notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 22, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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What could be more incomprehensible than someone else's grief?
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When popes, imams, rabbis, and gurus pretend to have a monopoly on truth, they lie. Our “betters” are liars.
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Hegel: “Truth lives only in the conquest of error.”
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Kierkegaard: “You will never be anything so long as you have money.”
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To those who say, “knowledge is power,” Socrates says “we know nothing.”
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Heidegger: “The greater the work accomplished the richer the unthought-of element in that work.”
Or, the more questions an answer raises, the closer to the truth it takes us.
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John Ruskin: “When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.”
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I don't write against anyone, not even Turks. I write against the Turk in me.
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Because we are experiencing a slow-motion and self-inflicted white massacre, we pretend it is not taking place.
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Erich Fromm: "Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him."
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True knowledge contains doubts, false knowledge only certainties.
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When it comes to political awareness, we are an underdeveloped people no better than Zulus and Ugandans.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 23, 2010
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REFLECTIONS
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One way to explain our misfortunes is to say that we are a nation of dupes at the mercy of windbags. Naregatsi, a harmless, solitary monk, accusing himself of all kinds of unspeakable aberrations; and Zarian in his youth pretending to believe Armenia was the messiah of nations.
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For many years I couldn't tell the difference between truth and propaganda. It took me not just years but decades to see that to be a man with “leadership qualities” means first and foremost to be an accomplished deceiver.
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Judging by the number of catastrophes mankind confronts today – from religious wars to global warming and overpopulation – we may know more but we understand less. Perhaps the price of greater knowledge is a diminished understanding. Speaking for myself: whenever I thought I knew better I committed a catastrophic blunder.
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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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Shaw said, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.” When Americans say “What's your racket?” they mean the same thing. I like the American version better if only because it's shorter.
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Censorship reduces men to sheep at the mercy of wolves who pretend to be sheepdogs.
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I wonder if I will live long enough to read an Armenian weekly in which Turks are not mentioned.
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Some Turks are so narrow-minded and fanatical that they believe all infidels will burn in hell. They have their counterparts among Armenians.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 24, 2010
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LOUIS XIV SPEAKS
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“Ah, if I were not king, I should lose my temper.”
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“Has God forgotten what I have done for him?”
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“I very nearly had to wait.”
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“Every time I fill a vacant office I make ten malcontents and one ingrate.”
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EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794), English historian:
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"I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect."
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ARAB PROVERB
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"The ass went seeking for horns and lost his ears."
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KURDISH PROVERB
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"Those who do not go to war roar like lions."
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A MAN AFTER MY OWN HEART
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Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who hated his fellow Austrians with a passion. No other writer has been as relentless as he in his excoriation of his fellow countrymen. Our Raffi too was very critical of Armenians but in his fiction he also created a good number of heroes and noble specimens of humanity. Baronian, Odian, and Massikian couched their attacks in humor and satire. Zarian's trajectory from great expectations to despair and disgust was gradual and he was careful to confide his denunciations in his correspondence with friends, diaries and notebooks that were published only posthumously. Thomas Bernhard's hatred seems to have been born in his cradle and continued all the way to his grave at the age of 58. But since he was widely translated and admired throughout the world, the Austrians had little choice but to award him a prestigious literary prize in the hope of that flattery may mollify him. It had the opposite effect. In his acceptance speech Bernhard delivered such a scathing attack on Austrian double-talk, mediocrity, intolerance, and fascism that the Austrian Minister of Culture and half of the audience walked out on him. I dare you not to love and admire such a man!
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 25, 2010
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READING PROUST
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“But to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant girl to embrace was to see the woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep hidden beauty.”
I cannot help wondering, why is it that it took world literature five thousand years to produce such a sentence.
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“Others are often better informed about our life than we think.”
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“The pleasure an artist gives is to make us know an additional universe.”
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“The dispelling of an error gives us an additional sense.”
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READING BETRAND RUSSELL
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On Lytton Strachey's EMINENT VICTORIANS:
“I read it again to myself in prison. It caused me to laugh so loud that the officer came round to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.”
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Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.”
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On speechifiers: “The human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects; preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the previous list of vices.”
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On envy: “Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, the envious person derives pain from what others have.”
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FROM MY NOTBOOKS
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Bad news for our Turcocentric pundits: as the number of tragedies around the world rises, the magnitude of our own goes down. This phenomenon is also known as "compassion fatigue." As a result, the more we talk about our tragedy, the more sympathizers we lose. I suggest therefore, "Less is more."
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Our Turcocentric pundits remind me of the survivors of another holocaust in the Old Testament who looked back and turned into pillars of salt.
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It is not easy educating those who are infatuated with their own ignorance.
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I have written over a thousand commentaries and letters and I am proud to announce none of them ends with Comrade Panchoonie's punch line, "Mi kich pogh oughargetsek" (Send us a little money). I am thus in a position to declare to my readers, "If dissatisfied, your money will be cheerfully refunded."
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 26, 2010
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READING SARTRE
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On dissent: “Its purpose is not the enjoyment of the reader, but his torment.”
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On Freud: “Psychoanalysis has no principles.”
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REFLECTIONS
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I don't trust a writer with a rich vocabulary. One may get drunk on words as surely as an vodka.
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No matter how hard I try I cannot believe in something that an important fraction of mankind finds it unbelievable.
Mohammad, the only true prophet of Allah.
Jesus, the only true son of God.
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If a friend "is a masterpiece of nature" (Emerson), what is an enemy if not a curse from hell?
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THREE DEFINTITIONS
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bipartisan: A resolution or policy agreed on by two opposing parties. Among us, an extremely rare occurrence of an extremely short duration.
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booboisie: From boob (fool) and bourgeoisie: the dumb middle-classes.
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bury the hatchet: From an American Indian ceremony symbolizing the end of hostilities. A ceremony that has no place in our culture, and an expression that has no equivalent in our language.
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CRITICIZING THE CRITIC
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There are many ways to belittle a writer's work and to insult a man and I have heard them all. Here are some random samples.
-You are a disgrace to your nation.
-What's your point?
-Was your mother a Turkish xxxxx?
-You repeat yourself.
-You are a racist.
-Why don't you say something we don't know?
-A dealer in verbal crapola.
-Gobbledygook.
-You are a denialist.
-Booooooooooooring!
-You are a fool.
-Son of a xxxxx.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 27, 2010
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ON BLUNDERS,
AMONG OTHER THINGS
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The number of blunders I have committed are so many that I could compile an encyclopedia on the subject. It is true that so far I have not started a revolution, declared a war, or ordered a massacre of civilians, but that's because I was never in a position to do so.
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Several readers have pointed out that my testimony cannot be relied on because as a neglected or ignored writer I am a traumatized witness. I am more than willing to plead guilty as charged. But if these very same readers imply that six centuries of Ottoman oppression followed by massacres and dispersion have not traumatized us, they deceive themselves. Either that or they have been so thoroughly dehumanized that it doesn't even occur to them that they may be in denial.
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From zero to hero is a possibility; from zero to zero is a probability.
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Is it conceivable that the only thing we have learned from our Ottoman and Bolshevik experiences is intolerance?
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There is more than one way to assert one's superior brand of patriotism, but going into the gutter is not one of them.
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We analyze Turks as if our aim in life were to improve them, and we avoid analyzing ourselves on the grounds that one should not fix what ain't broken. Why else would our dime-a-dozen Turcocentric ghazetajis spend more time exposing foreign misconduct and ignoring our own?
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If you lie down with a dog you may get up with fleas, it is said. Likewise, if you lie down with an Armenian you may get up with a Turk.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 29, 2010
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READING SPENGLER AND TOYNBEE
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We have many poets but not a single philosopher.
As a result, we may know how we feel but we don't know why.
We have many historians but not a single meta-historian or philosopher of history. As a result, we may know what happened but we don't know what were the forces that brought about the catastrophe.
Which may also explain why successive American administrations, after promising to recognize our genocide, refuse to do so.
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We know we are divided but we don't know why because the reasons may be buried in our subconscious.
Listen to two metahistorians and their tentative explanations:
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Oswald Spengler: “Real historical vision belongs to the domain of significances in which the crucial words are not 'correct' and 'erroneous' but 'deep' and 'shallow.'”
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“Vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing.”
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“All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry.”
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Arnold Toynbee: “The penalty that conflicting wills bring upon themselves by frustrating one another is thus not merely their own dethronement; it is the re-enthronement of the Subconscious Psyche.”
In other words, when unreason (or the subconscious) replaces reason, the consequences can be not only catastrophic but also incomprehensible. It follows, our so-called survival may not be what we think it is but the death of a thousand cuts, all of them self-inflicted.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 30, 2010
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J.S. BACH
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Books on Bach?
Forget it. Too technical and jargon ridden. Too cold and scholarly to be of any interest to the layman.
Two possible exceptions:
EVENINGS IN THE PALACE OF REASON: BACH MEETS FREDERICK THE GREAT IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT by James R. Gaines (New York, 2005), and
THE CELLO SUITES: J.S. BACH, PABLO CASALS AND THE SEARCH FOR A BAROQUE MASTERPIECE by Eric Siblin (Toronto, 2009).
Both books are unusual in that they read like thrillers. Entertaining as well informative and scholarly.
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Vahe Berberian tells me the subtitle of the second book is misleading because the Cello Suites were never lost. On the contrary, they were widely distributed and studied by cellists and musical scholars. What Casals did was to introduce them to the concert repertoire.
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Speaking of Casals and music: One of the most brilliant, insightful, and readable books I have read on many aspects of music composition, interpretation, and appreciation is CONVERSATIONS WITH CASALS by J.M. Corredor (London, 1956).
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To be noted: In the bibliography of Siblin's book I run into the following item: BAROQUE PIETY: RELIGION, SOCIETY, AND MUSIC IN LEIPZIG, 1650-1750 (Burlington, VT, 2007) by Tanya Kevorkian. Which reminds me of our family doctor's observation that no matter where you go, you will invariably run into an Armenian.
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Also to be noted: Three of the greatest Bach interpreters of our times, if not of all times -- Landowska, Casals, and Gould -- were not German, but Polish, Spanish, and Canadian respectively.
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Grieg on Casals: “This man does not perform, he resurrects.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

May 31, 2010
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ON FAITH
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Faith proves nothing except the absurdity of belief systems – all ten thousand of them.
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A MAN OF FAITH SPEAKS
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In a recent interview published in a learned French periodical, a Muslim scholar proves to his complete satisfaction that Islam is a better religion than Christianity, and the only reason Christians outnumber Muslims is that Christianity is six centuries older. In the next six centuries, he goes on, Islam will surpass all other organized religions in popularity. That is one of the central problems with all men of faith: they think they know better and they are closer to God even when they behave like swine. And you may have noticed by now that it is not the good and the honest who assert moral superiority but charlatans and riffraff. "If I am no good," they seem to be saying, "the least I can do is pretend to be better even if it means speaking like an idiot."
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CHINESE PROVERBS
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“A maker of idols is never an idolater.”
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“Behind an able man there are always other able men.”
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DANISH PROVERB
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“Unanimity is the best fortress.”
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ON CENSORSHIP
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Where there is censorship there will be fear: fear of knowledge; fear of objective judgment; fear of honesty; fear of excellence and originality.
Where there is fear there will be cowardice.
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A CONFESSION
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When writing against barbarians one should wield a civil pen.
May I confess that I have not always been successful in that endeavor perhaps because some barbarians tend to confuse civility with weakness.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

June 1, 2010
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MEN AND ROBOTS
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One of the worst blunders one can commit is to believe what one is told at a time when one is not old or mature enough to think for oneself on the grounds that the men at the top are fundamentally decent men who know better and should be trusted.
Whereas the truth is, “politics offers a larger field of observation than any clinic for mental illness” (Antonina Vallentin).
Or, in the words of Paul Valery: “...the work leads back, not to a man, but to a mask, and from a mask to the machine.”
By “machine” Valery here means impersonal factors that are dictated by a belief system that has degenerated to routine and ritual.
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READING VOLTAIRE
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On the origin of religion: “From the meeting of the earliest scoundrel with the very first fool.”
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“Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.”
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ON ARMENIAN POLITICS
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If and when the multiplication table becomes a political issue, we will disagree on it too!
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To speak of patriotism and to speak the truth are not always synonymous. On the contrary. One could even say that the greatest enemy of patriotism is not treason but objectivity.
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We place too much emphasis on mental or intellectual IQs and completely ignore moral IQs. And yet, if you think about it, most of our problems are created by individuals with higher than normal IQs but non-existent or negative moral IQs.
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If you mention bloodsuckers in the presence of bloodsuckers, you can be sure of one thing: they will accuse you of anti-Armenianism.
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