I may find again
The promise and the calm
We once thought
As a stormy story
It was an old
story
Yet poetry and ordinary
And lonesome walks
In smoky train stations
And, like after an August rain
Waves left the mossy rocks
And the beach dried in the sun
Still touching the bluest sea
And I found, in that respite,
The promise to walk on unmoon nights
Without leaving shadows behind
And it became my road
My way
September 8, 2024
Just before sunrise, when I was
walking my dog in a narrow street, I came face to face with Pietro Calvi’s
Othello. It was a bit surreal, and I blamed the vision to the weak coffee I had
brewed.
But it was real. There it was, outside
the house, on the concrete, Othello’s bust that made Calvi famous in 1870. It was homage
by Calvi to the African American actor Ira Aldridge, the first Black actor to
play Othello in England in 1825.
There were ten versions of the
marble and bronze bust and I had seen one of them in the Walters Art Museum in
Baltimore. Now, I was facing a plaster duplica, left on the ground, in
Prescott, Arizona. It was beautifully done though, although the desert weather
had taken its toll. But Desdemona’s handkerchief was there, so was the single
tear on Othello’s face.
I took a quick picture and I move
on. My dog did not seem to appreciate Shakespeare interfering with his morning
walk.
A mile or so in to the walk,
somehow, I thought of Leonard Cohen. Perhaps it was the tortured soul of Othello;
or the influence L. Cohen’s poetry has had on my youth. It was a fond memory,
and I did not mind letting my dog extend his morning promenade longer than
usual.
… It was 1976 and I was a college
student in Montreal. We were francophone then, but L. Cohen was already a rebel
troubadour for my generation. I recall going to one of his concerts in
Vancouver, even though we did not understand all his words – but we did
associate with his persona and outlook.
The last time I saw L. Cohen was in
2009, at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia Maryland. He was an old man
now, and it was one of his last concerts. Now his voice had given way to all
the wisdom his life had allowed him to keep.
For me, it was like turning the last
page of a book, knowing the ending, but still hoping for a surprise.
When I came back home and fed my
dog, I brewed a stronger pot of coffee and let my experience and feelings of
the morning walk find their war in and into words.
Here is what came out – not surprisingly
Cohenesque lines within that single tear on Othello’s face:
Life
is designed to overthrow you
While
you write to clear your mind
About
what can be
On
blank paper that once was a proud tree
And
it wasn't an offering
But
was offered, anyhow
And
your words
Looked
like a wooden bowl
Tasting
of honey
And
your song sounded like a newborn
Learning
from you
About
you
Knowing
he will become you
One
day
After
his first heartbreak
Life
is designed to overthrow you
Even
when you're at the foothills
Of
where sunsets burn the clouds
To
shade names
And
bathe sad brown eyes
In
offering
August 17, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
Around the bend
There were naked trees
Letting the breeze through
Shading their own roots
In snow and
Greeting lonesome souls
But I walked by
To follow the road
And when I reached the meadows
Where in rocks I once covered
A name I had given
To those I had not yet met
I looked back.
The road was following me
July 21, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
The summer heat has settled upon Arizona’s desert,
and I have to minimize my outdoor activities for a short while. My dog agrees, and takes only two long walks these days – one before sunrise, and another two
hours after sunset.
So, this morning I found refuge in thoughts
especially about seas and lakes.
The Mediterranean, the bluest of seas, shaped my
youth. As an adult I have traveled on and around all the oceans of our planet
and countless lakes. Yet, when I think of the Mediterranean, the origin of the
Greek words nostos and algos always come to mind. The western
combination of these words is nostalgia, translated as “acute homesickness”, or
returning home (nostos) and pain (algos).
As a healthcare professional, I spent many years in
Italy, especially Bari, Bologna and Ferrara. At the University of Bologna I
learned about Giovanni Pascoli, a 19th century poet and homme des letters.
His poetry was a celebration of the quotidian, written simply but with a touch
of mysticism. One of his poems, title “Mare”
(Sea) is a classic.
I had not read that poem for decades, and this
morning’s nostalgia lead me to a search for “Mare”.
I found a lovely literary blog site by Matilda
Colarossi, a writer who translates in English classic and modern fiction Italian
works. Her translation of Pascoli’s “Mare”
is beautifully done and can be found via this link: https://paralleltexts.blog/2022/06/08/giovanni-pascoli-mare-sea/
Here is the
poem, in its original language and the translation to English by Colarossi:
|
Mare
|
Sea |
Celebrating the daily moments many of us take for
granted or find ordinary has been the impetus of the expression genres I have pursued
in the past half a century. As a photographer, I have looked for stories in
streets of four continents, and captured them in B&W. My first book was a
novella, and the half a dozen that followed were travel stories about people
and places. My poetry was published in anthologies and British medical journals
always dealing with people’s attitudes to the basic joys, fears and hopes, no
matter their cultural inheritance, language they spoke or history they never
forget.
As such, it has always been about “returning home”,
the pain of that return never shadowing the joy of each return. It has been
about nostalgia, which I have renamed as “The
Salmon Syndrome” – we return home to give a chance for the next generations
to return home, at their own time, for one last time.
Back to Pascoli’s poem.
The first stanza’s imagery is elegant yet simple. We all have experienced the waves and stars
when near a sea. What breaks that usual scenery is poet’s description of the
sea suddenly sighing, winds exhaling and the waters acquiring a human
expression. And, there is the mysticism – a silver bridge appears out of that
transformation. More, that bridge is not only in or above the sea, but the poet
has also seen it over “silent lakes”, bodies of water that perhaps do not sigh,
and winds do not exhale. And Pascoli suggests that silver bridges are made for
lakes, even when he sees one in the sea.
Those four short lines make us think. Not about the
poet, but about ourselves. Where do these bridges lead? Is the sea, home of
rivers, also home of lakes? Are those bridges even more transcendent as paths
to our own consciousness? Do they make us homesick, be that of a terrestrial or
a mystic home?
… And, I recalled a moment in Trento, next to Lago
Di Caldonazzo, with a friend. We looked at the calm lake but somehow she
thought of bridges too, and used a charming Italian saying to bring her own
thoughtful mysticism to the apparent serenity surrounding us:
“Ma, l’aqua cheta la butta giú I ponti” –
our best bridges can be destroyed by calm waters.
I wrote about that moment here: https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2023/04/i-muri-hanno-orecchi-ma-aqua-in-bocca.html
I am glad it is 102F degrees outside and that my dog
is snoring under my desk as I write. It was a refreshing, memories journey back to
Bologna and re-reading Pascoli’s “Mare”.
PS/ The photo of the bridge is one I took in Paris,
over the Seine. The man on the river wall is pensive. The bridge is not made of silver. And the ducks are listening to the water sigh.
July 4, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
Metamorphosis. Every artist dreams of transforming a sheep skin, a papyrus, a stone or a petrified drift wood into a story to share. And in the process, to become what she or he always was.
… The heat is back to the desert and I found a cool corner to think, with my dog gently snoring under my desk.
And I recalled how for decades, at medical and public health conferences, I was introduced as a “storyteller” not a man who may have ideas about epidemics and human behaviour. Or human behaviour and epidemics. In a way, I had become who I always was – one who observes and finds a story to tell. By writing, photography, or mixing colours on whatever I could find to call a canvas.
Telling a story goes beyond reporting, though. It is a search that involves those shaping that story. It is how we transform a casual observation into becoming personal, for each reader or listener. In that sense, an artist is a chemist, mixing substances and elements in search of that transformation into a new one.
Interestingly, the oldest definition of chemistry is “Al Chemia” in Arabic, and the Western term Alchemy derived from it but took on a new meaning vis à vis the scientific patina of chemistry. Alchemy became that search for transforming lead to gold; common materials to precious ones; and, the analysis of the inner flow as secrets rivers run in each one of us.
It became synonymous with the obstinate search of the Philosopher’s Stone, a term cornered by a French bookseller in 1382.
And the world rediscovered the Greek word for changing shape from metamorphoum to metamorphösis and became the Latin equivalent of transformation. Centuries later, using the observation of a moth becoming a butterfly, social and clinical psychoanalysis was born when Jung and Freud found their way to tell a story based on the behaviour of those they observed.
… As a health care professional, I visualised psychoanalysis as a psychiatrist, holding a fishing rod, casting into those inner secrets rivers. A simple image yet a comforting one. Not in that the fisherman was allowed to have access to our secret rivers, but because of the fact that we all have those rivers.
However, and over time, I learned to wonder if those rivers know (or knew) where to flow. If the butterfly still has the moth in it. Hence if we just see a transformation in shape but not in nature and identity. In other words, that we discover the Philosopher’s Stone only when we realise that lead will remain lead even if we can transform its appearance to a shiny yellow.
In a less grandiose way, I came to believe that the Philosopher’s Stone can be bone, metal, cloud or water. That the wisdom we may discover in telling the story of our search, the alchemy of our own intellectual or emotional metamorphosis is in celebrating the heritage of the moth.
… The heat is back to the desert and my dog is snoring under my desk.
June 15, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
When you wipe
Dry eyes
With scar
Tissue
Or with
Hands
Of the days
Scorched
You do not
See
The smile
Waiting
But you
Hear
The
Train
June 9, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
They say
There are three
Types of secrets
Those we hide from
Ourselves
Those we hide from
Others
And secrets that
Make you
Forget
Even when
You still wish
To remember
May 25, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
