A Man’s Heart Tells Us How He Lived, Sometimes How He died. But Rarely How He Loved (Dr. Mallard, NCIS)

 

There is a common saying among pathologists that “a heart on the steel bed tells you how you lived and sometimes how you died”. The quote from Dr. Mallard (aka Ducky) in the TV series NCIS took it a step further merging medicine with poetry.

There is no other human organ more intimately associated with feelings and love than the heart. My all time favorite remains the myth of vena amoris about which I have written here https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2022/04/vena-amoris-does-it-matter-if-it-does.html . We all adhere to that myth, often unknowingly, when we adorn our ring finger with a band, because our heart had skipped a beat.

A healthy heart in medicine is one that beats in perfect cadence. A loving heart is the one that misses a beat.  The heart of a lover is the one that races, stops to recover, and races again.

When reading poetry in the English language, I often return to the simple lines William Wordsworth wrote about the heart and the way of life celebrating the heart in “My Heart Leaps Up”.

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

 

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

 

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

 

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

Medicine, poetry and the heart. What we see and what we hear tell us little of who we are.

 

September 17, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

PS/ on my painting and sculpture blog (https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2017/10/vahes-ark-vessel-of-eclectic-modes-of.html), I have often explored human expressions where the heart was dictating what we observe. Inspired by the myths and artistic expressions from the Southwest, often unconsciously, my paintings end up touching feelings poets attribute to that organ when missing a beat, while pathologists only examine when that missed beat never recovers.

Here is an example, as I put shapes and colours in harmony to learn about our hearts https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2022/01/clodomira-spirit-of-prickly-pear-cactus.html

 

 

Harmony is Not Lack of Conflict or Difference in Appearance

 

 

“So, how does it feel to be in nature away from airports and crowded cities?”

An early morning email from an old friend from England required a second cup of coffee for a reply.

… We met decades ago as healthcare professionals. Soon, we discovered that our interests went far beyond medicine and public health. Wherever our paths crossed around Asia and Europe, we made time for discussing physics, philosophy and poetry. And we remained grateful for the Internet to keep our chats alive when we physically could not meet.

“Physics is the purest approach to understand harmony” he once wrote. “It brings often conflicting concepts under a humble tent where they achieve harmony.”

Indeed, in a funny way, I think of poetry as similar to physics – the art of finding the essence with grace and parsimony.

 

“It feels great to be in nature” I wrote back. “One never feels alone or lonely there as in airports and hotel rooms.”

“Have you read “Tinter Abbey” a poem by William Wordsworth?” he asked.

I did not know the name.

“Not surprising, he wrote it in 1798” my friend wrote back with a smiling emoji attached. “It is a classic for those of us who like the pre-romantic era of English poetry.  I will send it to you, read the second paragraph – you will see that you are not the only one who prefers nature to lonely rooms and busy cities.”

 

Here are the lines he highlighted:

 

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart

 

… 1798! And say that even then busy towns and cities made poets think about nature, perhaps while sitting in lonely rooms. Lovely!

And I replied

“You know, harmony and poetry were existential processes for Confucius. You remember the Confucius Temple we visited together in Tainan, Taiwan?”

“I remember every temple we visited together, or alone” were his parting words, this time with a “photo” of Descartes at the end.

 

.. Somehow this discussion reminded me of a photo I had taken. And of the writing on a cardboard between the seemingly different cars.

 

August 19, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Dancing Through Drops of Rain

 

 

When days were sunny

For all around you

 

Smiling through drops of tears

When brown eyes promised

Morning arias

But Fado at sunset

 

Walking that quiet walk

Of no return

Upon fallen leaves

And broken wings

 

And with the last train

Remembering the first station

The dance between drops of rain

 

And keep walking

That quiet walk

In gratitude

 

August 12, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Part of the joy of Dancing is Conversation. Trouble is, Some Men Can't Talk and Dance at the Same Time." - Ginger Rogers

 

 

Night trains

And the goodbye dance

 

Promises

No one believes

 

Just a few steps

In silence before the whistle

 

Night trains

And the farewell

Lonely

Walk

 

July 14, 2023

© Vahé Kazandian, 2023

Stony Wall

 

 

If I left

My cup still full

It was because

I kept my lips

Upon its rim

For a while

 

If I left

My words silent

I kept them as a poem

On the pages

Of time

For all

Times

 

If I left

I kept of my stay

The reason why

All fires 

Become dormant

But their amber

Remains

 

July 4, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Stream of Consciousness: From Psychology to Philosophy and the Arts

 

 

It is the 4^th of July weekend, and there are gatherings all around town. A friend invited me to meet his neighbors over food and celebration.

Since I did not know most of the attendees, he introduced me as “a man who has criss-crossed the continents and lived in more than half a dozen countries.” And soon I was asked “where did you live for the longest time?”

Having been asked this question before, I knew there was no good way of avoiding further questions, no matter what my answer was. So I tried a new approach:

“I have inhabited my own self all my life”

And to my surprise, everyone was a bit puzzled, did not follow-up on my response, and we went on to talk about what we do in the High Desert of Arizona.

On the way back, I wondered why I chose the answer I gave. After all, don’t we all “inhabit our own selves”? Or do we?

 

To my delight, this simple moment made me think of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdock (1919-1999) and her writings about the arts and love. Most à propos to my thinking about the “self” was her definition of love (and the arts) as the act of “unselfing”.

So, I took my dog for a walk then sat down to read some of her essays and refresh my memory.

… I learned about “stream of consciousness” through a psychology class when Alexander Bain, the Scottish philosopher, was introduced. He cornered the term in 1855 almost four decades before William James, the father of American Psychology, used Bain’s definition to describe how we organize the stream of thoughts when we are aware (conscious) of these thoughts.

Years later, I discovered that Virginia Woolf had pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative mode to depict the plethora of thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of a narrator.  In the process of learning more about the use of a unifying concept in psychology and literature I was surprised to that “stream of consciousness” was not first proposed by Bain, nor James, but by Daniel Oliver, a physician and academic from New England, in 1835 in First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine. He wrote:

If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas”

Finally, it was through my readings about Virginia Woolf that I learned about Iris Murdoch, and through analysis of my own stream of consciousness, realised how her describing beauty and art as “an occasion for unselfing” and love as the act of unselfing, had influenced my behavior as a health care professional and an artist.

 

… So, should I have responded to the question “where did you live for the longest time?” by “I inhabited my own self all my life, yet my most glorious memories are those when I unselfed”?

I will try that next time the opportunity presents.

 

July 1, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

PS/ I took this street photo in Paris. It is one that I have not published given its poor quality, but somehow I felt it now fits well with the concept of “stream of consciousness.”

 

Blurred Photo on a Wall

 

 

 

As if the old in all of us

On a rainy August morning

Walked away from the window

Which looked over to a brick wall

Held together

By the courtesy

Of frigid

Time

 

And left unturned the single bed where every spring

Still recalls the dreams and lonesome turns

Framed by walls where black and white moments remain

On warped paper, hanging on nails

To look over

Of the old in us

Listening

To the

Springs

 

A Meerschaum pipe and a bottle of Grappa

Next to the bed

Glow in the morning rays

That bounces upon the brick wall

For a short while, to start each day

For the old of us to leaf  

Through a poetry book

And recite

Aloud

Ja ma armastan Sind, sest

Or

Ho bisogno di poesia,

Questa magia che brucia la

Pesantezza delle parole

 

And

End in a murmur

With lines once whispered alone

Under a bridge

C’est la grâce

tremblante

à la force

appuyée,

C’est ta main

dans ma main

doucement

oubliée

June 25, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023