A Scar is What Happens When the Word is Made Flesh.” ― Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

…When the flesh has a name

It teasingly forgets

That you also have a name

And all becomes unlived

As if a stay in bed

To miss the sunrise

…When the flesh has a name

It hides its own scars

To surprise the hopeful

And all becomes new again

To last the space of a good-bye

And miss a lonely sunset

…But that name comes back

As flesh, scar and poem

To remind you one night

That you still

Have a name

November 26, 2017

Gardenia Flower

My key locked itself

In the hope of a return

To what was now a story

Simple and common story

Rainy mornings in cities of people

Now are open spaces where I wonder

About teary people in cities of steel

Within them the past lingers, and the story hides

My key lost itself

Next to a window

On a rainy day

In a town with no past

...And, if I push open again

My window shutters one day

I may tell a story

To a new morning and day

And then

Throw my key away

November 18, 2017

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2017

Algún Sonido

It is November and the sky is heavy. Dead leaves are everywhere on the city streets and the desert is browner than usual. Large raven fly in groups and dance the fall farandole.

A good time to read poetry.

Coral Bracho is a contemporary Mexican poet who celebrates the daily life. I like his neo-baroque style and have read some of his poems translated to French. I came across a lovely translation in English of a poem I like. It is entitled “Among the Ruins” (Entre Estas Ruinas), and somehow it did hit a personal note today. In a strange way it reminded me of a photo I had taken a few years back of my two dogs. It was with a Yashica 124 and contre-jour. But it has a lot of feelings to it as I associated that photo with the wait.

Here are the opening lines of the poem in Spanish:

Este hotel es una Antigua escuela,

uno lo siente a pesar del tiempo.

A pesar de los muros derruidos,

de los espacios rotos.

And the translation:

This hotel is an old school,

you can feel it, though time has passed.

Despite the broken-down walls,

the smashed spaces.

The author looks for his old room in this hotel in ruins and ends the poem as such:

From here, all the spaces are back to front.

Perhaps I will recognize the look of my room

by its own back.  Or from it, perhaps, I will catch

some sound. (O tal vez reconozca de él

algún sonido.)

It was the choice of the word “sound” that made me uncomfortable. It is just too soft, too anti-climactic. Depending on my mood when reading this poem, I would have looked for murmur, a crashing wave, a roar of the surf! For example “sonido del mar” is more than the “sound of the sea”—it is the roar of the surf and the crashing of the waves!

But, it is November and the sky is heavy. And the slight evening wind is humming through the dry, fallen leaves on the city streets…

November 7, 2017

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2017

The Oak Sleeps in the Acorn (James Allen)

It is the first day of November and trees have let go most of their cover and leaves. It is time to be tree again – naked, unassuming but full of promise.

Because indeed the oak sleeps in the acorn, as James Allen wrote in A Man Thinketh. Because the memory of what we have done or produced defines who we are.

… I periodically re-read works which once affected me. Not only because I am eager to discover what I have missed during previous readings, but also to uncover how I interpret ideas as I change. It is both a re-discovery of the written works and a discovery of my-self.

So, I re-read a bit of Hume and a bit of Locke. These philosophers have helped me ask the questions for which I seek no answers, since these all pertain to the notion of identity. Indeed, in my humble and amateur way, over the past half a century I have been faced with notions of identity that have shaped my actions. And they have shaped my writings in books, articles, blogs and on numerous tortured pieces of paper that never graduated to becoming published.

Because the oak sleeps in the acorn.

Because there is no “I” in identity.

Because I was told that I can only recall and act upon my own experiences. No one else’s.

And therefore personal identity is defined by personal memory alone.

… Locke shaped entire generations of philosophers with his statements about memory and identity. And Hume criticized our believes in causality so radically that even as a researcher I often stopped to think if causality was indeed a normative concept or a human translation of the senses we harbor within ourselves, during our short passage.

But, I never sought answers. Because I grew up with the notion that “regret” is an illogical construct. 

Because one can really never regret given that one is never the same person as when an act or thought was undertaken. Man is variable in time and space. The memory of a past act is based on the consciousness we had on that very moment of the act. When consciousness changes in time and space, that memory becomes irrelevant to our present consciousness. We thus cannot regret that act-memory. It is unfair to the memory of that act!

If our consciousness changes, should we also expect a change in our self- identity?

… The relationship between consciousness, memory and identity is dictated by our spacial impulse to be what we are. Not necessarily who we are.

We are acorn with a promise of an oak tree. But we are not an oak tree.

So, when do we become an oak tree? Or even more importantly a forest of oak trees?

In other words, group identity. Is it the sum of self-identities that change over time? If so, then historical causal relationships cannot exist in a group because if acorns become oak trees with random frequency, unequal probability, and exposure to changing environments, then the memories of their experiences is different. Each acorn recants its experience differently.  So, how can these dissimilar recollections of memories add up to a group identity, which suggest uniformity and uniform conforming to normative attributes?

… I have always been amazed by the above concepts within the context of Quantum Mechanics. Consider Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It says that the momentum and position of a particle cannot be simultaneously and precisely measured because by the time the momentum is measured the position is less specifiable. In fact all wave-like elements adhere to this Principle.

So, if Hume and Locke were contemporaries of Heisenberg how would they view the sub-particle theories affect their thinking? Would they see a grander Principle that affects the memory and consciousness move (wave-like) through time and space like sub-atomic particles do? Would there be support for the concept of identity for not being a singular happening during the life of a person but a series of self-consciousness changes that in turn change identity itself? Is there a universal principle that best describes all movements in nature as identifiable only one point at a time and subject to change over time and space? 

It is the first day in November and the wind makes dead leaves dance in the street.

November 1, 2017

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2017