notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 11, 2010
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ON POPULARITY
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It is an honest man's duty to expose the dishonest because not to do so amounts to legitimizing their dishonesty and ignoring their victims. And because the dishonest outnumber the honest, he is bound to be unpopular.
My guess is, the Beatles made more money in a single day than Mozart in his entire life.
Popularity is for the birds and the likes of Elvis Pelvis.
Whenever I make myself unpopular with a reader, I think “mission accomplished.”
Can you name a single Armenian writer who was popular?
Naregatsi? Abovian? Baronian?
The first led an anonymous existence in a monastery.
The second committed suicide at the age of 43.
The third was betrayed to the authorities, driven out of business (as a publisher) and died of TB at the age of 49.
And they were the lucky ones.
Charents and Bakunin were worse off.
The first was betrayed, arrested, and committed suicide in a Yerevan jail at the age of 40.
The second was betrayed, arrested, tortured, and shot and the age of 38.
First nation to convert to Christianity?
Maybe, but in name only.
Intelligent, progressive, civilized?
Don't make me laugh.
Philistinized, Ottomanized, Sovietized (which also means converted to atheism)?
That's more like it
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The Polish nation is in mourning today.
If what happened to them happened to us, I have every reason to suspect we would be celebrating.
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When the truth is unbearable or unreachable, we lie.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 12, 2010
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MUMBO JUMBO
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Some words are untranslatable. Case in point: in Armenian we have a word for “house,” but not for “home.” There is a popular and widely quoted poem in English that says, “Every house ain't a home,” and “It takes a heap of living to make a house a home.”
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Man does not understand man (including himself) and yet, theologians pretend to understand and explain God to us. We can't understand God for the simple reason that God and man do not share the same dictionary. Man may need dictionaries. God doesn't.
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God created man, and man created words, and the twain shall never meet. That's why everything we say about God is irrational, absurd, and blasphemous in the eyes of other men.
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When we say “God is love,” or “God is our Father,” we in a sense make an attempt to bring Him down to our own level of understanding, and in this effort we fail miserably. Hence countless orthodoxies, heresies, religious wars, and massacres. It is no exaggeration to say that more people have died in the name of God than any other concept, including the Devil. Figure that one out if you can.
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The Tower of Babel, like Reincarnation, is not a single occurrence but a constant and ceaseless process.
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For millions of years, primitive man thought of God as the Unknown and the Unknowable; the source of all good as well as evil. Traces of this belief may be found today in all organized religions, including our own – as when we say in the Lord's prayer, “Do not lead us into temptation,” thus identifying God with the Devil whose business it is to lead man into temptation.
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God may be many things but he is not and cannot be a contradiction. Some day we may see and understand this very clearly but not as long as we speak of Him as if He were a better version of ourselves.
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When we say God knows everything, do we mean He knows all the names and numbers in all the telephone books in print today? God's words – assuming he has them, or needs them, or uses them – are not our words, and neither are ours His. When Wittgenstein said we should not speak about things we know nothing about (in his own words, “...about that of which one cannot talk, one must be silent”) I suspect he had God in mind and he was saying “Shut up!” to theologians. Two and a half millennia ago Socrates made a similar assertion when he said, “Of the gods we know nothing.”
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Jean-Paul Sartre, a contemporary of Wittgenstein, wrote a big philosophical treatise titled BEING AND NOTHINGNESS. In the cosmos, the planet on which we live is the size of a speck of dust so tiny that it might as well be invisible. Which may suggest that “being and nothingness” are not two contradictory conditions but one and the same, or as complementary to one another as mumbo jumbo.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 13, 2010
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APHORISMS
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We all harbor a killer and like 007 all we need is a license to kill.
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God did not create man in His own image. Man is prone to error. God is not – provided we assume creating man not to have been a serious blunder on His part.
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We choose an ideology or belief system not by its truth but by its usefulness to us.
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By selecting a set of values and facts, one can formulate an almost infinite number of belief systems and ideologies.
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There is a natural tendency in all of us to believe in pleasant lies and to reject painful truths.
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If the Bible is the word of God, then it is a clumsily garbled paraphrase by someone suffering from an advanced case of Alzheimer's.
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True knowledge contains doubts, false knowledge only certainties.
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If as a teenager I had read someone like me, I would have hated his guts.
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A bad reader can be a mean critic.
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Men have been talking about women since the beginning of time and they still can't figure them out. What does that tell you about the state of human knowledge and understanding?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 15, 2010
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READING BARUIR MASSIKIAN,
THE ABOMINABLE NO MAN
OF ARMENIAN LITERATURE
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“Armenian literature is a vast cemetery and writing for Armenians as cheerful a prospect as attending a requiem mass.”
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A handful of his contemporaries may have heard of him but the rest have every reason to assume that he is a fiction of my own imagination whose raison d'etre is to reinforce my own peculiar views on Armenians and related atrocities. It is to dispel that notion that I have translated below the brief entry on him in the SOVIET-ARMENIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA (volume 7, page 267), by A. Yapujian:
“Armenian author, born in Adana in 1914. He lived in Cairo in 1920. Received his primary education in the Berberian School, Studied law at the University in Paris, philosophy and literature at the University of Brussels. His works include OUR LIFE (1946), BROKEN CROSSES (1959), and PELTING RAIN (1962), which is a collection of humorous tales and the plays “My Grandson,” “The Cross,” “One Million,” and “Akhjikdes” [literally, “girl-viewing,” a formal visit arranged by match-makers). His operetta ERZRUM RONDO was staged in Cairo, New York, and elsewhere.”
In addition to being a composer he was also an excellent violinist, or so I am told by a personal acquaintance of his.
He died about ten years after the Encyclopedia was published in 1981.
His contempt of Armenian activists, Panchoonies, and Jack S. Avanakians was such that, when several of them approached him at his deathbed in a hospital suggesting he bequeath his estate to an Armenian educational foundation (he died single and, as a successful lawyer, he was a wealthy man), he is said to have replied: “I'd much rather leave it to a Cairo bordello.”
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“To be an Armenian poet means to be a beggar at the mercy of buggers.”
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“They asked a thief why he stole, and he replied: 'To qualify as a member of an Armenian organization.'”
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“He was convinced he looked like a doctor though he had not had much practice in legal murder.”
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“The logic of an Armenian charlatan: All geniuses have major failings. Since I have a major failing, I must be a genius.”
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“Instead of books, they want basterma. Instead of theater, belly-dancing. Instead of poems, obscenities and brawls.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 16, 2010
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REFRAINS
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Because he was a xxx, writes Kirk Douglas in his memoirs, he was constantly harassed, bullied, and beaten by neighborhood boys in New York. I too was bullied and sometimes beaten, not by Greeks but by my Armenian classmates.
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Nothing comes more naturally to a victim than the victimize the first chance he gets.
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For most of our historic existence we were at the mercy of bullies who were successful in convincing us we were in the best of hands. When shortly before he was himself murdered, Zohrab warned his fellow Armenians of the coming catastrophe, they said, “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” That's another problem with us. After being victims for centuries, we assume our status as underdogs to be an integral part of the human condition.
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I have said this before and it bears repeating: Once upon a time we were slaves. We are now slaves of former slaves.
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We experienced a literary Renaissance in Istanbul under Sultan Abdulhamid II. Under our own bosses and benefactors (and with the blessing of our bishops) we are experiencing the apotheosis of mediocrity which is worse than death.
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The dead can be resurrected. It is more difficult with the living.
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I remember to have read somewhere, “A feud should live a full and colorful life and then it should die a natural death and be forgotten.” After we die, our feuds will go on living. Our mortality is certain. So is the immortality of our feuds.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 17, 2010
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TWO BOOKS
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Two recently published books that I am looking forward to read are SPEAK, NABOKOV by Michael Maar, and a biography (the first, I think) of Lesley Blanch titled INNER LANDSCAPES, WILDER SHORES by Anne Boston.
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Nabokov is a favorite writer of mine. LOLITA is the only work of fiction that I have read four times with equal enjoyment. His critics are right when they say he has no moral sense, no social consciousness, and no constructive message. In that sense, he is very much like music, even though he was himself tone deaf, unlike his son Dimitry, who in addition to being an opera singer is also his father's editor and translator of his Russian works.
My admiration of Nabokov is such that I am more than willing to forgive his blind spots – two of them being his contempt for two bourgeois writers like Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Nabokov was born in the highest Russian aristocracy, a multimillionaire, who lost his fortune to the Soviets and his father to an assassin.
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Lesley Blanch is the author of THE SABRES OF PARADISE, the most fascinating book on the Caucasus, or rather, the fierce resistance of Caucasian tribes under the leadership of Imam Shamil, which continues to this day.
There are several Armenians in this epic story, one of them being a girl not much older than Lolita, with whom Shamil is said to have fallen in love. So much so that even when the girl's parents were willing to pay a ransom for her (she was abducted), she refused to return to her family.
Leslie Blanch married Romain Gary, author of the best-selling THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, (inspired by the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, with whom he was personally acquainted), who left her for a much younger Jean Seberg, who committed suicide; and so did Romain Gary.
I have a soft spot for all suicides (except Hitler), but I am also convinced it is the wrong people who commit suicide, and those who should, don't – Stalin, Mao, Franco, and any day now, Castro.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 18, 2010
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WRITING
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From an interview with Philippe Sollers in the latest issue of LE POINT:
“To know how to write, one must know how to read; and to know how to read, one must know how to live. That's all there is to it.”
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“It is said that anyone can be a writer because language is a medium at everyone's disposal. Allow me to confide in you if I may: writing is an art.”
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VICTIMS
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Not all victims are nice. I will never forget the young, attractive woman who was so rude to me that I did something I have never done before: I walked out on her. When she went and complained to my employer, he telephoned to explain that she had once killed a man who had tried to rape her.
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CRITICS AND DUPES
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There is more merit in being too critical to the point of being wrong than being a dupe. When one is wrong one may be corrected. But the chances of a dupe seeing the light are slim to the point of being non-existent. Racists, fanatics, fascists, and skinheads have existed and will continue to exist even in the most liberal democracies like the United States of America, and even in the most “progressive, civilized, and intelligent” nation like Armenia.
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TURKS
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If we call Turks swine we run the risk of alienating the good Turks as well as the half-Armenians within Turkey, that is to say, our most important potential allies.
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If teachers in Turkey have no choice but to use textbooks approved by the state, in what way is the average Turk today guilty or evil?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 19, 2010
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EXTRAVAGANT CLAIMS
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With the financial support of the Gulbenkian Foundation, an Irish academic by the name of D.M. Lang once wrote and published a lavishly illustrated book titled ARMENIA: CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION. Another academic, J. Strzygowski by name (an Austrian, I think) published a monograph asserting Italian Renaissance architecture is unthinkable without Armenian medieval architecture. Both claims have been rejected by our own academics, among them Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who was later to expose the illegal sale of ancient Armenian manuscripts by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, a well-known black marketeer.
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The sad truth is, there are as many charlatans in academia as there are in politics, organized religions, medicine, and jurisprudence.
Medicine. Last night on 60 MINUTES a con man maintained he could reverse the symptoms and even cure such terminal conditions as pancreatic cancer for the modest sum of $125,000. To prove this assertion he listed an impressive array of credentials, all of which were exposed as phony.
Jurisprudence. Consider its Greek variant which, in its Golden Age, condemned Socrates to death; Roman jurisprudence that crucified our Lord; more recently British jurisprudence that imprisoned Gandhi; Soviet jurisprudence and its Gulags; German jurisprudence and its concentration camps; and last but far from least, American jurisprudence that, with the blessing of the Church (all denominations) legitimized racism in the South and its countless crimes against humanity.
One may therefore be justified in suspecting that the aim of a justice system (even at its most progressive and civilized stage of development) is to legitimize criminal conduct.
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Who is taken in by charlatans? Not just the ignorant, the naïve, and the desperate, but also underdogs and victims whose egos have been so mortally wounded that like drowning man they will cling even to the most absurd lie.
Hamlet's assertion that to be an honest man is to be one in ten thousand holds as true today as it did four centuries ago.
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For more on Lang, Strzygowski, and Sirarpie der Nersessian, see my ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY & CULTURE (New York, 1980) which was published by the AGBU (also known as KGBU in some circles), conceived and written for the purpose of flattering the naïve and the uninformed (beginning with myself).
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 20, 2010
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READING MANN
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“The intellectual man is almost as much interested in painful truths as the fool is in those which flatter him.”
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Thomas Mann was a contemporary of Hitler who saw him as an enemy of the state as well as his own personal enemy. Like all megalomaniacs (a condition not alien to us) the German dictator thought of himself not only as a great statesman and a messianic figure on the stage of world history, but also a better writer than Mann. His resentment grew exponentially when Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize and his MAGIC MOUNTAIN sold many more copies than MEIN KAMPF. He tried to have him assassinated but failed. Mann escaped to America where he wrote a big book on xxxs – the four-volume JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, a magnificent and magisterial elaboration on a story from the GENESIS. He also wrote many analytical commentaries in which he tried to understand and explain his fellow Germans to the world. Understanding Germans also meant understanding Hitler and his hold over the nation:
“The totalitarian statesman is the founder of a religion; or, more accurately, the founder of an infallible inquisitorial system of dogma that forcibly suppresses every heresy while itself resting on legend – a system to which truth must austerely submit.”
Sounds familiar?
On Hitler as speechifier:
“It is oratory unspeakably inferior in kind, but magnetic in its effect on the masses: a weapon of definitely histrionic even hysterical power, which he thrusts into the nation's wound and turns it round.”
Further down:
“Thanks to his own baseness, he has indeed succeeded in exposing much of our own.”
Mann and Hitler shared a boundless admiration for Wagner's music. That was enough for Mann to call Hitler “a brother.”
“A brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it. For I repeat: better, more productive, more honest, more constructive than hatred is recognition, acceptance, the readiness to make oneself one with what is deserving of our hate.”
Finally, here is Mann on his contemporaries, among them Heidegger (according to some, the greatest philosopher of his time) who were taken in by Hitler in the same way that our own own writers were taken in by Stalin in both the Homeland and the Diaspora:
“...lame-brained sycophant intellectuals who mistook the vilest travesty of Germanism for the real thing – who spinelessly took part in every abjectness, prating the while of 'change in spiritual structure.'”
One must be blind not to see parallels here.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

April 21, 2010
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ON STYLE
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A rich vocabulary may complicate matters. Speaking for myself, I prefer a limited vocabulary -- as in the Bible or Hemingway. Less confusing. Easier to follow. More accessible. Shakespeare is at his best when he uses monosyllables -- “To be or not to be...”
“For whom the bell tolls.” That's not Hemingway but Donne.
Nabokov on Hemingway: “Bulls, bells, balls.”
Hemingway on writing: “Don't borrow, steal!”
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If it takes you an entire page to say what could be said in a single line, then the challenge you face is not being right but being readable.
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ON QUOTATIONS
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To those who say I quote too much, my answer is: We all quote or paraphrase and, more often than not, garble and misinterpret our sources.
Some of us do their utmost to quote honest witnesses; others prefer charlatans who will corroborate their perjury.
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ON LIMITATIONS
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One of the hardest things in life is to know one's limitations. But to most people, their limitations might as well be unknown territory.
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ON BRAGGARTS
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As children we were taught to brag about our past achievements. I will never forget the Greek who kept bragging about ancient Greek culture and its many contributions to world civilization to a bored American who finally said: “What else have you done more recently?”
What about us? What else have we done beside dropping our pants?
Once when I asked that question to a loud-mouth Armenian, he replied: “We taught the Azeris a lesson they will never forget.”
In other words, we did to them what they did to us. And I thought, there goes our much vaunted moral superiority down the drain.
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ON MORTALITY
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It is easy to come to terms with your own mortality; much more difficult to survive the death of someone you love.
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