The Ethos of Tango in the Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges and Alejandra Pizarnik

 

I was going through my files when I found a writing pad where I took notes during a work meeting in Buenos Aires.

As an epidemiologist, I had many trips to Argentina in the 1990s. Reforming the healthcare system was the goal but a good part of my visits was with friends talking literature and arts. Especially poetry. And I discovered cultural aspects in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Alejandra Pizarnik that I had not appreciated before.

… In a corner of writing pad I had scribbled “Patience is existential – it is not a waste of time to wait.”

I smiled and recalled how often I was told to be patient, that things would eventually happen, and that I first need to learn all the things the healthcare policy makers took for granted, as Argentinians, regarding how and went to implement reforms.

“We have the ethos of Tango,” I was once told “it is more than a dance and song; it is the essence of the wait.”

As I continued to look at that yellow page and the line I had written, I recalled lines from Borges and Pizarnik and searched the original poems.

 

Argentina’s most famous poet often wrote about time and waiting. Not time as an absolute concept but about the suspension of time. Not waiting as a delay or wasted opportunity, but a cherished space where memories and longing for future moments find their wisdom.

Waiting for love, or being loved, is a common theme in Borges’ poems, and his most famous lines are found in "Amorosa Anticipación" (Loving Anticipation). In this poem Borges watches his lover sleep, and he imagines her on a timeless beach where love exists untouched by life’s pace.

The ending lines of the poem are:

Arrojado a quietud,

divisare esa playa ultima de tu ser

y te vere por vez primera, quiza,

como Dios a de verte,

desbaratada la ficcion del Tiempo,

sin el amor, sin mi.

 

(Flung to quietness,

I shall see that last beach of your being

and I will see you for the first time, maybe,

as God must see you,

Time fiction spoiled,

without love, without me)

 

Another famous poem by Borges had the final lines on the wall of a bar in Buenos Aires where I often met with colleagues after work hours. It is again about time, patience but also about the optimism of the poet that love will arrive, that it was undeniably so, and that he has to decide if he would survive being under the siege of that moment.

The lines are:

"Es el amor. Tendré que ocultarme o huir...

Estar contigo o no estar contigo es la medida de mi tiempo."

(It is love. I will have to hide or run...

To be with you or not to be with you is the measure of my time.)

 

Alejandra Pizarnik approaches the issue of time, the wait and expectations as a femme fatale. When I first read her 1956 última inocencia, I thought of Circe in Homer's Odyssey - alluring in her pain, destructive in her survival. Not only her life and melancholic poetry have inspired me over the past decades, but I have also found her imagery most translatable to other forms of expression such as painting. More about this later in this post.

Melancholy and longing are central to Pizarnik’s life and writing. For me, she is a Fado singer, a Spanish poet who metamorphoses into a Portuguese artist singing the blues. Love is a painful reminder to her of times passed and of returns in await.

In “La Enamorada” (The woman in love), Pizarnik explores the pain and punishing of love as she awaits the return of her lover. Yet, in all the melancholy of her exploration she still holds on to hope, perhaps as Borges defined the inevitability of love. During that wait, she finds an internal patience in that waiting for her lover would “close the doors to her face” to isolate her away from the outside world where time is not suspended like Borges suggested.

She writes:

y te fue triste
estabas sola
la luz rugía
el aire cantaba
pero tu amado no volvió
enviarás mensajes
sonreirás
tremolarás tus manos
así volverá tu amado tan amado
oyes la demente sirena que lo robó
el barco con barbas de espuma
donde murieron las risas
recuerdas el último abrazo

 

(…sad you were alone

the light roared

the air sang

but your beloved did not return

you will send messages

you will smile

you will wave your hands

this is how your beloved so beloved will return

you hear the demented siren that stole him

the ship with beards of foam

where laughter died

you remember the last embrace)

 

 

… So, one line on a forgotten yellow writing pad page took me back to the 1990s to remind me that patient waiting is not a loss of time. Rather that it is stopping time to allow the inevitable to prepare itself for arrival. Suspend time to remember. Create that space where longing becomes a Fado song as I have heard numerous times in Oporto and Lisboa.

And when it comes to the poems and lives of Borges and Pizarnik, being patient is the ethos of Tango, a dance to accept the longing while awaiting your dreams to happen. Or to return.

And I thought that the essence of the wait is like sitting on a rock at the edge of time – uncomfortable and lonesome, yet protected and full of hope.

 

About the photo:

I took this photo from my car window, in Buenos Aires.  It was not published before as it is a photo with little story until I wrote about Pizarnik and her lover “closing the doors to her face” as a way to isolate herself from the daily reality of the outside world. Interestingly, all the windows are shut in this photo, something unusual for the daily life in many of the Latin American countries.

 

PS/ I have written about how Jose Luis Borges’ poems have influenced my own writings here:

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2026/01/from-edgar-allan-poe-to-garden-of.html

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2014/12/love-time-quantum-mechanics.html

 

And about Alejandra Pizarnik’s life as a muse for some of my literary outlooks as well as for my paintings:

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2024/11/la-de-los-ojos-abiertos-revisiting.html

https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2024/11/inpired-by-poems-of-blanca-varela-and.html

 

September 24, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

Deaf like Odysseus

 

I was reading words by the contemporary American lyrist poet Gregory Orr from his 2013 poetry collection “River Inside the River”. A passage about rivers made me stop and look from the deck of my house to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They look different with their barren peaks. The snow that melts from these mountain ranges becomes rivers, becomes the expected. Not this year.

Orr wrote

“I want to go back

To the beginning

We all do.

I think:

Hurt will not be there.

But I’m wrong.”

 

They say rivers cannot go back. I wonder if they do not want to go back. To the source, to the high mountains where the snow wait to be melted. To the meadows where deer and quail welcome sunsets as a promise for new, warmer rays. Perhaps rivers do not go back as wrote K. Gibran, and they might tremble before entering the ocean fearing it will disappear. But they know they have to become the ocean, because rivers do. Or perhaps because they have been there already, and their return cannot efface the pain they had left behind.

 

They say the oak tree lives in the acorn. I wonder if that tree drops acorns where part of itself will live again. In respect to where it came from. As a responsibility protected in the shell of time.

James Allen wrote in his 1903 masterpiece “As a Man Thinketh” about life’s flow:

“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

 

They say the song of sirens falls on deaf ears. I wonder if unwaxed ears fear the sirenas’ songs before they hear them. And after.

Sirens destroy our ships on the rivers leading to the seas. Odysseus wanted to hear those songs, but asked his sailors to tie him to the mast and for all to plug their ears with beeswax.

No siren song encountered during our journey on our inner river should allure or pierce our emotional boundaries. Especially if we are sailing up-river, against the current. Some inner rivers can and do go back.

 

They say he who deals in honey licks his fingers. I wonder if on the Spice Road merchants selling pepper licked their fingers. When our days are mellifluous and flowing with honey, we may be tempted to lick our fingers. But few of us embark upon that journey without the Spice Road merchants’ peppers.

Did Shakespeare in Sonnet 128 dreamed of kissing the hands of a woman playing music while his deaf ears heard the melody, as he wrote:

“Nimble leap

To kiss the inward of thy hand”?

 

Yet, not all rivers are for a journey. Some need to be just crossed; others to walk their banks. We are often curious about what hides on the other side of the river. That crossing is for those who have never seen an ocean before. The flux and flow they know is about the moment, what befalls upon our eyes and ears.

An African proverb reminds us of the humility necessary while we are safely on the banks of rivers going to sea, or inner rivers going upstream, against the current. 

  “Those who have not crossed the river should not laugh at those who are drowning”

... Rivers may or cannot go back. But it feels like they do when sailors turn the bow and push upstream.

September 19, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

Photo taken with a Soviet Salyut-C medium format camera and Zodiak 8B 30mm f3.5 lens made in Ukraine.

When the Clay Complies

 

 

Turn

And let the hands

Shape your way

To looking

Around

At their

Own

Pace

 

Pass

By the past

Seas and streams

Where old waves

Returned

 

 

Hear

The promises

You wanted to make

But made them

Only

To yourself

 

Shy

Remain curious

When your turn

Becomes

An unpretentious

 Line

A point

In the present

 

Then

 

Wet

The hands

A finger

At a time

With your forgotten

Last tear

And wipe them

With scar

Tissue

 

And

 

Turn again

That wonderful turn

This time

To shape

The hands you

Hold

With the colours

Of promises

That since

Found their

Seas and streams

Before

Sunrise

 

September 15, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

Photo I took In Baltimore Harbor with 1955 Fed-2 camera and Industar-22 lens

Beauty is Kind and Gentle, Like a Young Mother Half-shy of Her Own Glory, She Walks Among Us (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

 

 

 

Up the stairs

The young mother

Climbed in her old shoes

Leaving wet prints

Of her walks

In streets

Cleaned by the August

Rain

 

It was elemental

Ordinary

Yet all I saw

Was her glory

 

And the comfort

Of her beauty

Walked beside her

Up the stairs

Into the house

 

Leaving more than

Wet footprints

From the August

Rain

 

 

September 10, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

The Iwákteteya Web (Lakota Nation Dream Catcher)

 

 

I rang the bell

Then knocked at the door

No one came in

So I let

Myself

Into

My room

 

And there

I found

The vast space

Where I became

Echo

Where I stayed quiet

Having seen

What I wanted to see

Having done what

I had

Hoped

 

So I locked

The door

To Keep

Myself

In

 

September 5, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

In the Native American Lakota legend, the circular web connotes the circle of life and catches only good dreams, visions, and ideas to enhance that circle for each person.  The Iwákteteya Web also catches bad dreams and evil forces and guides them away to pass through the center hole of the web and fade away.

Picture taken with an early 1960s Nikkor-Q Auto 20 cm telephoto lens on the same age Nikon F camera, using ASA 400 film.

As I looked through the viewfinder to frame the shot, the closeness of the balloons and the differences in size and shades made me think about the dream catcher, as the balloons quickly went to different altitudes, and the smaller one faded away.

The invisible web old lenses cannot catch.....

 

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in Understanding the Worldview of Multilingual Artists

 

“Multilingual people perceive reality in their own way – thru a labyrinth where they never get lost” a friend once wrote to me. “It is a lovely gift to an artist.”

Indeed, I often encounter inquisitive looks when for a split second during a conversation I pause to allow my brain make connections between languages, words, colours and phonetics. It is not something I control, but surely anticipate. Sometimes I mix words from a different language while speaking in English. Often I recall names by making phonetic and descriptive associations with the name of newly met people. Other times I remember their names, as I did in my studies of biology and chemistry complex molecular structures and their names (phonetic mnemonics) by creating my own sentences about them mixing two or more languages. Recently I was in the Botanic Gardens of Denver, Colorado recently and I could not immediately recall the name of my favorite flower. It took me a second to think of an Orca to continue my conversation about the Orchids section.  Later in the evening, we were talking about Barbara Streisand movies and I said that a comedy themed one was my favorite.

“Which one?” I was asked.

“The one that had a rabbit in the title” I said.

After a Google search, I was told that the movie with Ryan O’Neal was called “What’s up, Doc?”

Ha! That was the famous line from Bugs Bunny, the 1930s Disney cartoon character… I was surprised myself that my brain had stored that association with the movie title decades ago.

So, when I talked about the incidents with a clinical psychologist friend via email, he wrote:

“You should watch the 2016 movie “Arrival”. I sometimes show segments of that movie during therapy sessions.”

So I did.

Arrival is a science fiction movie where The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, is used to explore how languages act as cognitive filters for experiencing and interpreting reality. The hypothesis proposes that brain pathways filter reality differently through the structure of different languages especially regarding spatial structures, the concept of linear time, colour, and sound. Eventually the worldview of a polyglot varies from that of single language users.

Needless to say, such a “skill” would benefit creative thinkers. One description in the movie resonated splendidly with me – it was that change in brain pathways, resulting to the knowledge and use of multiple languages, may lead a person to have memories of his future while still passing through his present reality.

Like being homesick for places we have never known. Unformed faces about which we have written poems on papyrus or sheets made of multi-layered synthetic polymers to save trees. And during unmoon nights, remembering the taste of wines made from grapes yet uncultivated.

 

… As I read more about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the reaction of the scientific community to it, I wondered if in addition to my linguistic vagabondage between languages I also can find some examples in my photography in literary works.

Indeed, I have often gotten feedback that my prose, poetry and even scientific publications, when written in English, have a hint of unusual sentence structure, use of words and imagery.

As to my photography, I thought of two photos that may be of interest to my psychologist friend during his therapy sessions! The first is atop this entry and is of a woman on a bridge looking at young people and children coming down a narrow stream in floats on a warm day. The vintage look of the photo is a gift of using a 1953 Soviet Fed -2 sporting a Jupiter-9 85mm lens from the same year.

The second photo is one I took more than a decade ago on the shore of the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

Clearly the compositions are very similar and neither photo tells a story of the moment in a unique way. But, after watching “Arrival” it occurred to me that these photos may tell more about myself than of a fleeing moment a street photographer tries to capture.

Could my “transition” from a vast space (the ocean) to a narrow stream be a reflection of the cognitive filters as time, linear or otherwise, had reshaped my brain’s pathway of inquiry and interpretation? Was I unconsciously re-taking the same photos with a new worldview? If so, was my memory of the future, which is now, influenced my taking the two photos in the past, which was my present then? In the photo atop this essay page did I associate the stream and the people in floats as memories coming back to the woman on the bridge, hence the reason of taking that shot?

Hmm.

I am eager to get my own therapy session, online this time, from my friend comfortably laughing in the Scottish Highlands….

 

August 18, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

Good and Evil in the Arts -- the Harmony in the Shades of Gray

 

I am always delighted to get thoughtful comments from readers; especially following posts that are more than a decade old. Their comments not only take me to reading what I had written (and often forgotten) but help me realise if and how my life experiences, hence thoughts, have changed over time.

So, my readers often provide the opportunity of introspection and discovery.

Last week I got an email from a reader in Asia about an essay I had written in 2016 about beauty in the arts focusing on symmetry and harmony ^(1).  It is still a popular read perhaps because beauty transcends cultures and geography. This time though, there was a challenging line in that email that read:

“Is ugly the counter-thesis of beautiful? Is evil necessary to the definition of good? You did not address how those themes have and continue to make artistic expressions universal.”

Hmm. I re-read what I had written and, yes, perhaps I was more optimistic, or wishful, a decade ago. So, today I will scratch the surface of not only how beauty and harmony co-exist in the arts, but also how good, evil and chaos are inextricable from the pursuit of beauty in all forms of artistic expression.

The Taijitu

Among the most parsimoniously abundant symbols of art, philosophy and medicine is the Taijitu, commonly known as the Ying and Yang. In one circle, the fluidity of being inseparable, unavoidable, contradictory and complementary is encapsulated.  The dark and the bright move together in harmony and an imbalance between their co-existence are not only a philosophical statement, but are the basis of Chinese traditional Chinese medicine, as it was thousands of years ago. The flux between the dark and the bright is also their reflux; the lack of energy in the harmony between the forces moving and pushing each other, results in excess energy in one of the forces and alters the well-being of a person, of cultures and of civilizations.

 

As a health care professional I, worked in Asia for more than a decade and often heard colleagues use the Taijitu to guide their thinking, and hope that it would guide mine too. I asked questions, but their answers were never about “good” or “evil, “beautiful” or “ugly”, nor “powerful” or “weak”. Rather, all explanations were to be found in restoring the dynamic equilibrium of the body, provide meaning to a person’s search for harmony within himself, with others and, the acceptance that both the Yin and the Yang contain the seeds of the opposite (these are the small dots in the swirls- a black dot in the bright swirl; a white dot in the dark swirl).

As such, the Taijitu maps the context and content of harmony, symmetry and co-existence. It is a philosophy of how to live, create in a universe where there are no absolutes. But in the flux and reflux of the Yin and the Yang, there is hope for well being.

(I have explored the paradigm of absolutes in relationship to the concept of time as defined by St. Augustine here⁽²⁾.)

 

Dante’s Inferno

In contrast to the Taijitu, Dante proposes that the gate of Hell has this written above it:

                                    “Abandon every hope, you who enter”

Hell is punishment, Hell is without hope. Hell offers no redemption. Hell offers no future because of your past acts and imbalances.

 

 

Demons and Angels through poetry

I chose a few lines from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado “Y era el demonio de mi sueño, el ángel” (And it was the demon of my dream, and the angel) as the question of good and evil is directly addressed.

The poem is among my favorites by Machado because, like the Ying and Yang, it addresses the dark and bright side of our existence but this time as evil and good. Indeed the demon is also an angel, and the duality is beautiful to the poet. It is a contradiction that does not address wellbeing or harmony, instead it the duality he saw in his dream invite Machado to an introspection journey to “the crypt of the soul”,  showing that good and evil lead to temptation even when we do not want to be tempted. That hidden urge to both accept and avoid temptation leads to pain, suffering (the caged beasts) and eventually submission.  

Here is a segment of the original version in Spanish, followed by the translation:

Y era el demonio de mi sueño, el ángel
más hermoso. Brillaban
como aceros los ojos victoriosos,
y las sangrientas llamas
de su antorcha alumbraron
la honda cripta del alma.
—¿Vendrás conmigo?
—No, jamás; las tumbas
y los muertos me espantan.
Pero la férrea mano
mi diestra atenazaba.
—Vendrás conmigo...
Y avancé en mi sueño,

 

And was the demon of my dream, the angel
most beautiful. Their victorious eyes
shone like steel,
and the bloody flames
of their torch lit up
the deep crypt of the soul.
—Will you come with me?
—No, never; the tombs
and the dead frighten me.
But the iron hand
clenched my right hand.
—You will come with me...
And I moved forward in my dream,

 

The Greek Concept of Kalokagathia

Talking about inseparable duality, ancient Greeks proposed and adopted a view about beauty in a more virtuous context. It is known as Kalokagathia where beauty (kalos) and moral goodness (agathos) co-exist, or should co-exist if art pursued harmony and symmetry. And those attributes were believed to transcend earthly values and reflect cosmic truths. Chaos does not keep the universe in peace; hence the arts should promote harmonia in the various modes of human artistic expressions.

 

 

Khalil Gibran’s view of Good and Evil

Perhaps the above discussion can best find its boundaries in a passage from Gibran’s “The Prophet”.

And one of the elders of the city said, Speak to us of Good and Evil.

…

You are good when you are one with your-self.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of your-self.

Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.

For when you strive for gain you are but a root that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.

Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, “Be like me, ripe and ever giving of your abundance.”

For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

…

 

So, how to we approach good and evil in the arts?

Inherently, the morality question has to be addressed – it can take central stage or a secondary role.  The artistic expression can be appreciated without knowing if the artist was a “fruit” or a “root” but by keeping in mind that fruits do not exist without relying on the roots. Any opposition in the life or character of the artist can take that secondary role when we are appreciating her/his artistic expression.

Like an archaeologist who unearths a thousand year old statue, it is the beauty of that statue that we celebrate often without knowing who the artist was.

And coming back to my reader’s quest “is evil necessary to the definition of good?” we each have to decide if evil is what we may call a misguided good. And then we proceed based on the answer we find comfort in.

After all, Black & White photography is just the harmony of the shades of gray. And so are Gibran's world famous charcoal drawings.

July 27, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

(1)   https://liveingray.blogspot.com/2016/09/beauty-in-arts-symmetry-harmony-and.html

(2)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/06/yin-yang-and-st-augustine.html