.. Di Questo Fondo Non Torno Vivo Alcun, S’I’odo il Vero Senza Tema D’infamia Ti Rispondo (from Dante’s Infreno)

It was a simple time. All lines were either straight or slightly bending. No mystery, and no repetition. Everything was “a first time”.

All lines were clear. Braque or Picasso stayed in their cubes. Rubik forgot the twists to align his cube’s faces. All faces were in line these days.

“Loneliness is when solitude stops populating your space” I was told. You have to listen like an ear listens to its earring. Like Spanish Cava masquerades French bubbles. Like when it is suddenly morning again.

Like it is now as it was then. When the Danube was never blue but walking it in Budapest or Vienna was best for loudly reciting Armenian poetry to those who did not understand Armenian. Or walking over that river, alone, to Petrzalka on a windy night.

All lines were either straight or bending just slightly.

Yet, we returned alive from these depths to where lines had become maze, and reality a title for a poetry book.  Dante descended to where many of us ascended near the Danube or the Caspian Sea. And we repeated, often unknowingly Dante’s lines:

               “If what I hear is true, without fear or infamy, I answer thee”

For in those depths all we found was soothing solitude we all eventually ascend to. There was no loneliness as the lines were straight. And, if they bent slightly before a new day arrived, without fear or infamy, we always had the same answer.

And the answer was a promise.

October 27, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

A Map in Flames

The world is changing again. At least the part of the world where I spent my youth.

I saw a map on TV about the Syrian conflict and two names reached deep into my long locked memory vault and for a minute, I ignored the passage of time, the vastness of continents, the languages I learned, and the lessons I cherished.

Ras el-Ain and Qamishli.

… One of the Kurdish-Syrian intellectual’s works I first read in the 1970s was the poetry of Saleem/Salim Barakat.  He is a Kurdish writer, poet and intellectual who now lives in Sweden. He originally described his approach as writing in Kurdish using Arabic language.  In fact, his original poetry was influenced (in my opinion) by historical moments from the Arab, Armenian, Assyrian and Yazidi cultures. And that is not surprising since Qamishli, where he was born and spent his youth, is a melting pot of all these cultures.

I have written about Barakat’s work before here https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2018/11/freedom-did-maslow-overestimate-human.html. Today, after seeing that map on TV, I searched the Web for more and found a very thoughtful literary site called Jacket2 (https://jacket2.org/about-us) that publishes literary commentaries, reviews and interviews. There, I read a commentary by Huda J, Fakhreddine an academic from the University of Pennsylvania. It is a very well written essay about Barakat and his influence in modern Middle Eastern and world literatures. In that essay Dr. Fakhreddine has also included a few translations she and a colleague made of the most poignant statements and imagery from Barakat’s 1983 work. Having read many of these in their original language, I found the translation well representative of the message Barakat sought.

Here are my favorites:

Writing: violence testing the forgotten

and

Sound: the ruin of form

… An academic myself, I often proposed that the answer is the death of the question.

And today, I hope the answer to that map on TV where burning icons are placed atop the cities is not the death of the question.

Since all questions start with Why?

October 19, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

Let There Be Spaces in Your Togetherness, and Let the Winds of the Heavens Dance Between You (Khalil Gibran, Broken Wings)

I met angels

Before they knew

What they would become

When the sand is warm

And the evenings

Lonely

Broken wings

Broke for a journey

To where those

Who see angels

Believe

In themselves

And they carry

The names of those they loved

Like wings now too heavy

To fly back

And call these names

Again
One more time

I saw angels

Before they

Saw me

A paintbrush in my hand

Giving shape

To their aching wings

And a new

Name
To their loneliness

October 9, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2109

PS/ I found these angels on the grounds of an old cemetery in Prescott, Arizona.  There seemed to be no grave under them, although time has not been kind to the graves there.