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

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).