I’ll Spit on You so I Don’t Put the Evil Eye on You.

                  A Room Without Book is Like a Body Without a Soul (Cicero)

On my painting and sculpture blog (https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2017/10/vahes-ark-vessel-of-eclectic-modes-of.html) I titled a painting I did as “Listening with my Eyes” (https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2018/09/listening-with-my-eyes.html) in September 2018. I had no anterior reference to such a description, other than what I described in my entry that I “listen” to the natural materials I use in my art, since I believe their characteristics dictate the subject I use them for, and the message I try to communicate.

In this case, it was a painting I did on hare skin.

A few weeks ago, I got a note from a visitor of my blog who suggested that I check the New Mexico Judiciary, New Mexico Center for Language Access and gave me a website address https://www.nmcenterforlanguageaccess.org/cms/en/courts-agencies/judges-portal/how-to-monitor-interpretation. Of course I did and a whole new learning experience unraveled!

I had no idea about the existence of an entire science defined as listening with your eyes, where a court-appointed interpreter communicates and interprets with a deaf person or a person who does not speak English the questions asked and interprets their responses.  The New Mexico Judiciary site helps the judge understand his/her role in supervising the interpretation by listening to the interpreter with both eyes and ears to assure a quality interpretation.

As I tried to learn more about the challenges deaf consumer face when working with an interpreter, I came across a book that I found most educational. It is titled “Deaf Eyes on Interpreting” published by Gallaudet University in 2018. The central thesis of the book, and hence its recommendations, is that:

Despite the many gains being made in the interpreting services profession, with an emphasis on the accuracy of the interpreted work, the perspectives of Deaf individuals are rarely documented in the literature. Opportunities for enhanced participation and full inclusion need to be considered in order for Deaf people to best represent themselves to the hearing, nonsigning public as competent and intelligent individuals.

This is a new topic for me and I plan to learn more. But as I was reading the synopsis of the above book, suddenly two of the words got a different meaning – “interpreter” and “eye”. Indeed, how could I not think about the line from Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre that is often quoted:

“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.” 

.. I have always thought of the eyes as “mirrors of the soul” where the eyes do not actively engage in “interpretation”. Rather they are the portals of entry into the inner world of the person (or perhaps all animals) and the person who enters that world does the interpretation and evaluation of what he/she sees.

As I was reflecting on this, I came across a quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero:

“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” 

Ok, now I was getting really excited! So, going back to 60 BC, the concept of eyes as interpreter was documented.  

… When I was growing up, all babies wore an amulet consisting of a glass blue eye known as, “Kharaza zaraa” which is believed to dispel the evil eye, or il Malocchio. Sometimes that amulet was made into exquisite jewelry as a cube of 4 glass eyes encased within an intricate 20 carat cold cage. I had one of these and it was believed that when someone transmitted the negative vibes of envy toward me, one of the eyes would crack. I have to admit that I made it through my childhood without any of those glass eyes cracking!!

But the role the malocchio or evil eyes occupy in the Arabic and Italian cultures derives from ancient Greece and Rome. The root of the negative vibe has always been envy about the beauty, health, wealth or success of the envied person. That is why in these cultures people behave humbly, and do not brag. Who knows, if their beauty and success does not create envy in fellow people, the Gods on Mount Olympus or Vesuvius may one day get jealous and do nasty things themselves!

In fact, many of the cultures around the Mediterranean (Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Tunisian and Algerian) celebrate the eyes for beauty and even for power. For example, the Arabic saying is “I am under the order of your eyes” when a woman has an ask from a man. And while in the West a woman is called “honey” by her lover, in the Arab world she is called “my eyes”.

The Greeks, like the Italians fear the evil eye. In addition to using the amulet of the glass blue eye to dispel the spell of envy, the Greeks have a very “Greek” way to prevent the effect of the evil eye, called Mati in Greek. They spit 3 times and say “Ptou sou na min se matiaso” which roughly translates as “I’ll spit on you so I don’t put the evil eye on you.”

… So, I looked into the eyes of my dogs. Two pairs of large brown eyes with sclera smaller than mine looked at me for a while without envy but with what I interpreted as love. And then, I realized that while there might have been love, they were most interested in interpreting MY soul to see if I had enough compassion to give them a few more snacks!

As I was laughing about my experiment, I could not resist wondering if Emily Bronte had read Cicero’s statement ….

PS/ I have used the above photo in a previous posting, but I think that it fits the topic of this essay perfectly.

March 21, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

Time Passes Slowly When You're Lost in a Dream (Judy Collins)

I wanted to set my soul be

Free of me

As a song is to the singer

A poem to constant pain

And a name left on an island

Before the morning rays

I wanted to let my fear be

Free of me

But it would not leave me

In fear of finding respite

On a calm beach where all waves die

Of lonesome trips

I wanted to get my watch and stop

The race I cannot win

But the mountain was too high to touch

And the sea too far to swim

So I kept my fear

And I held my soul

Within the space

Of my time

And then

Upon that beach where waves

Had died

And became sea

I sang a name

And let it be

March 13, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

Sui Ipsius

I poured the lake

Into a stone

And it bounced

Irrational

Existential

And absurd

And yet

I carried that stone

Up the hill

Till I reached

Nothingness

Then raced back down

Hoping in anguish

That the hilltop

Would find its hero

But it did not

And I was left

With the choice I did not make

March 8, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

Romanticizing the White Death: How Tuberculosis Shaped the Arts

My first public health teacher, with whom I have stayed in touch for 40 years, is a renaissance man. He has found a harmonious existence between medicine, public health, literary writing and watercolor painting. We often share our exploration in artistic expression.

A couple of days ago he shared on Instagram his latest painting. Suddenly, and perhaps because of the latest book I read, I was not looking at a watercolor painting on my computer screen but to a Ziehl-Neelsen stain of Miliary Tuberculosis under the microscope. The canvas was now filled with acid-fast mycobacteria and my mind immediately traveled back to the mid-1990s when I was involved in developing national guidelines for the treatment and public health implications of pulmonary tuberculosis. The first paper I co-authored ⁽¹⁾ in 1998 soon found echo by the World Health Organization and is still widely cited in the medical literature. For the next few years I got involved in epidemiological studies about the resurgence of tuberculosis in South East Asia and Africa.

I had not thought about these years much lately as my life is now mostly dedicated to explorations in art forms I am learning about in the American Southwest. Yet, the watercolor painting I looked at on my screen perhaps stressed the fact that we really do not forget, but just get used to the fact that things existed.  This is an idea proposed in a French song by Jacques Brel where he says:

                                        On n'oublie rien de rien
                                       On n'oublie rien du tout
                                      On n'oublie rien de rien
                                     On s'habitue c'est tout

But there is more. A book published in 2017, which I read recently, addresses the idea that in the 1800s tuberculosis was “chic”! It is a delightfully sociological book by Carolyn A. Day ⁽²⁾ where she documents how during the Victorian years women infected by the mycobacterium Koch later discovered, were seen as the epitome of beauty. Indeed, the rosy cheeks, the red lips, their translucid skin, the silky hair and the loss of appetite gave women a glow while the disease consumed them slowly.

Verdi would have never written La Traviatta without Violetta being consumed by tuberculosis; Niccollo Paganini would have never composed his Caprice No. 24; we would have never known the genius of Chopin, the conflict in the work of A. Chekhov, the colors of P. Gauguin, the poems of J. Keats, or the macabre world of F. Kafka.

Growing up, I was most attracted to romantic poetry that I avidly read in Armenian, French and Arabic. My favorite Armenian poet of the early 1900s is Matéos Zarifian, who is said to have contracted tuberculosis from infected soldiers in the Turkish Army. His poetry still helps me surpass the daily implications of being alive, but his diary makes me discover generic moments about human life. For example, he writes about this Kurdish soldier, one of many occupying a small cell in prison, who had tuberculosis. The man was also a raconteur, so all would surround him to hear his stories. When he had to cough, he would take his head cloth wrap, cough in it, and then wrap it back around his head as a turban. Then, someone would give him a freshly rolled cigarette and ask him to continue his story.

… Tuberculosis, which is now back on the rise worldwide due to other infectious diseases that weaken our immune system and allow opportunistic infections to also become symptomatic, has a unique place in our cultures as an almost positive, romantic, creativity-enhancing disease. Among the host of infectious diseases associated with artists and beauty are sexually transmitted or lifestyle diseases, but these do not have the positive aura that tuberculosis does. Although many of these diseases now pave the way for the resurgence of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases which are increasingly antimicrobial treatment resistant.

So, 20 years have passed since I was involved in the epidemiology of tuberculosis and have seen many monks in South East Asia with bright red lips. This morning I picked up Zarifian’s tome of complete works published in 1956 and made strong coffee. And I recalled a line from “Metzengerstein” by E. Allen Poe I once read in Baltimore:

                       “I would wish all I love would perish of that gentle disease”

March 3, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

( (1)   Chalk CP, Kazandjian VA. Directly observed therapy for treatment completion of pulmonary tuberculosis: Consensus Statement of the Public Health Tuberculosis Guidelines Panel.  JAMA. 1998 Mar 25;279(12):943-8.

(   (2)   Carolyn A. Day  Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease London, Bloomsbury, 2017.Pp. 208. ISBN 978 1 3500 0938 7.