I have always written. When my mother passed, I found
tortured pieces of papers in paper bags that had lines from me going back to
the age of 7 years. These were written either in Armenian or in French. My mother had kept these for half a century. Why, I never
knew.
I have always written, but at some point I do not recall
some of what I had surrendered to paper and later, to electronic media. Until I
come across them in an unplanned way, or someone else does.
And that is what happened early this year. I received an
email from a reader of my blogs who, among other things, wrote:
“So, an encounter during an academic lecture takes a tangent
into discussing love and passion - a delightful write up. And I have to say
that your definition of passion is quite unique – takes the reader into an
unexpected simplicity about that emotional experience. Here is that line:
Passion is not
love. It runs away from the daily, it also runs away from tomorrow.
Passion has only the need for distances to eclipse in its own moment of
readiness.
A great way to start 2023!”
Since the reader had kindly provided the link to that post (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2013/06/baltic-amber.html
), I tried to refresh my memory.
It is a piece I wrote in 2006, I believe on a flight back
from Europe. I sat next to an Eastern European colleague during a conference
and somehow we both lost interest in the lecture and ended up talking about
literature, love and passion. The write
up reads like a diary, as I often wrote about unusual events to not forget the
details, hoping to use them later.
Since I had posted that write up in 2013, I assume that I
had found the lines I wrote on that plane years later, perhaps stuck in a book
or other papers I was carrying on that trip.
And they stayed as a diary note.
… Of course, the topic is as old as any human feeling that
still challenges us today. Somehow, I believe all of us deal with the conundrum
of love and passion at some point in our lives. Often, youth favors cherishing
passion as we recall decades later when love takes over and keeps us company
for much longer. At some turn, we also become more philosophical about these
feelings. We become almost Socratic searching in ourselves when Eros
turned to Agape; and when dependency taught us to celebrate the
simplicity of our expectations.
Since I have often mused about the continuum of passion,
love and dependency, I did a word search in my posts to see what else I had
forgotten about the evolution of my thinking.
Quite a few posts were identified from among the 341 I had
published on that blog.
One page, posted in 2015 caught my attention as I could see
an interesting progression in my search for a comfortable co-existence between love
and passion into my lifespan.
The discussion there was about how an old container would
care for new wine. It was very similar to the Socratic evolving view of
intimate feelings, as the progression from Eros
to Agape may depict. In fact, years
ago we used to discuss such changing appreciations of intimacy as “La Petite Mort of Desire” when passion
finds its own moment of readiness after an unsustainable climax and temporary loss of consciousness.
Here are a few lines from that posting https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/02/new-wine-in-old-bottle.html
addressing some of these topics:
… Interestingly,
“new wine in old bottle” is a conceptual transliteration of a parable found in
the New Testament. There are different versions of it, but the one in Matthew
9:17 reads:
“Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins;
otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are
ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
The wineskins were actually the entire skin of a
goat where the openings of the legs and tail were tightly sewn. The opening of
the neck was the “neck” of this container and the partially fermented wine was
poured in the opening at the neck then tied off securely. (Now I know where the
“neck” of a bottle came from!)
… So what to do with the wineskin and wine parable?
Can one resemble the wineskin to a person’s soul? A soul where love had already
fermented and given the passion, the ecstasies and their side-effects? So now
would it be wise to pour new love into this used, expanded to its limits, and
old soul? Would the “Tumultuous Stage” of a new love’s fermentation tear this
soul to parts?
In other words, and to stay conform to the original
parable, should one pour new wine in an old bottle?
Hmm.
So, I wrote back to the reader and ended my email reply with
this:
“Thank you for taking me back more than a decade through your
reading of my blog. During that period, I have realized that passion does not
eclipse through distances alone. But it does transform itself, quietly, into
the Agape phase. That seems to be its state of readiness and eventual harmony.”
January 3, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023
Addendum: Today, January 30th, I received an email from a reader who said that "Khalil Gibran wrote about reason and passion in The Prophet."
.. I read most of Gibran's work in Arabic when I was a teenager. I did not recall the passage on reason and passion in The Prophet so I did a search, and indeed, the reader is correct. The translated passage can be found on https://poets.org/poem/reason-and-passion
And that made me realise that perhaps we never forget our life experiences -- our brain somehow catalogues and compartimentalises them and, at the moment propice, fragments of our experiences resurface.
Here are the ending lines of Gibran's "On Reason and Passion"
Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white
poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields, and meadows—then let
your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”
And when the
storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning
proclaim the majesty of the sky,—then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in
passion.”
And since you are
a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in
reason and move in passion.
From The Prophet (Knopf, 1923).
