questions

Thursday, January 6, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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In a recent issue of LE POINT (Paris: December 2, 2010) I read that Mario Monicelli, one of my favoried Italian directors, has committed suicide (“by defenestration from a hospital window”) at the age of 95.
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In the same issue there is talk of a contemporary Syrian poetess by the name of Maram al-Masri who has translated into French (from the Arabic) a collection of her own verse titled SOULS WITH NAKED FEET. She is identified as a social worker in the suburbs of Paris and her poems are said to be testimonies of “abused, insulted, raped, sequestered, and abandoned women.”
I have retranslated from the French two samples of her poems.
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First marriage at 16.
Eight children at 27.
First divorce at 30.
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Why does my dad
beat my mom?
She doesn't know
how to iron shirts.
When I grow up
I will know
how to iron shirts.
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I wish we had more poets like al-Masri as opposed to the kind of vodanavorjis who produced Bolshevik-chauvinist inspired nonsense that earned Sylva Kaputikian her Stalin Prize, or the hermetic verbiage by the likes of Krikor Beledian and Garo Armenian.
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“The demonization of Israel – will it ever end?” writes Bernard-Henri Levy in a commentary in the same issue. Jews, he writes, are the only people in the history of mankind who have known nothing but totalitarian and tyrannical regimes but who have freely chosen a democratic form of government from the very beginning.
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Friday, January 7, 2011
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ON FAITH AND RELATED ATROCITIES
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Certainties driven by faith are illusions (a euphemism for lies).
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It should be a crime punishable by law to say or imply,
my imam is a man of God,
but your pope is a baloney artist, or vice versa.
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Plato believed in the existence of universal ideas.
Aristotle, who was his student, did not.
Schopenhauer believed Hegel to be
one of the greatest charlatans that ever lived.
Marx (who changed the political map of the world) was a Hegelian.
This may suggest, charlatans enjoy a greater degree of credibility
than honest men.
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It is safe to assume that whenever a man begins a sentence with the words
“I believe,” he either deceives himself or is about to deceive others.
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Othello believed Desdemona to have been unfaithful to him.
Result: after murdering her, he committed suicide.
More recently, our own revolutionaries believed
the Great Powers of the West would never allow the Ottoman authorities to massacre unarmed Armenian civilians.
So much so that at one point they even challenged the Sultan to massacre.
How could they have thought to be 100% right
when they were in fact 100% wrong?
One way to answer that question is to say that
they were blinded by faith or rather by their own b.s.
I also suspect they were not and could not have been 100% sure
because they had a Plan B for themselves.
Which may suggest that even when deceivers believe in their own lies,
there is always a residue of unspoken doubt in them.
Hence the old sayings “Idol-makers do not believe in idols,”
and “Even the Pope doubts his faith seven times a day.”
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For many centuries millions of people believed kings ruled by the grace of God.
Man, we are told, has created and believed in ten thousand gods.
In a historic context, faith cannot be said to have been an asset to mankind
but the most misleading and dangerous liability.
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We should teach ourselves to say,
“Because I believe it, it cannot be true.”
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Instead of saying what I believe is true,
and what you believe is a lie,
we should teach ourselves to say,
“We are both dupes at the mercy of deceivers
who are themselves dupes
of their own illusions, arrogance, stupidity, and greed for power.”
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We should teach ourselves to say,
“I believe that I believe but I don't believe” (Sartre),
and “The function of philosophy is to introduce doubt
where there are only certainties” (Bertrand Russell).
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Finally, if you say “If all belief systems are wrong,
so must be your own unbelief.”
To which I can only reply:
“Like fire and water, faith is a good servant but a bad master.”
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Friday, January 7, 2011
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QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF
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You have been writing for three decades now:
what have you accomplished?
Nothing.
Why go on then?
In the name of consistency.
The era of messiahs may be over
but they go on waiting, why?
In the name of consistency rather than hope.
Why do you keep writing about Armenians?
I don't write about Armenians,
I write against myself and dupes in general –
the world is full of them.
As I see it, our choice is between being objective about ourselves
or being exterminated by either “red” or “white”massacre
(that is, alienation and assimilation).
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ARMENIAN QUOTATIONS
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Anonymous: “A clear conscience is a soft pillow.”
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Vahram Papazian: “To be indifferent to crime is to conspire with criminals.”
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ON THE ARMENIAN IDENTITY
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The Armenian identity
is an extension of the Armenian experience
and the Armenian experience
is a collective possession
as opposed to an individual acquisition.
None of us is in a position to assert,
“My experience is pure gold, yours counterfeit.”
Every Armenian – from the most assimilated
(who doesn’t even want to identify himself as an Armenian)
to the most dedicated chauvinist –
may be said to be the custodian
of a facet of the Armenian experience and identity.
And some day if and when we are allowed
to cross-examine assimilated Armenians,
we may discover that their alienation was a direct result
of the fact that at one time or another they were seen by
so-called authentic Armenians
as deviations from the norm.
It follows, self-assessed authentic Armenians
may well be at the very root of all our problems –
from dogmatism and intolerance
to tribalism and Ottomanism.
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