(A wavering but unwavering course)
It would have been easy for me to say: “Hamo Sahyan was a man who did things right. When it was time to fight, he fought; when it was time to play, he played and rejoiced. His hour of confession—which gives true literature its face—lasted long enough, and when it was time to leave, he left.” And, with a clear conscience, to add: “He was beautiful in all his moments, perhaps the most graceful of our own, for he never entered halls not meant for him, and so brought no surprises upon himself.” I could have said this, drawn that worthy man among the worthy aside from the great mass of those responsible for this collapse, and justified myself: “He is innocent; we are innocent.”
But because the collapse is our own collapse, one we seem no longer able to withstand, we call our elders and our departed to account—and, as we call ourselves to account, it is precisely the most worthy whom we question first. “Why did you make me of this substance, and why did you create me in this world?” So King Artavazd complained to his ancestor, as did Mher in the other epic; all of them drew strength from their ancestor’s strength, or were weighed down by his curse.
But how am I to shape my words so as to get round that inevitable “despite”? “Despite unimaginably difficult circumstances, nevertheless…”; “despite a great weakness of his, a distinctly national weakness of the Armenian, he nevertheless managed to enter into a relationship with that community of the world’s free people which calls itself the community of poets”; “despite his time having so few living moments that it might be called timelessness, and his space revealing living tremors so rarely that it might be called a desert, all the same…” That “despite” really must not be bypassed, because…
Because, ultimately, it is not the reader’s concern how many traps the word—Pavstos’s word, say—outwitted, or how many fires it flew over, before filling his home with joyful twittering. It is not the treasury’s concern through what bewildering labyrinths a particular emerald arrived. It is not that free community’s business that an entire interested retinue escorted, say, some other S. towards that same community, whereas Sahyan appeared utterly alone. If you are present, you are present; if you are absent, you are absent. That is how it is: you exist or you do not.
The word “free” has been used often. Let us remember that the Free is synonymous with God and with the Word: the Word and God are synonymous, and the Free is synonymous with both. Thus: Literature—Freedom. Freedom from the animal bonds of wordlessness. Here the Armenian ban meant the word: in the beginning was the Word. Utter a word, and you have separated yourself from the silent mass of the wordless. To do violence to the word is to drive a human being back into the bonds of lifelessness. In Armenian, ban also means a deed. To do violence to it is to make a mutilated country absolute. I have said it, and a wide gate has opened onto the arena of rejection and self-condemnation: charge in, even in whole regiments, and reject and destroy this entire mutilated body of words and deeds. Your country was no country; your idols were no idols; your rites were no rites, and your song was no song.
But Sahyan existed. He was Sahyan.
Sahyan of freedom’s struggle against violence? No. Freedom takes its fighting men captive, and they are never again allowed to be free. Glory to them, but they are only one moment in the rise and fall of our human course: the very important moment of defiance, negation and rebellion. Yet there are others who embody a longer span of that movement. This tendency towards lastingness is present in Sahyan.
Did he know this, and was that why—or thanks to that—that he adopted the conduct of a non-combatant? No. Born in 1914, a son of his people, a witness to genocide and exodus, to the imposition of communism, to inquisition and wars, he regarded his own and our mere existence as victory and joy.
Then Sahyan of tolerance and reconciliation? No. He was not so brave as to fall all the way and know the fall, to rise all the way and know the ascension, much less to preach them. A son of a defeated, common people’s country, he encountered the fundamental questions of war and peace, victory and defeat, decline and ascent in some other stance: perhaps that of dignity, perhaps of giving nothing away; in his own words, of sealing the outlet of his sobs with his own hand. But is this a virtue in a poet? If this world of self-restraint is a world beyond which lie Ham and the ways of Ham, yes, it is a virtue.
His image as an Armenian writer, his moral stance, the morality of that stance, is fashioned, of course, first of all from what he did, but also—and this is very important—from what he did not do; first of all from what he saw and noticed, but also from what he chose not to notice; from his exaltation of Shem and Japheth, but also—and this is very important—from his suppression of the Ham within him, his own Ham, from his refusal to lay bare the Last Judgement… For the Word, and above all our national Word, is as much a prophecy of what is to come as it is a history of what has been. Prophecy is as much invitation, creation, summons, the calling into being of a future that seems to exist independently, as it is prediction. Nothing unexpected, nothing, happens. What happens is what we expect and also call forth. The deeply affirmative emphasis with which he says a capital Yes to the Armenian and to the Armenian homeland points directly to his anxiety for that homeland. Sahyan born free? No. His entrance was not that of a “young genius”, nor were the ups and downs of his course evidence of an innately great charge.
Sahyan the master, who, assimilating the world’s and his homeland’s heritage, became a “young genius” over the years? Never. As soon as he decided what poetry was and what poetry should do, the lines died beneath his pen. Perhaps because he thought poetry belonged to him, rather than he to poetry. So poetry becomes something that exists in its own right, does it? A phenomenon in itself, a text bestowed by God, from which some manage to tear out pages. And did Sahyan manage it? He did, and often.
He was a peasant, a worshipper of nature, a conservative, a man of the East, an ashugh; he was a capricious intellectual, a Westerner, utterly modern. But he was neither utterly modern nor a Westerner, neither an intellectual nor an ashugh, neither a man of the East nor a peasant. Sahyan was a journey back and forth: from nature to writing, from writing to nature; from altruism to nationalism, from nationalism to love of others; from today to the past and from the past to today; from poet to peasant and from peasant to poet—a constant, endless journey back and forth. To settle at some stopping place supposedly found at last is death, the death of the poet.
I was his reader back in those distant school years, and he must have supposed that he had people who read him, recited him and quoted him even among the pupils attending evening classes. Later, I was his open-mouthed listener when he, the editor, and the author of The Unceasing Belfry, the two of them together, displayed before us students their triumphant procession towards the book’s publication: how they had taken a superior by surprise at an inconvenient hour and, indecorously, without a tie; how the lady had turned the superior’s favourable neutrality into sympathy for the book and the guests, and so on. Then I was his companion in wine and bread, a close friend, one might say—if, of course, he would ever have allowed himself to relax or to grow sufficiently defiant for one to say: “I saw Hamo Sahyan drawn from his scabbard; he was gleaming, or rust-eaten.” I received him as a guest and was his guest; I stood at his sickbed, and in my own hour of distress he was the first person I noticed standing over me. Then I walked in his funeral procession; now I visit his grave.
I accompanied him to his grave, shared his bread, talked with him and listened to him because I was his reader: I sought strength from him. Now I am a pilgrim to his shrine because I remain his reader. If he gives me what I ask, if he strengthens me, it will truly become a shrine. If he does not, I shall abandon him; let him enjoy his anonymous grave in peace among the many ordinary dead. Our native soil has called many and chosen few. If in my hours of falling and despair he fails to stand beside me for even a moment, I shall certainly abandon him; even against my wishes, I shall abandon him. He will be left behind by years and eternities, and forgotten. That is what will happen, because before we abandon them, they themselves must, at some moment in their course, have abandoned themselves, betrayed themselves and us. That is how it is: eternity is compressed into a moment, the migration of generations into one person; one person is all the moments of all people.
I feel a great need for his strength, for their strength—“today and tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow”. As essential as air and water, that thirst for strength makes me an idol-worshipper in my own way. I, a citizen of the Republic of Armenia, expect a milk-spring’s abundant flow even from sources that have never flowed, that have never existed. Is this my weakness? Should I blame myself for my frailty? Does a Frenchman, a Russian, a Turk, a Georgian, an Arab look so far back along his course? Do they look back at all? Does their literature become such a refuge for their peoples and kings? Does it become a refuge? If not, is literature a game? If so, is it their writing that has brought them to their prosperous or suffocating present? What, were we sending ourselves and our people, yesterday, into today’s Gehenna while telling our feeble tale as mere observers? We were to be seers—were we only observers? If we had had a king and a kingdom, would we have opened our mouths with a different mission? Would our word—that of Khorenatsi, of the epic, of Abovyan, of Tumanyan, of Charents—have been different? The Russians, after all—the Persians, the Turks, the Arabs—had kings and kingdoms. Is their poets’ word different? Have I no business with them; should I go and find someone like myself? Have we dropped from heaven in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or is our very existence God’s mistake?
I want to believe that what speaks in me now is not concern for my personal dignity or my work’s, but an awareness of the fundamental significance of the word.
In the beginning was the Word. But is this not a partisan trap for us innocents: to set my wretched mortal self supposedly at the sources of creation and, through me, confer authority upon all the self-existing black and white—as though I had called it forth, and, if I am being devoured, it is by my own monsters; if I soar, it is on my own angels? Or is this, after all, an ambitious and very human impulse—in the beginning was the Word—to impart the energy of creation to our human word?
I do not know.
I know only that I should not have witnessed this savage assault upon the human being, this ordeal of the human being and the human, this tearing apart of the world and of humanity—especially since it is Sahyan’s world that has come under terrible trial, the human being who entered the arena at his invitation who is being mauled.
On another occasion I must have said something like this: “The arrow of this savagery that calls itself civilisation, and of the hostile armies, points precisely towards what deserves our anxiety and defence: our native home.” And now that homeland, that same home, is being devastated; in the very same flesh and body, yesterday’s householder, on whose brow Sahyan deciphered the writing of integrity and nobility, is turning into a malicious passer-by. What has happened? What is happening? Whose fault is it? Is it our fault, the poets’? Is it Sahyan’s fault? Is it our ancestors’ fault that we are so powerless before this destruction, that they begot incomplete beings, and we, the incomplete, are now being destroyed? If wretchedness is a fault, yes. If wretchedness is first of all wretchedness of mind, yes: the educators of our minds are responsible for this panic-stricken retreat.
Only empty ears would be filled like this with alien voices; only the weak-minded would go beneath soldiers’ boots like this; only the poor in spirit would surrender like this to other gods; only galley slaves would smash their rowing benches like this, destroying themselves along with the ship. Only a godless people, young and old alike, would surrender themselves into such captivity. What a capacious basin a people poor in spirit is for the apostles of God or the devil! What an open arena the public square of need is for those recruiting mercenary armies!
One of the very first, here and elsewhere—or gathering into a single panorama, within his twentieth-century self, the incidental, uncertain, in any case unfixed experience of his predecessors and contemporaries—Sahyan registered, in the code of social and political thought, the civil rights of the self-sufficiently enlightened, autonomous child of Adam.
That human being is primordially self-sufficient, autonomous, perfect; he has no need at all for your love, your light or the proximity of your ideas. If he nevertheless has any demand to make of you, it is that you move away from him, leave him outside your apostle’s snares and free him from the alms of your master’s love. For your proximity embitters, contaminates, distorts and destroys him, as this wrecked communal dwelling of three hundred million people bears witness today. And if any attitude towards him is asked of you, it is reverence before his perfection.
Sahyan was the Armenian of this nervous, irritable crossroads of our times and spaces. His word became an anthem for our procession, and his work became our true image upon our flag. And because we are often a procession without a flag, and are even more often led by the sacred images of others, Sahyan’s work is fundamentally important.
May 1994
Hamo Sahyan: The Poet, the Thinker, the Man,
Van Aryan Publishing, Yerevan, 2001.