The Riverbed Was Dry

So I walked the bridge

For it was burning

Cello Suite No. 3 in C

Became sound and smell

Filled with smoke

At sunrise

There was a place beyond

The Joshua trees

Where I took my boots off

While watching the bridge

That was now a lit candle

Burning the morning sky

As a name does to memories

When one stops walking

Or forgets to cross the bridge

Before it burns to ashes

July 29, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Cassette Player in Montréal, Canada

For two years, I looked at a brick wall from the only window my room had. My room had a bed, a wobbly table, and a B&W TV I had bought with money saved from my evening job. I was a student in Montréal and happy to share a kitchen and the toilet with three others who lived in rooms similar to mine on the same floor.

More than 4 decades later, and after traveling and working in more than 40 countries, I sometimes encounter a building, a street corner or a peculiar architecture that reminds me of that room in Montreal which was walking distance from the Olympic Stadium. I did indeed walk that road many times just after Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the parallel bars. The world lost its head for a moment and so seemed the Olympic Stadium as the builders had run out of time to finish its roof.

… As I was going through my unpublished or rejected (by me) piles of pictures, this one made me stop and think again of the early 1970s. With my eyes closed. I could smell the fast food grease on Rue Maçon and the early spring muddy snow melt along the sides of Rue Dandurand.  When I walked back to my room from College, the owner of the corner Dépanneur smoked cherry flavored pipe tobacco that lingered in the humid air of spring in Montréal.

This picture is from a small town in Maine. I was driving through and suddenly all the above memories wrapped in sounds and smells of more than four decades ago made me stop the car. First, I was not sure why I stopped, as there was nothing unusual or picturesque. It was a small town with a few blocks of downtown before I get back on the interstate highway. Yet, there was something that I knew; something that had been part of my life once.

It was this building with its ubiquitous sign that rooms (or at least one room) were for rent. The window did not look to a brick wall as mine once did, but the brick side of the building reminded me of that wall.

So I took a picture, restarted the car and got back on the highway.

… Today as I stopped to look at the picture, among the many which sit forgotten in cardboard boxes here and there around my room, I finally noticed what subconsciously had stopped me in that small town in Maine. It was not the single window, nor was it the texture and depressingly monotonous angles of the brick wall. It was the radio (and am assuming cassette player) sitting at the edge of that window! I do not recall noticing that radio before. But it was there and my mind had somehow made the connection.

Yes, the connection with the radio I had bought after buying the B&W TV. It was a Zenith with bad speakers but it played cassettes!

Many today will probably not understand why a cassette player was so important to me 40 or so years ago. Today cellular phones and the Internet link us all, instantly. But then, as a lonely student in a room with one window that looked over a brick wall on Dandurand street in Montréal, my connection with my friends in countries where windows look over blue seas and angry oceans was through cassettes.

We used to talk to the microphone of the radio and record our feelings about our new life, loneliness, having spend Christmas alone, about the cherry tobacco aroma of the corner Dépanneur’s owner, about those we loved but who never knew, and about those we loved and who never loved us back. Then the cassette went into the mail and I waited weeks before someone sent a cassette back!

… As I type these lines, I know that when I post this page, readers in many countries will see it instantly. Readers who perhaps never knew how a cassette player kept lonesome students connected to those who spoke a common language, and sometimes because of the safety oceans and continents separated us, admitted on cassette, to loving the same person as others. But then only secretively….

July 16, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Braille Love and Intuition

This morning, before sunrise, I responded to a note from a friend in Europe, then went out with my dog to watch the sunrise over the high desert.

As I was sipping on my first morning coffee 6000 feet above sea level, the desert changed colours and aroma. It is not a smell, but the desert plants seem to have a different aroma with the changing temperatures of the day.  “A glorious sunrise” I thought.

And then I realized that while I cherish these moments of solitude with my dog quietly lying down near me, the inspiration I sometime get is based on intuition and illusion. The trigger to this thought was that I had never questioned the words “Sunrise” or “Sunset” although I know that the sun does neither of those. Yet I have found ample inspiration to love, write or just feel part of a new day by awaiting sunrises and sunsets.

Awaiting illusions when intuition takes over knowledge. Awaiting inspiration when nothing else matters.

… So, I took a few more sips of coffee and challenged my now clearer mind to take me forward into the co-existence of intuitive expectations while ignoring my knowledge base.

I immediately felt at ease accepting that I am past and present, while any intuition I have is about the future. I have observed sunrises since I knew observing and still, I expect to see something new every day. To feel in a new way about an old observation.  Intuitively I know that I am past and present yet never the same. My present changes my past. My past allows my present to have illusions. Even more, to cherish many of these illusions because they challenge the very foundation of the knowledge I have!

Now the rays were already warm and making my dog’s ears pink in their transparency.  And he knew, because of past experience, that it was about time for us to take a long walk together. He had patiently sat on the rocky ground allowing me to have my morning illusion and perhaps inspiration.

So we did. He has his usual path that he checks carefully at every trip. Perhaps a rabbit had slept under that rock last night. Or a deer marked his territory by urine. He somehow knew, maybe by intuition, that rattle snakes would not be out at this early hour. And I trusted him and allowed him to go off path into the tall and dry weeds.

.. When we got back to the car, he sat down on his hind legs and waited for yet another routine. For that gentle petting I perform running my fingers through his hair to find sticky desert burrs. Then I carefully remove them as he gratefully looks into my eyes.

I call it “Braille loving” as I run my fingers carefully into where I have learned, in our 11 years of companionship, the burrs will hook to his hair. I am almost sure he thinks of it as the reward for joining me in the desert before the illusion of sun rising.

After all, he is all past and present, with predictable expectations from the future.

July 13, 2015

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2105

We All Somehow Return

Far away mist

In the froth of its own mixing

Reminds me to return

To a northern sea

And wooden boats in red and yellow

Near a board walk

That ends at sunset

Shadows were never dark at midnight

In cities where women fear

That we all may return one day

To a name and a street café

... Far away mist

Exhaled a tender illusion

And reminded me to remain

Where wooden boats in red and yellow

Dream of northern seas

June 8, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Yin, Yang and St. Augustine

Perhaps it was the full moon that made me read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, or my cyclical desire to think more about time in a structured way. In my previous postings and writings, I have often touched about the question of time, especially from a scientific angle where physics occupies a central role. Newton, Kant, Einstein and Bohr have helped me over the past many decades to enjoy the philosophical and scientific challenges of understanding space, events, time and unseen forces of attraction.  Delightfully, I have found daily applications of these concepts and ongoing wondering about our place in the vaster universe. Eventually, it has been my inner universe, sometimes equally too vast for me to navigate, that has found comfort in believing that there is an order and symmetry to existence, especially in appreciating the beauty of what and who surrounds us.

So, perhaps it was more than the full moon that lead me to read Hawking’s much acclaimed synopsis of the progress in our thinking from St. Augustine to Newton and Einstein with a special emphasis on “What is Time?”

 … The basic conundrum has always been about the origin of time. Is time absolute in that it has always existed? If so, it will have no end. But if there is a starting point for time then there will be an ending point too. I have found St. Augustine’s statement most concise about this. He said that the time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. This statement makes us, at least indirectly, related to the origin of time.

Picture of “time” on rocks in Prescott, Arizona. I was thinking about St. Augustine’s statement when I took this picture. Can one discuss the ravages of time without the presence of the rocks?

While many have proposed definitions or properties of time as philosophers and scientists, the breakthrough came with the introduction about a century ago of the concept of space-time by Einstein in 1915 through his general theory of relativity. In short, he rejected the absolute definition of time long accepted given the works of Galileo and Newton and proposed that time and space are inter-related and that space-time is not flat (i.e., absolute) but that it is “warped” and that it moves along curved orbits. Hence the way we measure time, as space-time, is relative to the measurer and his position along such orbits.

Like many, I have been challenged in understanding the space-time concept. Yet, as I was reading Hawking’s book, suddenly after many decades of relative apathy, my mind made an interesting connection between traditional Chinese medicine and the concept of space-time. Let me explain:

The Zen (or Tao) thinking when applied to medicine sees connections rather than “absolutes”. The general framework for the inter-connectivity of entities and concepts, rather than their independent and absolute characteristic, can be placed under the umbrella of the Yin and Yang. The Yin and Yang are relatively known to the West but the underlying principle may not be. Specifically the Zen philosophy deals with paired co-existing entities such as body and energy, and their paired manifestations regarding health, disease, happiness, etc. For example, the Yin is the internal world (universe?) of the body, while the Yang is the external manifestation of the turbulences within the Yin. When in Asia I am often told to eat certain foods that will make my Yin happy and my Yang more pleasing during human interactions. The pairing of the origin of food (shrimp from the cold and fluid to farm animals from the land, melon and spicy soups, etc) follows this pairing concept. And when the body shows sign of dis-ease, then the role of the traditional Chinese medicine is to understand what imbalance (i.e. harmony) was disrupted between the Yin and Yang and restore it.

… Paired co-existence and the issue of harmony. The body would collapse -- the Yang will show symptoms of dis-harmony within the Yin. Similarly our universe would collapse without that Newtonian harmony of masses having equal and opposite attraction and repulsion. Time cannot be understood as flat but as space-time that gets warped due to movement and position. Without space-time the change in our universe i.e., its expansion, could not be explained; without the indispensable connection between the Yin and Yang our body, that wonderful micro-universe we each cherish, cannot be understood, maintained and enjoyed. When harmony is disrupted, our genes may have shorter endings (telomeres) predisposing us to weakness in fighting external insults such as bacteria, pollution, stress, and we may age sooner. Our time of existence may be expanded forward making us age faster.

… I smile thinking that one day someone may define a new measurable entity in Western medicine called “Existence-time” and receive the Nobel Prize!!

Back to the question of the origin of time. Most of us look forward and not back perhaps making the question of the origin of time absolute, hence rarely indispensible for our daily living activities. We accept what harmony exists around and inside of us and we thrive at ameliorating it for a more enjoyable existence.

But there will always be those among us who look back while most look forth. It is the nature of our curiosity and while Eastern philosophies have for long recognized the inseparable co-existence of paired concepts, Western scientists are just discovering the importance of joint concepts to explore the spectrum from genetics to the universe and its black holes. After all Einstein’s revolutionary thinking happened only a century ago…

It was perhaps this idea of looking back by curiosity but looking forth by Epicureanism that made me take this picture while kayaking on a sunny day.

June 4, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Tattoos: Rumi, Mastectomy and the Army

Spring storms over the Arizona high desert kept me inside for a couple of days. So I picked up a translation compendium of Rumi’s writings and sat by the window to listen to the rain.

I thought I had read most of his writings translated in English. Yet I was surprised to find a poem about a man who decides to get a tattoo of a lion’s face but after seeing the needle and learning about the pain, backs off.  The barber who was going to tattoo the lion’s face says to the squeamish man:

“O brother, endure the pain of the lancet, that you may escape from the poison of your miscreant self,

For sky and sun and moon bow to the people who have escaped from self existence.”

While the poem is typical Rumi concerning transcendence and self effacement, it made me wonder if tattoos were common in his days. So, while surrounded by the aroma of the wet sand, juniper and mesquite trees, I explored the topic.

I learned that tattoos and body piercing were common in Persia thousands of years before Rumi’s time. Specifically statues dating back to the Achaemenid Empire show tattoos and earrings on kings and soldiers.

Things may be returning full circle as in 2015 the US Army changed its regulations about solders and tattoos and now, under the Army’s new tattoo policy, soldiers will be able to have ink on their arms and legs as long as it isn’t visible in the Army Service Uniform.

I knew about soldiers or at least the Japanese Samurai who, as outcasts, tattooed their bodies both as identity and for the scare-factor. I have seen facial tattoos in descendents of the Atayal tribe in Taiwan. In ancient China criminals were tattooed on the face; in ancient Egypt tattoos may have had medicinal purposes, as anthropologists have suggested that many female mummies had tattoos on their pelvic area perhaps as a cure for pelvic peritonitis.

This got my attention and I searched more about the role of tattoos in folk medicine. Surprisingly it was not folk medicine but survivors of cancer after western medical treatment and surgery who have adopted tattooing as a new way of self expression. Especially mastectomy patients who have found tattooing as a way to turn their disfiguring scars into a form of art and self-expression.

How wonderful!

Actually there is a website called P.Ink that connects tattoo artists with mastectomy patient. One artist is quoted there saying:

“What was clinical became beautiful again… We turned sterile into sensual. We took back control.”

And that made me think about Rumi’s statement about self-existence. If Rumi knew that tattooing could restore self esteem, confidence, femininity and sensuality, would he still question the pursuit of self-existence?

… I looked in my “Ali Baba’s Photo Cave”… I had taken pictures of men with elaborate tattoos.

Placing them within the context of when and where I took these pictures, I wondered -- was it art? Search for identity? Self existence? Or perhaps simply therapeutic?

I may never know.

May 16, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Shape, Mood and Imagineering

Lately I have been doing much walking in the high desert of Arizona. It is a special place where the desert climate and topography varies every mile or so from barren lands to Juniper bushes and even pine trees. The granite rock mountains at this high altitude of 2000 meters change color with the ever present sun, occasional clouds, and type of grass.

Given the very low humidity, any dead tree becomes weathered by the sun and preserved carefully. The high winds and the sand give the dead wood a gentle polish and shades of gray. When I walk in these deserts I look at the ground as much as at the mountains. Well, sometimes it is to avoid a rattle snake,  but often because of my curiosity in finding “creative” dead wood shaped by the winds and polished by the flying sand.

I am in the creative studio of a unique artist, Mother Nature, when I walk between cacti and Juniper bushes.

… Here is my latest find. A twisted piece of a Juniper bush branch, about 20 cm long, probably fallen and dried for a few seasons now. I immediately noticed it as I thought, with its head on the left of the picture frame,  it looked like a coyote in motion. I did not think of a wolf because I have not seen wolves here, but plenty of coyotes that run sometimes as close as 30 meters from me and keep on looking at me as the intruder in their land.

So, I picked the piece of wood, put it in my backpack and continued my hike.

Upon return, I placed it on a table and to my surprise it was perfectly balanced on its 4 “legs”! Now I saw a coyote smiling while looking at me without slowing down his slow trot. And his hind right leg was in perfect proportion to its body and trot posture...

My curiosity increased and I slightly moved the “coyote” around. Now it looked like a strange hippopotamus! Its jaws were large open and ready to challenge my presence. Or was it a crocodile?

At this point I realized how delightful it is to be in the mood for seeing “something”. For anyone else, this would be just a piece of wood. For me, it was a fantasy moment when crocodiles, hippos and coyotes were right there, on my table.

…The photographer in me was intrigued by what 3-dimentional objects can give to the ready eye that 4th dimension of “Imagineering”. That is a term I like – it is the power of the image that lets us imagine. Fantasize.

I wondered how a two dimensional picture would “feel” after looking at this exquisite natural carving from various angles. So, I pulled out a couple of pictures I had taken on Coronado Island in San Diego to contrast and test my mood for imagination.

These birds are in motion, the ocean waves are undulating and there is a feel for the soft light of sunset. Yet, the motion is too obvious, predictable, and hardly surprising. In contrast, the coyote has character, body language, even a smile!

The next picture I chose was also from San Diego. Sunset again, 105mm lens for slight telephoto effect, and a lot of texture. There is a towering steel post, palm trees gently moving in the evening sun, and a bicyclist contre-jour. Yet the picture is static, even stagnant. The motion is implied but all seems to be very orderly.

… Texture, curvature and angle of observation may be the requisites for seeing what we are in the mood for seeing. One can freeze motion on film as one does on his retina or his memory.

But to see motion ones’ mood has to be in motion!

April 12, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015