The Death of an Old Man is Like a Library Burning to Ashes (African Proverb)

 

 

 

He was not an old man, but age did not wait for him to grateful. In fact, his dog looked older than he was, and it was his sixth 6 dog of his life.

“You find inspiration in all the things that make moments non-memorable” I once told him.

“And you, when you take a photo, do you look only at the subject you had in mind to capture?” his response was. “Or do you celebrate, under your loupe, looking at all the details, shapes, and perhaps stories that had found their way into your film’s negative strip when you were focused on the subject you had in mind?”

… We all eventually remember what we thought we had forgotten. It can be words, images, sentiments, taste or colour. But we do remember even when we are unaware how past experiences find their space in what we cherish, what we build, what we paint, or what we write. They find their space in who we were and who we become.

“And I assume you have something to share about why and how the morning dew is more important to you than the rare rain storms in the desert?”

“It is all about how you transfer your inspiration from one object, one event or one person to another. I used to think that I had to be inspired by the idea, the subject, or a pair of brown eyes to feel closeness, perhaps even love to that subject. But it was when I found inspiration in its own right, without a smell, colour, shape or words that I learned how I could transfer it to all things around me. Finding inspiration outside a person will allow you to be inspired by that person.”

… We all eventually remember what we thought we had forgotten. Or wanted to forget because we had not learned how to incorporate a person or event into who we were becoming. There was no space, no place, no urgency for such an inclusion.

 

“Sometimes I repeat thing, or maybe things get repeated. It is not spiritual, but all around us is repetitive. I think that when one finds that rhythm in small things, they end up like a rhyme. And they become poetry. I know that means something to you, yes?”

 

… Today, for whatever reason, I recalled this conversation which took place under far away skies, next to a sea, at a time when we all thought times would remain calm and predictable.

And I let my mind fly free, or fall free just because I had not revisited these words for a long while.

And somewhere during that flight or free fall, I thought about a famous French poem by Apollinaire, “Le Pont Mirabeau”.

Why? Because of the suggestion that all things around us are repetitive, and that identifying the rhythm of repetition helps us see the larger picture.

Here are the opening lines of the poem I still remember vividly:

 

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours

Faut-il qu’il men souvienne

La joie venait toujours après la peine

 

(Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

And our loves

Must it remind me

That joy always came after the pain)

 

 

And I realised why this poem came back to visit me: it was because we were taught that Apollinaire used repetitive words and imagery to help the reader appreciate the scenery, the feelings, and the moment. Just like what my friend was telling me about how he transferred inspiration from outside the subject to the subject to appreciate, love and celebrate that subject.

For the poet, it was a style of writing he called calligram; for my friend it was the way he found serenity; and I wondered if I had learned lessons from poetry and a wise man without knowing it. Had my past decades, my photography, my own writings found inspiration for the sake of inspiration, and then helped me celebrate life moments and people through that cache of inspiration ready for those red-letter moment?

 

I do not know. Perhaps the photo I took on a snowy day has the answer. It is all about simplicity but also the calm snow covered bushes provide, as the snow repetitively falls upon them, to transform the scenery, to make it new with every snow flake.

Yet, every snow flake is different.

But I will not have a chance to ask him – I learned that he passed a few years ago.

 

May 21, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

The Matriarchal Art of Reading Coffee Grounds and Fortune Telling

 

 

 

 

I had left my coffee cup in the car, and when I picked it up I saw a serpent in it! Well, not a real one, but the grounds had dried into a Rorschach “coffeeblots”. I took a picture before I wash the cup.

So, it was an opportunity to proceed with a self-psychoanalysis, and to revisit an essay I had written a decade ago about reading coffee grounds https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/08/reading-tea-leaves-in-arabic-coffee.html

 

Immediately, I saw a threatening canine head, jaws open, a fierce look in the eye.  Wolf? Dog? Coyote? And, the snake was growing out of the canine head with a perfectly shaped head of its own, even its tongue was out. The canine and the snake were in a similar posture but looking in opposite directions.

Here is a crop of the canine

 

And the one of the snake

 

Ok, now that I let my imagination transform a dirty coffee cup into a story, I wondered what these interpretations meant in tasseography.

As I was inquiring about this ancient art of reading coffee grounds and predicting the future, I learned a few things about coffee and the human propensity to see things where things did not exist (pareidolia).

It is believed that coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia and found its way to Yemen and today’s Iran. From there coffee became the prime social drink in the Levant, the region of the Middle East with all the ceremonies associated with its preparation and serving, including fortune telling by reading the grounds left in the cups. Eventually it found its way to present day Turkey and from there to the world in the 17^th century.

The human propensity to see predictions in various organic media proceeded that period of time and tasseography, though. Indeed reading tea leaves was popular in China, so was reading goat entrails part of ancient Greek and Roman cultures. And let us not forget the macabre practice of Druids in ancient Celtic societies (Britain, Ireland and Gaul) of examining the entails of human sacrifice victims to consult deities.

As I was doing my research, I had a smile on my face reading that during the Ottoman period coffee ground readings, of course in cups of Turkish coffee, were popular in harems. Indeed, there were “professional” tasseographers who read the ladies’ cups to make predictions about love and pregnancy.  However it is believed that this art was primarily a matriarchal one, where older women taught the secrets of interpretation to their daughters.

And that was the reason for my smile, as an old memory, somehow hidden in the remote storage areas of my brain, came back as I washed my cup of coffee.

… I was perhaps 6 years old when I first witnessed an old tradition. Women in our neighborhood would periodically gather in our apartment to have a “Doing the Sugar Day.”  It was a socialization day when women would bring pastries and sugary treats, make coffee (Turkish, Arabic or Greek) all day long, and help each other with epilation! It was called a “sugar day” because the full body removal of hair was done via a paste made of melted sugar and lemon juice, not wax per se. So, no men were allowed in the place for that day, only prepubescent boys and girls for whom that gathering, plus the sweet treats, were a much anticipated play day.

I recall the women drinking coffee, listening to the gossip born from reading the grounds, smoking cigarettes, and often sighing in discomfort as their bodies were covered in that sugary paste which were lifted and pulled abruptly to pull hair from their roots. Eventually, especially when the epilation was for facial hair, these women had swollen and reddish skin. But they were happy, as were we kids mimicking the sugar paste epilation on each other.

And at night, my father was always happy to have a few of my mother’s the left over vol-au-vent pastries filled with homemade apricot jam, with his own cup of coffee.

In retrospect, these gatherings were like a scene from a harem, and I think those sessions were my initial and comprehensive introduction to female anatomy…

 

The last mystery from my cup: As I was looking at the pictures I took of the coffee grounds, I discovered yet another animal at the very bottom of the cup – it was a black cat, in perfect posture, ears perked, with his tail showing, looking at the snake and the canine!

 

A black cat and a snake are interpreted as a bad omen and a deception in tasseography. That cannot be a good thing, I thought. So I forewent another cup of coffee, make my favorite lemon drop mate with matcha and green tea leaves, and sat by my laptop to write about the moment and my memories.

I wonder what my readers will see in these pictures during their own fortune telling.

 

May 17, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Burning the Candle at Both Ends After the Midnight Oil Has Burned Out

 

“I have been burning my desolate candle on both ends,” my friend said. “Sadly, I get more time to do things I have no interest in doing.”

“But you get more warmth?” I teased him.

… I knew that that idiom had become popular by an American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a poem she wrote more than a century ago. But being a multilingual writer, I am always curious to explore the origin of words and sayings.

So, I searched for the possible origins of the idiom.

First, here is the poem, published in 1920, titled “First Fig”:

 My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
    It gives a lovely light!

 

Since the poem’s publication, “burning the candle at both ends” has been used to explain, interpret and even insinuate various behaviors of folks around the globe. Often it means working long hours, into late at night, and to take care of the burden of jobs, responsibilities, or challenges in general.  It is used when describing an unhealthy behavior, with implications of taking the joie de vivre out of the days and shortening life. Yet, it is also seen as being in the moment and enjoying the pleasures with intensity. For those who interpret the idiom as life or the moment being a candle, the quality of the moment means using the candle to its fullest is what counts. Not the years of life that may result from burning only one end of it. Quality vs. quantity, of sorts.

And finally, burning the candle at both ends is also used to describe infidelity in a relationship. Hmm, truly an idiom is figurative and allows the user to go beyond the literal meaning of the words.

My next question was if Millay had formulated that idiom, or she immortalized that statement through her poem. My search for origins was most rewarding – that statement, used as an idiom or a metaphor, goes back to the 1600s first written in Old French then in Middle English!

Indeed, the metaphor seems to have originated in France with a similar meaning, as cited the Randle Cotgrave Dictionnary, published in 1611. Cotgrave was a lexicographer and his bilingual dictionary was titled “A Dictionnarie of the French and English Tongues.” In the Dictionnarie, he mentions the French phrase "brûler la chandelle par les deux bouts" which exactly translates to "to burn the candle at both ends," although it originally described extravagant and careless folks.

 

As for the metaphor’s use in High English, it seems that in 1603, a famous English clergyman in Worcester, author and translator Richard Eedes wrote, "He burneth the candle at both ends" when referring to someone who was keen on overworking.

Interestingly, Eedes was nominated as one of the translators for the Authorised King James Version of the Bible, in the Second Oxford Company. There is a monument to Richard Eedes in the Worcester Cathedral, England.

Ok, so Eedes used that sentence perhaps as a metaphor but Millay transformed it into an idiom that goes beyond describing overworking folks to encompass lost time to enjoying life (by dedicating their lives to work) and also adversely affecting their health in the process.

 

Next, I could not resist the temptation of linking two idioms together. I think most people would immediately see the resemblance between these two commonly used sentences:

Burning the candle at both ends

                       And

Burning the midnight oil.

 

On I went searching for the origin of the second sentence, and this was much more interesting!

The first known use of the term midnight oil to mean “late night work” comes from “Emblems” a book written by Francis Quarles in 1635:

Wee spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle; Wee tyre the night in thought; the day in toyle

(The word toyle, a noun meaning strife, could be found in Shakespeare’s works, as it is Middle English. Since then, it is written as toil, meaning hard work.)

 

But my intrigued curiosity was not done yet as I wondered if Millay had also written about the midnight oil. And to my great surprise and delight, she had!

 

Midnight Oil

Cut if you will, with Sleep's dull knife,
Each day to half its length, my friend,—
The years that Time take off my life,
He'll take from off the other end!

 

In this poem, Millay goes beyond the poetic tournure of celebrating burning her candle at both ends to realise that even if we cut our days in half (or perhaps cut our work days in half?) there is no escape from mortality through longevity. So, is it worth not enjoying the days we have, in full?

 

… I do not know much how Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in Maine, lived her life, but she died at the age of 58 (1892 -1950). Given the symbolism and philosophy of her two poems on how to enjoy life without pursuing longevity, it seems to me that she often burned her candle at both ends, and that she was not shy to burn the midnight oil. And that makes her poetry genuine and a reflection of a life well lived.

 

About the Photos: Both were taken in Taipei, Taiwan, as my healthcare profession took me there for more than a decade. The first one is one of many I took on medium format film of people in temples. I chose this one as the candles have that "imperfect human" posture compared to the perfectly straight hand carved wood pillars that often kept the burned incense aroma through the passage of time.

The second photo somehow reminds me of bookends – the two dogs made me think of bookends that hold books and manuscripts orderly and protected. When I was writing this essay about candles and “both ends” I immediately though about this photo.

Needless to say that one of the dogs noticed my 1971 Minolta Autocord, and as a wise dog guarding a temple, he smiled at me, as if to tell me the books they hold were about enlightment while living the moment of the present.

 

 

May 3, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Poetry as a Spoken Language

 

A childhood friend sent me a long email. It was almost 4 pages long and full of thoughtful lines from a man who now has time to think about life’s lessons.

“This is like writing a letter,” I replied, “you remember the days when a fountain pen used to glide on virgin paper?”

“I still have my fountain pen, but if I use it again, it will make arabesques rather than glide” was his response.

And then, a memory came back to him.

“Talking about arabesque, you remember the Lebanese poet Mikhail Naimy and his works we read in high school? He actually had written a multi-page letter to his friend that ended by something like “I am sorry to write you so long – I did not have enough time to write only one page.”

Ha! I had forgotten all about that. Perhaps that is what you and I have been pursuing all our lives – the art of distilling ourselves to our essence.”

… We were two young men all around us believed that we would dedicate our lives to the arts. As there is never a strait road around any bend, we ended up in the scientific world but always kept our secret gardens for the arts. I believe science loses its artfulness without music and poetry.

So, I thought about that line from Naimy.  The immediate analogy for science might be Ockham’s razor that states “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best.” And as a photographer, my strict adherence to Black & White film photography seems to encapsulate my outlook to simplicity in dealing with the challenge of telling a complex story.

As for poetry, the choices are infinite. First there is form of expression, or even the architecture of delivery. Japanese Haiku and Latvian Daina (along with traditional Lithuanian and Estonian poetry) come to mind. Indeed completing and sharing a thought, a feeling or a fantasy in very few lines or even words is much more difficult than writing a sonnet. The Haiku aims to express a full thought in 4 lines, and the Daina, using a repetitive meter (called trochaic), uses different syllables in a strict arrangement of succession.

Then there is the imagery, be that through musical notes, instruments and composition, or through words. While all expression is based on the author’s experience or intuition, they have to be panhuman to speak to the listening audience or reader. Personally, I have shed more tears and often skipped a heartbeat listening to string instruments than any other musical instrument. But hearing Jacqueline Du Pré play F on the D string always reminded me that the genius of the cellist is what touches us, not the composition or the cello itself, even if it was a Stradivarius.

So, in poetry as well, mastery of the language, like playing a cello, is not what touches the audience. Rather, it is the moment of intuition by the poet that leads to the discovery of a new meaning in and for a known word. Within a known feeling. In a known tragedy.

So, I played a game with the moment. I challenged myself to recall two sentences, from poems I had read more than once, where the most was said with the least words and that after each read over passing times, I had still identified with the message, imagery and intuition of the authors.

With little digging into my memory, lines from Neruda and Alda Merini popped up.

Here they are:

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

I have often written about the work of Pablo Neruda. His life and his sometimes bucolic imagery seem to immediately find a context where his poetry rests, without regret and without fanfare. Every word in this one-liner says something, almost without needing the other words to make the point. And the reader shuts his eyes, thinking about all the times he or she did not have the opportunity to say this line with such simplicity. Or to ever had the moment to say it.

Alda Merini is an Italian poet who also had a tumultuous personal life.  Mental and psychological maladies made her family, social and personal moments a struggle all reflected in her writings. She is up-to-the point, like Neruda, but somber and injured.

“Ho Bisogno di Sentimenti” is my favorite poem of hers, where an entire existence full of pain and disappointment is distilled. I need feelings, she writes, three words that encapsulate all that she had missed in life.

The first few lines of that poem set the tone:

I do not need money.

I need feelings,

words, words wisely chosen,

flowers called thoughts,

roses called presences,

dreams that inhabit the trees

 songs that make statues dance,

stars that murmur in lovers' ears.

 

And, in the last two lines, she describes her needs in the cloak of poetry:

I need poetry,

this magic that burns away the heaviness of words,

That awakens emotions and gives new colors

 

While the translation provides the guidance to a reader who does not read Italian, I think the beauty of these lines is best found in the melody of la bella lingua:

Ho bisogno di poesia,

questa magia che brucia la pesantezza delle parole,

che risveglia le emozioni e dà colori nuovi.

 

The lines from Neruda and Merini made me think about a painting by Jules-Claude Ziegler (circa 1852) of the Greek beauty Lais of Corinth now at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. It is a work on oil and canvas, but the moment it captures is ethereal, where Apelles is conversing with Lais in the shade of trees, above a water fountain.

I have always liked this painting for the genius of Ziegler, but today I wonder what Apelles was telling to Lais to make her so secretively pleased.

The garden is not of cherry trees and it does not seem to be springtime, but could Apelles be reciting the lines by Neruda?

 

… Then, I emailed those lines to my friend.

 

 

April 27, 2025

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Through a Camera’s Viewfinder

 

 

The light was timid

As it kept its promise

To shadows and shade

On narrow spaces

On faces hiding

Joy and impatience

 

 

The light was evasive

In the rush of cruel cities

Where identity

Lost its name

And became

Just a refrain

 

 

The light was never warm

But to hands cold of await

Became that promise

Dressed in quiet shadows

Like a gypsy dancer

Wearing

Red shoes

 

 

Light was an illusion

 

 

April 24, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Exordium

 

 

For a slow stroll

On a rainy night

When a fallen sparrow nest

Reminds us of times lost

 

Times that find their way

To ancient walls

To slow walks

Like waves do

 

Remembering mossy rocks

Where they end up resting

At the end of a long voyage

At low tide

 

… And you want to return

And you think that you can

To what was a prologue

That forgot to enfold

 

But on a rainy night

The fallen swallow nest

Reminds you that times

Were not lost

 

For they were graceful and lithe

 

And you keep on strolling

From side streets

To side streets

 

 

April 18, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

 

Nyx

 

The presence of love

Is the present of loving

Wrapped in a rainbow 

Of wishes we never made

And the memories

Of promises to be kept

Between the pages of a book

Where a coquelicot 

Dried its petals

In await

 

 

 

And on a full mooned night

When coyotes serenade

You find that book

Where you last left

And knew the page 

Where old petals became one

With the poem

You never wrote

 

The present of love

Had since turned the page

So you can read a new poem

 

In the same book

 

 

 

April 10, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Of Siren Eyes, Old Women and the Sea

 

“Women in your paintings have siren eyes” a visitor to my gallery told me. “That is all one sees on their faces.”

“I cannot hear their song without seeing their eyes” I replied.

… I was thinking about that conversation this morning, and I thought about the poem by Canadian poet Margaret Atwood titled “Siren Song” inspired by the Greek mythology of the voyages of Odysseus, but addressing the experiences of all humans through their travel through life.

The lines from that poem that remain in those after their first reading of Atwood’s almost spiritual analysis of a facet in human interactions are:

This is the one song everyone

would like to learn: the song

that is irresistible:

 

the song that forces men

to leap overboard in squadrons

even though they see the beached skulls

 

the song nobody knows

because anyone who has heard it

is dead, and the others can't remember.

 

 

I stopped to think about the last two lines, as mythology and my life experience crossed the space where time had taken respite and made room to remembrance.

Do I paint siren eyes to remember or to forget?

 

Perhaps the answer is in the lines of Pablo Neruda’s of “The Old Women of the Ocean”:

They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence

… Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

 

PS/ The photo atop the page is from the 1979 with a Minolta Mark II camera that used 110 film.

The photo of the fisherman’s wife selling sardines on the beach is from Nazaré, Portugal., taken with a Nikon F2.

March 22, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

The River Can Not Go Back – Khalil Gibran

 

 

It is snowing in the desert, favorite few short days of the year when my dog and I take the first walk of the morning in snow untouched by human feet, although there will be many imprints from the passage of rabbits and coyotes. But more than the desert snow, I inhale deep the new scents juniper trees and various bushes let escape with the moisture. And I follow the patchouli and sandalwood invitation like a young man would follow after the New Year’s dance.

Then, and often inspired by the aquatic transformation of the desert, upon return, I pick up a book. And my dog sleeps at the bottom of my couch.

 I have often written ⁽¹⁾ about how the desert changes under snow and rain. I find it wonderful that a vast and at first look uneventful space has been home to so many sensations, a way of life to so many cultures, and an invitations for our inner rivers to find their way.

 

This morning, I thought of a poem by Khalil Gibran titled “The River Cannot Go Back”. It is not written in the usual Gibranesque style, but the philosophy found in “The Prophet” is there.

 

Here is the poem:

 

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

 

The message is philosophical, didactic, and inspirational with a touch of fatalism. Yet, as I reread this poem at various stages of my life, the meaning seems to change when I ponder about the relationship of rivers and seas as a metaphor. I have lived in more than a desert around the globe; I was born on the shores of the bluest sea, and have fly casted for trout in many rivers and streams. In every instance, I have found a philosophy of existence and an identity that has influenced my personal outlook to an order of harmony associated with the journey through the environments and moments, rather than their transformation into a destination.

Interestingly, while rivers do not originate from bodies of seas, the concept of a river flowing into the sea always seemed to suggest a return of sort, of becoming one with the sea, or even changing its identity by becoming the sea itself.

And that realisation brought back a few lines from Joachim Du Bellay, a 16^th century French Renaissance poet and the sonnet XXX1 published in 1558 which is still taught in schools although it was written in Middle French and titled “Heureux qui comme Ulysse”.

This is one of the poems I had learned in secondary school. I could recall only the first stanza, perhaps because it had influenced me most – the finding of what matters most after learning from any long voyage.

Here is the first stanza:

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!

(Happy he who like Ulysses has returned successful from his travels,
or like he who sought the Golden Fleece,
Then returned, wise to the world
Live amongst his family to the end of his days!)

 

When I first learned the lines of this poem, “Parents” meant what it would mean to a young reader – mother, father, family. But today, re-reading Gibran and counting the years since I was in secondary school, I wondered if the sea was the parent to the river. After all, the long voyage of days often makes us become our parents ⁽²⁾.

But, when our inner rivers get re-routed through of voyage of days, do we become what we always were? Do we find ourselves after trying to be what we were expected to be? Even when the river flows into the sea, can its waters still keep their “riverness” even if the dream of every sea has always been in those rivers’ riverbed?

I believe that every sea and ocean harbor the dream of, at least once, experiencing what rivers and stream feel in spring when the snow melts on the mountains and rushes down to fill those lesser bodies of water with the joy of rejuvenation and promise.

… It is snowing outside. The bird feeder, lonesome and cold, awaits for spring to welcome birds of all feather and their song.

And my dog patiently snores next to my couch.

 

March 8, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

 

(1)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2021/03/saint-exupery-shakespeare-and-armenian.html

 (2)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2024/01/jamais-vu-when-familiar-becomes-unknown.html

(3)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2013/11/boussole.html