I am taking a break from writing. I’ve been focusing on painting; the world is drowning in words. I want to see if some colors can make anything any better. My last painting was one of Chicago, trying to capture the Wells Street Canyon. Since then, I have gone silent. But here they are, for posterity:
Still not writing much. But here’s some paintings:
Last time I saw MCM was in Rosario, Argentina during a Freedom Foundation event with Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Who would have thought MCM would go on to win her own prize. It was very nice to see her again, congratulate her for her award and give her the painting I painted for her, for encouragement, while she was in exile. She uses it a backdrop now for events and interviews — it hangs in the place where her golden Nobel medal should, which is both an honor and sad at the same time.
The quiet hum of Ashtarak highway reverberates in the background; the wind rustles the trees, new leaves – excited to show them off after a long cold winter. The city, away down into the valley buzzes with life: restaurants and some night clubs; a couple sits together on chairs outside of a cafe, sharing a secret. He says something in her ear, she laughs. A boy walks with his girl through lovers park, holding her close, its darkness under the cover of the trees now making their intimate rendezvous somehow forbidden. The booksellers are putting away their earnings for the day, stacking their books – covering them with tarps or into boxes; nobody will steal their livelihoods. Tomorrow will come another day, and there will be more opportunities – books are eternal after all, timeless as are those who seek them out — always coming, though never in a torrent the slow trickle never does abate despite the changing winds of world affairs. To escape into something epic and old – after all ambition has burned away is an unchanging fact and these ancient denizens as immutable as the bronze statues of the Cascade are willing to wait.
Tonight is my last night in Yerevan. That sentence was hard to write – I never expected to fall in love with a place and a people as I have here in Armenia. One of those special things that is all the more grand because it takes you by surprise, sweeping you away in a torrent of emotions. I remember my first night in Yerevan, just over two years ago. It was cold then, I walked the outdoor shopping mall – stopping for street food at midnight watching the children at play, “What are they doing out?” There was no pandemic then – there was no war – the “weeping nation” was filled with an almost youthful optimism, exuberance. So too was I. Coming from my wars in Africa, I found the fog that had closed in around my dark night of the soul temporarily lifted. Until the pessimism returned – unexpected and unwanted. But even that did not take away from my time here in Armenia. For Armenia saved my life, and for that I will always be grateful.
To be sure, it was not a euphoric time – as it started out to be. It is unwise, unkind to be too happy in such a time as this; and when the global catastrophe meets an ancient war rekindled… I spent the time – when not in lockdown – in communion with my little boy. I got to know him, really know him – and he grew into a boy here. “Goodbyes are hard” he said to me today, tears flowing freely down his cheeks as he bade farewell to schoolmates. Then it was off, to hunt down the elusive water-snake of the pond. We hiked mountains and made dams in rivers and trekked forests – we ate BBQ and dolma and fruit — so much fruit. Watermelon then cherries then apricots then peaches.
It was a quiet, somewhat lonely time – my time in Armenia. I developed good friendships that remained stillborn upon the shuttering of the world; leaving me with that feeling of wanting, of not being fully satiated like during a meal when they take away the main course before you can partake. I wish I could have spent more time here, debating ancient authors – discussing olden myths – praying in the monasteries black with the soot of a millennium of candles each one’s delicate smoke-trail taking the supplication up to God. And I lit not a few of my own; hopes that went upwards and left their tiny mark upon the intrados of the ancient houses of worship making common cause with so great a cloud of witnesses as this place has.
Tonight is my last night in Armenia. Life is transient and sad; we must come to grips with that. Things come and go and come back around but they are never the same – life is to be lived now, in the fresh pomegranate and the snow-ball fight and the ski adventure; in the moment when your little boy says “Daddy lets listen to music while we throw the frisbee” and though you are tired you pick up the toy and out into the glorious Armenian afternoon you go to revel in life lived now. Because it will never be again.
To be sure, there will be other moments. I will write about them – for those who care to read. And I’m excited about them too; swimming the coves of forgotten beaches – trekking the forests of my land – experiencing the vastness of the place that is my home and that I have never really experienced, not the way I plan to. But I will always take Armenia in my heart; and if I find myself comparing a golden valley high in the Rocky Mountains with a beautiful highland south-Caucasus pass – you might grin and forgive me. For I once lived in Armenia – and that changed everything.
“That is why I love America,” he said to me this morning, eyes watering. “A land where immigrants are welcomed and can free themselves of the shackles of the past – of the old country which we love so much, with a love that is laced with sadness.”
That is what Armenians feel about America. There is something special about Armenia – about Armenians. You feel this in the Diaspora, people who have found a way to fully embrace the chaotic turbulence of America without losing their serene passion for the “old country” – being both from there and from here, fully a part of both – which is in fact the spirit of America. A spirit which is exemplified in brilliant prose by Armenia’s amazing American writers. Leon Surmelian “I Ask You Ladies And Gentlemen“, the penultimate chapter of which was a sonnet to immigration, to the yearning for the old country that finds itself in a gratitude to the land of the free so beautiful that I had to put down the book and rush to find my wife, sitting her down – for she is also an immigrant to America (she from South America) – and read it to her aloud. Or “Song of America” by George Mardikian, a restauranteur and philanthropist from California who was also from Western Armenia and found upon the slanted streets of San Francisco what he could never find in Istanbul: washing away from himself the misery of Ottoman violence and Soviet oxygenless totalitarianism with all its myopic brutishness to experience the joy of opportunity in making amazing food for a grateful American public.
“I don’t understand this new generation of Americans,” my new friend went on. “They somehow don’t see it, don’t see that even though they don’t feel like they are privileged, they nevertheless are – juxtaposed against anybody from anywhere else.”
“Civilizations rarely survive so great a prosperity as we have known,” I responded. “It makes people think only about stuff, and makes them greedy. And the greedy know only bitterness and theft. They cannot see beauty anywhere in anything, which only makes them angrier and more dangerous.”
This morning I was sitting quietly on a leafy street in Yerevan reading “The First Man” by Albert Camus (review forthcoming, for it is Camus’ best work!) when my new friend approached me, representing as he did for me everything I love about Yerevan, about Armenia – and why it saved my life. “Camus!!” he said. “Great writer!” to which I of course responded. We then got into a wide-ranging conversation about why America was so divided, the sadness of seeing people who have so much, tearing each other down in so terrible ways and our joint hope that we would somehow find our way (we, because my new Armenian friend was American too). “America saved us,” my friend said. “It is a land of so many people, from so many different places!”
Its ironic that I had to fly so far from home, to a tiny land-locked war-locked country trapped in the mountain fastness of the south Caucasus to be saved. What was it that saved me?… you might be asking. Armenia is a conservative place – not in the political sense but in the civilizational one. A place where days are measured by hard work sunup to sunrise, weekends are weighed by the amount of meat on the BBQ and the number of family members at the wedding, and love is measured to the height of the great Mount Ararat that sits in silent supervision upon Yerevan, a reminder both of the timelessness of Armenians’ sojourn on this piece of land and of a bitterness like the black Armenian coffee – for Ararat sits in Turkey (what was once Western Armenia). I was saved by beauty. The painters that sit in Saryan square across from the Opera House (and where I bought not a few paintings); the alpine valleys where the delicate flowers grow beside crystalline mountain springs runoff from the melting mountain snows; the dark forests where the Divs still live and hunt their prey in solitude and mystery. The monasteries still in use by the monks who see the world not in years or decades but still talk about the Council of Nicea, of Gregory the Illuminator and the times when the apostles wandered through these places. I often wonder what Thaddeus and Bartholomew must have thought, replacing the vast open expanses of desert for the alpine mountains and the delicate rivers and the smells of sheep. Did they also look up at Ararat and wonder if the Ark was to be found there? I think they too loved Armenia, which is why legend places their graves here.
I was saved, more than anything, by the literature. Armenians from the Armenian boom days (in the 20s and 30s, behind Churchills Iron Curtain): Gevorg Emin, Yegishe Charents, Aksel Bakunts, Gurgen Mahari. So many others who nourished each other and often met their doom at the hands of Stalin or Beria’s brutes. Those who fled Western Armenia, from the genocide, making their way to America: Leon Surmelian and William Saroyan. Poets and composers like Komitas – the greatest of all composers – who lost his mind in sadness at the wickedness and died in Paris. His olden lament “Krunk” played mournfully, heart-wrenchingly in a recently bombed out church reminding us that the story of the Armenians goes on, that the ‘weeping nation’ continues to weep. “We live in a bad neighborhood,” my new friend says. And he is right, this place is so vulnerable, so weak and yet so resilient and full of the past and surprisingly the future.
Armenia saved my life, because America under the new maoist ‘dictatorship of culture’ has become an oxygenless place, especially for those who don’t really believe in ‘progress’, for those who think of an ancient faith born in Ur as still having the answers, and those who know that a great God sees the suffering of His people and rewards them for the trials they face on earth. Armenia saved my life because it reminded me that prosperity is tyranny in its own way, because it sets us apart from our God and asks us to put our faith in men, and they wicked and self-dealing; because it creates a natural client-body that is grasping and wicked and mean; and Armenia reminded me of the paradox that material wealth and spiritual poverty often go together, and that those without great affluence are more often more in love with the beautiful things and the quiet lovely places, the hope of peace in times of war, the gentle caressing of a pomegranate and the silent mountain vigil, beside a fire and warmed by brandy as the soft grunting of the sheep clustered together for warmth pervades a peaceful mountain night. No gadgets, no iPads, no tunes (Apple or otherwise) – just a man alone with his thoughts.
Armenia saved my life because it reminded me that there are still good places of beauty, good people who love their families and their freedom as a natural reaction to lives of difficulty which they are nevertheless not bitter about, though they are often sad; that despite the rise and fall of countries, empires and dynasties, there are things that remain good and true.
Back to Camus, there is very little of Camus’s existentialism here – to say nothing of the Nietzsche nihilism of America these days; except that one piece of yearning which does pervade Camus’ prose, the desire to live a good life, the discovery of wonder, and the hopefulness for a better tomorrow.
“There was once a dream that was Rome, you could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish.” Marcus Aurelius, ‘The Gladiator’.
Republics are funny things. They are resilient; not brittle or sclerotic like we are told but bending and morphing amazingly without breaking and shattering upon the winds of invention and the changing tides of culture. Our marvelous spontaneous order, millions of free people making free decisions, responding not to the question “Who will let me?” but instead “Who will stop me?” They are hard to control, too decentralized for those who seek power to find that sacred fulcrum which would allow them to seize the state, maneuvering the ship by enslaving the citizens-become-oarsmen. “If you are facing in the right direction, all you have to do is keep on walking in order to reach your dreams,” we are often told, music playing softly in the background. Unless we are being marched to the gulag. “Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood; we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we…” as Jean Rostand said.
Which is what make our republics also tremendously weak; people crave authority and tend to think in collectivities; part of our DNA perhaps, where we consider often the ‘pack’ and seek protection in numbers from our predators. Or we ourselves strive to become the predators in humanity’s endless efforts to impose our own ‘sacred values’ upon others. And this becomes existential when the pillars of our republic stop serving the purpose for which they were created, losing themselves in their passions as they align their interests with others ‘because it’s an emergency’ – cue our famed fourth estate.
Perhaps this is why republics have never lasted long: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage,” said Alexander Tytler. It’s a sad irony that a true democracy, a true republic generates such tremendous prosperity in excess that it produces a natural ‘spillover’ (usually in the form of entitlements through taxation) which allows the idiots to conspire and the miscreants to concoct great acts of national sabotage.
“There once was a dream that was Rome.” I often return to the Gladiator – the story always gives me chills; “A general who becomes a slave. A slave who becomes a gladiator. A gladiator who defies an emperor”. A story of sacrifice and honor and suffering. There’s something rebellious about Americans; something which does not suffer too great authority nor allow ourselves to be told, “It is not your place to challenge”. Because challenge we will – and we do. Product perhaps of our wide open spaces, our ancient history of revolt, and the knowledge that returns on life will be as great or as small as the efforts we invest.
But I am also wary. Hugo Chavez in an interview, back when he was still among us, was asked to identify his favorite movie. “The Gladiator,” he responded, much to my shock and dismay. Proving that the desire to authority often takes many paths both straight and torturous, and those who can do the greatest harm rarely see themselves as their own republic’s ‘Commodus’.
I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens. The acropolis. The Colosseum in Rome. We walk through the dusty streets of Timbuktu and gaze in wonder at the old mud mosques as we reflect on when these places had energy and purpose. They are not sad musings, for those of us who are tourists. Time has polished over the disaster. Now all that is left are great old buildings that tell a story of when things were remarkable – not of how they quietly fell away. “There was no reason, not really,” we tell each other as we disembark our air-conditioned buses. “These things just happen. Nothing is forever; and nobody is at fault. It’s just the way of the world,” our plastic wine glass in hand. Time ebbs and flows, slowly wearing away the foundations of a civilization until it collapses in upon itself – at least that’s what we say to comfort ourselves. There’s nothing to do about it. These things can’t be stopped. They just are.
This is what people will say in a hundred years, a thousand years about Caracas, Venezuela. Or Maracay, or Valencia, or Maracaibo. Those great sweltering South American cities with their malls and super-highways and skyscrapers and colossal stadiums. When the archeologists of the future dredge the waters of the Caribbean and find the remains of sunken boats; putting them on display in futuristic museums to tell of the time when this place had hosted a civilization. Ruins of great malls filled with water and crocodiles – maybe the ancient anaconda will have retaken their valleys; maybe the giant rats that wander the plains will have made their abodes in the once-opulent homes of the oligarchs – covering the tiles and marble with their excrement. “There was nothing that could have been done,” the futuristic tourists will also say. “The country declined – and vanished – it’s the way things go.”
We tourists are wrong.
I know, because I have watched the suicide of a nation; and I know now how it happens. Venezuela is slowly, and very publically, dying; an act that has spanned more than fifteen years. To watch a country kill itself is not something that happens often. In ignorance, one presumes it would be fast and brutal and striking – like the Rwandan genocide or Vesuvius covering Pompeii. You expect to see bodies of mothers clutching protectively their young; carbonized by the force or preserved on the glossy side of pictures. But those aren’t the occasions that promote national suicide. After those events countries recover – people recover. They rebuild, they reconcile. They forgive.
No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again. This is what is remarkable for me about Venezuela. In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.
So I wandered off. I helped Uganda recover after a 25 year civil war – emptying out the camps and getting people back living again. I helped return democracy to Mali, and cemented a national peace process. I wrote three novels. I moved, and moved, and moved again. I loved my wife; we took vacations. We visited Marrakesh, and Cairo, and Zanzibar and Portugal and the Grand Canyon. We had surgeries. I had a son. We taught our son to sit up, to crawl, to walk and to run; to sing and scream and say words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis”. To name the planets one by one, to write his name.
All the while the agonizingly slow suicide continued.
And always, in the early morning over coffee I open my computer to document, if only for myself, the next cut in Venezuela’s long, tragic suicide. I chat with my friends, who continue to try and explain to the mindless why their misery is a direct result of one bad idea built upon the last in a great edifice of stupidity. Good men and women who are stuck in a two-decade old debate from which there is no escape. I say silent prayers for the next in the long line of political prisoners. I look at photographs of places that I knew – beaches where I went and restaurants that I frequented; covered in garbage or boarded up and stinking. I watch the videos of the nightly sacking of supermarkets that are fortuitous enough to have had a supply of something.
Tonight there are no lights. Like the New York City of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the eyes of the country were plucked out to feed the starving beggars in abandoned occupied buildings which were once luxury apartments. They blame the weather – the government does – like the tribal shamans of old who made sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of an intervention. There is no food either; they tell the people to hold on, to raise chickens on the terraces of their once-glamorous apartments. There is no water – and they give lessons on state TV of how to wash with a cup of water. The money is worthless; people now pay with potatoes, if they can find them. Doctors operate using the light of their smart phones; when there is power enough to charge them. Without anesthesia, of course – or antibiotics, like the days before the advent of modern medicine. The phone service has been cut – soon the internet will go and an all-pervading darkness will fall over a feral land.
The marathon of destruction is almost finished; the lifeblood of the nation is almost gone. No, there is nothing heroic or epic here; ruins in the making are sad affairs – bereft of the comforting mantle of time which lends intrigue and inevitability. And watching it has, for me, been one of life’s great tragedies.
Joel D. Hirst's Blog 