Kachi-Kachi Yama

 

 

 

There is rarely enough time

Except wasted time

Lost time

And time 

To forget 

 

Yet in secret gardens

Streams stay still

For the space of a flow

To let lonesome

Trout

Jump

 

While hands tremble

And names lose their faces

They become cherished time

Two arms moving

In an old clock

 

There is never enough silence

When the clock rewinds

After stopping its tempo

And reminds us

That old dogs sleep

 

To wake up again

In lost time

In stolen time

In the secret gardens

Of remembrance 

 

 

… There is sometimes enough time

For moments we missed

Even before they too left

For better times

Where names

 

Got new faces

 

December 22, 2023

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

The Girl with Green Eyes

 

I enjoy watching movies from the 1930s to the 1960s. Given my photography years exclusively in B&W, the technical aspects of these movies attract my curiosity because telling a story in B&W takes much more ingenuity than in colour – it affects our brain and not our eyes.

But these old movies most often also tackle psychological, human and philosophical topics that stay with us long after the screen shows “FIN” or “END” – the cheap thrills of fast car chases and violent behaviors never allured me.

So, a few days ago I discovered a 1964 British movie titled “The girl with green eyes”, based on a novel by Irish writer Edna O’Brien “The lonely girl”. My first reaction was “how does a B&W movie racont the behavior of green eyes?”

Therefore I decided to watch it.

Immediately I was attracted by the visual softness of the cinematography. Whatever British-made pellicule they used, it was noticeably different from American products used decades before the 1960s which are high in contrast and definition.  The Girl with Green Eyes had that comforting, fluid feeling even when capturing moments of love and deception.

A few minutes into the movie, and the genius of the cinematographer gave me yet another feeling – I was actually able to see green eyes in B&W! What a delight.

As for the story and plot, they tackle an age-old topic, that of a young woman falling in love with a man twice her age. She is also innocent and self-described as “unsophisticated”; he is a well known writer with a life baggage.  She finds ways for inviting him to have tea with her, and he eventually gets fascinated by her simplicity and inexperience. They even get married (informally of sorts) but the story ends as many such stories end – the initial attraction fades away for him, and she finds her own way (by going to night school) to meet other men.

… While I started watching the movie for the softness of the cinematography, I ended up with a comfort due to how the story was told. Both characters are candid about their feelings, their expectations and the void they tried to fill. There is no intrigue, no malice or dominance. It is a very fresh (and British!) display of the need for discovery – she about herself, and for him about re-discovering who he had been. It is a moment in time when two people “happen together” and discover that they did not belong to that moment as hoped. As such, it is a moment of selfishness, but without causing harm to each other. They just continue alone, knowing more about themselves.

 

It was a couple days later, when I was making my morning coffee that I knew how best to formulate why I liked that movie. It was not because I “saw” the green of her eyes in a B&W movie; it was not because there was no violence through the loss of passion; and it was not because the story ended with an unexpected twist.

No. It was because there was a soothing message to the viewer – that self-discovery, no matter how selfishly pursued at times, can be gentle and celebrated.

And, when the first sip of coffee cleared my mind, I recalled a line from Khalil Gibran:

The feelings we live through in love and in loneliness are simply, for us, what high tide and low tide are to the sea

And so it flows.

 

November 24, 2023

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Chanting a Daina

An owl flew low

Forgetting the quiet 

Her wings promised 

To the rabbit

And the first rain

Washed the dreamy eyes

Of the high desert

In the dark

Sunshine late today

Juniper tree berries

Now scented the air

As a woman does

Walking barefoot 

After a steam bath

And the owl flew passed

And the rabbit chanted a daina

For living through another sunrise

In the high desert

Wearing wet fur

November 19, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Love is So Short, Forgetting is So Long (Pablo Neruda)

 

And I walked

With my shoes taken

Away

In the day

Through the nights

And made

A path

 

Where secretly

Shadows found time

To rest alone

As I walked passed

By

 

A scarecrow

Hung the sun

Hung the moon

Upon its hat

For memories to fear

Remembering

What I should

Had

Forgotten

 

And I walked

Without my shoes

Secretly

So not to scare

The sun

The moon

Hanging upon

The shadow

Of the scarecrow

 

November 7, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

When Buildings Swirl Before Sunrise

 

It was a cold morning, a few hours ago. As usual the internal clock of my dog dictated that we go downtown before sunrise.

And in the dark, I saw a man struggling to walk. My dog recognized him and walked to greet him.

Over the years we have met this gentleman and his dog around the Court House. We have had a few conversations and our dogs socialized happily. This time he hardly looked at Ziggy but starred at me with an empty look when we got close.

“Good morning” I said, “I have not seen you for a long while. How are you?”

With that empty look, he replied “Do you really want to know?”

He looked unkept and his gait had changed.

“Let me sit down, everything is shifting around me.”

He slowly lowed himself and sat on the street curb.

“Everything is moving, shifting around me. This is the second time this happens to me. The tree trunks are moving, the buildings are not the same as I remember.”

So I sat next to him.

“I have Alzheimer’s and my balance is bad. It is a strange feeling when nothing is the same as it once was. You have noticed how difficult it is for me to walk now, yes?”

I nodded.

“Do you know if the Solid Rock is open? I need to eat something.”

He was asking about the kitchen where food is offered to homeless folks of the city.

“It is too early” I said. “Why don’t you sit down a little longer till they open.”

Ziggy was trying to get his attention, but he never looked at him.

“Time is shifting too. It now has an oval shape.”

… He looked like he had been on the street for a while. And he seemed lost yet his speech was fine and I could follow his rational and almost cohesive reasoning. I recalled that he was a professor once, and that we had shared discussion about poetry during our previous meetings.

“Should I call for assistance?” I asked.

“No, no need. I will figure things out. I am sure somewhere; someone knows what is happening to me. But I have no idea.”

Then he looked at me and drew a slight smile on his unshaved face.

“We will meet again on a better day,” he promised.

Photo taken with a Yashica Lynx 14e in Zagreb, Croatia

 

October 27, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

PS/ I have written about this gentleman here  https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2023/05/love-is-rider-who-breaks-us-all.html

Love is Stumbled on Through Loving

 

I did not feel like reading poetry this weekend. The world was not a loving place this week.

But I wanted to read. So I went to a French translation of Dante’s “La Divine Comédie” and started at the beginning with “L’enfer”.

But could not continue for long.

Then I recalled that the once forgotten English poet, William Blake, was also an engraver who was working on illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy as his last work before his death in 1827. So, I opted to read pages from Blake remembering a statement of him that had stayed with me during any creative process I spent my past 50 years in pursuit.

He said:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

Perception, consciousness and apprehension. Over the years, I have considered these dimensions as the three legs of the stool upon which an artist rest, and where a scientist aspires to distill all complex questions faced.

Yet, the doors of perception are often closed, locked tight, or turned opaque. But when cleansed or open, thinking that through these doors the infiniteness of everything can be experienced is perhaps what Béatrice showed to Dante after his descent to Inferno and passage through the terraces of Purgatorio.

So, I leafed through some of Blake’s poem. To my delight, given my initial inclination to read Dante, I found a poem I had not read before entitled “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. At first lecture, it seems an abstract poem or series of thoughts. Until one gets to the line

“Roses are planted where thorns grow”

I stopped for a while thinking about that line. Was Blake looking though the cleansed doors of perception? Or was he lamenting upon human nature?

Perhaps the answer is in the following stanzas:

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

These almost sound like what Virgil could have said to Dante during his descent to hell. And secretively, I found the short poem by Blake more to the point, faster. How delightful was his choice of the poem’s title!

 ... I did not feel like reading poetry this weekend, but I did. Perhaps in hope of that infinite Blake was urging us to discover.

October 15, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Arizona High Desert Morning

 

Bent and broken

The morning driped its dew

Upon dirt and over the rays

Ready for another cactus to flower

 

And creosote filled the air

With the smell of rain

While sage brush painted the sound

Of a damp desert silent in morning dew

 

Bent and now bright

The high desert will soon offer shade

To rabbit, hare and rattle snake

Under the wings of owls and hawks

 

And I sit alone

Next to thornless honey mesquite 

Searching for my soul

Grateful and in peace

 

Bent and dreamfull

 

October 5, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Roses, the Circle of Life, and the Circle of Love

 

It is gently raining this morning and while my dog was walking me, I enjoyed the sight of rain droplets on the roses. At first sight I recalled Khalil Gebran’s lines about friendship from “The Prophet”:

 

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed

 

Then, as we walked are daily mile in the streets of the town, out of nowhere, a poem by Pierre de Ronsard took over my memories. This poem, written in the 1500^th, was among my favorites in French literature class in high school days. I knew this poem by heart, like many others but I had not thought about it for more than half a century! Slowly, some of the lines came back, and to the bewilderment of my dog, I started reciting them aloud.

 

Back home, I shook the dampness off my hat and searched for the poem. Here are the opening lines, in old French, of  “Mignonne, allons voir si la rose” and a good English translation:

 

Mignonne, allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au Soleil,
A point perdu ceste vesprée
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vostre pareil.

Las ! voyez comme en peu d’espace,
Mignonne, elle a dessus la place
Las ! las ses beautez laissé cheoir !
Ô vrayment marastre Nature,
Puis qu’une telle fleur ne dure
Que du matin jusques au soir !

 

Sweetheart, let’s see if the rose
Who this morning unfurled
Her dress of crimson to the sun,
Has lost at evening
The folds of her crimson dress,
And her color at the same rate.

Alas! See how in a little bit of space,
Sweetheart, she has the place.
Alas! Weary of its beauties she let fall!
Oh, truly cruel Mother Nature,
That such a flower doesn’t last
From morning to evening!

 

It is about beauty and the passage of time. It is about our willingness to appreciate the circle of love, the circle of life, while finding beauty along the way.

And as I sipped on my morning coffee, lines from the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca found their way in this unexpected expedition in memory. Indeed, it was in his writings that I first learned how often poets have talked about their refuge, and perhaps liberation, in self love when love, like roses, has transcended others and experiences.

 

He wrote:

 

After a while

you learn the subtle difference

between holding a hand

and chaining a soul.

 

Every time I think of those lines, at various stages of my life, I interpret the last line differently. Is it the soul of the one we love? Or the soul of those we loved? Or is it our own soul?

 

No matter. Lorca has experienced all three of those interpretations, and here are lovely lines from one of my favorite poems of his “Serenata”

  

Por las orillas del río

se está la noche mojando

y en los pechos de Lolita

se mueren de amor los ramos.

 

Se mueren de amor los ramos.

 

La noche canta desnuda

sobre los puentes de marzo.

Lolita lava su cuerpo

con agua salobre y nardos.

 

Se mueren de amor los ramos.

 

La noche de anís y plata

relumbra por los tejados.

Plata de arroyos y espejos.

Anís de tus muslos blancos.

 

Se mueren de amor los ramos.

 

And the translation :

The night soaks itself
along the shore of the river
and in Lolita's breasts
the branches die of love.

The branches die of love.

Naked the night sings
above the bridges of March.
Lolita bathes her body
with salt water and roses.

The branches die of love.

The night of anise and silver
shines over the rooftops.
Silver of streams and mirrors
Anise of your white thighs.

The branches die of love.

 

… Roses again. And I looked for a photo I had taken where roses, the circle of love and youth found their way through my camera’s lens.

 

September 23, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

A Man’s Heart Tells Us How He Lived, Sometimes How He died. But Rarely How He Loved (Dr. Mallard, NCIS)

 

There is a common saying among pathologists that “a heart on the steel bed tells you how you lived and sometimes how you died”. The quote from Dr. Mallard (aka Ducky) in the TV series NCIS took it a step further merging medicine with poetry.

There is no other human organ more intimately associated with feelings and love than the heart. My all time favorite remains the myth of vena amoris about which I have written here https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2022/04/vena-amoris-does-it-matter-if-it-does.html . We all adhere to that myth, often unknowingly, when we adorn our ring finger with a band, because our heart had skipped a beat.

A healthy heart in medicine is one that beats in perfect cadence. A loving heart is the one that misses a beat.  The heart of a lover is the one that races, stops to recover, and races again.

When reading poetry in the English language, I often return to the simple lines William Wordsworth wrote about the heart and the way of life celebrating the heart in “My Heart Leaps Up”.

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

 

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

 

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

 

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

Medicine, poetry and the heart. What we see and what we hear tell us little of who we are.

 

September 17, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

PS/ on my painting and sculpture blog (https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2017/10/vahes-ark-vessel-of-eclectic-modes-of.html), I have often explored human expressions where the heart was dictating what we observe. Inspired by the myths and artistic expressions from the Southwest, often unconsciously, my paintings end up touching feelings poets attribute to that organ when missing a beat, while pathologists only examine when that missed beat never recovers.

Here is an example, as I put shapes and colours in harmony to learn about our hearts https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2022/01/clodomira-spirit-of-prickly-pear-cactus.html

 

 

Harmony is Not Lack of Conflict or Difference in Appearance

 

 

“So, how does it feel to be in nature away from airports and crowded cities?”

An early morning email from an old friend from England required a second cup of coffee for a reply.

… We met decades ago as healthcare professionals. Soon, we discovered that our interests went far beyond medicine and public health. Wherever our paths crossed around Asia and Europe, we made time for discussing physics, philosophy and poetry. And we remained grateful for the Internet to keep our chats alive when we physically could not meet.

“Physics is the purest approach to understand harmony” he once wrote. “It brings often conflicting concepts under a humble tent where they achieve harmony.”

Indeed, in a funny way, I think of poetry as similar to physics – the art of finding the essence with grace and parsimony.

 

“It feels great to be in nature” I wrote back. “One never feels alone or lonely there as in airports and hotel rooms.”

“Have you read “Tinter Abbey” a poem by William Wordsworth?” he asked.

I did not know the name.

“Not surprising, he wrote it in 1798” my friend wrote back with a smiling emoji attached. “It is a classic for those of us who like the pre-romantic era of English poetry.  I will send it to you, read the second paragraph – you will see that you are not the only one who prefers nature to lonely rooms and busy cities.”

 

Here are the lines he highlighted:

 

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart

 

… 1798! And say that even then busy towns and cities made poets think about nature, perhaps while sitting in lonely rooms. Lovely!

And I replied

“You know, harmony and poetry were existential processes for Confucius. You remember the Confucius Temple we visited together in Tainan, Taiwan?”

“I remember every temple we visited together, or alone” were his parting words, this time with a “photo” of Descartes at the end.

 

.. Somehow this discussion reminded me of a photo I had taken. And of the writing on a cardboard between the seemingly different cars.

 

August 19, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Dancing Through Drops of Rain

 

 

When days were sunny

For all around you

 

Smiling through drops of tears

When brown eyes promised

Morning arias

But Fado at sunset

 

Walking that quiet walk

Of no return

Upon fallen leaves

And broken wings

 

And with the last train

Remembering the first station

The dance between drops of rain

 

And keep walking

That quiet walk

In gratitude

 

August 12, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Part of the joy of Dancing is Conversation. Trouble is, Some Men Can't Talk and Dance at the Same Time." - Ginger Rogers

 

 

Night trains

And the goodbye dance

 

Promises

No one believes

 

Just a few steps

In silence before the whistle

 

Night trains

And the farewell

Lonely

Walk

 

July 14, 2023

© Vahé Kazandian, 2023

Stony Wall

 

 

If I left

My cup still full

It was because

I kept my lips

Upon its rim

For a while

 

If I left

My words silent

I kept them as a poem

On the pages

Of time

For all

Times

 

If I left

I kept of my stay

The reason why

All fires 

Become dormant

But their amber

Remains

 

July 4, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Stream of Consciousness: From Psychology to Philosophy and the Arts

 

 

It is the 4^th of July weekend, and there are gatherings all around town. A friend invited me to meet his neighbors over food and celebration.

Since I did not know most of the attendees, he introduced me as “a man who has criss-crossed the continents and lived in more than half a dozen countries.” And soon I was asked “where did you live for the longest time?”

Having been asked this question before, I knew there was no good way of avoiding further questions, no matter what my answer was. So I tried a new approach:

“I have inhabited my own self all my life”

And to my surprise, everyone was a bit puzzled, did not follow-up on my response, and we went on to talk about what we do in the High Desert of Arizona.

On the way back, I wondered why I chose the answer I gave. After all, don’t we all “inhabit our own selves”? Or do we?

 

To my delight, this simple moment made me think of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdock (1919-1999) and her writings about the arts and love. Most à propos to my thinking about the “self” was her definition of love (and the arts) as the act of “unselfing”.

So, I took my dog for a walk then sat down to read some of her essays and refresh my memory.

… I learned about “stream of consciousness” through a psychology class when Alexander Bain, the Scottish philosopher, was introduced. He cornered the term in 1855 almost four decades before William James, the father of American Psychology, used Bain’s definition to describe how we organize the stream of thoughts when we are aware (conscious) of these thoughts.

Years later, I discovered that Virginia Woolf had pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative mode to depict the plethora of thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of a narrator.  In the process of learning more about the use of a unifying concept in psychology and literature I was surprised to that “stream of consciousness” was not first proposed by Bain, nor James, but by Daniel Oliver, a physician and academic from New England, in 1835 in First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine. He wrote:

If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas”

Finally, it was through my readings about Virginia Woolf that I learned about Iris Murdoch, and through analysis of my own stream of consciousness, realised how her describing beauty and art as “an occasion for unselfing” and love as the act of unselfing, had influenced my behavior as a health care professional and an artist.

 

… So, should I have responded to the question “where did you live for the longest time?” by “I inhabited my own self all my life, yet my most glorious memories are those when I unselfed”?

I will try that next time the opportunity presents.

 

July 1, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

PS/ I took this street photo in Paris. It is one that I have not published given its poor quality, but somehow I felt it now fits well with the concept of “stream of consciousness.”