Cassandra and Apollo

ABFH has asked her readers to contribute doggerel to a "Tony Attwood/FAAAS Poetry Slam", which I think is an awesome idea, but I've been fighting writer's block recently, and trying to write poetry (even bad poetry!) after so many years out of practice sounds like too big a challenge.

So, instead, I'll talk about Cassandra and Apollo.

Cassandra, as she appears in the Agamemnon, is a former priestess of Apollo and princess of Troy, captured by Agamemnon in the Trojan War. She has the gift of prophecy, which she demonstrates on arriving at Agamemnon's palace by reciting his family's bloody history.

This amazes the chorus (made up of wise old men of Argos, too old to have accompanied Agamemnon to Troy) so much that they have to ask her how she came by her gift:

Chorus
You come from a far country and recite
Our ancient annals as though you had been present.

Cassandra
The Lord Apollo bestowed this gift on me.

Chorus
Was it because he had fallen in love with you?

Cassandra
I was ashamed to speak of this till now.

Chorus
Did you come, then, to the act of getting child?

Cassandra
At first I consented, and then I cheated him.

Chorus
Already filled with his gift of prophecy?

Cassandra
Yes, I forewarned my people of their destiny.

Chorus
Did your divine lover show no displeasure?

Cassandra
Yes, the price I paid was that no one listened to me.

(Dialogue taken from George Thomson's 1938 translation of the Oresteia, reproduced in Classical Mythology: Images and Insights by Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner).

So, Apollo falls in love with Cassandra, and gives her the ability to see the future as part of his courtship attempt. Cassandra, wanting to keep the prescience but not wanting to shed her priestly virginity, rebuffs him, which makes him angry. He curses her, rendering her gift useless and sterile, and her visions a burden --- while still at Troy, she foresees the Greeks' strategy of entering the city in a wooden horse, and warns her people, but they ignore her; and while she's a captive at Argos, she foresees Clytemnestra's murderous intentions toward her husband, Agamemnon, and toward Cassandra herself, but is similarly unable to convince anyone of the danger. Even those elders in the Chorus, who are quoted above listening to the story of how Cassandra became a prophetess, and marveling at her ability to pull their royal family's sordid history out of thin air, end up dismissing her predictions.

With that in mind, let's turn to the treatment of the myth on which Maxine Aston and FAAAS seem to have based their own mythology of Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder:

CASSANDRA
Apollo fell in love with the mortal Cassandra, but cursed her after some small infringement of his rules. "This attraction of opposites seems to exert a magnetic pull, when - like the God who loved Cassandra - an Apollo man is drawn to a psychic woman who is emotional, irrational, impractical, and often unimpressed with him. He finds her fascinating, frustrating, and unpredictable. Many Apollo men are drawn to such women whom they try and control."

"The woman who rejects the handsome, virtuous, dependable Apollo man usually does so because he lacks qualities that are essential for her, such as depth and intensity, or emotional closeness, or sexual spontaneity ... Apollo men are rejected by women who want a deeper bond, with more intensity and emotional expressiveness, than he can provide.

I really don't see this in the story at all; if anything, it's Apollo who wants more (sexually and emotionally) from Cassandra than she is willing to give!

I also don't see in the Cassandra of legend any of the traits Aston (or her source, Jean Shinoda-Bolen) attributes to her: as a priestess of Apollo, Cassandra would have held many of the same values as her divine suitor --- why else would she have chosen to devote her life to his service?

Still less do I see in Apollo the emotionally distant, hyper-rational being who just can't understand the human need for love and attention. While he is the god of a lot of things associated with intellect and reason --- music, healing and medicine, cities, the sun --- he's also a very demanding, jealous and quick-to-anger sort, like most of the Greek gods.

Examples: He and his sister Artemis killed the fourteen sons and daughters of the Theban queen, Niobe, just because she boasted that in bearing and raising so many children she had outdone Apollo and Artemis's mother; he had Artemis kill a woman, Coronis, whom he had loved and found to be unfaithful; when the satyr Marsyas challenged him to a musical competition and lost, he had Marsyas flayed alive for daring to think himself a better piper.

Apollo is also frequently head over heels in love --- typically with mortal women (and a few men) or nymphs, and often tragically. Besides Cassandra, there's Daphne, who begged her river-god father to turn her into a tree rather than let Apollo touch her; Creusa, a mortal woman who had a son, Ion, by him, whom she abandoned, only to be unable to conceive any other child once she married, and met with skepticism and disgust by her grown son when she finally reunited with him; Hyacinthus, whom Apollo accidentally killed; Rhoio, whose father threw her into the sea when he learned she was pregnant (by guess who); Adonis, the hero also loved by Aphrodite, killed by a wild boar; Cyparissus, who killed himself in Apollo's presence; Clytia, who loved Apollo unrequitedly and was changed into a sunflower; Leucothea, sister of Clytia, whom Apollo visited disguised as her mother, and whose father, learning of the affair from Clytia, ordered her to be buried alive.

Neither of these aspects --- the jealous, angry god who'll kill you for looking at him cross-eyed, or the serially lovesick Romeo whose reckless affairs frequently end in the loved one getting killed --- sounds like the Apollonian man Aston and Bolen describe:

APOLLO
Apollo was the Greek God of detached observation and intellectual elucidation, a personality trait having similarities with the cognitive style of those with alexithymia. In classical myth Apollo is considered the antithesis of Dionysus, the God of emotional expressiveness.

According to Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Jean Shinoda-Bolen, "Individuals who resemble Apollo have difficulties that are related to emotional distance, such as communication problems, and the inability to be intimate ... It is paradoxical that the God of clarity, and the man who can speak so precisely and clearly about an impersonal subject is so sparing of words about feelings and so obscure and difficult to interpret when he does say something about himself ... Rapport with another person is hard for the Apollo man. He prefers to access (or judge) the person from a distance, not knowing that he must "get close up" - be vulnerable and empathic - in order to truly know someone else...

While this is certainly an aspect of Apollo (cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy), it's not the side of him I see guiding his actions in the Cassandra story. That Apollo is demanding, needy, desperately in love and furious at Cassandra for withholding it from him.

He might even have Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder!

Autism-Related News and Miscellany

I found out from ABFH that GRASP's Michael John Carley has been reaching out to Autism Speaks's Alison Tepper Singer. Well, actually I already knew that, being a subscriber to the GRASP newsletter: what was news to me was that the "understanding" promised seems to be only one-way.

Two years after Carley wrote these paragraphs,

It's probably very traumatic for the parent of the severely-affected child to be lectured on the immense potential inherent in the brain and ability of a person on the spectrum. If, when they ask for help, they were to be told no, because their child might have a [Nobel] prize in him, I can imagine fewer injustices that would be larger than that. Wouldn't that seem to insultingly invalidate (sic) all the hardship they were going through?

Wouldn't it also be equally scary for someone on the spectrum who is desperately seeking positive self-images to be lectured by the world that his life will be, or is, awful? (emphasis mine)

the founder of Autism Speaks, Suzanne Wright, wrote a short article for Parade magazine including these lines:

Some may view autism as the disease du jour, the cause of the moment. That trivializes what many are enduring. Families are literally going broke trying to provide their children with the services they deserve. Adults with autism are failing to meet their potential.
...
We're now playing catch-up as we try to stem the tide and ultimately eradicate autism for the sake of future generations. If we continue our current trajectory, we'll get there in my lifetime. (emphases mine)

Now, in theory I am all for outreach efforts; I think autistic adults are the very people parents of autistic children could most benefit from talking to. But a problem arises when the two sides (and it's to be pointed out that GRASP is hardly an all-inclusive autistic self-advocacy group; ASAN might have been a better choice), rather than meeting in the middle, meet far to one side because only one party is willing to compromise. We've seen how well that works in the past, oh, twelve years of US politics, with the Democrats' steady march to the rightward-creeping "center" while the Republicans stay planted on the far right. It's nasty. All sorts of groups --- women, gays, people of color, poor people, non-Christians, disabled people, transpeople, immigrants --- suffer from a political discourse that shunts them aside in favor of courting rich, white, married Christian men ad nauseam. I don't want that to happen to the autism community, with the interests of nonverbal or multiply disabled autistics thrown aside in favor of a civil accord between "passing" Aspies/HFAers and the cure-autism-now crowd.

In the comments on ABFH's post, I found this post by Socrates rounding up autism-related UK news stories. It wouldn't have been of much interest to me (except for the bit about a new autism prevalence study --- I am quite confused about the actual prevalence, having seen a post at Autism Crisis casting doubt on the more recent figures) if it weren't for the mention of Maxine Aston near the end of the post.

Finally a New Year Quiz:

Who said "Living with an autistic man can give you cancer", was it?

a) Tony Blair
b) Groucho Marx
c) Karl Marx
d) Maxine "would you like to buy a signed copy of my book" Aston.

Curious to see if she really said that, I headed over to her site, specifically the page on Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder. (Cassandra disorder is Aston's name for her notion that relationships with one autistic partner and one NT partner subject the NT partner to cruel emotional deprivation, putting the NT partner into a depressive state Aston compares to that of SAD sufferers in winter).

I found she does indeed say that: on the "Healing of Cassandra" page, she lists all the physical and psychological symptoms that she thinks can be blamed on the autistic partner's obtuseness and unintentional cruelty:

Physical Effects

• Migraines
• Loss or gain in weight
• PMT/female related problems (I think PMT might be what we Yanks call PMS?)
• ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) (Might be the same as Chronic Fatigue syndrome)
• Low immune system - colds to cancer

There was also

Mental Health

• Anger turned to depression
• Anxiety
• Phobias - agoraphobia - flying - social
• Asperger ways
• Complete breakdown
• Medication and therapy

OH MY GAWD ASSBURGERS IS CONTAGIOUS!!!!1!

The "Mental Health" list reminds me a lot of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" --- disproportionate emotional response to random events. We don't read that poem and feel angry at that horrible, heartless Raven who drives the speaker into catatonia; we can see that the speaker is egging himself on, realizing that the bird can only say one word and deliberately asking it questions that stoke his emotional fires. We decide that the speaker must have already been in pretty bad shape before the Raven ever tapped on his door.

None of this, of course, should be taken to minimize anyone's experience of real emotional abuse, but I do not believe merely being autistic and having an NT romantic partner constitutes abuse. Indeed, Aston's own work (reported in her book --- yes, I bought it --- Aspergers in Love) indicates otherwise. She tracked a bunch of mixed autistic/NT couples and found many successful ones, and that the major predictor of success was awareness that the autistic partner was autistic. A clear understanding of one's own, and one's partner's, nature and limitations is always going to make for a healthier, more realistic outlook on the relationship.

When I mentioned this disparity before on ABFH's site, another commenter (Alyric) told me that Aston probably had an editor breathing down her neck when she wrote the book, preventing her from going off into "autism = abuse" territory. Seeing her site, I think that's a reasonable explanation. (I'm going to give my partner cancer? Really? And PMS too? --- That'll be quite a trick, since he's a guy).

That brings me to the other thing that's bugging me about her site: despite mentioning on the Cassandra homepage that both men and women can get the disorder, the entire rest of the site's content proceeds from the assumption that the "Cassandra" is female, and her callous autistic partner is male*. The whole thing frankly reeks of heteronormativity and "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"-type essentialism, with the male stereotype in this instance also being pathologized.

*In her book, Aston does talk about autistic women in relationships, though she says the women are much more likely to be in relationships with other autistics than the men. I should research that --- both to confirm it, since Aston is clearly not the most trustworthy, agenda-free source, and to see if I can't find out why --- it could be very interesting to explore that little difference, if it in fact exists, from a feminist perspective.