Was Mayakovsky listening? Do statues listen? (Pablo Neruda, Statues)

 

 

I make time, most weekends, to read poetry. I read in more than one languages and my mood at the moment leads me to a poet I know, or perhaps one I was eager to discover.

This weekend, I rediscovered Pablo Neruda. I have read most of his romantic poems in Spanish, but had not explored other themes he was known to tackle as well. In my search I stumbled upon a poem about statues he had written during a visit to Moscow. It is a poem about the statues of two famous Russian poets Pushkin and Mayakovsky. I learned that these were not just statues but sites of remembrance where citizens gather to read poetry. That fact alone made me decide to read this poem and explore Neruda’s poetic heritage further.

The poem is titled Estatuas and starts with pigeons perching on Pushkin’s statue:

Las palomas visitaron a Pushkin
y picotearon su melancolía:
la estatua de bronce gris habla con las palomas
con paciencia de bronce

(The pigeons visited Pushkin
and pecked at his melancholy
The gray bronze statue talks to the pigeons
with all the patience of bronze.)

Translated by Jodey Bateman

Then, they fly to Mayakovsky’s statue

y con briznas de Pushkin
vuelan a Mayakovski.
Parece de plomo su estatua,
parece que estuviera
hecha de balas:
no hicieron su ternura
sino su bella arrogancia

 

(They make droppings on Pushkin
Then fly to Mayakovsky.
His statue seems to be of lead.
He seems to have been
made of bullets.
They didn't sculpt his tenderness -
Just his beautiful arrogance.)

And Neruda ends the poem by referring to those who recite poems near the statues

Yo alguna vez ya tarde, ya dormido,
en ciudad, desde el río a las colinas,
oí subir los versos, la salmodia
de los recitativos recitantes.
Vladimir escuchaba?
Escuchan las estatuas?

 

(One time when it was late and I was almost asleep
on the edge of the river, far off in the city
Of the reciters in succession.
Was Mayakovsky listening?
Do statues listen?)

 

… I am not a landscape or urban architecture photographer, although I have taken a few photos of statues. But I have never wondered if statues listen to what surrounds them. Of course Neruda was implying more of a sociological or political type of “listening”, but still it was an interesting, albeit poetic, concept. So, I went back to a few of my photos to see if they would make me understand what Neruda was saying.

 

Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires:  I visited the cemetery on every visit and made sure to pass by this statue. Over the years moss and ground cover vegetation have grown over parts of it providing a distinct character to the stony shapes. The photo at the top of this page shows the early morning shades I like. The statue hides no secrets under the midday sun.

 

Graveyard behind the Armenian Apostolic Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator, Singapore: This is another graveyard I like to visit as it tells the unexpected story of Armenians in Asia dating to the 1800s. The tropical weather of Singapore has taken a toll on the limestone statues and other tombstones, but with the shade of surrounding palm trees, there are magical moments to be captured. Perhaps this is the statue that reminds me of Neruda’s poem and his last question – I have always recited a poem or two, in Armenian, to this enigmatic effigy.

 

The Louvre Museum, Paris.  My parents lived in Paris so for the last decades of their lives Paris was like a second home to me. There are various temporary exhibits to see at the Louvre and these modern statues told a story. In the context of Neruda’s question, perhaps this man did listen to what tourists were saying and disagreed with them!

 

… So, pigeons may sit on statues around the world, but only a poet can let his feelings fly to remind us that a statue represent history, even if they do not respond to the passing of time.

 

February 13, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Of Pistachios and Large Hats

 

 

“It is like eating pistachios” she said.

The hill looked over the small town, and the sun was at its zenith.

“If you take a handful of pistachios roasted in their shell, you start with the one with the shell wide open. It is easier to get the nut out that way. After a few, you start checking the pistachios hoping to have a different taste. Sometimes you use your thumbnails to open one that is only slightly cracked. That is the surprise element, when you hope that the protected nut will have a more distinct taste.”

Her large-brim hat made the brown of her eyes capricious.

“But you were told not to eat a pistachio whose shell had not opened, yes? Perhaps because it was not ready to open. Or, that it was not mature enough. No matter, there are plenty of opened–shell pistachios in the bag. And, sometimes there also are empty shells from which the nuts have fallen out. Perhaps their inside was too small, or that their shell opened too wide.

But why do you keep on eating? I think it is because you once had the most wonderful taste from a pistachio and you are hoping to relive that taste. Perhaps it was a pistachio from Aleppo, or Isfahan. And it was salted, and the shell was covered with cayenne pepper dust. You were at the seaside, or perhaps under a pine tree in the mountains. You threw the shelled pistachio in your mouth, licked the pepper and moistured your mouth in salt. Then, took it out, opened the shell and tasted the most wonderful pistachio of your life.

And you never had the taste in you since.

See, that is why you cannot eat only one pistachio. Now, it is not the taste alone that you like, but the mere search for that old taste.”

For a short moment we watched pigeons fly over us.

"Yet, you know that you will not relive that taste again, yes? Because, that pistachio was more than what you ate. It was the seaside where you once sat; and it was that pine tree in the mountains that gave you shade."

The large brim of her hat now made her eyes less capricious.

 

February 3, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Near the Graveyard of Old Promises

 

 

 

Cooler than the underside

Of an old pillow

When the first spring rain

Washes the sand

From window sills

 

Dry as apricots strung

On an old string

Lonely as the necklace

Left on the hickory floor

For the cat to play alone

 

And quiet, to hear the rain

Before it stops

To let the mid-day promise

Sound almost new

And sound already at peace

 

For old pillows remember

That spring rain wash more than sand

At noon, when the cat plays

With dried summer apricots 

Strung on an old string

 

On the hickory floor

 

January 21, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

From Eros to Agape – When Human Consciousness Forgets about Reason

 

 

I have always written. When my mother passed, I found tortured pieces of papers in paper bags that had lines from me going back to the age of 7 years. These were written either in Armenian or in French. My mother had kept these for half a century. Why, I never knew.

I have always written, but at some point I do not recall some of what I had surrendered to paper and later, to electronic media. Until I come across them in an unplanned way, or someone else does.

And that is what happened early this year. I received an email from a reader of my blogs who, among other things, wrote:

“So, an encounter during an academic lecture takes a tangent into discussing love and passion - a delightful write up. And I have to say that your definition of passion is quite unique – takes the reader into an unexpected simplicity about that emotional experience. Here is that line:

Passion is not love.  It runs away from the daily, it also runs away from tomorrow.  Passion has only the need for distances to eclipse in its own moment of readiness.

A great way to start 2023!”

 

Since the reader had kindly provided the link to that post (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2013/06/baltic-amber.html ), I tried to refresh my memory.

It is a piece I wrote in 2006, I believe on a flight back from Europe. I sat next to an Eastern European colleague during a conference and somehow we both lost interest in the lecture and ended up talking about literature, love and passion.  The write up reads like a diary, as I often wrote about unusual events to not forget the details, hoping to use them later.

Since I had posted that write up in 2013, I assume that I had found the lines I wrote on that plane years later, perhaps stuck in a book or other papers I was carrying on that trip.

And they stayed as a diary note.

… Of course, the topic is as old as any human feeling that still challenges us today. Somehow, I believe all of us deal with the conundrum of love and passion at some point in our lives. Often, youth favors cherishing passion as we recall decades later when love takes over and keeps us company for much longer. At some turn, we also become more philosophical about these feelings. We become almost Socratic searching in ourselves when Eros turned to Agape; and when dependency taught us to celebrate the simplicity of our expectations.

Since I have often mused about the continuum of passion, love and dependency, I did a word search in my posts to see what else I had forgotten about the evolution of my thinking.

Quite a few posts were identified from among the 341 I had published on that blog.

One page, posted in 2015 caught my attention as I could see an interesting progression in my search for a comfortable co-existence between love and passion into my lifespan.

The discussion there was about how an old container would care for new wine. It was very similar to the Socratic evolving view of intimate feelings, as the progression from Eros to Agape may depict. In fact, years ago we used to discuss such changing appreciations of intimacy as “La Petite Mort of Desire” when passion finds its own moment of readiness after an unsustainable climax and temporary loss of consciousness.

Here are a few lines from that posting https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/02/new-wine-in-old-bottle.html addressing some of these topics:

 

…  Interestingly, “new wine in old bottle” is a conceptual transliteration of a parable found in the New Testament. There are different versions of it, but the one in Matthew 9:17 reads:

 

“Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”

 

The wineskins were actually the entire skin of a goat where the openings of the legs and tail were tightly sewn. The opening of the neck was the “neck” of this container and the partially fermented wine was poured in the opening at the neck then tied off securely. (Now I know where the “neck” of a bottle came from!)

 

 … So what to do with the wineskin and wine parable? Can one resemble the wineskin to a person’s soul? A soul where love had already fermented and given the passion, the ecstasies and their side-effects? So now would it be wise to pour new love into this used, expanded to its limits, and old soul? Would the “Tumultuous Stage” of a new love’s fermentation tear this soul to parts?  

In other words, and to stay conform to the original parable, should one pour new wine in an old bottle?

 

Hmm.

 

So, I wrote back to the reader and ended my email reply with this:

 

“Thank you for taking me back more than a decade through your reading of my blog. During that period, I have realized that passion does not eclipse through distances alone. But it does transform itself, quietly, into the Agape phase. That seems to be its state of readiness and eventual harmony.”

 

January 3, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Addendum: Today, January 30th, I received an email from a reader who said that "Khalil Gibran wrote about reason and passion in The Prophet."

.. I read most of Gibran's work in Arabic when I was a teenager. I did not recall the passage on reason and passion in The Prophet so I did a search, and indeed, the reader is correct. The translated passage can be found on  https://poets.org/poem/reason-and-passion

And that made me realise that perhaps we never forget our life experiences -- our brain somehow catalogues and compartimentalises them and, at the moment propice, fragments of our experiences resurface.

Here are the ending lines of Gibran's "On Reason and Passion"

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields, and meadows—then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”

     And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky,—then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”

     And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

From The Prophet (Knopf, 1923).

Koki

 

 

The North Sea 

Forgot its north

And its ripples

 

When

 

A profound shadow

Of brown eyes and of await

Invited me

To see through

 

… There was an island

And a stormy night

 

There was a parrot

Older than its cage

 

And a fallen tree

Behind which Vidar, Petar and Saša

Let me see through

Again

What I had seen once

 

Or twice

 

… But next to the North Sea

All felt new

That stormy night

 

Even

When the parrot cage door

Was left open

But the old

Parrot

Stayed

In

 

December 4, 2022

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022

When We Burn the Candle at Both Ends

 

I met an artist at a local art studio who had just moved to town. A man with ample silver-gray hair, a moustache reminiscent of William Saroyan, and an aura that says “I have done what I wanted to do; now I just play with colours on canvas.”

 

That was probably why I was attracted to him and his work.

 

“So you are retired too?” he asked. “I am sure you are having a good time since you look healthy.”

When I asked if he still paints for others, he said “No.”

“I paint because that is what I know to do, but I now do it for myself. For decades I burned the midnight oil to survive on what others would appreciate in my work. I also burned my candle at both ends as an artist in California and somehow I made it to an age when all is extra time I had not counted on having.”

“You have done a lot of burning” I teased him.

“Yes, but hope some of it did brighten people’s dark moments a bit” he pensively replied.

 

… That night, I searched for a century old poem without remembering the poet’s name. I had read the lines years ago and the conversation with the painter made me think about them.

The author was Edna St. Vincent Millay and the poem was published in 1918. The lines I recalled were:

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!

 

The Californian artist’s candle lasted more than a night—in fact decades as he said. And during this time, his works found walls in countless houses to “brighten people’s dark moments a bit.”

And the creativity of the artist did not get affected by the burning of that inspirational candle -- he is still painting, although more as an impulse than a survival need.

… Candles have inspired imagery in all forms of art as symbolic of the fragility of life yet representing beauty, coziness and surprising resilience to the drifts of our days.

There is a saying by Buddha that goes beyond these symbolisms regarding candles – it places the candle as a source of light and enlightment, philosophically taking the darkness of other candles away. It reads:

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

... So as my first email to the artist, I sent him the above quote.

He replied with this:

“Buddha was a smart man! Yet I do not know if we can share happiness through art. We can share evasion; and we can share scars from wounds that can only be healed from inside out. The rest is to those who take my art home and try to find themselves in it.

You know? Of all those poetic and philosophical lines we know about candles, my favorite is from the late Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper who said:

Electricity is a wonderful thing. Do you realise that if we didn't have electricity, we'd be watching television by candle light?

In our phase of life, we need to remember that a candle is just goat fat and a wicker – don’t you agree?”

 

Indeed, I often do.

 

PS/ The photo at the top of the page is from my backyard, on a windy afternoon. The Pampas grass, native of South America, can be spectacular in growth following sustained rainfall.

To my eye, they looked like candles flickering with the wind.

 

November 16, 2022

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022

Manna, Ambrosia and Soma – the Superfoods that Shaped Human History and Mythology?

 

 

Among the blessings life has allowed me is the joy of staying in touch with many of my childhood friends. Sure, belonging to a generation where communication became the easiest and fastest in human history, helps to keep that blessing ongoing.

 

A friend with whom I shared a primary school desk sent me an email about his trip this summer. It started:

 

“Do you remember the Lebanese tennis-ball-size nougat confiserie we used to eat? It was made with Manna and filled with pine nuts. It was called Mann wa Salwa or Mann el Sama’a – perfect name for what falls from the sky! Say, you remember?”

 

And he continued:

 

“Well, we thought it was a Lebanese, or an Iraqi sweet confection but, we were wrong! This summer my wife wanted to see Sardinia, so we did. And, Manna does not fall from the sky on that island, my friend – they harvest it like Canadians do with maple syrup – they make holes in the ash trees and the sap that comes out is Manna!

 

We stayed in Palermo and I ate Manna made in Castelbuono whenever my wife was not looking!!!”

 

Wow, that was more than half a century ago when we used to get either Baba au rhum (from a special tray made without rhum for the kids…) or Mann el Sama from the confectionery on our way home from school.

 

…So my mind left the present moment and went back where memories await us.

 

Manna is known as the “bread of angels” since when Moses and the people of Israel left Egypt for the promised land they faced starvation in the desert. But they ate quail and Manna came down the sky to assist them during the 40 year journey across the desert. The Bible refers to Manna as a bread-like substance, tasking sweet and of white colour like snow.  The Old testament has descriptions of how manna was snowed over Israelites in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Nehemiah, and Psalms.

 

But manna and the exodus of Israelites from Egypt are also described in the New Testament, and the Quran. In a 10^th century Persian medical book, one finds a more scientific description of Manna (called taranjabin in Farsi) as the sap of the Tamarisk tree, which is still commonly found in today’s Iraq and Iran.  

 

… And with the Middle East as my context, I grew up with my mother’s sayings as guide. One such saying was about manna:

 

“May in your difficult times, blessings fall upon you my son, just like Mannana once did”

 

I worked in Arabian Gulf for a few years and was told that there was an annual manna collection excursion to the desert. Since manna is the sap of ash trees, and since there were no ash trees in the desert (at least in the 1970s when I was there…) but there was a shrub called Rimth in Arabic that was said to drip its sap when punctured by insects. That is when I heard the term Manna-Rimth as yet another possible source of manna proposed by Arabian desert Bedouins.

 

No matter, the name given in Iraq to the sweet substance they to this day collect, be that as ash tree sap or the sap of the Rimth shrub (Haloxylon salicornicum) remains Mann El Sama’a (or Manna from the sky or From the sky), perhaps staying within the historical context of manna being “food of angels” that came down from the sky as if snowflakes tasting like honey.

 

But for me manna has specific association with the Armenian Apostolic Church, an Eastern Christian denomination in communion with the other Oriental Orthodox churches. And that association is with incense smoked during religious or cultural ceremonies. Indeed, similar to Eastern Orthodox churches (Greek, Russian), frankincense offering is made during religious ceremonies in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The connection between manna and frankincense comes from ancient Greek when this incense was called livanománna (λῐβᾰνομάννα) or powdered frankincense.

 

Frankincense is the hardened resin obtained from Boswellia trees after cuts are made to drain the sap. So manna and frankincense are either sap or resin from trees and shrubs. Interestingly, while manna was called the “food of angels”, ancient Egyptians called frankincense the 'Sweat of the Gods.’

 

I have written more about frankincense and the historic Spice Road here:

 

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-spice-road-from-lebanon-to-mongolia.html

 

… So now, my mind was curiously navigating through history, religion and the magic powers given to manna and frankincense. And that takes me to two other historical “superfoods” – ambrosia and suma, both enshrined in myth and mythology.

 

In ancient Greek myth, the gods on Mount Olympus feasted on ambrosia brought to them by doves. Just like manna, the true composition or origin of ambrosia remains unknown, although in Homer’s writings nectar is usually the drink and ambrosia represent the food of the gods assuring immortality, while nectar is the drink of gods. Needless to say that does not explain much more about what ἀμβροσία (ambrosia) or nectar are or contain!

 

Finally, there is Soma, a drink used in ancient India, by the Vedic culture. Just like ambrosia, the true nature of Soma remains unknown, although it is a drink that gave Vedic gods power and longevity. Although it is a myth, Soma as a drink, is believed to contain Ephedra elata (Alanda in Arabic) known to modern medicine to have anti-oxidant, anti-obesity and anti-diabetic characteristics.

 

Is that enough, however, to give gods immortality?

 

… It was a long journey into myth and mythology based on an email I got from a childhood friend who reported on eating “manna”, a sweet – tasting sap from Fraxinus ornus ash trees in Castelbuono during a trip in Sardinia.

 

As a scientist, I do not know what manna, ambrosia, nectar and soma really are. They represent a myth but also enablers of how humans have faced adversity, challenged death, and risen above the earthly banalities.

 

But, though the cultural and social symbolism represented in the form of food or drinks, even when their chemical composition is unknown, the effect they had on the course of human history and our vision of cosmic powers, remain undeniably potent.

 

PS/ I took this photo of a female camel herder in Morocco. Although I have lived in the Arabian Peninsula desert and now I am a permanent resident in the high desert of Arizona, the ecosystem of each desert is different. Yet, all make me think of our history more than forests of Aspen trees and snow covered blue spruce trees do.

 

October 13, 2022

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022