Piercing the Veil of Time -- The Only Beauty of 2020 to Celebrate

 

This morning the cloud upon the mountain range was like a flat saucer and then a while cloud seemed to jet out of it. It was like a lance; like a bolt as what perhaps Zeus would have thrown from the top of Mount Olympus.

And it was a perfect moment to think about the end of a year when every land of our globe got touched by disease, unknown prognosis, lockdown, shutdown, elimination of socialization with fellow humans, and the wearing of the mask.

Many of these aspects of an epidemic have happened before in human history. But a pandemic in year 2020 when the world travels, when the people believe that they are invincible because man has conquered all infections with a pill or an injection, yes, in that case a pandemic is like that white “Zeus Cloud” I saw this morning.

…. I have always been attracted to the concept of a veil. Because it keeps secrets gracefully, with beauty even. A veil is what separates what we know from what we see. It dissociates our fears but also our trust.  A veil is privacy, like an iron fence can be.

And the pandemic pushed us to wear our masks, not to keep secrets from others but to not share and receive what is dangerous and contagious. Or contagious and dangerous depending if we think of the mask as a veil.

And in the privacy of our isolation, for 10 months now we have found a certain comfort. Even if large numbers of people resist the notion that a mask can be life saving.  In fact we have created virtual masks though our isolation. We may communicate even continue to work through virtual images of ourselves on a screen large or small, but we are not there. Because we are worried.

We are worried that our veil would not protect us anymore from our own secrets. From our own memories. From what we have forgotten once to say; from what we indeed once said.

And in that way, the mask protects us from sharing what we harbor, but the veil protects our time. The time we have stopped and placed behind that very veil.

… This morning I realised that the veil, like that flat saucer–shaped cloud atop the mountain range, is not only harboring and protecting frozen personal time but with the passage each one of us proceeds through, the veil becomes time itself. More, the veil becomes the mask of time. So we do not share what is harbored, through time, with others.

Sometimes even not with ourselves anymore.

So, when I took a photo, I did not think of clouds or Mount Olympus, but of a moment when our isolation within the year 2020 has suddenly pierced the veil of time!

And that is a wonderful way to end such a personal year.

 

December 28, 2020

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020

Like a Drunken Boat – Pandemic, Isolation and the Wisdom of Rimbaud and Baudelaire

 

In my multicultural and multilingual upbringing and education, I have kept a soft spot for languages that allow poetry to flourish. French is one of them, and over decades I have revisited the classics either in time of extreme anxiousness, uncertainty or to recalibrate my compass regarding where my serenity waits for me.

The past year has certainly made me revisit many books in different languages. Isolation seems to provide the ample space for reading and writing.

So, it was a commentary I heard a few days ago that made me think of Arthur Rimbaud, one of the”enfants terribles” of French symbolic poetry. I heard a commentator define 2020 as the year when “countries navigated through the pandemic like a drunken would through the streets of an unknown city.”

Fair enough. So, I went to search for the “Le Bateau Ivre” (Drunken Boat) by Rimbaud.

Rimbaud was a capricious writer. He wrote a few poems, the most remembered entitled “Le Bateau Ivre” was written in 1891. It is a symbolic poem where a boat (bateau) is describing, as a human would do, its travels. It is also about escape, new horizons and discoveries.

As such, a perfect construct for someone in isolation to understand and use for his own mental, emotional or spiritual travels.

And that brings us to another “poèt maudit”, namely Charles Baudelaire who in 1857 wrote a poem entitled “Le Voyage” in his most famous poetry book “Les Fleurs du Mal.” In pure Baudelairian arrogance, he described the “real travelers “/ (vrais voyageurs) as those who travel on the impulse for a journey but without a journey. Just for the sake of adventure. He wrote :

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent

Pour partir, cœurs légers, semblables aux ballons, 

De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent, 

Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours : Allons !

So, it is spontaneity that counts, even when we may not know why we take on the journey. For after all, it is a futile one. We never learn why we stay, why we go. We just realize that we have to go.

Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” seems to follow a similar pattern of self discovery.  Here are a few lines from his twenty five lines of alternate-rhymed alexandrines:

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré. Les aubes sont navrantes,

Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer.

L'acre amour m'a gonfle de torpeurs enivrantes.

Oh! que ma quille éclate ! Oh! que j’aille à la mer!

It is the futility of the journey that Rimbaud realises, just as Baudelaire did toward the end of his poem. From my high school days, I still recall these lines, although now I understand them better as my own boat, sober or drunken, has taken most of its journey.

And for my bilingual readers, here is a masterful translation of Rimbaud’s poem by Samuel Beckett. In fact, Beckett titled it “The Drunken Boat” and his translation is more of an interpretation than a literal translation:

But no more tears.

Dawns have broken my heart,

And every moon is torment, every sun bitterness;

I am bloated with the stagnant fumes of acrid loving –

May I split from stem to stern and founder, ah founder!

 

… As I wrote these lines, I recalled a photo I had taken in a small New England town in the North East of the United States. It was of a small boat that was in the middle of a forest…

So, we can ask “How did that boat get there?” but the answer would be simple – because someone dumped it there. Maybe it was taking in water; maybe the engine could not keep up with the journey.

But the real question, the one that Baudelaire and Rimbaud have been faced with would be “Why did that boat get there?”

Maybe one day I will know the answer.

 

December 10, 2020

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020