Last day of 2008

life is not a wish fulfillment fantasy.
we walk on sidewalks that ends somewhere
but never in dead ends.
And in the mornings
through drops of dew
and pieces of sky
framed by frosty windows
splashed with layers of colors
red, turquoise, blue
yielding to the grey of the starting day
and stillness disturbed only
by the barking of a dog.

then fragrance of coffee and freshly baked cranberry bread raises
while the bouquet of an old wine
drunk the night before
and aimless in the freshness of a new day
continue loitering the space
mixing the warmth of old friendships
with the rythm of breathing.

The alleys of the garden swept clean just yesterday
covered now with early morning's ice
the screen of a computer glowing
with the love of beloved people
from remote places
or the beautiful poem that comes always
with Wies's end of the year wishes
and even though a Parisian babahoo
stands in the way of my wish
in this last day of December 2008

The mighty pulse of Life
pushes on
to pick up the shatterd pieces of last night's dream
to wash the tired eyes
and to walk
with a broad beautiful smile
all bumpy walks of Life
Flora

A Day Among The Buried

"The poem comes in the form of a blessing_'like rapture breaking on the mind,' as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining. Life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life."
Stanley Kunitz





We treaded through the graves, on the cracking leaves
of a cold november day
on the otherwise silent paths
till we lost all measure of present and past


As we reached the monumental stone
a girl started smearing red on her lips
while the dark delectable chocolate
melted down in our mouth
And the girl kissed Oscar's stone
some things are never clear
even on such a bright day
a subtle, soft colored chimera
hanged there in the air
We took it in
our earthly souls wandering among the buried ones
Life's pulse playing a clarinet concerto
Music of words wandering into the vastness of death

the way came to an end
as it always does
in real life
careless of unborn things
longing to live their time of beauty
and to die
before maturity robs its dreamlike quality.
Flora

Nobody stays forever buitenlander, even in Zoersel

First flakes of snow, the green of nature tucked away, coffee grounds on a ruffled note, Robert Frost's words subsiding to words and no embraces of fire. What's there so special about an hour, a day, a lifetime in a place like Zoersel.
What is there special to you they asked me,the buitenlander.
On a day in the spring there will be "The Global Fiesta" they said.
and one theme will be a photo exhibition showing what is special about Zoersel in the eyes of buitenlanders/wat niet-Belgen special vinden aan onze gemeente?
Wherever I lived I thought the place was special, bijzonder, as they say.
To me all the daily motions of life are precious as life itself. There are the simplest of things that are the most special. Het is De Gewon dingen dat zijn de meeste bijzonder
Zoersel is a hideaway where time runs on a zen schedule in a setting of mysterious beauty.

When I first came here, I went to walk in the woods and the leafy paths made me think that if things become unbearable into their quiet I can come, there, trying to hold Rusty's unrest, I knew that the place, the gloom of the trees, the edge of a clearing, the water running in a ditch, all looked like a rendering of Robert Frost's poetry. It was then that I felt brave enough to take in the learning of a new and difficult language and to settle into the uncanny feeling of an apparently unwelcoming place.
I wandered further in the woods and came upon the Boshuisje, where I could read on a plate that it was the setting of Hendrick Conscience's "De Loteling" and though I'd never read a line of him I knew him as the towering figure in the middle of the namesake quiet plaza in Antwerp and the one who put the Flemish language on the map of novels. To me the little house and its bistro looked like the kind of place the Grimm Brothers would stop to drink a beer and discuss their next sprookje.
On the way back that day, I got lost and the little numbered plates on the trees were no help at all as they obstinately pointed out, from everywhere to the same direction: Boshuisje. Fortunately the late summer light lingered long enough for me to come out of the woods before the nightfall.
On the first day of our moving, while opening frantically the boxes to settle in for the night, our very first day "home" after two months of hotel living, we suddenly realized, along with noticing Rusty's absence, that a commotion was going on in the street. Both my children, Lou-Davina and Leonardo, run out and almost immediately jumped back in, livid. The neighbour across the street was about to kill Rusty. As I made a dash outside, I saw the man brandishing a spade and running after the mischievous dog. The second he set his eyes on me he came forward directing the threat of the spade to me while yelling in a funny French "C'est votrrrre chien çà, je vais la touer hein!" I turned my back to him caught the repenting dog's collar and got in closing the entrance door. So much so for a sprookje life style! Where were the welcoming committees of yesteryear? Catherine's moving day lasagna, Gevik turning bare spaces into full furnished home, leaving hot croissants by the door, Frank arriving medical kit in one hand, to rescue Leonardo from a ravaging virus and 'Boston Chicken' meal in another hand to save the day. Here in Zoersel, the wish of a welcoming committee became true the very same night Rusty escaped narrowly the knock of the spade. At 9PM two friendly police officers rang our bell and courteously made it clear that the spade equipped neighbour complained about our "dangerous" dog running loose. They were sorry to bother us so late in the evening but they couldn't help and had to file a report. They played with Rusty, chatted a bit with the kids, suggested that Rusty, while outside, be permanently kept on a leash and left wishing us a nice stay in Zoersel.
I guess, in the begining, being in Zoersel felt like playing gooseberry!
Time passed and one day I ventured out in the prairie across our street the Gagelhoflaan, literally the Myrtle Garden, and stepped in Charles and Dinora's garden. Theirs is a single house surrounded by corm fields, and in autumn's late afternoons, the mist lingers just above the ground, making their place look like seating on the clouds. Charles guided me through his Art gallery, the paintings, the sculptures, curious metallic structures, I attended a while his drawing workshop where we had always the same model, a beautiful thin girl, with not much flesh on to draw great curved lines, rather befitted for miniature painting. There was always a cheerful atmosphere there, and I met my dear friend Wies, the water colorist, who always took time to explain the jokes being told so that I could take part in the laughter though not at a synchronized time. A short time after Charles stopped teaching but we stayed in touch through their Art Group, De Artfanner. going sometimes to exhibits, or taking short trips.
My Flemish is still a work in progress but the circle of nice people is widening. Wies and I are carpooling to our drawing workshops, attending together Yohan Truyen's animal drawing and watercoloring. Or going to see Yohan's beautiful, sober drawings exhibited in the Oude Sint-Martinuspastorij.
Nowadays, my daughter left to attend university in Middelburg, she and Francis, my husband were forever nagging about missing out on the urban life...but my son and I just love this place. He rides his Brommer or his bike through the streets and the woods to get to his friends houses or to fuifjes (DJ parties) I love the quiet and the zen mood floating on the whole place, so tucked away from the tumults of our world and giving me a sense of balance and concentration to read, to write and to translate. From time to time I go on short trips, to Brussels or Paris, and coming back I feel that Zoersel is now home to me, that the language is opening up, showing its beauty, its possibilities, through the patient teaching of Lieve Amssoms. Somehow it's our state of mind and our own will that makes any place bijzonder and the people and their warmth, which is all the same in the whole world. As an Armenian born in Isfahan, Iran, and living in Zoersel, Belgium, I feel that at the core of one's existence is a personal identity that can embrace and blend in anywhere, and that everywhere the air is infected with human possibilities, in which change is a constant part of it, and the mind moves everywhere, along the past's rememberings and beyond today's blended cultures, in which keeping alive the vernacular languages such as Armenian or Flemish is like hugging the solid trunk of the trees, to stay rooted while admiring the delicacy of the ever changing leaves of tomorrows.
Flora

The memory structure in droplets of July's rain water

"Mais quand d'un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l'odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l'édifice immense du souvenir."
Marcel Proust

"when nothing of the past remains, after the passing away of beings, after the destruction of things, the only enduring matters are scents and flavors. Brittle yet bright, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, they hang around like souls remembering, waiting, hoping against the downfalls of everything else, carrying without bending in their almost intangible droplets, the huge structure of memory."
Marcel Proust, translated by Flora


Now, that structure bends me down...

The bushes are full of tasteless, flavorless, sunless blackberries hardly reminiscent of the mulberry trees of my childhood on which both white and black delicious berries grew and under which we played tag or closed eyes to play hide and seek and when everyone vanished in their chosen hideaway, Hratch, the gardener's son would feel safe to take me in his arms and kiss me. A purple colored daring and pleasant kiss.
the light trickles through the tree branches, sparsely yet playfully and there shimmer before my eyes, in slow motion, fragments of memory. A father putting his daughter on the bike, holding her tight, the warm feeling of security and the ride through the leafy alleys of the orchards, the light making everything look soft and safe if only the time of that bike ride in a hand made cool summer dress.

On summer irrigation days, we would go to the orchards and among cousins, we would build bridges made of mud and dried sticks and leaves over the narrow ditches meandering the water all over the place. I loved it there. We would gather under the guidance of Hossein, the orchard keeper's son and we would wander off around in search of jackals. The thrill of it all and the delicious feeling of fear...
Afterward it was time to seat around our beloved grand-mother, to suck in her patient love, her fragrance of quince preserve, of tomato chutney, of sweet pickled lemons and peel walnuts. We would peel off the green skin of ripe walnuts fallen under the tree, letting our fingers soak up a dark inky color which remained till the school's opening day. But until then there was plenty of time to fill up big buckets of water and let it warm up to scorching temperatures under the sun and to bath our dusty bodies, running and chasing each other like crazies, droplets of water evaporating from our skin, vanishing into the hot summer air; Time working to take away the bliss of those moments which would soon enough vanish starting with the death of our grand-parents and erasing itself through the tumultuous history making its way.
How I feel like going to the place, digging the earth with my bare hands and see if the ground can still hold all my beloved smells, for which my body aches, when all it's left is people, stripped of their homeland, their tongue, now in a land with bushes of tasteless, odorless berries and no more mother tongue in which fantasize poems, like the one I wrote in 1984, five years after I knew that there will never be a return way to that blissed state of things.

Arroser le jardin des ancêtres
Qui reviennent à l'appel
Avec le parfum de la terre humide.
Est-il possible
Que la Beauté des choses
reste?

Watering the garden of forefathers
making them come back
by the sheer smell of moistened earth
Is it possible
that beauty be still
on duty?


To be able to say the beauties of past and present in a mother tongue. To be able to name a place where I belong. I already know all too well that all of it was meant to vanish and that fortunately my mother was smart enough to prepare me for all yet to come well ahead of her time, putting me through foreign languages, forging the road of becoming a citizen of the world, as for the rest all I know is that the spirit of beloved people will always be there, mixed with moist earth, with sweet memories,and despite their rotten dead bodies inside the graves of Julfa's cemetery, or Californian and Bostonian cemeteries, a beautiful, though still aloof, hymn of hope raises from that remote place,haunted by the playful children of yesterday.

Flora

For you Child

OH! THE PLACES YOU'LL GO, Oh! that bygone time of Dr Seuss reading, Veronica's nose admiring, trying hard to get the tiger out of the tea pot and thousands nights of story spinning...
Tucking you in bed, a goodnight kiss and Good Night >Moon...
I won't cry Child, I'll take solace in the poetry of our beloved Shel Silverstein 'where the side walk ends'
See Child, up to now you've been sheltered, walking on the sidewalk.
But there comes always, sooner or later, that terrible edgy moment and the sidewalk ends. Then you're left to step in the dangerous traffic of life and make it safely out from one place to the other. The walk is well worth its risks and if you patiently wait, for the traffic light to pass to green then a Shel Silverstein kind of invitation might be waiting for you...



If you are a dreamer come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you are a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

So go in Child. Take up that invitation the world is offering you and we too, will eventually chime in and sing the same song that generations of parents sang to generations of children; the lyrics going about..." Listen to the wind...carrying your heart's wishes...then you'll find... your own path...listen to the wind...in the stormy night...and you'll find...your own path... OK, OK, I'm not good at this, toneless as an empty bucket's bang bang; so go on sing it by yourself.
See Child the fire you leave behind, here, will be kept warm and alive for you to comeback whenever you like...
Speaking of fire, I remember that other poem, in Farsi, that I used to love when I was your age. Something like this:

Yes, yes, Life is Beautiful,
if you light its fire
it will soar high toward the sky
but if you let it down to die, then
all that remain
are ashes scattered in the ensuing still life.

Love you Child.
Mom

On change and the imperfect thoughts

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jewelled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.
Ada Louise Huxtable

Our summer here, in Nettle country, has been a far cry from the right kind of summer days. We have yet to witness one of those 'stripping-down-to-bathing-suit' days or a perfectly balmy night...and all of it not only because of the rotten weather. Indeed ever since, a few months ago, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with an illness necessitating a major surgery, our days and nights have been angst ridden...of course nothing comparable to what himself has been going through neither what his wife (my little sis) has had to cope with, specially in front of their lovely daughter.
Yet both of them kept up the mood and acted coolly. They even took a short vacation trip just before the surgery and had a terrific time, soothing their battered spirit in the uplifting warmth of a Greek island, believing that all that happens, happens for the best as my late uncle would say.
The surgery is over now and doctors are confident that it went well. my brother-in-law has been wheeled out of ICU, that dreadful yet life saving place.
He is recovering in his hospital room and upon his own request, we are not allowed to see him. We will wait till he feels ready and comfortable to see us again.
Despite this good part, we can't just shed down our tension, not yet, not when, in a few days it will be our beloved Boston cousin's turn to undergo heavy surgery for his back.
I guess I could say... and so on in a Kurt Vonnegut manner...
Well it is just that. Going on so...
There is this old friend, that I visit every now and then in Ghent, battling deep depression for over three years now, her old self gone, trying to no avail to grip one end of the rope that will enable her or her doctors to pull it up from that dark abyss invisible to most of us.

Last I saw her, just before my brother-in-law's surgery, my tired eyes hidden behind dark glasses, I asked her to walk from our meeting point in the Zen garden just outside the train station till Sint-Baaf cathedral and light candles. Which is exactly what we did.Though I knew how Cathedrals can overwhelmingly weigh us down, outlining our smallness and that maybe our timing was wrong. But we went on. As we stood under "The Adoration of The Mystic Lamb" its incredible beauty made me feel even more weighed down in a painful way. I reflected that the brothers van Eyck in all their greatness must, most certainly, have had to go through the changes of their own lifetime. Maybe as they finished the very masterwork that kept our heads skyward, they experienced the delusion of directing time. Their Art made it through the trials of time, from the Middle Ages into the twenty first century, imperturbable in its beauty.
Then it sunk down that we too, with all our flaws and endowed with emotional intelligence, will be able to stand up to those changes no matter their conspicuous character, no matter that can take the shape of absence, your own daughter's, who is going away to the feast of the world leaving you to face the emptiness of days with no sweet sound of music practice, no complaints over a vegetarian dinner just because absolute beauty will always be on duty.
Time spent drawing with my niece, in the afternoon light, our inside chit-chat at long last hushed by our concentration; times when my daughter arrives, late night from say a London trip, entering by the front gate while my son makes his come back from one of his nightly bike rides from the back door, in almost a synchronized motion, joining each other over a late snack on the kitchen counter, Their laughter fading in the night as fatigue takes over, or when I walk out of a cathedral with a cherished friend battling ugly depression, but able to laugh in a self mocking way while talking, over coffee and speculoos, about her own history of passing out on the most impromptus moments in life, actually finding herself lay down on a marble table in the lobby of an old Roman house... I take off my dark glasses and let my eyes get, once again, acquainted with light and the lighter side of life. So the changes come up close to the point of becoming memories.
Summer 2007 is not yet over and there is hope for balmy nights, meanwhile spending evenings with Haruki Murakami, sipping chilled white wine has its own rewards. In the opening pages of his "Norwegian Wood" he so pertinently points out that:" Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts."
Flora

Aangenam Amsterdam

Coming across “Thirty Centuries of Persian Art and Culture” on the Shore of Amstel River

A couple of years ago, as I sat in a beginner level class in an attempt to master basics of Flemish language,I learned the word aangenam first thing first as in ‘aangenam kennis making’, nice to meet you! It was my very first words venturing into Flemish and I took it for an open sesame leading denizen foreigners (see previous blog contents) straight into a spot in the heart of Nettlelanders; but que nenni! Not at all, just some wishful thinking.
Paying recently a neighborly visit to the next door Nederland, I couldn’t help but notice, once again, how high the Dutch scored when it comes down to switching into English even when one is actually trying to show off a basic knowledge of their aangenam language versus the unforgivable look of Nettlelanders while you are bravely attempting to get by.

Anyway Amsterdam looked to me a bit shabby and run down this time but it still had the power of running wild my imagination toward the seventeenth century, when Armenian merchants arrived there, then the trendy center of world trade, with their silk loaded caravans making the long journey through Russia. They offered their silk for the bullions they brought back to the Persian Safavid court. The resulting wealth contributed to the modern state building of the time, in Iran. So in a way, between Amsterdam, Russia and Persia it has always been an old story. That’s what's giving such a natural feel to the opening of the Hermitage museum on the canal belt and an even homier feel to its seventh exhibition featuring Persian Art.

The old days of Golden Age silk trading are long gone and embarking into a search journey brings nothing but deception. Much like the time I visited the Willet-Holtuysen house dating back to that meaningful time. The name belongs to the art collecting family who owned it in the nineteenth century which of course explains why I couldn’t find the least littlest bit of my own quest into that particular moment of history so dear to me. Yet I keep imagining those Armenian merchants_ who competed and won against the powerful East Indian Company when the great Shah Abbas Safavid auctioned the monopoly of trading his silk_ as business dinner guests in the Genteel Gratchtengordel houses.

So one guesses how much I was amazed to discover that the Hermitage Amsterdam, a work in progress, which opened his doors in 2004, featured ‘Persia, Thirty Centuries of Art” as his seventh venture into the rich collection of the Great Hermitage. It was tough the old days were kind of resuscitated!

A sleepy Shah as guide and Art narrator…

A short walk from the Herengracht, crossing the bridge over Amstel river toward the n° 14 on the Nieuwe Herengracht got me at the door of the museum’s 500 m2 exhibition space divided into a total of six galleries where the big portrait of a stoned looking Nasir Al-Din Shah from the pool of Qadjar dynasty greeted the visitor with words some humor driven curator had put in his thick whiskers covered mouth:

“Ours is a land full of people, full of Art. Your visit will be a joyful reacquaintance with these delights”.

Boy! Despite his opium imbued look it was though the guy knew what he was talking about.

The exhibition focused on the recurring leitmotif of old forms and traditions.

The first gallery displayed a sample of pre-Islamic art. Small everyday objects that the languid eyed Nasir explained as the starting point:

“Our story begins with the Elamites a people who lived in our realm many thousands of years ago. It was they who made the first works of Art. Simple pieces yet already imbued with an aesthetic style that would continue to characterize our Iranian Art.”

What captured my attention was a dark blue coffee jug with its bird’s beak looking spout. A knock-out piece of modern design out of a thee drinking nation!
The second showroom outlined Iran’s tradition of bronze and ceramics production. Here again my ever so sleepy Shah went on with his towering comments:

“We Iranians love flowers, plants, people and animals. The prophet Mohammed, may God bless him and peace be upon him, warned us not to have divine pretensions and breathe life into man and beast in images. But our artists could not resist this temptation, for they desired to represent the creation of Allah. The Iranians preferred to call their craftsmen artists and they in turn interwove form and decoration to create aesthetically pleasing objects, from simple bronze cauldron to candle stands for mosques.”

It seemed to me that then as now, artists, shahs and simple mortals were all already outsmarting God and the forbidding ways of his prophet!

The third section outlined the importance of Iran’s fabulous calligraphy and miniature painting featuring works of my hometown’s master, the famous Reza-e-Abassi of the Isfahan school of painters. So I was sufficiently in awe to take the Shah’s word as some spell binding statements. With his outwardly gaze he went on as though guessing my state of mind:

“In the eleventh century hijra (18th century) Isfahan masters were influenced by contacts with the west. These contacts gave miniatures a more ‘three dimensional' character and added European towers, houses, bridges and horses to the painters repertoire. In the second half of the 12th century hijra (19th century) Iranian artists were also fascinated by Indian (Mughal) painting.”

I stood there in front of fragile illustrations of literary epics, tragic love stories some of them learned on the school benches and reflected on that bygone story book place I lived once upon a time.

Pulling myself out of a nostalgic reverie, I followed the fourth part with more bronze and ceramics and learned that Kerman was one of the most important center of ceramic production, that in the years before the Safavid period a new style was introduced and artists began to engrave ornaments and inscriptions (suras from the Koran etc.) that resembled a large net. Metal ware was also decorated with expressions of greeting and congratulations or wishes of happiness and success. Then came a time of Chinese influence; dishes from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries with a central medallion and the Ming dynasty porcelain patterns all of it an outcome of the trade between Iran, China and Europe.

The fifth group of glass and textiles showed the skills of Iranian glass blowers. Beautiful curves and the transparent blue colors combined to the beauty of brocades, mantles, scarves and garments, usually worn indoors by royals left me to ponder about the more practical side of cloth washing job. How they managed to not damage such a dainty material? Nasir Shah didn’t seem to have an answer for this and I skipped all together the subject. One shouldn’t bother a royal with such trivialities.

So that brought me to the sixth and final part of the show. The lethargic Qadjar period of loose cloth fashion and beard growing. Animal figures were no longer made of copper or bronze but of steel. The central piece in this Qadjar gallery was a carpet featuring Persepolis, symbol of the Qadjar’s will to link themselves to the grandeur of the oldest dynasties. Portrait paintings made its appearance…that’s probably how Nasir ended up leading visitors through this very exhibition while the West was already opening his way into the legendary realm of Iran.

I bade farewell to Nasir, his sleepy look so familiar by now and headed out to the museum's store stocked with various Iranian items. I gave in to the temptation of the moment and bought Mijn Minnaar, My lover, by the late Forough Farrokhzad, the celebrated poetess of the twentieth century as a gift for my daughter,wondering about incredible turns of fate…my own daughter discovering Forough’s beautiful poems in Dutch! The DVD of Jafar Panahi's movie “Circle” winner of the 2000 Venetian Gold Lion tackling the women’s treatment under the rule of Islamism as well as a cookbook for the first Flemish speaking friend who comes up showing some interest in Persian cooking.

Yeah! Het was me eens aangenam in Amsterdam.
Flora