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Journal Poem – 1
Hearing Cassandra
Whose story do we believe? Grab a tea for a thoughtful conversation.
In reading the legend of Cassandra of Troy, the parallels to today’s conversations are uncanny. We seem to be listening, but perhaps we are not hearing. Poor Cassandra is doomed to tell the truth to all those who listen, but what they hear, they do not believe.
Cassandra was the most beautiful daughter of King Priam of Troy, who famously lost the war to the Greeks with the ambush in the Trojan horse. One of nineteen children, the storyline that follows her through all retelling is that she was given the gift of prophecy by the Greek god, Apollo, and was subsequently cursed by him because she refused his sexual advances. She would speak the truth, prophecize about the fate of Troy and no one believed her.
Her story is a tale told by the victors. There are no ancient writings that speak from Cassandra’s point of view. Her fate is lamented in a Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:
Apollo, Apollo!
God of all ways, but only Death’s to me,
Once and again, O thou, Destroyer named
Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!
She is said to have been a novice or a priestess in the temple of Apollo, that is how she came to his attention. There are mixed stories as to how she came upon her gift from Apollo. Some say that he courted her and bestowed the gift as a demonstration of his love, as a god loves, fast and furious. Others say that she had already promised herself to him and the gift was payment for her sexual favours. From both scenarios, we hear that she refuses his advances, either in fidelity to her duties as a priestess, or as a malcontent vixen. He then either spits on her or forces a kiss and breathes a curse on her lips. Her earlier gift of prophecy could not be taken away, but her stories, now, would not be believed.
Throughout history, even to the present time, Cassandra’s story is told as an illustration of a hysterical woman. In ancient times, it was considered a “tangible, concrete, and logical reaction to an organic imbalance of the body resulting from the uterus being out of rhythm with its own nature.” (The Cassandra Complex, pg 38). Through the twentieth century, Freud and other psychoanalysts divested the dis-ease of its mystical overtones and labeled it a neurosis. (ibid, 48). In the intervening centuries, it was used to murder women in witch hunts or commit them to asylums. Cassandra was driven to the point of madness because she could see terrible visions: of the fall of Troy at the hands of the Greeks in the Trojan horse debacle and even her own murder at the hands of Clytemnestra, King Agamemnon’s wife.
Historically, the myth of Cassandra came out at a time when an egalitarian society gave way to a patriarchal culture. Apollo goes from a being a bully: He came down furious from the summits of Olympus, with his bow and his quiver upon his shoulder, and the arrows rattled on his back with the rage that trembled within him. He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them” (Homer, The Iliad, line 44) To become “the god of purity, only at a later period, his sharp clarity, his superior spirit, his will that enjoins insight, moderation, and order, in short all that we call Apollonian to this day.” (The Cassandra Complex, pg 21) And Cassandra is hysterical.
What is Cassandra’s side of the story? We can’t know for certain. I can extrapolate some scenarios based on my basic knowledge of human nature:
As the nineteenth child, Cassandra is sent to the temple to be a priestess. Even as a king, too many children can mean buying divine favours by sending extras to the temple, I suggest. A beautiful young girl vows to honour the god, Apollo, who murderously took over the oracle of Delphi (ibid, pg 23). In those vows, she agrees to celibacy.
In this, or any time period, Apollo is a man in a position of power. We do not know how old Cassandra is. I suspect young. Whether wooed into accepting Apollo’s gift of prophecy or cajoled into it, the modern issue of consent rears its head in this story. Cassandra has the right to withdraw her consent at any time. And spiteful Apollo curses her. Cassandra’s tale now becomes he said, she said. In a society moving to a strongly patriarchal worship of the gods, Cassandra is not believed, never believed.
Although, intellectually we know that we are all going to doe, Cassandra knew that when her father gave her away as a spoil of war, she would be raped by Ajax the Lesser and murdered by Queen Clytemnestra.
And I see the death-steel glancing
And the eye of murder glare;
On, with hasty strides advancing,
Terror haunts me everywhere.
Vain I seek alleviation;–
Knowing, seeing, suffering all,
I must wait the consummation,
In a foreign land must fall. (Cassandra by Friedrich Schiller)
None of her pleading, lamenting or beating of her breast could change the trajectory of her life. Madness ensues.
As I reflect on this story, I hear the young girls of the Salem witch hunts (The Crucible by Arthur Miller); I hear Anita Hill challenging the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas; Christine Blasey Ford challenging Brett Kavanaugh; I hear everyone who stands up to #metoo and #blacklivesmatter.
History does not teach us a solution. It can teach us to hear. What Cassandra prophecized did come to pass. She spoke the truth. Is it time to hear and believe it?
It feels hard to hope now. Ah, the gift of hope from Pandora’s box. That is a story for another day.
Acedia Gratitude
Helen Keller once said, “Everything has its wonders, even darkness, and silence.” As I sit with that thought, I am considering the wonder of acedia.
Acedia does offer time for contemplation if I choose to take it rather than ruminating about what I could or should be doing. It does become work to make acedia contemplation into something useful. When I bring in mindfulness and gratitude to acedia, I can be awakened to the happiness of an uncomplicated moment.
I am grateful for acedia because it helps me slow down to make decisions. The demon acedia’s voice is contrary. When I have a decision to make, acedia will speak many reasons why I don’t need to take action or complete a task. It does make me aware of my actions. Am I taking the right action for the right reason?
Sometimes though, acedia is too much of a stall. At some point, I will need to ask the demon to leave.
I am grateful for the rest acedia offers me. Time has become my most valued currency — as it is in the world, and it probably always was, we just didn’t realize it. Acedia allows time to stretch out in front of me. Perhaps a nap is wisely taken. Perhaps a trip down an internet rabbit hole helps me to discover a new piece of wisdom that I can store away. Perhaps a bath or a walk is needed. Acedia offers all of these self-care options.
I am grateful for acedia because I am able to pause my overwhelm. When I sit to watch the snippets that the evening news, and my email feed, and my social media stream offers, I am overwhelmed by all that there is to do to repair the world that we have broken: climate crisis, gun violence, inequality, pollution, poverty, and any one of a very long list of problems that vie for my attention. I want to do something. Acedia stops me from feeling that I need to do everything. By sitting, I can feel small and still see the world. I can see that, as Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee prophetized “The world is not a problem to be solved, it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self, and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” I lean against a tree as I sit and eventually the demon acedia sleeps. I can stand and move one step closer to a hopeful future.
Stereotypes
In a project I have undertaken, I was required to make learn about cultural stereotypes and my personal experiences with them. This is what I learned:
A stereotype, according to the Oxford dictionary, is a noun. It is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. Stereotype is just a word. Often, though, we assign meaning or bias to that word. And most often that meaning is skewed towards the negative. I was asked what stereotypes do I identify with. This made me think and the first thing I do when I need to think is research. And in my research, I made some interesting discoveries.
First, I asked my daughter, fresh out of academia. When I told her that I was working on identifying cultural stereotypes and my personal experience with them, she suggested that this topic was forcing me to use the white feminist cultural identity. I told her that I was uncomfortable talking about my experience as a white woman in suburban Canada when I live in a resplendently diverse country. She asked me if I ever felt that I was the subject of a stereotype. I might be naive, but my answer was “no”. I couldn’t think of a time that I was ostracized, bullied or attacked because of who I was. I am lucky. Privileged.
I next turned to Google for help. I typed in stereotype stories and the first page of Google was all about gender identity. Not gender identity for me as a woman. Gender identity for those questioning whether the world will accept them with the gender identity they chose. I identify as a woman. I do not question my identity and the recent gender challenges haven’t caused me any issues. I know which box to check on a survey.
Then, I turned to TED. TED gives us a wonderful array of personal stories and ideas. When I typed in stereotype, thirty talks come up. The first one on the list, I assume because it actually used the word stereotype in its description is a talk to help remove my stereotype against organic chemistry. Honestly, I didn’t know I have one. And after I watched the video, I realized I did have the bias that organic chemistry is hard.
There were other TED talks that introduced me to stereotypes and beliefs that I might hold: Millenials are lazy, entitled avocado toast lovers; women go crazy just before their period; ageism is a prejudice against your future self; many superheroes are straight white guys. What I discovered was that stereotypes are sometimes simple ideas that swirl around us, whether we realize it or not.
The most fascinating discovery I made was the origin of the word stereotype. It comes from French printmaking. A stereotype is a mould from an object that can be used to make more of that object. The stereotype makes exact duplicates of an object.
When a mould is made everything can remain the same. This can be useful when printing books or making plates. The mold or stereotype can be limiting when it is used with people.
Today we are more aware than ever the stereotypes that dog us everyday everywhere.
As with a mould, we have two opportunities when dealing with stereotypes: We can break them or we can use them to show up and paint them with our own design.