Cassandra

It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.

Aren’t we beyond all proclamations and prophecies, and so beyond tragedy?

We foreigners are all the more dependent on it because here we have no command of words, are incapable of deciphering even the signs outside the shops, must rely on pictures, smells.

Am I already broaching the theme?

The self-devouring city. A force has come over me. Have the sightless eyes of the korai opened up to me?

And then we went to see the korai (‘maidens’) from the Erechtheum, which have been placed in the museum on the Acropolis to safeguard them from total destruction. They stand in a semicircle, gaze down at us spectators, and weep. The stone is weeping, and I do not mean metaphorically. Tears have streamed over the faces of the stone maidens and eaten them away. Something more powerful than grief has engraved itself in these beautiful cheeks: acid rain, polluted air. Once these faces may have been blank and expressionless; our century has forced its own expression on them, that of mourning

Objects ought to be speaking to me, but that fact does not loosen their tongues. The colour snapshots N. is taking will not stir my imagination when I get them home, any more than they do here.

Indifference, the least welcome thing of all, the alien element where we are most sure to founder, even more surely than in impotence and guilt. No, I told the young gypsy woman, I do not want my hand read. That’s true, isn’t it? said C. – one doesn’t want to know the bad things that are to come. But that noon under the bright Greek sun on the foreign coast, there was nothing I feared more than the verdict that nothing was to come. How hyper-alert I was the first time I crossed over the border, how greedy to hear the first words in a foreign language; how captivated by my first foreign city. Captivated by love, small wonder (I heard the ironical echo say inside me, the echo which I am used to by now). You cannot expect love from this city.

The spirit of place held back. Sightseeing made me feel numb, I might have known it would.

Oh, man’s fate, when happy, bears comparison

to a shadow; when unfortunate –

a damp sponge sweeps across and blots it out!

And more than the shadow’s fate, this extinction pains me.

Naturally Cassandra loved this god, or whatever he was; for that very reason she had to reject him when he grew obtrusive. Western female logic? More like male logic, witness Aeschylus. But why did she choose a man’s profession when she trained to be a seeress? Why did she want to become like men? Why was it in fact a man’s profession to be a seer? Had it always been so? If not, since when? And are those generally the sorts of questions that are able to free Cassandra from myth and literature?