing it on a long flight between Thailand and Europe, and I play it more often than any other piano recording I own. What I would have given to have been at that concert! You can hear the crowd's shivery excitement at the end of the Bach-Busoni; they are ecstatic at the end of the Beethoven and wild from the Chopin on. Pletnev played five encores, enough for another entire CD: Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Scarlatti, Moszkowski, and finally the "Islamey" oriental fantasy of Balakirev.
. . .
Tomorrow, Holy Week begins, always an emotional and musical marathon for me. (If you haven't read what Blaugustine had to say on March 27th about Mel Gibson's Passion, please do.) It's a strange thing to live with the event for a week, as I do with my choir responsibilities and seven services to sing between Palm Sunday, tomorrow, and Easter. We hear the story read, we sing it, we chant it on Good Friday as a kind of opera/passion play that is the focus of our church's deeply meditative evening service, with the choir playing the "role" of the crowd. What one cannot do is ignore it.
I find, having done this now for many years, that Holy Week is a sort of touchstone, a way of checking in with myself spiritually and emotionally. Although I can't remember exactly what I felt like last year, or five, or ten years ago, I definitely remember the range of feelings: involved, bored, sad, reflective, inspired, restless, moved, distant, accepting, resistant. The fatigue that builds as the week goes along contributes to this experience. No other time in the liturgical year has the same effect; there is never the same intensity of shared experience that is also so utterly individual. It is a retreat while being in the midst of one's regular life, and if nothing else it brings an awareness of the strangeness of the sacred embedded in the secular: society moves noisily on, oblivious except for the mounds of Cadbury eggs, chocolate bunnies on plastic grass, yellow and lavender marshmallow Peeps. There is much of the story of this week that I cannot fully accept, but the cruelty and truth at the heart of it is the story of humanity, of the ongoing struggle between what is best and worst in us. Spending one week per year meditating on that, and on my place in the Crowd, is not much sacrifice to make.
6:15 PM
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Friday, April 02, 2004
LOIS at the Frick
As CB and I turned the corner and walked toward the entrance to the Frick Collection, a woman in a tan coat came racing toward us, arms wide. "Is it really you guys?" she cried. It was Lois of Heart@Work, discovered by CB to be in NYC for a few days coincidental to my own visit. The conversation began and didn't stop for the next two hours, as CB gave us an erudite tour of the highlights of the Frick, the art-centric conversation spiced and diverted by frequent detours into religion, spirituality, literature, and, of course, blogging. At one point, in front of CB's favorite Vermeer, we realized several people were listening to us rather than the guided tour in their museum-supplied headsets. Well - alternative media has its appeal, even off the internet! It was a wonderful encounter, and many of you were fondly mentioned, and your presence sorely missed.
We had two and a half hours this morning with Bishop G.R., and it was some of the most productive and interesting interview time I've ever spent. After the first half of the interview, we took a break, and G. went downstairs to check his mail. He came back with a fistful of letters. "Here," he said, reading highlights of several. There was hatemail from someone in Tennessee, an admonishing letter from a woman in the Diocese of NH who wanted him to stop appearing on television and in the media -- and a get well card (he's had flu) with personal messages from the inmates at the NH women's prison. "That's my life," he said, smiling, and handing us the card. "But look, isn't that just great?"
When we resumed I told him about this blog and the questions I'd asked you to send me. I read him the first one I received, from Dale. The Bishop took a deep breath, and said, "Do we want to go there?"
I said, "Yes, sure," and go we did.
At the end of his long answer, which took us back to Lexington, through seminary and therapy and marriage, he went over to his desk and brought out a well-worn, underlined copy of the book that he said had changed his life as he was struggling to accept and live his gayness as well as his priesthood. It was "Embracing the Exile" by John Fortunato. He then read aloud the passages that had been most relevant to him. It was an extraordinary, intimate moment. I held my breath, trying unsuccessfully to fight back tears. As he read, a marriage dissolved, a person accepted himself in his wholeness, a life was transformed, and the necessary courage was found to create the person who sat in front of me.
We have another interview next week, on Maundy Thursday. Please send me more questions if you have them.
7:17 PM
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SNIFF The excellent Ecotone topic for April 1 is "Smells and Place". I haven't posted yet, and nether have very many others, so I'm making a pitch for you all to do some good writing and post it over there. I'll have something up in a few days too.
4:38 PM
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Thursday, April 01, 2004
SOUTH ARABIAN MASK, in a gallery window on Madison Avenue, New York
Walking meditation can happen even in a city. Yesterday I arrived early for a rendezvous with two fellow bloggers after taking the Lexington Avenue subway uptown, so I walked down one side of Madison Avenue for ten blocks or so, up the other, and then over to Fifth. This section of the city, known as the Upper East Side, and bordered on one side by Central Park, is a toney place filled with fancy apartment houses, museums, and high-priced designer shops and art and antique galleries. After the Cartier amethyst-and-coral necklaces, Prada handbags, and Sonia Rykiel frills, I came upon this face, or perhaps it came upon me.
It was a drizzly day, and the park was filled with a dreamy fog punctuated by the wet trunks of plane trees and the ethereal pale yellow foam of new forsythia blossoms. In the garden of a museum, beyond the wrought-iron fence, pale fat buds of magnolia were like pink, anxious fists against the grey sky, and below them, phalanxes of shield-like tulip-leaves rose, strong and stiff, from the earth.
In my black anorak, I stood gazing into the park: the wet grass, the tracery of the yellow blossoms, the architecture of the plane trees drawn across the scene as if with a few deft strokes of a sumi brush. Another figure in black -slender, handsome, intelligent - strode along the fence. I looked away, looked back; he looked twice at me, tentatively, then with assurance. "Yes," our smiling eyes agreed, "it must be you."
I'll write more about the meeting tomorrow; for now, two more pictures:
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Thank you so much to everyone who has sent good wishes to us and to our friends. She is on the mend, and everyone is getting some much-needed rest. I have a lot to write about, but it looks like that will have to wait until after we are back home.
Tomorrow, if all goes well, a brief blogger rendezvous.
9:55 PM
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Monday, March 29, 2004
I'm back in New York. A very close friend of ours had surgery for breast cancer on Friday, and on Saturday her elderly mother died. So needless to say, it has been a very difficult situation, and we came down to help out. I'm glad we did. Things seem much better today, everyone got some sleep, our friend is back home and her husband and daughter are feeling better. It's a gorgeous day here, too - we're in the Village, close to Washington Square, and the morning light is shining on the buildings and streaming into the apartment. Lots of love here too.