And I walked
With my shoes taken
Away
In the day
Through the nights
And made
A path
Where secretly
Shadows found time
To rest alone
As I walked passed
By
A scarecrow
Hung the sun
Hung the moon
Upon its hat
For memories to fear
Remembering
What I should
Had
Forgotten
And I walked
Without my shoes
Secretly
So not to scare
The sun
The moon
Hanging upon
The shadow
Of the scarecrow
November 7, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023
It was a cold morning, a few hours ago. As usual the internal clock of my dog dictated that we go downtown before sunrise.
And in the dark, I saw a man struggling to walk. My dog recognized him and walked to greet him.
Over the years we have met this gentleman and his dog around the Court House. We have had a few conversations and our dogs socialized happily. This time he hardly looked at Ziggy but starred at me with an empty look when we got close.
“Good morning” I said, “I have not seen you for a long while. How are you?”
With that empty look, he replied “Do you really want to know?”
He looked unkept and his gait had changed.
“Let me sit down, everything is shifting around me.”
He slowly lowed himself and sat on the street curb.
“Everything is moving, shifting around me. This is the second time this happens to me. The tree trunks are moving, the buildings are not the same as I remember.”
So I sat next to him.
“I have Alzheimer’s and my balance is bad. It is a strange feeling when nothing is the same as it once was. You have noticed how difficult it is for me to walk now, yes?”
I nodded.
“Do you know if the Solid Rock is open? I need to eat something.”
He was asking about the kitchen where food is offered to homeless folks of the city.
“It is too early” I said. “Why don’t you sit down a little longer till they open.”
Ziggy was trying to get his attention, but he never looked at him.
“Time is shifting too. It now has an oval shape.”
… He looked like he had been on the street for a while. And he seemed lost yet his speech was fine and I could follow his rational and almost cohesive reasoning. I recalled that he was a professor once, and that we had shared discussion about poetry during our previous meetings.
“Should I call for assistance?” I asked.
“No, no need. I will figure things out. I am sure somewhere; someone knows what is happening to me. But I have no idea.”
Then he looked at me and drew a slight smile on his unshaved face.
“We will meet again on a better day,” he promised.
Photo taken with a Yashica Lynx 14e in Zagreb, Croatia
October 27, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023
PS/ I have written about this gentleman here https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2023/05/love-is-rider-who-breaks-us-all.html
I did not feel like reading poetry this weekend. The world was not a loving place this week.
But I wanted to read. So I went to a French translation of Dante’s “La Divine Comédie” and started at the beginning with “L’enfer”.
But could not continue for long.
Then I recalled that the once forgotten English poet, William Blake, was also an engraver who was working on illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy as his last work before his death in 1827. So, I opted to read pages from Blake remembering a statement of him that had stayed with me during any creative process I spent my past 50 years in pursuit.
He said:
“If the doors of
perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
Perception, consciousness and apprehension. Over the years, I have considered these dimensions as the three legs of the stool upon which an artist rest, and where a scientist aspires to distill all complex questions faced.
Yet, the doors of perception are often closed, locked tight, or turned opaque. But when cleansed or open, thinking that through these doors the infiniteness of everything can be experienced is perhaps what Béatrice showed to Dante after his descent to Inferno and passage through the terraces of Purgatorio.
So, I leafed through some of Blake’s poem. To my delight, given my initial inclination to read Dante, I found a poem I had not read before entitled “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. At first lecture, it seems an abstract poem or series of thoughts. Until one gets to the line
“Roses are planted
where thorns grow”
I stopped for a while thinking about that line. Was Blake looking though the cleansed doors of perception? Or was he lamenting upon human nature?
Perhaps the answer is in the following stanzas:
Then the perilous path
was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.
Till the villain left
the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
These almost sound like what Virgil could have said to Dante during his descent to hell. And secretively, I found the short poem by Blake more to the point, faster. How delightful was his choice of the poem’s title!
October 15, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023
Bent and broken
The morning driped its dew
Upon dirt and over the rays
Ready for another cactus to flower
And creosote filled the air
With the smell of rain
While sage brush painted the sound
Of a damp desert silent in morning
dew
Bent and now bright
The high desert will soon offer shade
To rabbit, hare and rattle snake
Under the wings of owls and hawks
And I sit alone
Next to thornless honey
mesquite
Searching for my soul
Grateful and in peace
Bent and dreamfull
October 5, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023
It is gently raining
this morning and while my dog was walking me, I enjoyed the sight of rain
droplets on the roses. At first sight I recalled Khalil Gebran’s lines about
friendship from “The Prophet”:
In the sweetness of friendship let there be
laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart
finds its morning and is refreshed
Then, as we walked are
daily mile in the streets of the town, out of nowhere, a poem by Pierre de Ronsard took
over my memories. This poem, written in the 1500th, was among my
favorites in French literature class in high school days. I knew this poem by
heart, like many others but I had not thought about it for more than half a
century! Slowly, some of the lines came back, and to the bewilderment of my
dog, I started reciting them aloud.
Back home, I shook the
dampness off my hat and searched for the poem. Here are the opening lines, in old
French, of “Mignonne,
allons voir si la rose”
and a good English translation:
Mignonne, allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au Soleil,
A point perdu ceste vesprée
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vostre pareil.
Las ! voyez comme en peu d’espace,
Mignonne, elle a dessus la place
Las ! las ses beautez laissé cheoir !
Ô vrayment marastre Nature,
Puis qu’une telle fleur ne dure
Que du matin jusques au soir !
Sweetheart, let’s see
if the rose
Who this morning unfurled
Her dress of crimson to the sun,
Has lost at evening
The folds of her crimson dress,
And her color at the same rate.
Alas! See how in a
little bit of space,
Sweetheart, she has the place.
Alas! Weary of its beauties she let fall!
Oh, truly cruel Mother Nature,
That such a flower doesn’t last
From morning to evening!
It is about beauty and
the passage of time. It is about our willingness to appreciate the circle of
love, the circle of life, while finding beauty along the way.
And as I sipped on my
morning coffee, lines from the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca found their
way in this unexpected expedition in memory. Indeed, it was in his writings
that I first learned how often poets have talked about their refuge, and
perhaps liberation, in self love when love, like roses, has transcended others
and experiences.
He wrote:
After a while
you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand
and chaining a soul.
Every time I think of
those lines, at various stages of my life, I interpret the last line
differently. Is it the soul of the one we love? Or the soul of those we loved?
Or is it our own soul?
No matter. Lorca has
experienced all three of those interpretations, and here are lovely lines from
one of my favorite poems of his “Serenata”
Por las orillas del río
se está la noche mojando
y en los pechos de Lolita
se mueren de amor los
ramos.
Se mueren de amor los
ramos.
La noche canta desnuda
sobre los puentes de
marzo.
Lolita lava su cuerpo
con agua salobre y
nardos.
Se mueren de amor los
ramos.
La noche de anís y plata
relumbra por los tejados.
Plata de arroyos y
espejos.
Anís de tus muslos
blancos.
Se mueren de amor los
ramos.
And the translation :
The
night soaks itself
along the shore of the river
and in Lolita's breasts
the branches die of love.
The branches die of love.
Naked the night sings
above the bridges of March.
Lolita bathes her body
with salt water and roses.
The branches die of love.
The night of anise and silver
shines over the rooftops.
Silver of streams and mirrors
Anise of your white thighs.
The branches die of love.
… Roses again. And I looked for a photo I had taken
where roses, the circle of love and youth found their way through my camera’s
lens.
September 23, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023
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
“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
