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.

The second of the wild animals behind the wire fence has been shot; it is bleeding from a shoulder wound, looks at us reproachfully, sadly, and at the same time implacably. ‘Did you shoot at it?’ I ask H. ‘Naturally,’ he says, ‘what else could one do?’ He has taken a hunting rifle that was hanging on a wall in the kitchen. But he could not shoot again, he says. The animal does not look as if it was about to die of this wound. It occurs to us that the animals might have escaped from a passing circus. It is too late to make inquiries. We cannot possibly live with them. We cannot kill them, either. They will not leave our kitchen voluntarily. We stand there, eye to eye with the mute wild beasts, and know: it is a hopeless situation.

According to these figures, there are three European tons of TNT for every person on earth, that is, for each one of us. The Great Powers could annihilate each other more than a dozen times over. And so on. We laugh, slightly embarrassed. ‘Normal feelings’ are numbed by such statistics. Indignation, revolt would be inappropriate. The aesthetic of resistance to it all has yet to be developed.

I see our three figures in the meadow from a long distance off. A feeling of loss of reality – as if someone had made a hole in the plastic bag that has been slipped over us and now the air is escaping along with the sky.

Later, as I sit on the bench outside the house pitting plums, I wonder how many more years I will sit on the bench this way. How many years do I want to go on sitting here? A sudden tug of age.

But the line the narrator pursues is that of male action. Everyday life, the world of women, shines through only in the gaps between the descriptions of battle.

My pain for this continent is in part a phantom pain: not only the pain for a lost limb, but for limbs that have not yet been formed, not developed; for unlived feelings, unfulfilled longing. All of this compensated for in literature: for how long?

Does there exist an ominous right (or duty) to bear witness? Tenacious of life, the supposition that someone must always go on writing.

I can no longer view Cassandra as a tragic figure. I do not think she saw herself that way. Does her contemporaneity lie in the way she learns to deal with pain? So, is pain the point at which I assimilate her, a particular kind of pain, the pain of becoming a knowing subject?

The Homeridae, through their accounts of heroic deeds of long ago, may have united and structured the masses who listened to them, above and beyond prevailing social structures. The classical Greek dramatist helped create, by aesthetic means, the political-ethical attitude of the free, adult, male citizen of the polis. The hymns, mystery plays, and saints’ legends of the Christian medieval poet also served to promote a bond whose two terms, God and man, were both responsive. The courtly epic has a fixed set of characters to whom it relates by praising them. The early middle-class poet addresses his prince in burning protest, and at the same time addresses the prince’s subjects, stirring them to rebellion. The proletariat, the socialist movements with their revolutionary class-struggle goals, inspire the literature that accompanies them to concrete partisanship. But in the face of modern-day phenomena, awareness of the incongruousness of words keeps growing. The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe what we see. We cannot express what we already believe.

The Homeridae, through their accounts of heroic deeds of long ago, may have united and structured the masses who listened to them, above and beyond prevailing social structures. The classical Greek dramatist helped create, by aesthetic means, the political-ethical attitude of the free, adult, male citizen of the polis. The hymns, mystery plays, and saints’ legends of the Christian medieval poet also served to promote a bond whose two terms, God and man, were both responsive. The courtly epic has a fixed set of characters to whom it relates by praising them. The early middle-class poet addresses his prince in burning protest, and at the same time addresses the prince’s subjects, stirring them to rebellion. The proletariat, the socialist movements with their revolutionary class-struggle goals, inspire the literature that accompanies them to concrete partisanship. But in the face of modern-day phenomena, awareness of the incongruousness of words keeps growing. The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe what we see. We cannot express what we already believe.