Does Zorba Need to Go Home?

I was born an immigrant and lived in three countries as an immigrant even when I was a citizen. I lived in the Arabian Desert for a while, and now in the high desert of Arizona. My professional work took me to four continents and I learned enough languages to feel at home in every place I visited.

The decades of travel across and through time and space seemed a forward path to me. But now time seems to have curved, and I think more about a circle than a straight line. Specifically, about closing that circle.

And in this state of mind, the nagging question of “returning” surfaces at every step. Specifically “returning home”.  It is nagging because for an immigrant, “home” is an escape to identity.

… Returning home. It is an emotional pursuit that goes back to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BC – 475 BC) who proposed that while change is central to the universe, that there was a fundamental order to that change. He called it Logos (λόγος). But in the Western philosophy, it is one of his statements, as quoted by Plato, which has had the most impact. It is:

                                    “You could not step twice into the same river.”

Why? Because a river is defined by its waters and with the flow of the waters it is not the same river again. And more, you are not the same person again.

… Returning home. The philosophy of Heraclitus may be best translated in our times by Thomas Wolfe who titled his book "Don't you know you can't go home again?”  While it may be said that since most rivers reach a sea or an ocean, they do indeed go home. That the ocean is the home of the river. That every drop of rain that falls upon the waters of a river eventually goes home to the sea. That the clouds are never home to rain drops. But when it comes to us humans, Wolfe says:

 "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

…Returning home. As a kid I was told the story of a girl called Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl. They wanted to look for happiness, represented by The Blue Bird of Happiness.  A good fairy named Bérylune helped them in their search. After spending a lifetime seeking happiness in vain, Myrtyl and Tyltyl return home in old age. And to their surprise, the Blue Bird of Happiness was perched on a tree behind their childhood home.

Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck wrote The Blue Bird (L'Oiseau Bleu) in 1908 as a play and my father told me the story, many times over, when I was a child. It was the story of a blue bird then, and my father always ended it by saying “one day you will understand about that bird.”

I do today.

…Returning home. Is it always to the Blue Bird of Happiness? Staying within the avian metaphor, the saying “Till the chickens come home to roost” has an interesting origin. I learned that it was a motto on the title page of Robert Southey's poem The Curse of Kehama, published in 1810 and it reads:

                "Curses are like young chicken: they always come home to roost."

…Years later I told the story of the Blue Bird of Happiness to our children but they belonged to an era when Hannah Montana was their idol. In the movie of the same name, Miley Cyrus sang "You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home". It was a hopeful message and our kids grew up believing that one always goes back to one’s roots and identity.

Will they?

…Returning home. Perhaps the most eloquent statement is by the Persian philosopher and Sufi mystic Rūmī who admitted:

“It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I have gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.”

The “satisfaction I need”. Is that what we search for when our straight path through time starts shaping like a curve? Like a circle? Is the satisfaction to be found in closing that circle? By going home? Is home a place? A person? A history?

…Or, Heraclitus, Rūmī , Wolfe and Maeterlinck may all be wrong or misguided. Perhaps one should find the ultimate comfort in the words of Zorba, the immortal character created by Nikos Kazantzakis who from Heraklion, Crete, gave my generation the epicurean optimism for those who did not know where was home. The optimism of Zorba shaped my teenage years as I reread Kazantzakis’s works endless times, and still keep a VCR tape of the 1964 B&W movie by Michael Cacoyannis  “Zorba the Greek” for moments when I need to watch it again.

The last scene of the movie shows Zorba and his boss on the island’s beach after losing loved ones to local customs and failing to start a new logging industry. They had failed in every attempt and lost what they had. It was time for his boss to go back to England, to go home to his books.  Between two mouthfuls of roasted lamb and a gulp of red wine Zorba looks him in his boss’s eyes and says:

      “A man needs a little madness or else he would never cut the rope and be free.”

And his boss, a stoic Englishman suddenly relaxes, loosens his tie, takes his jacket off and replies:

                                               “Would you teach me to dance?”

…Perhaps the circle is just an illusion. One only needs to learn to dance like Zorba.

August 30, 2015

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

"If You Can't be a Poet, be the Poem"

It may be true that if one can walk, one can dance. Yet if one can write would poetry assurantly, or assonantly follow?

In 1991 I read Diane Ackerman’s ode to life gracefully organized in a book entitled “A Natural History of the Senses”. It is a masterful work where science and poetry found both their harmony and a continuum. The style is voluptuous and to celebrate our gift to smell, taste, touch, hear and see. Diane Ackerman as a naturalist, poet, explorer and pilot is as eclectic as the topic of this book. My intent is not to discuss the book, as there are volumes about it in the literature and on the Internet. Instead, it is to revisit the role of poetry we all knowingly or unconsciously allow to influence our daily lives.

… So, I reread Ackerman’s book. Why? Because of a serendipitous comment a friend made about those who want to learn about our surrounding world. “Remember the Kung Fu series of the early 1970s? David Carradine played the half-Chinese, half-white Shaolin monk.  He was being trained to see the world his eyes closed, and hear, smell and touch to appreciate all that surrounded him. He was called “Grasshopper” by his Master, and sometimes I see that “Grasshopper” in you.”

Now, I had to do a search about the Kong Fu series as I had watched it only intermittently (when there was electricity) during the Lebanese civil war almost 40 years ago. I also read the biography of Carradine, his constant search for love and thrill, and I found an intriguing statement, which I used as the title of this essay, attributed to him.

… What does it mean to “be the poem”? I did not find his suggestion eccentric or capricious. I know what he means: the poem is how one structures his moments so others can see an escape in what he/she does or, they remember when they had done so as well. The “poem” is the common language where people’s desires, hopes and memories find the simplicity of sharing and celebrating. More, the poem is a synthesis of all our senses, but used somewhat differently than their routine roles: a poem is not what we see but how we see it. It is that personal yet widely observed angle to the ordinary where others also find refuge. A poem is not what we taste, but why we trust our taste buds to remind others about the importance of not being alone. And, a poem is that morning coffee we make when it is raining outside: the welcoming of another day of discovery is then filled with aroma, sound, fear and joy.

Being the poem is what turns the passage into a voyage that lasts as long as we last. And then it tells a story to those who are planning that journey on their own.

In fact, that is how Diane Ackerman ends her book. Here is that delightful passage:

“It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”

… I always lived through my senses. I cook with my nose (it is ready when the aroma is right), I taste wine with my eyes first, and the tremor of a body is best experienced through a smile and a whisper before a touch. So is the case with words and the sharing of what we have found (or missed) during our journey through that flat emotional terrain. 

Eventually being the poem is celebrating that simple language that has no alphabet, no geography and no cultural history. Except perhaps the story of what we all do, have done, want to do, or are too self-conscious to share. In its simplest form, being the poem is cooking with the nose and surprising everyone when the dish comes out perfectly cooked!! 

Distilled to its essence, being the poem, is purely being -- and I have learned to be though my senses, on that mysterious path Ackerman describes. A path where science and logic got orphaned because they hoped to answer the "Why".

Being the poem is learning to leave the poet smoke his pipe looking at an empty page.

Note: I took this picture during my morning coffee in Bellagio, Lake Cuomo, Italy.

PS/ David Carradine died in Bangkok on June 3, 2009 from a fatal autoerotic asphyxiation accident.

August 15, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

The Rivercane Wicker Basket

Take the basket with you.

Pack it for a slow sunset

Beyond the pine trees

Fill the basket with cheese

Hard bread, wine and thyme

The evening will bath your glass

In gold and the whisper of the red rocks

Let your hair feel free, and your hands happy

To garnish your temples with desert sage, lavender and tender lily

For there is magic when the willow bush

 Blooms in May in chocolate scents and a sweet whisper

And when you find the rock

From where the sunset paints the horizon of times

Let the wine flow in the same colors as the evening sky

For in your basket you have brought

The gift of love and the secret tremor

Of being one

With sage, lily and marigold

August 12, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Reading Tea Leaves in an Arabic Coffee Demie Tasse

I was reading a book of Armenian poetry. Unexpectedly my mind left the page and my olfactory senses were filled with the aroma of Arabic coffee, ground with Cardamom.  Nothing in what I was reading could have taken me back to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, to our balcony overlooking a busy street of Beirut, and to the aroma of Arabic coffee.

I shut my eyes and I could almost hear my mom’s slippers on the Terra Cotta floor tiles leading to our balcony. And there was my father, waiting for his evening coffee!

… It was a flashback, and it took me by surprise. I was on a high mountain in Arizona, surrounded by desert, with no sea, lake, river or any body of water nearby. And yet, my mind, somehow triggered by a few lines of romantic Armenian poetry, had decided to fly back and away.

I shut my eyes again hoping to see my parents one more time, alas in vain. But at that very moment, I recalled that my mother had a set of coffee pots and that I had kept them as souvenir from her. She used to boil coffee in these small, handmade copper pots with wooden handles. I recall them as being made in Armenia.

So, I rushed to the kitchen and looked for these pots I have kept on a high shelve but have never used them for 50 years.

There they were, next to a few demie tasses my mother had!

With a lot of emotions, I filled the smallest of these pots with water to boil. Then two small spoonfuls of ground coffee and a spoonful of sugar. A few minutes later the aroma of boiling coffee filled my moment and I forgot about the desert. I was near the Mediterranean again.

Here is the capture of this seemingly simple moment that in the cloud of Arabic coffee aroma erased 50 years of my life, albeit for a short moment. 

I sipped on this elixir slowly trying to recall the last time I made Arabic coffee. Then, in a gesture so common to all those who drink coffee around the Mediterranean, I turned the empty demie tasse upside down. It was/is a ceremony that follows the coffee drinking: each person turns the demie tasse upside down letting the coffee grounds slowly slide down the inside of the cup drawing unpredictable shapes. Then, someone in the group will be designated to “read the cup”.

… It is perhaps as old as humanity the belief that there is a message in various forms around us. Ancient priests of Greece and Rome used to open the entrails of freshly slaughtered goats and sheep to predict the outcome of wars; Druids saw messages in boiling liquids; and it is said that many of Nostradamus’s visions and predictions were made following what he saw in crystal balls and clouds in the skies.  In Western cultures, the modern term for such ceremonial behaviors are best defined as “reading tea leaves”. I personally have never seen anyone read tea leaves….

So, here are some of the shapes the coffee grounds made in my cup. I did not try to read them; I had already traveled in time, even if retrospectively.

However, if I were to read the shapes, I am much inclined to see a man on the right talking to a woman. After a few minutes of careful looking, I can see ardent eyes on the man’s face and a quiet smile on the timid woman’s face….

But the best was yet to come. Instinctively I also turned the small copper coffee pot upside down, and to my surprise it was made in the Soviet Union! Not surprising as Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and I recall my mother using these coffee pots more than 50 years ago.

Well, Soviet or Armenian, it was my mother’s coffee pot and the coffee I made had an aroma almost as good as the ones she offered to my father, on that balcony overlooking a busy street in Beirut….

August 7, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015