L'Amore Domina Senza Regole (Love Exists Without Rules)

 

 

It is Thanksgiving Day and I am thinking about seasonality. I often do, when my dog takes me for long walks before sunrise. We walk through the desert heat; we shiver with the first freeze; and, we tell ourselves that sunrise is in a couple of hours. At least I do. For him, it is the daily gratitude of being able to walk long miles and have me at the end of the leash.

It is that gratitude that I have cherished in dogs, and learned from, over the past 45 years, as I have never been without a canine friend during that period of time. And, we have probably walked enough miles to circle the earth more than once. There are few rules during these walks – in fact just one: I follow my dogs. That is what a long leash allows – there is always one who leads and one who follows.

… I grew up learning how seasons dictate what we eat, what we celebrate and what we cherish in those changes. The food on our table was always fresh, never from seasons past kept in await in a freezer or a tin can. We ate lamb only in the spring, beans and tomatoes in the summer, and fish when small fishing boats were able to get out to sea and upon return, sell the fish on the beach. It was glorious simplicity around the Mediterranean when garlic fried in olive oil always made our house a home. And as I grew older, I listened to the advice of accepting my own changes of season, the discoveries they bring, and the limitations they impose on what to expect and do.

It was never a feeling of being cheated; of being restricted or regretful. Perhaps life can be untasty if it were kept in a freezer or a tin can. It had to be lived and celebrated with the moment, in the moment, but only with love. Even in the most difficult times. Even when one feels that there is no sunrise by the end of a long walk, at the end of a leash.

Because there is.

… It is Thanksgiving Day and tables will be full for the lucky ones who can fill their tables. And I thought about our dining room table when I was a kid as I have kept a picture my father took during a holiday more than 60 years ago when my sister and I were about to start lunch under the watchful eye of our mother. Our dining table was simple, but there was plenty of sunshine bathing the room. And always a bottle of red wine for my father to toast in gratitude. Those lunches tasted better than any I have had in restaurants or prepared by street vendor on four continents. And we gave thanks to our mother before every meal. And after.

It is a photo I revisit when I think about what makes a house (in our case growing up, an apartment) a home. The answer is universal and simple – love of the moment. And we felt fulfilled.

And I recited a line from K. Gibran that has stayed with me as I circled and lived around the globe for the past 50 years:

                             “Love has no desire than to fulfill itself”

 

November 28, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

El Dolor es Una Maravillosa Cerradura /Pain is a Marvelous Deadbolt (Blanca Varela, Peruvian Poet)

 

 

And you shut it tight with a smile. All that remains is the illusion of being complete, piece by piece. Of being attainable.

With time, those pieces become warped and do not fit together again. But you do not un-shut the deadbolt. Rather, you find new pieces to fill the gaps. The cracks. So tight, that no light is seen through.

You fill your red wine glass with white wine. Without regrets. And for all the sunsets you missed, you raise that glass to a name you never met. To the memories of all those without names.

Of that deadbolt you speak rarely. Sometimes you only think about the door it holds tight. The one that was repaired with new parts. The one that does not let light pass through.

And then, one sunrise, you wash your red wine glass with a promise, wipe it dry with scar tissue, and fill it with cold coffee left from a previous sunrise.

And you walk pass the door, the deadbolt still on it. The coffee tastes like the first coffee you brewed in an old land. Or perhaps like the second one. But the wine glass warms your hands.

You are not attainable at that moment. Because it belongs only to you.

And at sunrise, you go to the seaside of a city of steel and concrete, and feed your inner Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

 

November 14, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024

La de Los Ojos Abiertos: Revisiting Alejandra Praznik's work Twenty five Years After my First Reading

 

In the 1990s, I worked with the Argentinean Ministry of Health toward improvements in their healthcare system. At the conclusion of my first visit to Buenos Aires, a colleague who had read my poetry gave me a book entitled “La ùltima Inocencia “as a gift.

“You probably do not know Alejandra Pizarnik’s work” he said, “She is our femme fatale poet. I found the first edition of her book, published in 1956. I think you will like it.”

I read the book during my flight back. One poem stood out entitles “La de los Ojos Abiertos“(The One with Open Eyes) and I read it a few times at 40,000 feet.

This weekend, as I was searching for a book, I came across that copy and many memories of B. Aires kept me away from continuing my search for the initial book. So, I sat down and reread the above poem.

Pizarnik was a lost soul, often lost in her own loneliness and despair about a life she did not figure out how to live. Or why to live through it. And she put an end to it at age 36, but her poetry continued to hold a special place in modern Argentinean poetry. Thirty years after my first reading of “La de los Ojos Abiertos“, I found new meanings to her imagery.  Here are a few lines from that poem and an attempt to translation to English:

 La vida juega en la plaza

Con el ser que nunca fui

(Life plays in the square

With the being that I never was)

 

Mi vida

Mi sola y aterida sangre

percute en el mundo

(My life

My lonely and frozen blood

 Beat in the world)

 

… ... Pizarnik’s “open eyes” is an inverse metaphor; rather, her depression of seeing her life pass without the achievements she wanted would better be described as “eyes shut and chin touching the chest” reading her own tortured entrails. And that thought surprisingly made me think of a photo I took, also in the 1990s on the streets of Taipei, Taiwan. There was a young woman, in front of a Buddhist temple, holding a white umbrella. Perhaps she was leaving the traditional written message for the spirits hoping for an answer. Perhaps she was just there for no reason. And I could not see her eyes.

A few minutes later I wrote my feelings of the moment, in my own way:

 

 

In the shadow of a tree

I found the tree

In solitude

Yet unhurried

 

Under a white umbrella

Her smile

Remained tender

Yet unshared

 

In streets of concrete

A promise was left

To become a poem

Yet unread

 

And the river forgot

That in every flow

The old dance

Loses its foot

 

Unhurried

Unshared

A secret smile

Under a white

 

Umbrella

 

November 3, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024