The Cassandra Quartet
by Barbara Maria Rathbone
This is a story, about a quartet, not a string quartet but of people, whose lives are irrevocably intertwined by circumstance. One action, or suppression of action, like the wind on butterflies wings changing the tides of the earth, has changed their course and now each one through deep desire or through the repression of such desire will be changed forever. There maybe pain, there maybe faltering indecision, there may be a resolution. One thing remains – they are where they are because of one thing. A decision. A fork in the road appeared and one took not the road less travelled by but one of conformity and safety, the familar path, while the other three try to find their way to the right path, whichever it is for them. One of them is blind to choice, all of them are wrestling with unfamiliar emotion; one of them is full of rage, standing back and knowing like Cassandra on the Trojan shore, watching. The legend of Cassandra speaks of her ears being washed by snakes so that she could ‘hear’ the future but no-one believed her prophecy so Troy fell. However, the snakes that cleansed her ears represent Aesclepius, who brought that which was dead back to life, so maybe hope is not lost.
So will this Cassandra, resurrect with her foresight? Will she draw the others back from the shadows of fate around them? A potentially deadly fate, in emotional terms. Will she with love, with anger, or determined anticipation lift the fog that has misted around the quartet’s destiny? If she cannot, the one who took the wrong path will be lost to her and the others will follow. Fate can be kind. She might succeed, or fate might remove our Cassandra and take her to a new continent of emotion, leaving perhaps two in the teeth of that one questionable decision. The truth that lies within this is that the heart is a very noisy place and to shut out its noise is to be constrained on that familiar, safe path and never to know the true value of love. But a single act of emotional suppression by one will affect others, more deeply than any of them will ever know.
This is just a story but it could be true. It happens all the time, all over the world. You might be in such a quartet, or trio or even quintet , the binding thing being that each ‘player’ is linked by synchronicity. I suspect there is always a Cassandra among them, weeping for them all, trying to pull the others from a Lethean swell.
