Broken Wings

It is dove hunting season. I found a dove fallen under a tree, one wing broken.

… I was 14 years old when I first read Khalil Gibran’s “The Broken Wings.” As for any young man, love was the ultimate unknown I had explored only through poems and other people’s stories. I had not read “The Prophet” yet so I discovered Gibran through his love for Selma.

As I looked at the dove with a broken wing, I had a similar tremor as when I read “The Broken Wings” almost 50 years ago. And I decided to read it again.

… It is not clear if this book is autobiographical, but as I turned the pages, I realized that it is autobiographical in a generic sense: it is the experience of every man, it is panhuman. It is about learning about love through a person, not while reading poetry or hearing the stories of others. Selma is Gibran’s introduction to that basic need and feeling. Yet, Selma is physically fragile. And when her newborn son dies, she sees death as her rescue, her passage to peacefulness. In her words:

“You have come to take me away my child . . . lead me and let us leave this dark cave.”

And she does leave that dark cave.

Years later, Gibran writes:

“Today, after many years have passed, I have nothing left out of that beautiful dream except painful memories flapping like invisible wings around me, filling the depths of my heart with sorrow, and bringing tears to my eyes; and my beloved, beautiful Selma, is dead and nothing is left to commemorate her except my broken heart and tomb surrounded by cypress trees. That tomb and this heart are all that is left to bear witness of Selma.”

… When I finished the book, I looked at the high desert outside my window. It is not the Mediterranean, nor the month of May when Gibran met Selma, but a dove with broken wings dies the same way, no matter the geography.

And I reread the line from the book when Gibran summarizes his experience with love:

“…yesterday [Selma] was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and today is a silent secret in the bosom of the earth.”

September 6, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

When Poetry Interprets Photography

I am not a scenery and outdoors photographer. Perhaps I do not have the patience to find the right angle and wait for that split second when the light is just right. Yet, I cannot go anywhere without a camera hanging from my neck.

During a memorable hike in the Cedar Breaks National Park in Utah, I could not resist taking a few photos of the half-mile deep geologic amphitheater. I used a 1970s Vivitar Series One 70-210 mm variable zoom to reach down the amphitheater. And then a 1948 Rolleiflex TLR for a few photos of subalpine forest trees surrounding the mouth of the amphitheater.

I was looking at these photos and wondering why I took them. The few pine trees gathered in the otherwise barren amphitheater were a striking contrast to the lush forest half a mile above. And, in a strange turn of things, these two photos made me think about lines of poetry from various poets.

First, the bristlecone pine tree in the forefront of aspen trees reminded me of a line from Rumi:

“May be you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.”

Was I? Was it why I could not figure out why I took that photo?  

Hiking such grand and open spaces often makes me feel part of the space while at the same time very alone. Not lonely though, as I feel like the countless others who have taken that hike before me have given that space a name. It is a welcoming name – in fact I think of it as a room. A vast room with no walls and no ceiling.

And that made me recall lines from the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer who suggested in his “The Half-Finished Heaven” that:

                                               “Each man is a half-open door

                                                leading to a room for everyone.”

So, was I a half-open door during that hike? What was behind the half-closed door in me? Would I have opened my doors wide if I knew they were half-open?

… Feeling alone makes me look around me. Perhaps to check if I was really alone. But that impulse allows me to see more than perhaps others notice. And what I notice stays in me, sometimes dormant for a while. And then seemingly unrelated events or moments, such as looking at photos I took and not understanding why I took them, make these dormant impressions manifest themselves.

And that is when my favorite lines from Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun made me understand why I took these photos.

                                               “Alone,

                                                 alone.

                                                Glug glug glug I drink gulps of light

                                                and I brush.

                                               So I shower and put myself back, alone.”

That was it – I was trying to put myself back, alone.

June 21, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Feather and Arrow

Across the whisper

Of a name in tears

_who?_

A promise

Got caught

In a net

_why?_

               A boy fell from the nest

               And a sparrow became a man

               _when?_

               Neither could fly

               In the air

               But the wind

               Took them home

               _where?_

I called the name

And it called me back

_how?_

June 19, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Mallarmé, Einstein and the Navajo Wisdom

It has been raining for days. It is cold, dark and wet in the desert.

Apocalyptic fires are burning in Alberta, Canada. An entire city has burned, almost 100,000 people evacuated. The skies have been night-like for days over Alberta while burning amber fills the thick air. The smoke from the blaze has traversed the continent and now can be seen in Florida.

So, I put on wool socks and fired up the fireplace. Not only for warmth but also for brightness. The skies are dark and the flames give the feeling of protection. My dog curled up under my chair to warm up his aging joints.

It was a day for poetry and contemplation.

… Yesterday, when the rain stopped for a brief moment and the sun appeared, a magnificent rainbow shaped in color and hope. So, while staring at the fire, I recalled a few lines from “Song of Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,

My oldest force is good as new,

And the fresh rose on yonder thorn

Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

My oldest force. Perhaps because it is Mother’s Day today that I thought about my mother, my oldest force. I recalled, as a child, putting my head upon her knees and asking her to run her fingers thru my long, curly hair. On this cold and rainy day, I had the feeling of a phantom limb running over my head.

Somehow, I thought of an 1850’s poem by Stéphane Mallarmé

Qui jadis, sur mes beaux sommeils d'enfant gâté

Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermées

Neiger de blancs bouquets d'étoiles parfumées.

                          (Who, in the blissful dreams of my happy childhood

                         Used to hover above me sprinkling from her gentle hands

                         Snow-white clusters of perfumed stars.)

Mallarmé. I have read many of his works when I was fervently a Baudelaire fan. The most challenging poem by Mallarmé is called “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) where he used visual organization of words, letter fonts and their special arrangement to allow for many interpretations. A line has stayed with me over the years:

“cadavre par le bras / écarté de secret qu’il détient”  (corpse by the arm / unattached to the secret it holds.)

A body that holds a secret. A secret that lives within a body. And the phantom hands of my mother that reached my head from the l’au delà, the hereafter.

… A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. A century later Einstein used a similar thought to describe the cosmic determinism he believed in. When criticizing quantum mechanics and its suggestion that probability and randomness are inherent to the seeming order and determinism, he said:

                                    “God does not play dice with the universe.”

But if God (however defined) did play dice, Mallarmé suggests that the rules of chance and probability would not be affected. That we would continue to be subject to certain randomness no matter how we act. Or, as I understand it, our indeterminism is pre-determined!

… I must have chuckled loudly at this thought as my dog woke up, looked at the dark skies outside, looked at me, re-positioned himself and went back to sleep.

So, there is determinism, but it is not absolute. Like rivers that search for their sea or ocean. Is it the destiny of a river to find its sea? Can a river be a lesser river if it does not find its ocean?

A few lines by Jorge Manrique came to mind:

Nuestras vidas son los rios

Que van a dar en el mar

Que us el morrir

                                  « Our lives are the rivers

                                     That empty into the sea

                                     That is our dying”

Are we the rivers determined to find our sea? A sea of tempestuous loving? An ocean of vast emptiness? Is our journey our identity before it gets transformed into a grander find? Or it does not matter if we throw a dice, just for the fun of it?

… Living in Arizona and through Native American songs/poems I have discovered a new wisdom about nature and our relationship to it. Many of these songs are associated with rituals such as initiation rites, planting or hunting. Recently I read the lyrics of a Navajo song that on this rainy day in the desert brought together my wandering thoughts back under the rainbow:

Truly in the east

The white bean

And the great corn plant

Are tied with the white lightning.

Listen! Rain approaches!

The voice of the bluebird is heard.

Truly in the east

The white bean

And the great squash

Are tied with the rainbow.

Listen! Rain approaches!

The voice of the bluebird is heard.

… Yet, the rain will end soon. I will take off my warm socks, let the fire exhale in the fireplace, and wake up my dog. Then together we will go out looking for a rainbow.

May 8, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Identity Has an Unknown Face

I was researching articles about facial reconstructive surgery. I came across a recent report about the work of Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), in a hospital in Amman, Jordan (1). 

It is not a new topic for any war zone yet I was compelled to read because of one paragraph:

“The mission of this one-of-a-kind hospital, funded and run by MSF, is to rebuild the identities of patients, most of whom are forced to confront their trauma every time they see their reflection.”

Rebuilding identity. Most of us search for our identity not because we lost it but because we never found it.  We go back to identify ancestry, history and life experiences. If lucky, we just build our identity based on the inherited.

Rebuilding is totally different. It has nothing to do with the past, but all about the type of future one can now construct.  And this time it is an identity that we let others, like surgeons, decide what it will be.

I remember a saying about mirrors:

                   “Mirrors should reflect twice before sending our image back to us.”

…. For some reason I then looked for a picture I took last year but left it in the drawer. I was looking at the bronze sculpture of an unknown woman in a corner of a museum yard. It was perhaps a famous woman once, but now frozen in bronze and left in that corner. Even with a small plate about the artist, she had no identity.

Then, as I like for most of my street photography moments, a woman peeped into the yard from behind the iron fence. Her hair was very similar to that of the unknown, bronze face that was facing me. 

For a split second I thought about identity and being “imprisoned” behind the bars of ancestry, history or life experiences.

So I clicked because that is what I do when I have my camera hanging from my neck.

May 4, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

(1)   “Plastic Surgeons Treat Physical And Psychological Wounds In The Middle East” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/plastic-surgery-jordan-hospital_us_56e9ab9fe4b0b25c91843d60

When Sandburg, Longfellow and Rumi Look Through a Window

We all are inquisitive about discovering the yet undiscovered. Some of us do so as scientists, musicians, painters, photographers, philosophers or poets. The path to discovery is the purposeful peeping into what is partly covered by knowledge, dogma or experience. Thus the first step is to find an opening, or in some instances pierce one through our curiosity and eagerness to know more.

The symbolism of an opening can be materialized through an actual structure and transformed into metaphors. In poetry, most commonly an actual window or a door are used to uncover what is or was behind them. In every language I know there are poems about windows and doors, and perhaps by projection about balconies. I belong to the latter group of curious people who have written about balconies and what they may represent ⁽¹⁾. In short, a balcony is an escape from the main building. A place of evasion from where one can watch the street and people below, a sunrise, a sunset, and keep memories of a kiss stolen at high noon or at dawn. If not stolen, borrowed for sure.

… I was reading poems by Carl Sandburg, an American poet I like, perhaps because of some European influence his life attitude adopted given the Swedish descent of his parents. I stopped on the page entitled “At a Window”. I have read it many times before but my eyes lingered on that page again. It starts by the poet asking God to give him hunger and other difficulties, perhaps to test him. But the request Sandburg has is to also give him the chance to be loved and experiencing love. The powerful ending lines are:

“But leave me a little love, 

A voice to speak to me in the day end, 

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness. 

In the dusk of day-shapes 

Blurring the sunset, 

One little wandering, western star 

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window, 

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk 

And wait and know the coming 

Of a little love.”

The window is an actual one, but the await for love is a symbolic gesture based on the experience of the poet. Suddenly, the banal window becomes that opening to a hope and demand for the most fundamental of our wants.

So, I searched for another poem I like, this time by H.W Longfellow. This one is about lost love, lost happiness, and uses a visit to his old house to remember the good moments and what is now lost.  It is entitled “The Open Window” and we see the poet visiting the home where he was a child once. Now he is there with his own child, and he remembers the sounds and liveliness in that house he knew. And looking to a window that hides no laughter or joy now, he writes:

“And the boy that walked beside me,

  He could not understand

Why closer in mine, ah! closer,

  I pressed his warm, soft hand!”

In this case the window is an opening for introspection and remembrance. The quiet building is like a lifeless body and the open window akin to a gaping wound.

… The symbolism of a window is different from that of a door in poetry. A door has active expectation – to walk through it, to have someone else walk back to you. A window in contrast, is a true opening from which in most instances we expect feelings, actual light or memories to come through. I say “most instances” because, as a health professional, I have encountered many occasions in Asia and Northern Europe where a window is left open for the room where a patient is taking his/her last breath. An open window is needed for the soul to leave the room.

I have a tendency to end my literary reading by going back to Rumi. His short statements seem most conducive for departing thoughts that stay with me long after I close the book.

A few lines of Rumi do bring the concepts of a window to love as follows:

“Moonlight floods the whole sky

From horizon to horizon

How much it can fill your room

Depends on your window.”

And:

“Love said to me:

There is nothing that is not me.

Be silent.”

… So I closed the book.

April 24, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

^{(1)       http://vahezen.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-balcony-of-baudelaire-garcia-lorca.html}

 I took this photo in a church in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."

Broken stone

Upon broken stone

I made a place

For desert dreams

To find dark

Shade

The black old cat

Was burned

In a firy sunset

For there was no river to run

And no sea to set in

So the cat let it go

Stone upon

Broken stone

I made a space

For lost sunsets

Black old cats

And a name

I found hiding

In a desert dream

It may never rain

Again

In Tidikelt

Yet the desert hare

Will learn to chase its shadow

In search of shade

And the name I once knew

Will dream of rivers

Where river beds once slept

For

Broken stone

Upon broken stone

I made a place

For things

To end

April 23, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

The title of this posting is from a poem by T. S Elliott "The Hollow Men"

I took this photograph in Morocco of a man making clay pots and dishes.