Thursday, August 21, 2025

Not Learning Being In Two Places At Once

 



 



It is a landscape

Where sunsets

And sunrises

Share

The space

Of an August

Rain

 

Where

Unshaved men

And women of no

Age

Share sage flower

Without promise

To rub

Their hands

With gratitude

 

Where

Cities of steel

March to ocean fronts

To stay

Away

From what men

Can do

When unwelcomed

To the silence

Of a secret

Whisper

 

Where

Red-tailed hawks

Build their

Eyrie

In brush

Above

A quail nest

To keep them

Safe

 

When

Sunsets and sunrises

Make the

Landscape

For August

Rain

In the

Same space

Where once

Unshaved men

And women of no

Age

Rubbed their hands

With

Sage

Flower

And smiled

To

Secret

Whispers

 

August 21, 2025

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025


I took this photo in front of the Colosseum in Rome

Sunday, August 10, 2025

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing (T.S Elliot, Four Quatrets)

 





I went to the funeral of a mentor and friend exactly half a century after we met.

At the airport I recalled moments of our working together around the world. The vast communication we maintained about the arts, sharing our writings, paintings and sculpture. We published scientific works together and for decades taught two generations of public health students.

The last year of his life he did not recall who I was.

… While waiting for my flight back, I recalled the lines from T.S Elliot in “East Coker” about waiting without hope. I had read these lines before when faced with the dilemma of acceptance. And in the stillness of my await in an airport where all around me were eager to return to homes and the familiar scent of a warm bed were their siren song, I thought about all that I had found in waiting. Even though I was an explorer, carrying my body over continents or when, in the stillness of moments, letting my mind take flight.

But I have always engaged with the moment, and often engaged the moment in the process of waiting. Now, I found T.S Elliot’s “East Coker” perfect for my returning from a funeral.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wing cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

 

… It was at this moment of reflection when a woman sat in front of me, took her phone out of her bag and in a prostrate position stared at her phone for a long while. In await. For a message to come through. Perhaps for a promise or an apology.

 

And the last lines from the “East Coker” took on a whole new reality.

 

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;

wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

 But the faith and the love are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

 

 

August 10, 2025

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025


Saturday, August 2, 2025

Love Is a Rebellious Bird That No One Can Tame (From Habanera in Bizet’s Carmen Opera)

 




 

It is Saturday and I picked up a book of poetry, as I do most weekends. My dog knows the routine, so he found his spot next to my painting easel and let go of a gentle sigh.

 

I did not read poetry in July. It was a difficult month and my mood was to melancholy. I was glad when August announced itself and the desert welcomed me back. So it was appropriate for me to reread for the nth time the classic poem by Arthur Rimbaud “Une Saison en Enfer” (A Season in Hell).

But somehow, the famous lines of Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen drove me away from the poem. I started whistling and the lines kept repeating in my head:

L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser


L'amour est enfant de bohème
Il n'a jamais, jamais, connu de loi

 

(Love is a rebellious bird
That no one can tame


Love is a bohemian child
He never, ever knew any law)

 

Hmm.

I searched for the B&W, 1964 video of Maria Callas singing Habanera. My favorite interpretations of that operatic passage from Carmen are by Callas and Elina Garanča. But today, the extraordinary coloratura voice of Callas was not what I desired. Rather it was Garanča’s mezzo-soprano timbre and her range of emotional interpretation that I was craving.

When I started playing Garanča’s Habanera as she portrayed the teasing and playful Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera in 2009 (my favorite of all her other interpretations over the years), I knew I had gotten over July. Even my dog opened his eyes and was happy to see me enjoying the moment. Then, he went back to sleep.

As the 6 or so minutes of the video were ending, I recalled another moment from a few years ago. I was reading poetry when I heard a loud hit on my window glass. I looked out and a hummingbird had misjudged its space and hit the glass in flight. I went out and picked up the bird, which to my delight, was alive but seemed in shock after the accident. I immediately took a picture with my phone hoping that it will “come to its senses“and fly away soon.

Which he did.

….I did not read Rimbaud today. But the memory of that moment when the hummingbird left my open palm reminded me of Habanera’s message.

 

August 2, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025



Sunday, June 29, 2025

“Le Spleen de Paris”: the Posthumously Published Prose Poems Book of Charles Baudelaire, circa 1869

 



 

It was a hot weekend in the Arizona. But like in any desert, the nights remain cool allowing for long walks with my dog before sunrise and close to midnight. The rest of the weekend I spent reading. This time I revisited the “prose poems” of Baudelaire known as Le spleen de Paris, a collection of fifty prose poems published in 1869, posthumously.

Written in paragraph form like prose, Baudelaire’s work deals with the Parisian life through a musicality and aesthetic outlook one finds in his poems. He has used the word Spleen before in his previous works to describe his dislike of many aspects of life. In this case, it is specifically about aspects of life in Paris that he covers through a writing genre which was adopted years later by another famous and rebellious French poet, Arthur Rimbaud.

As I read “Les Fenêtres” (The Windows) I recalled a photo I had taken in 2019. After a second reading, I let my pencil slide on a yellow pad page. I often take notes of the moments a poem (or prose) inspires me during lecture.

Here is what my pencil tip left behind:

 

So let the window half-open

And recall skies in rain

Eyes in surprise taken

And words on lips forgotten

 

Summer rain and the sea deaf

To the cry of returning waves

Let the window half-closed

Salty winds keep your candles in dark

 

And in the stillness of the unsaid

Forget about skies in rain

And barefoot and the briny breeze in your hair

Dance on the beach

 

But leave the window wide open

 

June 29, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

 

PS/ I found a masterful translation of “Les Fenêtres” by Emily Leithauser at https://www.literarymatters.org

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Cielo a Pecorelle

 



 

I did not find

The wind had taken away

What the summer rain

Had forgotten to bring

 

I did not promise

The mossy rock had left no scars

On bare feet awaiting the waves

That forgot to swell

 

I did not let go

Broken dreams

Heal under the harvest moon

And become a name

I once knew

To spell

 

Yet, I have wondered

Like a wandering cloud

If the summer rain

Ever dropped a tear or two

On that mossy rock

By the bluest sea

 

June 22, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

The Death of an Old Man is Like a Library Burning to Ashes (African Proverb)

 


 


 

He was not an old man, but age did not wait for him to grateful. In fact, his dog looked older than he was, and it was his sixth 6 dog of his life.

“You find inspiration in all the things that make moments non-memorable” I once told him.

“And you, when you take a photo, do you look only at the subject you had in mind to capture?” his response was. “Or do you celebrate, under your loupe, looking at all the details, shapes, and perhaps stories that had found their way into your film’s negative strip when you were focused on the subject you had in mind?”

… We all eventually remember what we thought we had forgotten. It can be words, images, sentiments, taste or colour. But we do remember even when we are unaware how past experiences find their space in what we cherish, what we build, what we paint, or what we write. They find their space in who we were and who we become.

“And I assume you have something to share about why and how the morning dew is more important to you than the rare rain storms in the desert?”

“It is all about how you transfer your inspiration from one object, one event or one person to another. I used to think that I had to be inspired by the idea, the subject, or a pair of brown eyes to feel closeness, perhaps even love to that subject. But it was when I found inspiration in its own right, without a smell, colour, shape or words that I learned how I could transfer it to all things around me. Finding inspiration outside a person will allow you to be inspired by that person.”

… We all eventually remember what we thought we had forgotten. Or wanted to forget because we had not learned how to incorporate a person or event into who we were becoming. There was no space, no place, no urgency for such an inclusion.

 

“Sometimes I repeat thing, or maybe things get repeated. It is not spiritual, but all around us is repetitive. I think that when one finds that rhythm in small things, they end up like a rhyme. And they become poetry. I know that means something to you, yes?”

 

… Today, for whatever reason, I recalled this conversation which took place under far away skies, next to a sea, at a time when we all thought times would remain calm and predictable.

And I let my mind fly free, or fall free just because I had not revisited these words for a long while.

And somewhere during that flight or free fall, I thought about a famous French poem by Apollinaire, “Le Pont Mirabeau”.

Why? Because of the suggestion that all things around us are repetitive, and that identifying the rhythm of repetition helps us see the larger picture.

Here are the opening lines of the poem I still remember vividly:

 

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours

Faut-il qu’il men souvienne

La joie venait toujours après la peine

 

(Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

And our loves

Must it remind me

That joy always came after the pain)

 

 

And I realised why this poem came back to visit me: it was because we were taught that Apollinaire used repetitive words and imagery to help the reader appreciate the scenery, the feelings, and the moment. Just like what my friend was telling me about how he transferred inspiration from outside the subject to the subject to appreciate, love and celebrate that subject.

For the poet, it was a style of writing he called calligram; for my friend it was the way he found serenity; and I wondered if I had learned lessons from poetry and a wise man without knowing it. Had my past decades, my photography, my own writings found inspiration for the sake of inspiration, and then helped me celebrate life moments and people through that cache of inspiration ready for those red-letter moment?

 

I do not know. Perhaps the photo I took on a snowy day has the answer. It is all about simplicity but also the calm snow covered bushes provide, as the snow repetitively falls upon them, to transform the scenery, to make it new with every snow flake.

Yet, every snow flake is different.

But I will not have a chance to ask him – I learned that he passed a few years ago.

 

May 21, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Saturday, May 17, 2025

The Matriarchal Art of Reading Coffee Grounds and Fortune Telling

 


 

 




 

I had left my coffee cup in the car, and when I picked it up I saw a serpent in it! Well, not a real one, but the grounds had dried into a Rorschach “coffeeblots”. I took a picture before I wash the cup.

So, it was an opportunity to proceed with a self-psychoanalysis, and to revisit an essay I had written a decade ago about reading coffee grounds https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/08/reading-tea-leaves-in-arabic-coffee.html

 

Immediately, I saw a threatening canine head, jaws open, a fierce look in the eye.  Wolf? Dog? Coyote? And, the snake was growing out of the canine head with a perfectly shaped head of its own, even its tongue was out. The canine and the snake were in a similar posture but looking in opposite directions.

Here is a crop of the canine

 


And the one of the snake



 

Ok, now that I let my imagination transform a dirty coffee cup into a story, I wondered what these interpretations meant in tasseography.

As I was inquiring about this ancient art of reading coffee grounds and predicting the future, I learned a few things about coffee and the human propensity to see things where things did not exist (pareidolia).

It is believed that coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia and found its way to Yemen and today’s Iran. From there coffee became the prime social drink in the Levant, the region of the Middle East with all the ceremonies associated with its preparation and serving, including fortune telling by reading the grounds left in the cups. Eventually it found its way to present day Turkey and from there to the world in the 17th century.

The human propensity to see predictions in various organic media proceeded that period of time and tasseography, though. Indeed reading tea leaves was popular in China, so was reading goat entrails part of ancient Greek and Roman cultures. And let us not forget the macabre practice of Druids in ancient Celtic societies (Britain, Ireland and Gaul) of examining the entails of human sacrifice victims to consult deities.

As I was doing my research, I had a smile on my face reading that during the Ottoman period coffee ground readings, of course in cups of Turkish coffee, were popular in harems. Indeed, there were “professional” tasseographers who read the ladies’ cups to make predictions about love and pregnancy.  However it is believed that this art was primarily a matriarchal one, where older women taught the secrets of interpretation to their daughters.

And that was the reason for my smile, as an old memory, somehow hidden in the remote storage areas of my brain, came back as I washed my cup of coffee.

… I was perhaps 6 years old when I first witnessed an old tradition. Women in our neighborhood would periodically gather in our apartment to have a “Doing the Sugar Day.”  It was a socialization day when women would bring pastries and sugary treats, make coffee (Turkish, Arabic or Greek) all day long, and help each other with epilation! It was called a “sugar day” because the full body removal of hair was done via a paste made of melted sugar and lemon juice, not wax per se. So, no men were allowed in the place for that day, only prepubescent boys and girls for whom that gathering, plus the sweet treats, were a much anticipated play day.

I recall the women drinking coffee, listening to the gossip born from reading the grounds, smoking cigarettes, and often sighing in discomfort as their bodies were covered in that sugary paste which were lifted and pulled abruptly to pull hair from their roots. Eventually, especially when the epilation was for facial hair, these women had swollen and reddish skin. But they were happy, as were we kids mimicking the sugar paste epilation on each other.

And at night, my father was always happy to have a few of my mother’s the left over vol-au-vent pastries filled with homemade apricot jam, with his own cup of coffee.

In retrospect, these gatherings were like a scene from a harem, and I think those sessions were my initial and comprehensive introduction to female anatomy…

 

The last mystery from my cup: As I was looking at the pictures I took of the coffee grounds, I discovered yet another animal at the very bottom of the cup – it was a black cat, in perfect posture, ears perked, with his tail showing, looking at the snake and the canine!

 


A black cat and a snake are interpreted as a bad omen and a deception in tasseography. That cannot be a good thing, I thought. So I forewent another cup of coffee, make my favorite lemon drop mate with matcha and green tea leaves, and sat by my laptop to write about the moment and my memories.

I wonder what my readers will see in these pictures during their own fortune telling.

 

May 17, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025