Cassandra, After the Fall

Cassandra by Frederick Sandys, est. 1863-1864.

The Greek god Apollo¹ was the god of music, poetry, prophecy, healing, and archery. He was also considered the most physically beautiful of the gods. He could also be vengeful, spiteful, and cruel, bringing death and disease to those he hated. In fact, Apollo’s vengeance was so legendary that it spawned the birth of the Cassandra Myth.

Apollo gifted Cassandra — a princess of Troy — with a “gift”. As men tend to do, he was trying to buy her affection and devotion (and her body, of course). But she rebuffed his advances. And like men tend to do when we dare to say “no”, he spit on her, and thusly cursed her twice.

The first curse was the “gift” of prophecy. Leave it to a man to give a curse wrapped up like a gift.

The second, sealed when he spit in her mouth², was that despite the fact that she was a prophet, no one would believe her prophecies. All of her warnings would go unheeded. She would just have to watch it happen.

Cassandra, undettered, kept warning people of what she knew. Just before the Trojan War, Cassandra had a vision of the destruction of Troy, another war fought because of petty kings and the women they covet.

She tried to warn the Trojans, to tell them that the giant wooden horse the Greeks left behind when they retreated was full of soldiers waiting to strike. Due to the curse, her warnings went unheeded. The Trojans chose to march the horse through the city walls.

All Cassandra could do was watch as her city burned.

Unless you live under a rock (can I join you?), you know that Trump’s Troopers, his own personal SS, murdered another American citizen in cold blood in Minneapolis over the weekend. His name was Alex Pretti.

When I read the news, I had to fight my body’s first reaction, which was detachment and numbness. It’s easier to numb than to feel the fear, the rage, and the disgust. I will not let detachment and numbness take over, even when it would be the easier option.

I have been struggling to write about this situation, or any situation, because I am trying to figure out how I can write about it. For years, my playwriting and my essays have been from a place of warning. Just another Cassandra, screaming against the wind.

It didn’t work, obviously. Not only did it not work, it subjected me to abuse and harassment. It made me question my own sanity. Gaslighting is too inadequate a word. I’ve never felt more insane as I have in the past decade.

And yet, YET, there are still people who insist with their whole chest that nothing would have been different had this man not been elected, that America was broken and unfixable, and that the systems in place could not be reformed.

I think it would have been nice to see if there was a chance that it could.

The wolves were at the door. We failed to keep them out. The responsibility is on all of us. I take responsibility for my part of it. For the ways I stuffed down my fear and decided to play the game. For the ways I shrugged it off when I should have kept screaming.

I wish I could have better imagined what it would be like to write when we got here. My foresight couldn’t take me that far. I just had to hope it wouldn’t come to this.

It doesn’t matter now.

So what do we do?

I don’t know.

I didn’t want to get here in the damn first place.

I wasn’t built for it. I’m super great at looking at a situation and connecting the dots. I’m great at talking to people I don’t agree with, or at least I used to be before the Hulk-level rage took over. I’m good at identifying and dealing with narcissists, which is something I’ve done for basically my entire life, and want very much to be done with.

I can tell you the Storm of the Century is coming. I don’t know exactly when, but I can tell you how you should prepare. I can help you if you call me from a flooding house, screaming in panic as the water gets higher. I am great in a crisis that way. If I can be helpful, nothing makes my brain happier. I can have you fashion sandbags out of some cat litter and old clothes.

But I can’t tell you what to do once your house is floating down the river.

I don’t know how anyone survives anything.

So, what happened to Cassandra, anyway?

We talk a lot about her story before the fall of Troy. But we don’t talk much about the after. It’s not a pretty story.

When the war began, she sought shelter in the temple of the goddess Athena, and hoped being near the statue at the altar would give her protection. It was on that altar that she was brutally raped by Ajax the Lesser. This desecration of the altar greatly angered Athena, and would later have consequences for both Ajax and the Greeks. You don’t violate a woman’s sacred temple and get away with it.

Except when you do.

After the fall of Troy, Cassandra was taken as a war prize by the Greeks, and became a concubine of their king, Agamemnon. She was forced into sexual servitude by the very man who burned her city.

Later on, Cassandra had a vision that Agamemnon’s wife and her lover planned to murder her and Agamemnon on their voyage back to Greece. She warned him earnestly, but she was rebuffed. He did not believe her. And not long after, her vision came to pass, and she met her death exactly as she had seen it.

I wonder if the last thing she thought was the Ancient Greek version of “I TOLD YOU BITCHES”.

Or were her thoughts of relief? To finally be unburdened of knowing exactly what’s coming, and being powerless to stop it?

Or a mixture of both?

I’m not a prophet, thank god. Just a person who has some decent pattern recognition and a working knowledge of history. I also love people, and that love made me afraid for them. That love made me angry when I knew they were wrong and I couldn’t stop it. That love made me grieve so hard over the past year that I almost went to a place beyond being able to feel.

That love also gives me my fierceness, my determination, and my hope. And my ability to be kind. And I have to be able to find that again, even when Troy is burning. Even when I know what we’re up against when the flames die down.

I also know that I have to let go of my inner Cassandra.

I know that things are forever changed. That my creative instinct must come from somewhere else now. That I can’t go back to the way I was.

None of us can, now.

We have seen too much.

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So grateful to have you with me.

xo

KBQ

1. His twin sister, Artemis, was the goddess of hunting, wild animals, and the protection of children.

2. What is it with the spitting into someone’s mouth thing? I’M SORRY ITS GROSS.