I may find again
The promise and the calm
We once thought
As a stormy story
It was an old
story
Yet poetry and ordinary
And lonesome walks
In smoky train stations
And, like after an August rain
Waves left the mossy rocks
And the beach dried in the sun
Still touching the bluest sea
And I found, in that respite,
The promise to walk on unmoon nights
Without leaving shadows behind
And it became my road
My way
September 8, 2024
Just before sunrise, when I was
walking my dog in a narrow street, I came face to face with Pietro Calvi’s
Othello. It was a bit surreal, and I blamed the vision to the weak coffee I had
brewed.
But it was real. There it was, outside
the house, on the concrete, Othello’s bust that made Calvi famous in 1870. It was homage
by Calvi to the African American actor Ira Aldridge, the first Black actor to
play Othello in England in 1825.
There were ten versions of the
marble and bronze bust and I had seen one of them in the Walters Art Museum in
Baltimore. Now, I was facing a plaster duplica, left on the ground, in
Prescott, Arizona. It was beautifully done though, although the desert weather
had taken its toll. But Desdemona’s handkerchief was there, so was the single
tear on Othello’s face.
I took a quick picture and I move
on. My dog did not seem to appreciate Shakespeare interfering with his morning
walk.
A mile or so in to the walk,
somehow, I thought of Leonard Cohen. Perhaps it was the tortured soul of Othello;
or the influence L. Cohen’s poetry has had on my youth. It was a fond memory,
and I did not mind letting my dog extend his morning promenade longer than
usual.
… It was 1976 and I was a college
student in Montreal. We were francophone then, but L. Cohen was already a rebel
troubadour for my generation. I recall going to one of his concerts in
Vancouver, even though we did not understand all his words – but we did
associate with his persona and outlook.
The last time I saw L. Cohen was in
2009, at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia Maryland. He was an old man
now, and it was one of his last concerts. Now his voice had given way to all
the wisdom his life had allowed him to keep.
For me, it was like turning the last
page of a book, knowing the ending, but still hoping for a surprise.
When I came back home and fed my
dog, I brewed a stronger pot of coffee and let my experience and feelings of
the morning walk find their war in and into words.
Here is what came out – not surprisingly
Cohenesque lines within that single tear on Othello’s face:
Life
is designed to overthrow you
While
you write to clear your mind
About
what can be
On
blank paper that once was a proud tree
And
it wasn't an offering
But
was offered, anyhow
And
your words
Looked
like a wooden bowl
Tasting
of honey
And
your song sounded like a newborn
Learning
from you
About
you
Knowing
he will become you
One
day
After
his first heartbreak
Life
is designed to overthrow you
Even
when you're at the foothills
Of
where sunsets burn the clouds
To
shade names
And
bathe sad brown eyes
In
offering
August 17, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
Around the bend
There were naked trees
Letting the breeze through
Shading their own roots
In snow and
Greeting lonesome souls
But I walked by
To follow the road
And when I reached the meadows
Where in rocks I once covered
A name I had given
To those I had not yet met
I looked back.
The road was following me
July 21, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
The summer heat has settled upon Arizona’s desert,
and I have to minimize my outdoor activities for a short while. My dog agrees, and takes only two long walks these days – one before sunrise, and another two
hours after sunset.
So, this morning I found refuge in thoughts
especially about seas and lakes.
The Mediterranean, the bluest of seas, shaped my
youth. As an adult I have traveled on and around all the oceans of our planet
and countless lakes. Yet, when I think of the Mediterranean, the origin of the
Greek words nostos and algos always come to mind. The western
combination of these words is nostalgia, translated as “acute homesickness”, or
returning home (nostos) and pain (algos).
As a healthcare professional, I spent many years in
Italy, especially Bari, Bologna and Ferrara. At the University of Bologna I
learned about Giovanni Pascoli, a 19th century poet and homme des letters.
His poetry was a celebration of the quotidian, written simply but with a touch
of mysticism. One of his poems, title “Mare”
(Sea) is a classic.
I had not read that poem for decades, and this
morning’s nostalgia lead me to a search for “Mare”.
I found a lovely literary blog site by Matilda
Colarossi, a writer who translates in English classic and modern fiction Italian
works. Her translation of Pascoli’s “Mare”
is beautifully done and can be found via this link: https://paralleltexts.blog/2022/06/08/giovanni-pascoli-mare-sea/
Here is the
poem, in its original language and the translation to English by Colarossi:
|
Mare
|
Sea |
Celebrating the daily moments many of us take for
granted or find ordinary has been the impetus of the expression genres I have pursued
in the past half a century. As a photographer, I have looked for stories in
streets of four continents, and captured them in B&W. My first book was a
novella, and the half a dozen that followed were travel stories about people
and places. My poetry was published in anthologies and British medical journals
always dealing with people’s attitudes to the basic joys, fears and hopes, no
matter their cultural inheritance, language they spoke or history they never
forget.
As such, it has always been about “returning home”,
the pain of that return never shadowing the joy of each return. It has been
about nostalgia, which I have renamed as “The
Salmon Syndrome” – we return home to give a chance for the next generations
to return home, at their own time, for one last time.
Back to Pascoli’s poem.
The first stanza’s imagery is elegant yet simple. We all have experienced the waves and stars
when near a sea. What breaks that usual scenery is poet’s description of the
sea suddenly sighing, winds exhaling and the waters acquiring a human
expression. And, there is the mysticism – a silver bridge appears out of that
transformation. More, that bridge is not only in or above the sea, but the poet
has also seen it over “silent lakes”, bodies of water that perhaps do not sigh,
and winds do not exhale. And Pascoli suggests that silver bridges are made for
lakes, even when he sees one in the sea.
Those four short lines make us think. Not about the
poet, but about ourselves. Where do these bridges lead? Is the sea, home of
rivers, also home of lakes? Are those bridges even more transcendent as paths
to our own consciousness? Do they make us homesick, be that of a terrestrial or
a mystic home?
… And, I recalled a moment in Trento, next to Lago
Di Caldonazzo, with a friend. We looked at the calm lake but somehow she
thought of bridges too, and used a charming Italian saying to bring her own
thoughtful mysticism to the apparent serenity surrounding us:
“Ma, l’aqua cheta la butta giú I ponti” –
our best bridges can be destroyed by calm waters.
I wrote about that moment here: https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2023/04/i-muri-hanno-orecchi-ma-aqua-in-bocca.html
I am glad it is 102F degrees outside and that my dog
is snoring under my desk as I write. It was a refreshing, memories journey back to
Bologna and re-reading Pascoli’s “Mare”.
PS/ The photo of the bridge is one I took in Paris,
over the Seine. The man on the river wall is pensive. The bridge is not made of silver. And the ducks are listening to the water sigh.
July 4, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
Metamorphosis. Every artist dreams of transforming a sheep skin, a papyrus, a stone or a petrified drift wood into a story to share. And in the process, to become what she or he always was.
… The heat is back to the desert and I found a cool corner to think, with my dog gently snoring under my desk.
And I recalled how for decades, at medical and public health conferences, I was introduced as a “storyteller” not a man who may have ideas about epidemics and human behaviour. Or human behaviour and epidemics. In a way, I had become who I always was – one who observes and finds a story to tell. By writing, photography, or mixing colours on whatever I could find to call a canvas.
Telling a story goes beyond reporting, though. It is a search that involves those shaping that story. It is how we transform a casual observation into becoming personal, for each reader or listener. In that sense, an artist is a chemist, mixing substances and elements in search of that transformation into a new one.
Interestingly, the oldest definition of chemistry is “Al Chemia” in Arabic, and the Western term Alchemy derived from it but took on a new meaning vis à vis the scientific patina of chemistry. Alchemy became that search for transforming lead to gold; common materials to precious ones; and, the analysis of the inner flow as secrets rivers run in each one of us.
It became synonymous with the obstinate search of the Philosopher’s Stone, a term cornered by a French bookseller in 1382.
And the world rediscovered the Greek word for changing shape from metamorphoum to metamorphösis and became the Latin equivalent of transformation. Centuries later, using the observation of a moth becoming a butterfly, social and clinical psychoanalysis was born when Jung and Freud found their way to tell a story based on the behaviour of those they observed.
… As a health care professional, I visualised psychoanalysis as a psychiatrist, holding a fishing rod, casting into those inner secrets rivers. A simple image yet a comforting one. Not in that the fisherman was allowed to have access to our secret rivers, but because of the fact that we all have those rivers.
However, and over time, I learned to wonder if those rivers know (or knew) where to flow. If the butterfly still has the moth in it. Hence if we just see a transformation in shape but not in nature and identity. In other words, that we discover the Philosopher’s Stone only when we realise that lead will remain lead even if we can transform its appearance to a shiny yellow.
In a less grandiose way, I came to believe that the Philosopher’s Stone can be bone, metal, cloud or water. That the wisdom we may discover in telling the story of our search, the alchemy of our own intellectual or emotional metamorphosis is in celebrating the heritage of the moth.
… The heat is back to the desert and my dog is snoring under my desk.
June 15, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
When you wipe
Dry eyes
With scar
Tissue
Or with
Hands
Of the days
Scorched
You do not
See
The smile
Waiting
But you
Hear
The
Train
June 9, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
They say
There are three
Types of secrets
Those we hide from
Ourselves
Those we hide from
Others
And secrets that
Make you
Forget
Even when
You still wish
To remember
May 25, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
If you think about a place
A thought you never shared
You become that thought
You become that place
And if you stay in that place
You become the space
Where no one wants to
Find you
But if you stay
As short as a passing thought
The place leaves you
Behind
Or holds you tight
If you decide
To share
May 15, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
“It is about simplicity and dualism, not minimalism.”
It was an email from an old friend with whom I periodically
connect to see how we have evolved over the years in our mutual exploration of
the arts role in healing.
“And eventually it is that celebration of beauty as our body
wrinkles and beauty fills in.”
… More than a decade ago she asked me to read Roger Scruton’s
“Beauty: a Very Short Introduction” a
book where the renowned philosopher explored what makes an object beautiful in
the arts, in people and in nature. And then I read his book “The soul of the World” that helped me
understand my own, till then unformulated, quest of expression in photography.
It was his concept of “cognitive dualism” that continues to guide my
photography, along with appreciation of the arts, in a structured way.
“We have a long way since our biology and chemistry labs” I
replied.
“Yes, but we are not there yet, are we?” she noted.” Melpomene
and Thalia have shaped both of our philosophies – you look at the world through
antique cameras and print in B&W; and I look at suffering through others’ hoping
eyes. But we both end up celebrating the beauty we encounter through our
explorations.”
… Melpomene and Thalia, the daughters of Zeus represented in
the tragedy and comedy masks of ancient Greek theater. An early form of dualism where the human
condition is distilled to two masks, two philosophies of existence.
When we ended our email chat, I sat in my rocking chair and
recalled some of Scruton’s formulation of cognitive dualism beauty.
The human condition, the theatre masks of ancient Greece,
found their way in my thoughts and lead to the concept of cognitive dualism
where Scruton proposed that a human is both a physical organism and construct,
but also a subjective entity where realities beyond physical sciences find safe
harbor. It is a transcendence of sorts between that tangible and the intangible
that defines a human and, as my friend said, our relationship with the arts and
beauty. Thus, it is not a dualism in the sense of duality, but as a separation
of two dimensions that co-exist in us.
And that is why I found the concept of cognitive dualism more
than a philosophical formulation, but a guiding blueprint for both the pursuit
of expression by an artist, and a necessary attribute in those who interpret
the product of the artist.
…At this point, I became curios how, consciously or unconsciously,
I had incorporates what I understood as the difference between duality and
dualism. So, I took a visit to my prints.
A.
The photo atop this essay incorporates my attraction
to vintage lenses and the character they give due to the optics technology more
than half a century ago. I used a 1950s Zeiss Biotar 58 mm f2.8 focusing on the
dogs. The background is delightfully creamy and dreamy, letting the viewer
seamlessly go from the tangible to the intangible.
B. The kiss in New York’s Times Square was not posed – I did not know the couple. I just happened to be walking around with my Mamiya 645. Two humans sharing an intimate moment surrounded by other expressions of art.
C.
The concert poster in Vienna was just a poster
until I shapes the environment through curved lines via a Soviet Salyut S
camera and the lovely Arsat 30mm lens. Now, it is a conversation in a context
that is not realistic. Two generations of women making us wonder about the intangible.
The dualism here could be said to be ontological rather than cognitive.
D. This early morning discussion was near the Cathedral in Ferrara, Italy. Again captured in medium format, the moment is fluid as two subjective people converse and almost invites us to ear drop.
Always in Ferrara, on a different visit. It was an unreal moment as a man, dressed as a woman, holding a plastic doll, was begging for money. It was apparent that he was a man and the baby was not real, yet a man holding a kid approached to give money. As I was waiting to complete the scene, a young boy walked into my viewfinder frame with a puzzled look: was the man a woman? Was the baby real? It is the joy of street photography to witness such impromptu stories unfold, and lucky if you can press the camera shutter knob to capture that moment.
F.
A similar moment from Taipei, Taiwan. This is a
night shot without flash (I never use flash, just slow speeds and fast lenses)
into a store selling Asian clothing. I was intrigued by the fact that the
mannequins looked more western than Asian. Just as I was to take a photo with
my 1969 Nikon F, the salesperson walking into the frame. She too looked more
western than I expected – almost resembling the mannequins! The photo is one,
at least for me, that gives the viewer a temporary sense of direction, context
and challenges the expectations we might have had. As such it challenges our
cognitive faculties.
G. I wanted to take this photo because of the body
language these young lovers displayed on the boardwalk around Baltimore Harbor.
It was a moment, a posture, and expectations most humans have experienced. More
importantly, the moment was not subjective/personal to this couple, but
universal. For that reason and to respect their identity, I blurred their faces
by dodging while printing the photo under my darkroom enlarger.
H. Finally, a calm moment in the Baltimore harbor
where two military ships took a respite. This photo makes me think of times
when we look into our own selves, in stormy days, knowing that we were, like
ships, not made for safe harbors. It is that call of discovery that makes any
dualism so essential, cognitive or not.
May 5, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
It is Sunday, my personal time to wander without walking; to travel through lines others have thought about first.
Usually, Sundays are my time to read poetry. And as I was
thinking about wandering and traveling, I revisited the lines by the Spanish
poet Antonio Machado (1875- 1939) from his collection Proverbios y Cantares
(Proverbs and Songs.) The most remembered and celebrated lines from
that collection are Machado’s dialogue with the reader about identity and
destiny. It is a symbolic poem where the poet believes that we all make our
paths by walking through life, hence that we have control of our choices. In a
few short lines the poet makes the reader empowered and optimistic.
Here is the original poem in Spanish:
“Caminante, son
tus huellas
El camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
Se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
Y al volver la vista atrás
Se ve la senda que nunca
Se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
Sino estelas en la mar.”
There are a number of translations I have read into English. Unfortunately the translators often are tempted to also “interpret” the original work’s intent. A representative of that temptation is a translation by Willis Barnstone in 2004, which incorporates a number of interpretations that would differ across and among readers of Merchado’s original choice of words, imagery and philosophy.
Here is the translation, which I do like, but I remain uncomfortable with a few words:
Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.
Huellas directly translates into “Footprints” rather than “Footsteps.” And that is important because if indeed we make the road by walking, and if we are to able to look back and see the path we made, then we should have left signs of our passage. Or prints. Even if we will not take that path again.
Interestingly, Machado’s last two lines leave us perplexed regarding our ability of looking back AND seeing that path. Because now he suggests that the road we created by walking is like a trail left by a boat on the sea which disappears with the waves.
It reads:
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar
A direct translation of “estelas” would be “trails” not “foam trails” as in the English translation. This is where the interpretation of the translator feels like interference. Perhaps “wake trails” are a better interpretation of Merchado’s message regarding the vanishing of the past.
Finally, every time I have read this poem in Spanish, I got the sense that it is about a traveler rather than a walker, although Caminante translates as Walker. To me, it is more about our travel in life, through choices we make that define our identity.
.. In my walks, I might have made a road or two. And I have looked back, without regret yet sometimes with nostalgia. And when I sit in my rocking chair and try to understand, I still believe that ships do not lose their wake trails in the sea, because trails made by cutting waves find their way back to beaches they know, to the mossy rocks that await them.
Wake trails do not disappear.
April 14, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
A dream-weaver
Covered her shade
Where salt brush bloom
In the space
Of her passage
Shuffling through the sand
She reached the Ghaf tree
Where
She left last night's dream
Unfinished
In that dream she wove
The cadence of white camel herds
Like a Nabati poem
She had learned
Many rains ago
And now the day’s shade
Covered the dream-weaver’s hands
Holding on without regret
Letting go without a sound
The echo unspoken words
Bounce in the desert
April 5, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
It was a quiet thought
Like the shadow August moons
Keep under the broken wing
Of lonesome fruit bats
It was a lost name
Left in secret meadows
That wore the scent August rain gives
To untaken paths
Of lonesome souls
It was a stone that rolled
Hoping for an unplanned ride
Through the ordinary
It was a quiet thought
March 30, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
Physics always attracted me - on this blog I have numerous essays about the intriguing parallels between quantum physics, the interactions at molecular level, to human behaviour with the world around us, or at the macro level.
Among these is our characteristic of having
perceptions albeit not always knowing
how they translate to our understanding of our environment. More importantly,
it is our “unknowing” how to translate these perceptions into evaluating our
present and future behaviours.
In fact, this very topics has puzzled scientists for
more than a century, especially when exploring the role of the brain vis à vis our
perceptions in interpreting our sensory experiences. The scientific formulation
of this inquiry was in the 19th century by a German physician and
physicist Hermann von Hemholtz. He proposed that while our brain interprets
sensory signals/stimulations , many of us perceive and interpret that same
signal in different ways. After all, visual arts, even written poetry send the
same signal to everyone’s brain but we perceive what we experience differently,
making art a platform where our individual past experiences bypass the wiring circuits of our brain and
transform the predictability of the interpretation fluid, different and personal.
Present day scientific research has expanded Von Hemboltz’s
framework of brain and perception to brain-mind perception. The intervening
dimension in the new framework is that of consciousness
when the mind translates what the brain analyses into perception. Thus, the
brain records facets of an observation or experience, and the mind/consciousness
interprets them within the parameters of perception that are influenced by the
past experiences of the “brain owner.” Such experiences range from feelings, passing
through pragmatic decision making, to actions taken based on superstition. In
this context, it has been proposed that the relationship between quantum
physics, perception and effect on behaviour becomes more scientifically tenable.
Why?
In the observation of micro, molecular level
interactions, quantum mechanics has demonstrated a fundamental effect of the
observation on the behaviour of the observed. In the early 19th
century, the German physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Werner Heisenberg discovered
that when atoms are observed, the very act of observing them affects their
behaviour. It is called the “observer
effect” and has influenced scientific research beyond physics, including
psychology and medicine. And that is where the molecular world of quantum
physics has guided our understanding of our own behaviour in, and interaction
with the macro world.
How?
Any creature, including us humans, interacts with
its “world” by interpreting the observed and reacting to it. That reaction can be appreciation, rejection,
fear, fight, flight as well new understanding leading to future reactions when
similar observations are interpreted. As
such through the initial observation, the observed becomes real, and it shapes
our own self. Further, through our actions post interpretation, we change the behaviour
of that original observed which will now take a new “form” when encountered
again. But through this new experience of observation and interpretation, we
are also changed by understanding the process.
That is the essence of what is called “Quantum Leap” in psychology. Specifically
that through the observer effect of daily life, we become multiple versions of
our own selves – that we acquire different abilities to interact with our
reality. And those multiple versions of us are like the particles observed in
quantum physics – they will be affected and changed through observation. Thus
the “Leap” we develop is like particles – going from version of ourselves to
another, never at the same time, every time we are faced with a new interpretation
of reality.
In a funny way, the quantum mechanics contribution
to psychology, and the field of consciousness in the interpretation of reality,
seems a mirror image of the observer effect – it is we who change when reality looks back at us!
… Today we face a new challenge – that of Artificial
Intelligence (AI). Simply put, AI would act as a brain by processing all
available “knowledge” about an observation of topic, and synthesizes a signal
of that composite for us to run through our consciousness and perceptions. In
traditional human terms, the composite signal the AI offers us is not reality
as our brain is built to record, but a “Suprarealty” (my terminology)where “Supra”
stands for “beyond and outside the limits”.
No doubt, this new reality is one that
we have to learn to adopt, but with a caveat – our past experiences and
knowledge will not be able to fully analyse that new reality through our present
consciousness, hence perceive its meaning. We may not know wrong from right,
real from fiction, and thus be unable to dissociate our known reality from the
AI generated Suprareality.
The fundamental challenge may be because our reality
and the Suprareality do and will coexist. Perhaps the human brain will evolve
to accommodate such duality, but for now our old brains are not designed to
guide our consciousness to evaluate the two realities in tandem.
As a simplistic experiment, I ran the photo at the
top of this page through a rudimentary AI function on my phone. It is a photo I
took in Mumbai during a passing summer rain.
The goal of my experiment was to see how that photo would be modified
using the synthesis of drawing techniques and result in a product that would
qualify as artistic. Here is the result:
As a street photographer, I aim at capturing reality
as it happens. I do not alter what I observe, and my past 50 years of people
photography have shaped my consciousness to predict the next behavior based on
an initial one and get ready to take a photo when that predicted moment happens.
Looking at the “drawing” of my photo, I cannot hear
the rain, the brouhaha of the busy street, and almost smell the humid air in
Mumbai.
Maybe I will, one day, learn how to have those feelings
when looking at a Suprareality photo. And that would not be a quantum leap, but
rather a paradigm shift.
Sample from my previous posts about the role of physics beyond scientific research
1.
https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2013/11/paradox-and-uncertainty.html
2.
https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/06/yin-yang-and-st-augustine.html
3.
https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-oak-sleeps-in-acorn-james-allen.html
March 25, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
