Show Some Mercy to this Chair Which Has Stretched Out its Arms to You for So Long; Please Satisfy its Desire to Embrace You! (Molière)

 

It has been a massive storm now covering Northern Arizona’s high country where mountain ranges of the high desert go from 5,000 feet altitude to close to 7,000 feet. Almost 3 feet of snow fell in the past 24 hours transforming the desert topography to Nordic scenery.

I was not sure what to expect so in optimism and anticipation, I loaded my 1970s Soviet Salyut medium format camera with B&W film. Unfortunately the sun has been covered for two days now and, if I carry the 4 pound monster camera outside, the 25 mile/hour winds would fill my old “light box” with snow in a minute!

So, I was watching the storm from a window overlooking the balcony. One of the rocking chairs started to be filled with snow and stopped rocking alone at the wind.

My immediate reaction was that it was a sad chair. Lonesome and cold.

And that, somehow, reminded me of a poem by Jane Hirshfield titled “Chair in Snow” I had read many years ago online. Then, I had thought it was a tangible metaphor most people would identify with except perhaps the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert!

So, I found that poem online⁽¹⁾ and read it again.

 

…“and yet a chair in snow is always sad

 

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

a chair is shaped for just one thing”

 

I stopped for a minute. What was that “one thing” for me?

Clearly a chair is for humans, although cats and dogs often make a chair their own. A chair is shaped in many ways, some inviting like a dulcet bed, others requiring uncomfortable acrobatics to use. But the purpose is often the same – to settle for a moment.

However, not everyone can settle down or in. My favorite summary of this character trait is by André Gide, Nobel Prize 1947:

Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.

And leave he did. He left norms and some literary traditions behind to become the most famous French writer in the 1930s and 40s. In his words:

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.".

So, a chair has to be matched to a person's character. A true character I recall from the sports world, cricket more specifically, was the New Zealander Glenn Turner. He put it simply:

"Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do but it gets you nowhere”

Of course, all Turner thought about while playing cricket was to hit the ball and run between the wickets to make it to the other end without a fielder hitting the wickets with that ball. He did not seem to have been the type to worry too much – just run.

…I looked at the chair again. The storm had dumped (or the wind had moved around) much more snow leaving only half of the rocking chair visible. At this point it seemed that snow was sitting in the chair with a "snow arm" on the left arm of the chair.  It was a strange sight and I took a couple of photos with the Salyut.

Why?

Why would one take a photo of a chair “filled” with snow?

Perhaps because of what Andy Warhol once typically said:

“You would not believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair, especially if it matches the colour of their curtains”

Ha!

So, after my own musing about Hirshfield’s idea as to that one thing a chair is shaped for, I continued reading her poem:

 

… “to hold

a soul its quick and few bendable

hours

 

perhaps a king

 

not to hold snow

not to hold flowers”

 

… My chair was now holding snow, and letting the wind blow parts of it away. The snow made my chair happy; its sadness seemed to fly away with the cold wind.

I thought it was a good thing to happen to a lonesome rocking chair. And it made me smile on this gloomy day. Maybe even made me happy like Albert Einstein suggested:

 

“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?”

Nothing really. Or perhaps a warm blanket for a good night's rest in that chair.

January 25, 2021

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

 

⁽¹⁾https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/a-chair-in-snow-poem-by-jane-hirshfield/

When a Dog Knows What We Hide from Ourselves

 

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

                  Pablo Neruda

For the past 45 years, I always found myself at the other end of a leash.  The five dogs that walked me every morning during these days were bitches, studs and sires, and every one of them was the master of passing moments.

I am with my last dog now. He is heavy, strong and big. He can drag me into the brush if he sees a deer or a wild pig. Sometimes I think I can ride him like a pony when tired of the daily long miles of walk. But I let him take me home, at his own pace, pulling on the leash.

He is my last dog because I do not see myself with a small dog. I do not see me carry a dog in my lap when going to a restaurant or a store. My dogs have all been strong but careful with their strength. They all snored at night at the end of their lives. Some snored even as a puppy.

I have trusted my dogs to decide first who is friend or foe. They somehow, in a split second, decided who was good for me. And they were never wrong.

… It is a snowy day and he is all joy. All joyful. His large paws, wide open to run in the snow, have already marked all the pristine snow covers of this morning. He will soon get tired and sleep by the fireplace.

He may even snore and not hear the coyotes howling outside.

He is my last dog, and I already know I will not learn how to walk with a leash alone if he goes first.

 

January 23, 2021

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

The Balcony that Wasn’t – the Pandemic that Still Is

 

A year already – we are still in the grips of the coronavirus at every corner of the world.

Those of us, who will make it through, will be the raconteurs of a time when the planet got confused in the midst of all the advances in medicine and public health. Poets will write words to inspire, journalists stories from here and there, and cinematographers will give free flight to their imagination by patchworking stories till the end of time.

But for each one of us, there will be a special moment we will keep in us till our last breath. Perhaps it is the moment our loved one entered the hospital and never came out again. Perhaps it is how all relationships suddenly became virtual and deprived us of a touch or a kiss. Or perhaps it is how we celebrated the end of 2020, alone or with one other person, reading the pandemic statistics on the TV screen.

Yes, there are a million ways to letting 2020 and the pandemic permanently scar our memories.

… For me, it is the soo Italian behavior in Rome after the mayor Virginia Raggi invited city residents in lockdown to open their windows or step out onto their balconies for a singsong, at 18.00 every evening!

I had tears in my eyes every day following that first “balcony outing” when news from Italy showed the national anthem sang first from windows, balconies and rooftops in a Rome with empty streets and no traffic. There also were violin serenades, opera arias, or the clanging of pots and pans to demonstrate that coronavirus cannot stop the celebration of dolce vita. But that rather it can enhance the national gratitude, as throughout the country, people in windows, upon balconies or on rooftops every evening applauded medical professionals for their fight and dedication.

For me, that is what I will hang on to support my optimism in human nature and collective destiny.

… In many ways, 2020 has been a tug-and-pull between what we want and what the new situation tells us to accept. Namely that what we need to minimize or eliminate is exposure: to the virus and carriers, to unfounded opinions about how we can evade a pandemic, and to our own fears about helplessness.

Interestingly, when I followed the “balcony outings” in Italy a few synapses were made with my previous life as an epidemiologist.  Indeed, I recalled that as a student learning cancer epidemiology, I was most interested in the work of Bernadino Ramazzini who in 1713 identified the risk of breast cancer in women to nulliparity. He reported that women who had no children had higher odds for developing breast cancer than women who were single and nuns. He stated that parity and risk of breast cancer establishes “this marvelous sympathy of the breasts and uterus, those two sources of desire.”

It took almost a century for the Italian surgeon Domenico Rigoni-Stern in 1842 to analyse mortality data from death registers in Verona to confirm Ramazzini’s proposed association between parity and breast cancer, but in the process discovers an inverse relationship between uterine cancer and parity. That is, breast cancer patients had lower odds for uterine cancer i.e., nuns and unmarried women had lower risk of dying from uterine cancer.

If parity (or marriage and children) are the “exposure” that would provide protection against the odds of breast cancer.  But that there may be another cause for uterine cancer – hence the early suggestion of infectious diseases.

For me, the challenge of 2020 was convincing people that there are exposures that can be minimized or eliminated to win the fight against an infectious causative agent. The challenge remains.

My second synaptic cleft in between the balconies of Rome and the pandemic came after thinking about Verona and Domenico Rigoni-Stern. This time it sounded like:

          O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

Strange, no?

Well, the reason why I thought about this has to do with Juliette’s balcony from where these immortal words were spoken.

But now, in the year 2020, this balcony was a symbol of unfounded and untrue “knowledge” that I believed we needed to minimize exposing ourselves to during this pandemic.

Why?

Well, Shakespeare never described a balcony. Rather he wrote that Juliet “appears in a window above”.

Hmm, so why do we think that Juliet was on a balcony? Well, because on via Cappello in Verona, there is a 13^th century house called “Casa di Giulietta”.  And it has a balcony that is not original.

So where did the balcony come from?

This is where Hollywood enters the scene. In 1935, George Cukor initiated the production of the first Romeo and Juliet movie starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in the title roles.  The MGM  scenographers were sent to Verona to design the set for the film.

Well, there was no “Juliet house” in Verona nor her tomb as Shakespeare had described! So, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and minister for press and propaganda, helped MGM recreate a balcony on that 13^th century house in the heart of Verona in 1937.

And that is what people believe Shakespeare wrote.

So, the entire story about the house is untrue – Juliet never lived there! But more importantly, Juliet is a fictional character – she never existed. Shakespeare wrote his famous play based on a 1562 poem entitled” The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who in turn is said to have been influenced from a tale written by the Italian monk Matteo Bandello in 1554….

There we have it – millions of tourist flock to Verona to visit la Casa di Giulietta and touch the bronze statue of hers in the yard.  Even if it is all fiction and Hollywood!

… It is 2021 already. We do need to believe in Romeos and Juliets because it makes the challenges we have easier to cope with.

But we also need to realize that balconies, even when real, are part of a building.

January 18, 2021

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021