A Commemoration of the Victims of Flight 752 on 02.02.2020

Maurice Ravel’s Bolero was playing on 96.3 FM on my way back from the ceremony held in Vaughan, Ontario today in keeping with the sombre; yet, forward-looking mood that I had been experiencing upon taking in both the sights and sounds that testified to the beauty of two loving souls that are no longer in our midst. Back at Terrace Banquet Centre where Dr. Eghbalian’s wife (Parisa Eghablian) and daughter (Reera) were commemorated, there had been mention of a series of topics ranging from the importance of keeping the memory of those who had perished on the Ukrainian plane alive to the hardships of immigration especially for women who have to find wings to fly from the proverbial qafas (“cage”). There was also talk of childhood: a realm where a “pink elephant” (in reference to Reera’s pink stuffed elephant, Elli) makes just as much sense as a “real” grey one; a colourful phase in which the portal to all possibilities is open.

One need not have known these beautiful souls in person to appreciate the beauty which they embodied: both extrinsic and intrinsic, but more so the latter than the former. There was also mention of the poignancy of the loss a beautiful woman that chimes in with Edgar Allan Poe’s remark in “Philosophy of Composition,” which is said to have, incidentally, influenced Ravel, where the so-called “Tomhawk man” asserts that “the death of then a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world,” going on to say that “equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Everyone had been waiting to listening to the “bereaved lover,” who has become the voice of other relatives of the victims of that ominous flight. And speak, he did... at the very end. His composure was admirable. He thanked those who had sponsored the event and graphically imagined what may have transpired in the final moments of that horrific flight. He pictured the crying of the youngest passenger Kurdieh and the exchanges that could have taken place between a number of other doomed passengers including Pouneh and Arash, who had gone to Iran to get married before embarking on, what could have been, exciting and enriching adventures together. Dr. Esmaeilion went on to compare their lack of knowledge with our awareness of the reality on the ground: that what occurred on the flight was no technical error, but the killing of innocent lives. He told us of how Reera had been perplexed at how there could be people who could have no qualms about killing another human being and in so doing, once again, there was a comparison and contrast between the innocent world of children where the villain is a Darth Vader whose evil aspect does not lead to the downing of a passenger plane and our own. It was also moving to hear him express his lack of belief in an Afterlife, believing that the very paradise that some may depict for his loved ones in another world was very much what they had here on this planet, on this earth. 

While I am not sure whether there is life after death, having been an avid reader of Dante’s Commedia at one point and being fascinated, in particular, by his catabasis, I do wonder if we could assert the absence of Afterlife with such certitude. Nonetheless, speaking of our earthly abode, I wonder if t is better not to burn all one’s bridges and leave the door open for an eventual return to one’s homeland in whose bosom one has spent many a formative year and may wish to be enwombed once again towards the very end, prior to being entombed.

Dr. Esmaeilion’s concluding remarks were around the importance of seeking full justice; of having the black box examined. It is important that one not forget the tragedy that befell so many families as result of the plane crash. Yet, sadly notwithstanding the outcome of any possible litigation or black box examination, those who have departed have gone to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”  

The loss of so many promising lives, including those of Parisa and Reera, has touched me and so many others. The loss will be compounded in the event that it should be discovered that the downing of the plane had occurred not by error but on purpose. Yet, what I have come to see once more is that we grieve in different ways: some more in the closed quarters and the privacy of their homes more so than others; some in more exaggerated forms than others; some in more covert forms than others. What is clear is that the loss of so many lives on Flight 752 has turned into a collective grief: we are all mourning—in various degrees.

Our grief has brought us closer to each other, hopefully, in a way that will stretch beyond the hic et nunc that we are in. As we saw images of Parisa and Reera unfold during the ceremony, we bemoaned the loss of a happy family life and felt for all of those who have lost their loved ones in the plane crash.

We realize that in our world even a grey elephant, let alone a pink one, may soon disappear without being swallowed by a boa, in which case, it could have become the source of florid imagination (see Antoine Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince). Yet, it is encouraged that we hold onto what is left of our imagination which will allow us to visualize an elephant as being pink and a rose as being green in the same fashion that James Joyce did as he recounts in A Portrait of the  Artist as a Young Man (1904). It is only through imagination that we will be able to engage in a defamiliarization that will turn our currently grey world into one which is endowed with colours and possibilities. It is also by virtue of imagination that the Italian conductor, Arturo Toscanini could imagine a Bolero more refined perhaps than the one that Ravel himself had composed.

I am writing as we in North America are still going through a uniquely palindromic day as today (02022020). I remember having been fascinated by the palindromic, yet, otherwise ridiculous question of “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” as a child in a way that I am no more today. Nonetheless, I am hoping that our gathering together in such large numbers in honour of the lost lives of the passengers on the ill-fated 752 flight on this day has marked a momentous occasion beyond its commemorative significance.

Hamlet wishes to keep alive his quest for revenge, as he asserts: “And spur my dull revenge,” or later on, “O, from this time forth,/ My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!” (VI.vi). It is a noble thought, especially, when so many more beyond one’s own self are involved. Yet, let us hope that, that unlike in Hamlet, there will be no more blood baths and that sooner rather than later, the truth will out, as painful as it may be, for one would rather face a painful truth than a horrendous lie.

End of Year Musings!

End of Year Musings

There is a scene in Paul Auster’s Sunset Park (2010) where on New Year’s Eve the acclaimed publisher Morris Heller asks himself how many dead bodies he has set eyes on as he finds himself overwhelmed by a series of images of death that unfold in his mind. He envisions the putrefying body of the swarthy sexy Hollywood heartthrob of the golden age of cinema, Steve Cochran as it is drifting across the ocean with three young women accompanying him, who, not knowing anything about sailing, had assumed that they would never touch land again. As outlandish as that image seems, it did actually take place back in 1965 when Cochran had unexpectedly died on his yacht at the youngish age of forty-eight seemingly succumbing to a lung infection.  New Year’s Eve does happen to be a time for such meanderings of the mind as one contemplates the figurative death of one year as it gives way to the next and, perhaps, in a spirit akin to that of Thomas Hardy who on the dying hours of the nineteenth century imagined the “Century’s corpse outleant” when a darkling thrush seems to suggest that in the midst of the doom and gloom that pervades the air hovering over the detritus of the dying century, there may be an element of “blessed Hope;” yet, even that is tinged with despair especially in view of the likelihood that it is hearkening back to the “darkling plain” of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) which is destitute of joy, light and love. However, one would always like to believe otherwise. The darkening thoughts of death conflate with the desolate landscape that tends to be before of us at this point of the year, in this part of the world as we contemplate on death prior to being suffused with a yearning for new beginnings.

Finding myself alone (but not lonely) on New Year’s Eve, I, too, thought about the number of actual dead bodies I had set eyes on. To my surprise, there had been only three: all in their prime. The first belonged to a young man of twenty-four who gained posthumous acclaim in the wake of his death that came as a result of a senseless shooting at parliament hill in 2014. I recall finding myself before the lifeless body of a handsome young man as copious tears coursed down my cheeks. I had been imagining how Cirillo would be making it to middle age; how his young son would be growing into a young man; how he would blossom in his role as a guardian of the nation... Images of the life that could have been but was no more would come to haunt me for days on end. In February 2015, I found myself standing before another promising life that had been snatched away too soon by the tentacles of death: a twenty-eight year old psychology student of a classmate of mine who had got off in the middle of the highway in Montreal to check his car only to be struck by oncoming traffic. “... any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” The third and last one bore the hallmarks of a self-willed death. It was the sudden death of a fifteen year old in the full bloom of spring and as I stood by the body that bore makeup in the fashion of her indigenous ancestors, I found it hard to believe that what was before me was but an earthly husk destitute of life as she (‘it’) looked as she (‘it’) was ready for the bridal chamber and not the funereal crypt. I hoped for a unio mystico on a more sparkling plain of existence than the one she had departed from.

All of those deaths, I found especially poignant, in light of the absence of the praemia vitae that punctuate our lives as hallmarks of success; as milestones that ought to be traversed and without which, it is as if one has lived a meaningless life or no life at all.

Indeed, New Year’s Eve is the time of such reckonings as we take stock of how many praemia vitae we have acquired and how many more time do we have to go for.

Yet, notwithstanding the brevity of our lives that is premised upon the ontological certitude of death that is intertwined with our being on this planet, a longevity that would span the infinite expanse of the universe would do us little service as can be seen in the example of Karel Capek’s “The Makropolous Secret” (first performance 1922), in which, the eponymous character, who has come to adopt a league of other appellations in the course of centuries, bemoans the lack of sympathy for mankind that has come as a result of the burden of her years.  Also, in Groundhog’s Day (1993), the lead character, Phil Connors, ends up getting caught in a time loop that gives him an infinite amount of time; yet, he yearns to be restored to his previous mode of existence, for, notwithstanding the auto-didactic range of activities that timelessness seems to allow, it robs one of any modicum of happiness; of any possibility for a sense of grounded-ness on a planet, which itself is transitory in the grand scheme of the universe.

In the end, what measures the so-called praemia vitae of life, as Philip Carey in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) muses, is the “complexity of the pattern”  that constitutes one’s life, in which, neither happiness nor pain quite matter.

On the other hand, I am tempted to take note of what Paul Auster writes in his New York Trilogy, namely, that “In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.”

Upon mulling over both observations, I am inclined to say that as contradictory as the two may sound, they are not, in that, they reflect two ways of looking at life: one in medias res, another sub specie aeternitatis. Life is ultimately what we make of and invest in it, simply put. However, it is hoped that we will be given the chance to weave patterns of our choice into the warp and woof of our lives without being bogged down by the weight of existential exigencies, or even worse, of what we as a race have made Life to be. Along the same lines, when comparing the recent washing ashore of a “Ghost ship” with seven dead bodies along the coasts of Japan with Cochran’s fate, one could deduce the difference between being given the means and opportunity of adorning the patterns of the tapestry of one’s life versus being deprived of such an opportunity. Thus it was that in dying days of the second decade of the century, I found myself being haunted by the aforementioned images of promising lives cut short (not to mention the thought of those who were plucked away too soon in the midst of the widespread protests that swept across the globe) and the urgency of peppering the Persian carpet of my life with as many colourful and complex patterns as possible. Carpe diem!

Ratatouille

I was very impressed by the new animation feature film, "Ratatouille". As a student of literature, I could easily carry over the ideas that were voiced in the film to the realm of literature. In fact, it reminded me of a comment made years ago by Professor Bahram Meghdadi who suggested that a great writer is like a great chef, knowing how to combine the ingredients to create art. There were some who objected to this remark at the time, but I realized rightaway that he was dead on. After all, there isn't anything new under the sun and it's only a new touch that can make a difference in things. When James Joyce at the beginning of his Portrait talks about a GREEN rose, he is making a point: that Stephen Dedalus was capable from an early age of viewing the world through his own artistic lens. A green rose might not exist in the outside world, but can easily come to life in the artist's imagination.


What was also interesting about "Ratatouille" was that the real artist can never be a Herdenmensch, for he is not a part of the flock, but apart from it. S/he takes the path "less traveled by" and refuses to follow the norm. Usually, it requires great strength to part from the norm, for as Bernard de Clairvaux (1090-1153) reminds Pope Eugene III: "Qui hoc facit quod nullus, mirantur omnes" ("He who does what no one else has, (makes) everyone wonder," and in so doing, becomes, oftentimes, uncomfortably conspicuous.

The critic in "Ratatouille", who was rendered even more authoritative by Peter O'Toole, upon savoring a special dish prepared by a chef of the most humble origins, is transported in time, bringing to mind Proust's "les petites madeleines" episode in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It is the characteristic of true art to transport its audience existentially, if not, temporally. In the case of Anton Ego, the transportation is more like a transformation. After experiencing the taste of uniqueness, he is reminded of his youth, his mother, his origins and thereupon feels internally transformed. I believe one of the major highlights of the film to lie in Ego's own artistic review. After all, "it takes one to know one." The artist, in offering himself to the world, makes himself vulnerable, but in the end, "critquer c'est facile, mais l'art difficile," and Ego is well-aware of that.

Though everyone can cook, not everyone can be THE cook. The same applies to many other arts. However, what all arts have in common is their connection to the sublime and that is what makes us move to the core and renders our lives worth living on this otherwise dreary planet.

(O)UTOPIA

With all the scourges that are plaguing our planet, I sometimes wonder if there is any utopia at all. However, once I read Utopia (1516) by Thomas More (1478-1535), I realized even if there were a utopia in a Morian sense, it wouldn't really change matters on earth, since it couldn't be any better than many other places. In fact, the pun in the title of More's masterpiece is very meaningful in that it can be defined as "no-place" or "good-place" and both would be equally applicable.

The framing of Utopia represents an idyllic scene, wherein More has a conversation with the Raphael Hythlodaeus, the homo peregrinans, who has been to Utopia, amongst other places. Raphael like his angelic namesake is a messenger of a yonder world, yet despite his vast learning, does not wish to get engaged in politics (very wise of him, I would say). The greenery of Book I contrasts with the gray atmosphere of Book II in which the specifics of Utopia are described:

There are 54 cities, a federation guided by a senate of 162 members which meets annually in the capital city, Amaurot. All cities are identical in language, customs, institutions and laws. Agriculture is the primary occupation; however, everyone learns a trade or handicraft. Everyone works for 6 hrs a day. Some magistrates are entitled not to work, but they do not take advantage of the privilege, preferring to set a good example. The households generally consist of blood relations and extended families. Urban households have no fewer than 10 and no more than 16 adult members. Each year 20 persons from each rural household move back into the city after completing a two-year stint in the countryside. In their place, 20 substitutes are dispatched from the town, to learn agriculture from those who are better skilled at it. The oldest member of each household is the ruler. The society is exclusively patriarchal. Wives act as servants to their husbands, children to their parents, and the younger to their elders. Woman are treated ‘equally’, but in reality are subordinated to their husbands (as is the case with even most of the advanced societies of our time).

Thomas More, en avant de son temps, paints a society similar and yet different from our version of socialism, for not only is property held in common, but also money and private wealth have been abolished. Paradoxically, gold and silver are held to be inferior to the multi-purpose iron. Diamonds and pearls are used as toys for children!

Should one read Utopia, one will realize that the society that lends itself to the title is far from what most of us had been expecting and that More's De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia ("On the State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia") has been an intentional misnomer. The Utopians' might have a much less tainted life-style than our own, but their lives are in no way enviable. What we ought to learn from the Utopians though, is their disgust for blood sports and hunting on grounds that they lead to mutilation and murder.

Once again, I reach the conclusion that Arcadia is nowhere but in the mind; i.e., if we happen to be lucky enough to have a fertile mind that will foster such a serene space.

White-ness

The certain symbolisms attributed to different colors used to hold a fascination for me: Green indicates fertility and freshness; red, violence and horror; blue, calmness, serenity and sorrow; pink, innocence... It was only later that I realized how arbitrary these symbols could be:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes... (Voyelles, Rimbaud)

Many critics have attempted to decipher the mysteries that lie latent in the sonnet "Voyelles" by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Some have even come up with very interesting reasons as to why "A" should be associated with black and then "E" with white, namely that birth takes place in darkness and then gives way to light and whiteness. As to why "O" comes after "U", critics claim that it is because OMEGA is the ultimate letter of the Greek alphabet and is also associated with purple which accounts for the last color of the spectrum. As interesting as these interpretations are, they might not all be totally what the teenage genius had in mind when he penned these enigmatic verses.

Despite the arbitrariness of color-symbolism, I have always been interested in the diverse connotations which "white"evokes. Literature abounds in examples: The whitness of the whale in Hermann Melville's Moby Dick and the White Div in Abolqassem Ferdowsi's The Shahnameh, are only two of many instances in the world of literature. Blankness/whiteness is being used more and more in the world of cinema to express an intensity beyond words, an example of which comes to the fore in Requiem for a Dream (2000) upon a quick succession of scenes which conveys the hopeless state of the characters of the movie. Another effective example of this white/blankness appears in Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu's 9/11 episode in which he asks his audience: "Does God's light guide us or blind us?" Too much light, after all, can be as blinding as the pervading darkness of Mazandaran (a reference to The Shahnameh).

Perhaps no one has expressed the polysemous nature of "white" as brilliantly as Hermann Melville: "Whiteness is not so much color as the absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all color"; also: "this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time, enforced a certain nameless terror". The white whale not only evokes terror but also our sense of awe for the ineffable.

But, what can I say of all the whiteness that has held the streets of Toronto in its thrall for a whole week now? Terrifyingly beautiful?

Das Leben der Anderen

For the most part of the movie, tears were coarsing down my cheeks not only in memory of experiences that I had long buried in the dark recesses of my mind, but also because of the events that led to the transformation of the stern officer of the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) in East Germany, Gerd Wiesler. Wiesler who has been entrusted with the task of spying on the playwright Georg Dreyman, is at first, portrayed as a stiff sponsor of the Stasi values, intent on weeding out any suspicious elements from the system. As time goes by and he becomes privy to the inner workings of Dreyman's life, he begins to fall for the playwright's charm: His knowledge of music, his musical touch, his thoughtful remarks... so much so that he sneaks into the artist's apartment to steal a volume of Bertolt Brecht's poetry:

..."Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel/ War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah/ Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheuer oben/ Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da" ("And above us in the beautiful summer sky, was a cloud/ which I looked at for long/It was very white and way above/ and when I looked up, it was no more")... Just picturing the configuration of a fluffy white cloud in the summer-time, at a time, when everything around you is dreary and you are so lonesome that you have to hire a prostitute to keep you company and even she is with you but for a short moment between two interludes of meaningless nakedness...

By and by, Wiesler turns into one of those whom Dreyman had earlier referred to as "those who really listen to Beethoven's music and can thus never be bad" and becomes intent on rescuing Dreyman from the clutches of the destructive Stasi. He well knows that his attempts are tantamount to risking his own carreer, but "Kunst" is above such mundane considerations. How could he let Dreyman fall into nothingness when so many other artists had already been condemned to silence in the face of the suffocation imposed by the regime? Wiesler goes on to change the transcripts on his espionage activities in a way that would portray Dreyman as propelling the Staat's ideals.

On comparing Wiesler to similar characters in the early days of the Iranian revolution, I could not help but be pained by the fact that in those days of mass arrests, hardly any of the officers in my country had any appreciation for art which would allow for that inner-transformation to occur and hence hardly any artist was saved. It is true that had Wiesler been facing the layman and not the artist, he would have remained sterner than ever, but there is no question that his transformation in the name of a value that transcends most, if not, all others, i.e, ART is still noble. After all, art bespeaks the language of, in Brechtian terms, an "ungeheuer oben" and any traces of that realm are bound to move "those who understand."

SYRIA

Since writing this piece last week, a lot has taken place in Syria. There has been more bloodshed, more fighting, more deaths. What marks this war (the activitsts not wishing to be on the same footing as the government forces, are against the use of 'civil war' in this case, although as French foreign minister has lately asserted it very much falls into that category) is the indiscriminate targetting of civilians many of whom are women and children. Words are inadequate in the expression of the horror that has many parts of Syria in its grip; yet, I hope that the international community will begin to take serious measures in line with staunching the ongoing violence in that country...

Knock, Knock, Knock… Let Us Open the Window to the Horror, the Horror in Syria:

« Péris si tu veux, je suis en sureté »

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It was reported on May 30 that since the start of the Syrian uprising last March over fourteen thousand people have been killed including more than eight hundred women and over one thousand children. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the Syrian violence has been the senseless massacre of children. While a great deal is being reported on the horrendous scale of the bloodshed in Syria, one cannot but feel disillusioned with humanity in its failure to respond to the latest cycle of violence which has engulfed major parts of a land formerly referred to Levant evoking the French term ‘lever’. Risen up it has and that in the face of leaders whose primary concern at the height of the killings is the online shopping of luxury items such as Ming Luce vases and Pistil candlesticks. However, it is hoped that the recent massacre in Qubair characterized by the high number of women and children among its victims may galvanize the international community into concrete action. This latest discovery of bodies marking the destruction of entire village (including its livestock, as reported by BBC’s Paul Danahar) follows the massacre of over one hundred people including forty-nine children, thirty-two of whom were under the age of ten in Houla, an area close to Homs.

How many more innocent lives have to be perished for the world to ‘rise up’? Jean-Jacques Rousseau posits : « A murder may with impunity be committed under his window [and the philosopher] has only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself, to prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself with the unfortunate sufferer ». Significantly, it was the lack of windows in a particular compound that drew a number of the victims of the Houla massacre to use it as a refuge Although Azzawi believes that if there had been windows, perhaps, the victims’ cries for help would have been heard and heeded, in view of the on-the-fence stance adopted by the international community towards Syria, one may wonder as to how things could have been any different for those victims if there had been an orifice in the wall or if any of those apertures could have translated into an overture to concrete action. True that monitors on the ground including chief UN observer, Robert Mood have expressed their anguish over the scale and modus operandi of the latest attacks; yet, gone are the days of Donne, when, along with the great Metaphysical poet, we could have said « any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ».

The amour-propre that Rousseau alludes to in his discourses, is a negative product of civilization, an unnatural self-love that leads to the prioritization of the self at the cost of the denigration, if not annihilation, of the Other. And it is an amour-propre that has us in its grip once again as we close our windows and block our ears to the sights and sounds of the horror that pervade across a land, which true to its appellation, has risen up to demand its basic rights.

On May 29, The Telegraph quoted Abu Jawfer, a Syrian rescuer in Houla as saying: « For hours I heard the screams of women and three times of children, and always gunshots. Then the voices stopped. The silence was the most terrible thing». That silence as the first-person protagonist of Albert Camus’s La Chute, Clamence demonstrates can be interminable and haunt us for years, just as it did this not too clement character who had ignored the desperate cries for help of a young woman whom he had sighted on Pont Royal. Similarly, the protagonist of The Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlowe finds himself in Europe only to discover that even in the West he can hear the reverberation of the onomatopoeic word uttered by the colonialist Kurtz towards the end of his life in the heart of the ‘dark continent’: « horror ».

As token measures are taken in condemnation of the horror in Syria, there seems to be a glimmer of hope that the amour-propre manifest in governments who wish to keep the status quo in place for the sake of their vested diplomatic interests in the region is being replaced by an amour de soi, in the form of a love for a self which extends beyond one’s bodily confines to include the entire human race. The world cannot afford another episode of guilt-ridden silence, neither can it afford another Rwanda, another Serbenica… another ‘knocking at the gates’ of home.