Thursday, April 06, 2006
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There is an unspoken Armenian theory (to which I subscribed for many years) that says: “The angrier you get, the more you raise your voice in outrage, the closer to the truth you are.” It took me many years to see the wisdom in the old Chinese proverb: “He who loses temper has wrong on his side.”
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In NEWSEEK magazine today an American politician running for office is quoted as having said: “It’s hard to have a debate when you have to debate a bunch of morons!” I can’t imagine an Armenian saying that about fellow Armenians, can you?
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Since not all of nature is comprehensible to us, we tend to call phenomena that we can’t explain miracles, Aldous Huxley writes in one of his essays after witnessing a “miracle” (a weeping statue) in an Armenian church in Beirut. As a child I remember someone telling me that Jesus did not change water to wine, which would amount to legitimizing alcoholism. He just had water added to the remaining wine and the guests were by then too drunk to notice the difference in taste. And in our paper today I read that according to an Israeli scientist Jesus did not walk on water but on a patch of ice. If you are interested in this subject I suggest you read Thomas Mann’s THE TABLES OF THE LAW where many other Biblical miracles are explained scientifically.
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If I had a say in the matter, I would make tolerance (beginning with tolerance of Turks and their side of the story) the most important subject for study in our schools. One benefit of tolerance: it may lower the barriers that divide us thus enhancing our chances of survival as a nation.
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The very same people who have been blabbering endlessly about massacres demand that I change my tune and say something new.
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Friday, April 07, 2006
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On more than one occasion I have been told to Armenianize my surname. To what end? To cover up 600 years of Ottoman subjection? Can it be done? I think of Malcolm X who changed his name but was murdered by his own kind anyway. Besides, the root of my surname is not Ottoman but Venetian. “Bailo” in Venetian dialect means ambassador. Among other words that the Turks borrowed from the Venetians are “piazza” and “maranga” (carpenter).
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Was one of my ancestors an ambassador? I don’t know and I care even less. Unlike some of my fellow Armenians who trace their ancestry all the way back to Vartan Mamikonian (of Chinese descent) or the Bagratunis (Jewish), on a good day I can trace mine all the way back to my father, who was born in Sivrihisar, a town famous only as the birthplace of Nasreddin Hodja – a detail that I discovered only very recently on the Internet.
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Some of my readers may not be aware of the fact that for several centuries Venice and Constantinople were in constant touch as allies, competitors, and more often as rivals.
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When Sultan Mehmet II (1429-1481) wanted his portrait painted, he asked the Doge of Venice to send him a good painter. The Doge chose Gentile Bellini. The Sultan approved Bellini’s portrait and he commissioned him to paint the head of John the Baptist, who it seems is venerated as a prophet by the Muslims. When the work was done the Sultan had one minor objection. The neck of the prophet was too long, he said, and explained that when a man is beheaded the muscles in the neck contract and the neck shrinks. When Bellini seemed unconvinced, the Sultan had one of his slaves beheaded in Bellini’s presence to prove his point. Bellini was so horrified and scared that something similar might happen to him if he displeased His Majesty that he hastened his return to Venice under cover of darkness.
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It is to be noted that some of these superpatriots who urge me to change my name are so proud of their own that they write under assumed names that are anything but Armenian. As Zarian says somewhere, “even their filth has not been picked up from our own streets but from alien gutters.”
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Saturday, April 08, 2006
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Whenever told he repeats himself, Saroyan would recount the story of the cellist who played the same note over and over again. When asked why he did that, he would reply, “Other cellists play different notes because they are looking for the right one. I have found it.”
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To the untrained ear all Bach’s fugues (and he wrote hundreds of them) sound alike. One could also say that all of literature, from THE ILIAD and THE SONG OF SONGS to MADAME BOVARY, ANNA KARENINA, and LOLITA, is about women.
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A few years ago when a Holocaust denier by the name of Zundel was jailed in Canada, one of our elder statesmen wrote me an angry letter saying it was wrong to jail a decent man for exercising his fundamental human right of free speech. And now, he and his kind are doing exactly the same thing when they refuse to listen to the Turkish side of the story on the grounds that the Turks are denialists.
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To verbally abuse someone on the Internet from a safe distance and anonymously is to compound insolence with cowardice. The question to be asked at this point is: What kind of idiot would make himself vulnerable to these charges? If I have said this before, it bears repeating.
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