Love Is the Rider Who Breaks Us All

 

 

 

I was on my daily walk with my dog when he pulled hard to greed another dog. I always let him decide who he likes to meet.

It was an old dog, sitting at the feet of an old man sitting on a bench.

“Good morning” I said and introduced ourselves.

“It is always a good morning when I can still be out with Florence” he replied.

 

By now, Ziggy was gently licking Florence’s face.

 

“Lovely” the old man said, “reminds me of days when I was young and wild”

And we started chatting knowing that our dogs would not want us to pull them apart.

 

From his careful choice of words and the optimism that comes with age, I assumed he was well read. So I asked him what he once did.

“I taught literature, even when students did not want to learn.”

I told him I had many of these experiences.

“You like poetry?” he asked.

And when I shared my love for words, spoken or otherwise, he turned to Florence with a smile:

“Flo, go ahead and recite a few lines from Dylan Thomas.”

Then, with a pensive posture he added:

“She is busy with Ziggy, I will refresh your memory myself”

And, just after sunrise, sitting on a public bench in a cowboy town five-thousand feet above sea level, the old man nostalgically started:

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night

“I was wild once, you know. Now Flo is 15 years old and I am five times older than her. It is good to meet someone who likes poetry.”

… I thought about him during the one hour walk. And a bit about Flo. Then, after giving Ziggy his breakfast, I searched for a poem I had read by Ribka Sibhatu, a contemporary Italian poet, entitled Parola.

The last stanza is my favorite

Parla parole ce

emanano profumo

e portano l’animo

nel tempo e nello spazio.   

 

(Speak words

that emit a fragrance

and carry the soul

through time and through space)

 

I hope to see the old man again.

About the photo: I took this in Barcelona. It seemed unlikely that I would see a man, well dressed, reading an Agatha Christie book, siting on the boardwalk, next to his old dog 

May 10, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

 

 

I Muri Hanno Orecchi, Ma Aqua in Bocca

 

 

“It is like building a cyclopean wall. Large stones are not always at the base – just like major attractions are not what you build upon when meeting a person.”

… Cyclopean walls. In Greece and Italy I have walked along these walls. They are said to be built by Titans. It is from ancient Mycenae that comes the belief that Cyclopes built the walls of large boulders. The Titans were inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes named after the sun god Helios.

“It does not matter who built the walls. There is a colossus in all of us. There is a dormant Titan that makes us curious about the what and why we do things. Small and large.”

… Perched in the Alps, Trento surrounds you with a medieval tempo. And with megalithic walls, and pristine lakes. It is still a little bit Austrian, but the joie de vivre is all Italian. 

“We build cathedrals like we build stony walls. It is sometimes for protection, a glorious shield. Often, we protect ourselves from ourselves hoping to keep the titan in us asleep. Moving large megalith or boulders across vast spaces is easy compared to moving a feeling to the open. Suddenly a stone becomes a menhir, for all to see”

…  It was all about stones and walls that morning. It was all about metaphors.

“We place stones on graves to remember; we write on boulders a name for others to wonder about.”

“And we put a stone upon our hearts to forget. Not the person who left and left us alone, but the pain of continuing. Love is like a cyclopean wall – large and small stones should co-exist to keep that wall standing. But love should exist without using mortar -- the stones should fit perfectly.”

… And she looked at Lago Di Caldonazzo.

“Ma, l’aqua cheta la butta giú I ponti” – our best bridges can be destroyed by calm waters.

 

PS/ The photo of the cathedral is of the Armenian cathedral of Gregory The Illuminator, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It has an angle of view I have not seen in other photos of the cathedral since I took it from my car.

April 23, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Sambuca and the Art of History Telling

 

I first tasted Sambuca in the 1970s. I was in Bari, on the boot heel of Italy where I stayed for more than a month. On that August day, I met a friend of my father, an older Armenian who had lived in Italy since he was a teenager. He was a historian and a musician, and invited me to lunch in an all’apperto restaurant overlooking the bluest sea.

“Should we have Sambuca to clean our palate?” he asked while rolling a cigarette.

I had tasted Lebanese Arak and Greek Ouzo, but not Sambuca.

“The fragrance of Anise is the same, but Sambuca has more history behind it” he replied.

When the dink arrived, there were five coffee beans floating in it.

“We call it ghiaccio e mosche” he explained. “meaning ice and flies. You can have 3 or 5 coffee beans in it, and these are the flies. Never an even number – it is bad luck.”

After his first sip and a deep inhale from the cigarette, he started:

“You know, sambuca was the name of a Roman war machine. In fact the sambucae were ships made for attacking a sieged city from the sea. They were invented by Heracleides and in Ancient Greek they were called σαμβύκη.  You will be interested in knowing that Heracleides was a physician and the first one to write a treatise on the Hippocratic Corpus.”

At this point the sambuca had made me relaxed, and while chewing on a coffee bean, I wondered why a physician had designed a ship-borne siege engine.

“Well, in ancient times, a physician was also a philosopher, a scientist and often a musician. A learned man cannot understand disease without understanding the man and his history.”

I often recalled his statement when I first read “Man, the Unknown” by Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Winner and father of organ transplant surgery.

“And the Romans took this Greek invention and tried it during the siege of Syracuse in 213 BC. But Marcus Claudius Marcellus was unsuccessful in bringing the city to its knees with sambucae because the Greeks had long-range stone–throwing artillery and catapults designed by Archimedes that prevented the sambucae to reach the shore and extend the ladders to climb the fortified city walls.”

“Do you like the Sambuca? Better than the Lebanese Arak? I know it is better than Ouzo” he added with a twinkle in his eyes.

“And now, let’s have frutti di mare con orzo perlato to celebrate our getting together.”

 

… It was a meeting that has remained in my memory as an Italian moment. I have often recalled a few lines from this historian through my past 50 years of experience with life.

Today I thought about him again because when I was researching the origin of the Kamancha, a string instrument used by Sayat Nova, a 1700s famous Armenian poet, and I came across the history of a historical musical instrument called a sambuca. Consulting Wikipedia, here is what I found:

The original sambuca is generally supposed to have been a small triangular ancient Greek harp of shrill tone, probably identical with thePhoenician  sabecha and the Aramaic   sabb^ekā. The sambuca has been compared to the siege engine of the same name by some classical writers;Polybius likens it to a rope ladder; others describe it as boat-shaped.

It was the last line of the above description that took me back half a century, to an open-air Italian eatery in Bari, and the company of an Armenian-Italian philosopher who introduced me to Sambuca.

 

April 16, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambuca_(instrument)

She Once Held her Beloved Parrot (thinking of my mother)

 

 

 

Soon the mourning doves

Will return to their nest

Under the roof

By her window

 

She waits

Holding the teddy bear

That lost its glass eyes

A Saturday, decades ago

 

Dissociated, tasting old ashes

She sits at the window

Next to her narrow bed

Gazing carefree, waiting

 

Soon the mourning doves

Will mourn 

 

 

April 11, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Literature is the Most Agreeable Way of Ignoring Life (Fernando Pessoa)

 

 

In cities of steel

I let the bluest sea

Bathe the moon

And keep me free

 

In brown eyes

I drowned

And let time snore a nap

Away from old dreams

 

Near a wall of stones

The sea became night

As quiet as emotion

Is to rhythm and flux

 

In cities of steel

I learned to walk alone

Like a line from a poem

Once lost to the poet

 

But enchanted

To stay unfound

 

March 26, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

 

 

 

PS/ A friend and colleague from Portugal sent me a new book, published in Yerevan, Armenia, where Fernando Pessoa’s select poems are translated into Armenian. It was a unique experience to read the poems I knew in my native tongue. As with all translations, especially of poems, the original feel, sound and meaning would change, but universal emotions do not get obscured. Rather, they acquire a new meaning, and become a new message.

Through the pages of this new book, Pessoa’s Messagem made me think of lines he had not written. Perhaps of lines I had not written, neither.

The Forbidden Meadow

 

 

An icicle grows down

Rooted in the clouds above

Like a spear

Pushed into

The gloomy soul

Of lingering winter

 

An icicle 

When it melts 

On a bright day

Remains ice, with the promise

That it will again

Grow its roots upward

 

But never will it become

A spring

In a forgotten meadow

In a forbidden meadow

Where I once buried a name

Cold as a winter sunset

 

February 16, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

About the photo: I took it at sunrise a day after a snowstorm in Prescott, Arizona. The protected street had allowed icicles to grow down on a fire escape ladder.

Hadria

 

 

The sins of dreams

Squat under stone walls

And warm their shadows

With fatty candles

 

They walk the walk again

Parfuming in thyme and rosemary 

Their memories of mornings when

Nights got darker at candle light

 

They rupture pleasure

Offered as a dream tied with ivy

To last the space of a promise

Near old stony walls

 

The sins of those dreams

Are then shared when candles burn

But do not melt, they do not drip

They just warm the shadows of those

 

Who pass  by the stone walls

Silent as moonlight

 

February 16, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023