Beirut-- a Forgotten Moment

During the return flight from a recent trip to Arizona I wanted to save a document on the memory stick I have been carrying in my backpack for a while. When I opened the files on the memory stick, I found a few old drafts written during past travel. One of these drafts, saved as “Haircut” surprised me, as I realized that I had almost no recollection of writing it!! It was probably written during a trip to Asia, given the date of “July 1, 2009”.

So, I read, smiled, re-read and ran a spell-check.

The cacti of Arizona, strangely, seem appropriate for describing a barber shaving with a straight razor.  Here is the document:

I took the gardenia flower from the gardenia bush, and put it afloat upon the water which filled the clay pan.  The clay was of the color gardenia flowers become when they float too long in simple waters.  When they turn in rounds as I make little waves in the pan with my finger.  When gardenia flowers see the bush they were cut from and do wonder why.

I dripped a few drops of rosewater into the pan.  I like the mix of aromas between the bottled rosewater and the fresh gardenia flowers.  One seems to dream of the days when it was all roses; the other knows it was a flower a few hours ago but will never be a flower again.  When mixed, the room becomes rich in memories, one petal at a time.

… I still manage to find a quiet moment to sit next to the clay pan and make little waves with my index.  Then to run my wet finger upon my moustache, close my eyes and remember the West Beirut of the 1960s, when I used to go to Abu Kha’aled for a haircut.  I was a young lad and there was no need to discuss hair styling.  He knew only one—buzz cut.  Within minutes, he would run the clipper in ascending horizontal lanes upon my head and get the landscape he wanted. 

But, that was not why I remember these haircuts.  It was the ceremony after the cut—he would produce a boar’s bristles brush, put talcum powder upon my neck which he had shaved with a straight razor, gently sweep the powder away, and then dip his palm in the deep porcelain pot filled with water and floating gardenia flowers.  As I closed my eyes in anticipation of this ceremony, he would run his hand upon my now barely populated scalp and give a simple massage.  I have never forgotten the aroma of talcum powder, gardenia flowers, and the subtle smell of freshly cut hair.

…Then life changed; then civil war reared its unpleasant head.  Even Abu Kha’aled could not make that head look good, but he tried, in his own way.  He kept his barber shop open everyday.  He ignored bombs, snipers, or the hooligans now owning the streets.  He was there everyday, early, to shave faces he had known for years, talk politics, curse a bit, and then admire the pencil-drawn moustache he had managed to carve with his steady hands and German-bladed straight razor.  And, he would splash a handful of that gardenia and rose water potion, almost in a religious ceremonialism.

… That morning, the bombs fell close to the Mosque about 300 meters away from the barber shop.  It was the only business open that day, even the Armenian butcher had decided to stay home.  I was now a young man, and like a young man ignoring all dangers, I went to see Abu Kha’aled for a shave and some chatting.  He was alone in his marble-floored shop, smoking a cigarette.  His hair was heavily ointed with “BrylCreem”, which was very chic those days.

He said good morning, but not much more.  He pointed to the chrome and leather barber chair farthest from the glass door.  Then moved toward the door, took three fast and consecutive draws upon his beloved Du Maurier, coughed slightly, sprung the cigarette butt into the street, and came back to tend to my needs.

First, he washed his hand in the gardenia water.  Then he started rubbing my face with hot water from a Thermos bottle.  It was part of the ceremony to first soften those bristly facial hair, especially around the chin.  As he was doing this, I realized that I smelled the cigarette on his fingers rather than the gardenia flower.  I looked into the ceramic pot and there were no gardenia flowers there!  Instead, there was a miniscule green apple floating on the surface.

“I used all the gardenia flowers from my bush,” he said.  “I should get more in a couple of days.  For now, I will use this apple for both freshening the water, but also for you to hold it in your mouth and tighten your cheeks.”

And he gave me the apple to hold inside my mouth, shifting it right or left as he moved his blade.  A bomb fell pretty close.  “81 mm” he said without shaking his hand.  “That was close.  And they shot it from near by.”

And then, “Please do not eat the apple.  That is the only one I have for today.  Just take it out, I will wash it, and use it again if another customer shows up.”

… Nearly forty years have passed since that day.  My chin is now gray, and I do not let anyone shave my face.  I do not use aftershave; I do not rub my chin with hot water before shaving.  Yet, when the gardenias bush flowers, I think about Abu Kha’aled and his apple.  I now wonder how many others came to get shaved after I did, that day in West Beirut, when 81mm Howitzers were falling very close to the Mosque.

But mostly I wonder how many had used that apple before I did.

July 1, 2009

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014

Hiraeth—That’s Welsh for Longing

“How would you feel if just before you die you learn that an asteroid would hit the earth and make all humans disappear like was the fate of dinosaurs? Would you have any regrets regarding your own life?”

I am very fortunate to use the Internet for maintaining my age-old friendships or sometimes rekindling them. Geography, time and mood do not have any effect on my desire to drop a note to someone light years away in his or her life experiences. And in return receive a philosophical, practical, romantic, or simply heart-warming response. While we have similar or different professional training, we never write about what puts food on our table or keeps our roof from leaking. That has been the unwritten rule for almost three decades now.

So I wrote back that I would have no regrets, because I am not sure how regret works. For me it is looking back with today’s optic and knowledge upon acts I had or would have carried out in the past. And then evaluate these. Put a value on them, often as “good” or “bad”. And then have feelings about doing bad things or for not doing good things. Or yet, feel bad just for not doing what I could have done.

It just does not make sense to me.

Therefore we jumped to another topic, that of retrocausality. Like all theories of philosophy and physics, I remain most interested in learning about them and keeping myself up-to-date with emerging ones.

Retrocausality.  It posits that the future affects the past which affects the present. That what we do had already been determined to be done. All this because it is not a sequential but a simultaneous universe, where as predicted by Einstein, our past, present and future exist at the same time. It is a very challenging new outlook by physicists who want to take Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory to the next level. Perhaps to more of a philosophical level than one of formulae and experimentation, because while quantum mechanics has uncertainty about position and movement, retrocausality brings forth the uncertainty about free will.

If what we do or did was determined by and in our future, then we cannot be held responsible for doing things by free will.

Thus, free will becomes an illusion. So does regret.

Yet, I think that in all of us there is a comfort with the Newtonian clockwork model where causality presupposes a sequence and an order: the cause comes before the effect, and we can trace it back to understand the “Why” of a “What”. After all, that is the basis of Karma, when we believe that what we do today will get back to us, in some other time or form, accordingly.

“Retrocausality and Karma—this is getting funky. Let’s go back to nostalgia.”

 “If you do not understand regret nor when you do not think your present is already determined by your future, would you still have nostalgia?”

That is a question worth pondering upon. As it was sub-zero outside, I put on warm socks, made green tea and sat down to think.

… I had always thought that nostalgia was a medical term, constructed to diagnose a psychological or emotional state. After all, “algia” is pain, but I was not sure of the word’s true origin. So I did some searching.

The word nostalgia was first coined as a medical term in 1688 by Johannes Hofer (1669-1752), a Swiss medical student. It uses the word νόστος along with another Greek root, άλγος or algos, meaning pain, to describe the psychological condition of longing for the past. In James Joyce's Ulysses, the final part, during which Leopold Bloom returns home, is called the Nostos.

Aha! Yet another medical pigeonhole for an ostensibly human reaction. The key term seems to be that of longing, not nostalgia.

But what is longing?

Again, as a disciplined academic, I went to definitions.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines longing as "a strong desire for something unattainable."  

I was immediately interested in noticing that the definition is not immediately about the past-- it seems to be about the future. It does not seem to coincide with nostalgia, which is defined by the same dictionary as "pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering from the past and wishing that you could experience it again."

Now I was feeling comfortable with my skepticism about the interchangeable use of the terms “longing” and “nostalgia”. Clearly the former is about the future while the latter is about the past. Or is it so? Could the “unattainable” be our inability to go back in time and experience past pleasures again?

… And I went back to thinking about retrocausation, the future affecting the past, free will being an illusion, and the joy of debating such topics with a friend separated by space and time! Or is it IN space and time?

My feet were warm now, especially since my dog niched himself under the table and put his head on my right foot. It was snowing steady and in wet flakes.

And I wrote back:

“I may be longing for the unattainable but I do not suffer from the pains of wishing for what I have already experienced. Yet I keep the illusion of free will alive, because without it I will feel nothing when learning that an asteroid may hit our planet and kill all humans. Perhaps you will find it insensitive, but upon my death bed I would mourn the destruction of free will more than I would mourn the destruction of humans.”

March 4, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014 

I took this picture when walking my dog in the snow. At some point his paw and my shoe made imprints next to one left by a deer. It made me think of a moment in time when harmony may have been the dominant force of all things living. The theme of this essay seems to accommodate this rather pretentious photograph.