Does Zorba Need to Go Home?

I was born an immigrant and lived in three countries as an immigrant even when I was a citizen. I lived in the Arabian Desert for a while, and now in the high desert of Arizona. My professional work took me to four continents and I learned enough languages to feel at home in every place I visited.

The decades of travel across and through time and space seemed a forward path to me. But now time seems to have curved, and I think more about a circle than a straight line. Specifically, about closing that circle.

And in this state of mind, the nagging question of “returning” surfaces at every step. Specifically “returning home”.  It is nagging because for an immigrant, “home” is an escape to identity.

… Returning home. It is an emotional pursuit that goes back to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BC – 475 BC) who proposed that while change is central to the universe, that there was a fundamental order to that change. He called it Logos (λόγος). But in the Western philosophy, it is one of his statements, as quoted by Plato, which has had the most impact. It is:

                                    “You could not step twice into the same river.”

Why? Because a river is defined by its waters and with the flow of the waters it is not the same river again. And more, you are not the same person again.

… Returning home. The philosophy of Heraclitus may be best translated in our times by Thomas Wolfe who titled his book "Don't you know you can't go home again?”  While it may be said that since most rivers reach a sea or an ocean, they do indeed go home. That the ocean is the home of the river. That every drop of rain that falls upon the waters of a river eventually goes home to the sea. That the clouds are never home to rain drops. But when it comes to us humans, Wolfe says:

 "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

…Returning home. As a kid I was told the story of a girl called Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl. They wanted to look for happiness, represented by The Blue Bird of Happiness.  A good fairy named Bérylune helped them in their search. After spending a lifetime seeking happiness in vain, Myrtyl and Tyltyl return home in old age. And to their surprise, the Blue Bird of Happiness was perched on a tree behind their childhood home.

Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck wrote The Blue Bird (L'Oiseau Bleu) in 1908 as a play and my father told me the story, many times over, when I was a child. It was the story of a blue bird then, and my father always ended it by saying “one day you will understand about that bird.”

I do today.

…Returning home. Is it always to the Blue Bird of Happiness? Staying within the avian metaphor, the saying “Till the chickens come home to roost” has an interesting origin. I learned that it was a motto on the title page of Robert Southey's poem The Curse of Kehama, published in 1810 and it reads:

                "Curses are like young chicken: they always come home to roost."

…Years later I told the story of the Blue Bird of Happiness to our children but they belonged to an era when Hannah Montana was their idol. In the movie of the same name, Miley Cyrus sang "You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home". It was a hopeful message and our kids grew up believing that one always goes back to one’s roots and identity.

Will they?

…Returning home. Perhaps the most eloquent statement is by the Persian philosopher and Sufi mystic Rūmī who admitted:

“It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I have gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.”

The “satisfaction I need”. Is that what we search for when our straight path through time starts shaping like a curve? Like a circle? Is the satisfaction to be found in closing that circle? By going home? Is home a place? A person? A history?

…Or, Heraclitus, Rūmī , Wolfe and Maeterlinck may all be wrong or misguided. Perhaps one should find the ultimate comfort in the words of Zorba, the immortal character created by Nikos Kazantzakis who from Heraklion, Crete, gave my generation the epicurean optimism for those who did not know where was home. The optimism of Zorba shaped my teenage years as I reread Kazantzakis’s works endless times, and still keep a VCR tape of the 1964 B&W movie by Michael Cacoyannis  “Zorba the Greek” for moments when I need to watch it again.

The last scene of the movie shows Zorba and his boss on the island’s beach after losing loved ones to local customs and failing to start a new logging industry. They had failed in every attempt and lost what they had. It was time for his boss to go back to England, to go home to his books.  Between two mouthfuls of roasted lamb and a gulp of red wine Zorba looks him in his boss’s eyes and says:

      “A man needs a little madness or else he would never cut the rope and be free.”

And his boss, a stoic Englishman suddenly relaxes, loosens his tie, takes his jacket off and replies:

                                               “Would you teach me to dance?”

…Perhaps the circle is just an illusion. One only needs to learn to dance like Zorba.

August 30, 2015

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

"If You Can't be a Poet, be the Poem"

It may be true that if one can walk, one can dance. Yet if one can write would poetry assurantly, or assonantly follow?

In 1991 I read Diane Ackerman’s ode to life gracefully organized in a book entitled “A Natural History of the Senses”. It is a masterful work where science and poetry found both their harmony and a continuum. The style is voluptuous and to celebrate our gift to smell, taste, touch, hear and see. Diane Ackerman as a naturalist, poet, explorer and pilot is as eclectic as the topic of this book. My intent is not to discuss the book, as there are volumes about it in the literature and on the Internet. Instead, it is to revisit the role of poetry we all knowingly or unconsciously allow to influence our daily lives.

… So, I reread Ackerman’s book. Why? Because of a serendipitous comment a friend made about those who want to learn about our surrounding world. “Remember the Kung Fu series of the early 1970s? David Carradine played the half-Chinese, half-white Shaolin monk.  He was being trained to see the world his eyes closed, and hear, smell and touch to appreciate all that surrounded him. He was called “Grasshopper” by his Master, and sometimes I see that “Grasshopper” in you.”

Now, I had to do a search about the Kong Fu series as I had watched it only intermittently (when there was electricity) during the Lebanese civil war almost 40 years ago. I also read the biography of Carradine, his constant search for love and thrill, and I found an intriguing statement, which I used as the title of this essay, attributed to him.

… What does it mean to “be the poem”? I did not find his suggestion eccentric or capricious. I know what he means: the poem is how one structures his moments so others can see an escape in what he/she does or, they remember when they had done so as well. The “poem” is the common language where people’s desires, hopes and memories find the simplicity of sharing and celebrating. More, the poem is a synthesis of all our senses, but used somewhat differently than their routine roles: a poem is not what we see but how we see it. It is that personal yet widely observed angle to the ordinary where others also find refuge. A poem is not what we taste, but why we trust our taste buds to remind others about the importance of not being alone. And, a poem is that morning coffee we make when it is raining outside: the welcoming of another day of discovery is then filled with aroma, sound, fear and joy.

Being the poem is what turns the passage into a voyage that lasts as long as we last. And then it tells a story to those who are planning that journey on their own.

In fact, that is how Diane Ackerman ends her book. Here is that delightful passage:

“It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”

… I always lived through my senses. I cook with my nose (it is ready when the aroma is right), I taste wine with my eyes first, and the tremor of a body is best experienced through a smile and a whisper before a touch. So is the case with words and the sharing of what we have found (or missed) during our journey through that flat emotional terrain. 

Eventually being the poem is celebrating that simple language that has no alphabet, no geography and no cultural history. Except perhaps the story of what we all do, have done, want to do, or are too self-conscious to share. In its simplest form, being the poem is cooking with the nose and surprising everyone when the dish comes out perfectly cooked!! 

Distilled to its essence, being the poem, is purely being -- and I have learned to be though my senses, on that mysterious path Ackerman describes. A path where science and logic got orphaned because they hoped to answer the "Why".

Being the poem is learning to leave the poet smoke his pipe looking at an empty page.

Note: I took this picture during my morning coffee in Bellagio, Lake Cuomo, Italy.

PS/ David Carradine died in Bangkok on June 3, 2009 from a fatal autoerotic asphyxiation accident.

August 15, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

The Rivercane Wicker Basket

Take the basket with you.

Pack it for a slow sunset

Beyond the pine trees

Fill the basket with cheese

Hard bread, wine and thyme

The evening will bathe your glass

In gold and the whisper of the red rocks

Let your hair feel free, and your hands happy

To garnish your temples with desert sage, lavender and tender lily

For there is magic when the willow bush

Blooms in May in chocolate scents and a sweet whisper

And when you find the rock

From where the sunset paints the horizon of times

Let the wine flow in the same colors as the evening sky

For in your basket you have brought

The gift of love and the secret tremor

Of being one

With sage, lily and marigold

August 12, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Reading Tea Leaves in an Arabic Coffee Demie Tasse

I was reading a book of Armenian poetry. Unexpectedly my mind left the page and my olfactory senses were filled with the aroma of Arabic coffee, ground with Cardamom.  Nothing in what I was reading could have taken me back to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, to our balcony overlooking a busy street of Beirut, and to the aroma of Arabic coffee.

I shut my eyes and I could almost hear my mom’s slippers on the Terra Cotta floor tiles leading to our balcony. And there was my father, waiting for his evening coffee!

… It was a flashback, and it took me by surprise. I was on a high mountain in Arizona, surrounded by desert, with no sea, lake, river or any body of water nearby. And yet, my mind, somehow triggered by a few lines of romantic Armenian poetry, had decided to fly back and away.

I shut my eyes again hoping to see my parents one more time, alas in vain. But at that very moment, I recalled that my mother had a set of coffee pots and that I had kept them as souvenir from her. She used to boil coffee in these small, handmade copper pots with wooden handles. I recall them as being made in Armenia.

So, I rushed to the kitchen and looked for these pots I have kept on a high shelve but have never used them for 50 years.

There they were, next to a few demie tasses my mother had!

With a lot of emotions, I filled the smallest of these pots with water to boil. Then two small spoonfuls of ground coffee and a spoonful of sugar. A few minutes later the aroma of boiling coffee filled my moment and I forgot about the desert. I was near the Mediterranean again.

Here is the capture of this seemingly simple moment that in the cloud of Arabic coffee aroma erased 50 years of my life, albeit for a short moment. 

I sipped on this elixir slowly trying to recall the last time I made Arabic coffee. Then, in a gesture so common to all those who drink coffee around the Mediterranean, I turned the empty demie tasse upside down. It was/is a ceremony that follows the coffee drinking: each person turns the demie tasse upside down letting the coffee grounds slowly slide down the inside of the cup drawing unpredictable shapes. Then, someone in the group will be designated to “read the cup”.

… It is perhaps as old as humanity the belief that there is a message in various forms around us. Ancient priests of Greece and Rome used to open the entrails of freshly slaughtered goats and sheep to predict the outcome of wars; Druids saw messages in boiling liquids; and it is said that many of Nostradamus’s visions and predictions were made following what he saw in crystal balls and clouds in the skies.  In Western cultures, the modern term for such ceremonial behaviors are best defined as “reading tea leaves”. I personally have never seen anyone read tea leaves….

So, here are some of the shapes the coffee grounds made in my cup. I did not try to read them; I had already traveled in time, even if retrospectively.

However, if I were to read the shapes, I am much inclined to see a man on the right talking to a woman. After a few minutes of careful looking, I can see ardent eyes on the man’s face and a quiet smile on the timid woman’s face….

But the best was yet to come. Instinctively I also turned the small copper coffee pot upside down, and to my surprise it was made in the Soviet Union! Not surprising as Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and I recall my mother using these coffee pots more than 50 years ago.

Well, Soviet or Armenian, it was my mother’s coffee pot and the coffee I made had an aroma almost as good as the ones she offered to my father, on that balcony overlooking a busy street in Beirut….

August 7, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

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