Our march of the living is under our ancestor's blessing or, if we have left them, under their heavy curse. Here.
If you ride me
Free from Masis,
They will call you brave
They took the free one up to Masis,
You will visit there.
This is the curse of the hard king Artashes on the weak and complaining king Artavazd. this is the curse of the father on the heir. this is the stigma of the motherland on the renegade sons.
This Artavazd king expected a happy and prosperous country from his father, but he inherited a ruin. "Before you go," he says, "take everything with you. Who will I destroy?" And from his father's tomb he gets the only answer worthy of the complainant.
When your rider goes hunting
Since Azat Masis:
Courage will hold you back
And stay constrained.
In other words, May your train to God be broken, may your evil detain you, and may you not be worthy of the image of your God, because your word on what you received did not become a ruling king, but a complaining slave.
Then he comes.
Strike, blacksmiths, the iron plate
Beat the tree - the chain will be strengthened.
Shackle the cursed king...
etc.
Our march of the living is either under a blessing or under a curse.
William Saroyan's language was very far from these noble things.
The 4500-word Saroyan dictionary of Armenian, collected from aunts and uncles, uncles and aunts, and the voices of the people, was very far from including these old, past realities. His life as an orphan manch was far from this epic of mythical kings, far more than Pacific California from the poor and uncomfortable village of Bitlis in the Armenian highlands, far as the times are only from each other, strangers to each other, strangers to each other, but also enemies.
But a certain thing that brings distant times and opposite situations closer, brings them closer, resembles each other as much as repetition, a true power to that boy from the orphanage and the street, who had nothing but ignorant courage in his soul, a power as inexhaustible as the world and time made that brave young man stand exactly where true kings and true poets only stand, kings of words and kings of deeds - the thing and the word is the deed - the great king of the Word. A word is not a word if it does not take the form of a deed, a deed is not a deed if it is not given to words, it is not crowned with words.
It is the place and the moment to pledge to the world. It is an hour full of counsel and trembling. That's how they swear when inheriting a kingdom, that's how they tremble when taking a step on the path of the unknown. "Did you go?" they ask. "I went." "Do you know you don't have a companion?" they say.
"I know. if I had, I would not have set out. I will be the only one who gets lost, only my name, William Saroyan, will be on everything found."
"Are you a master?" is heard.
Displaced and destitute people, confused priests, broken military leaders, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, faded farms, desolate land, poor trees, drunkards, horses, mice, squires who see themselves as actresses, women in armor who see themselves as rulers, people gathered from memories, those who are even enraptured by memories, trumpet singers, silent trumpets, sinners ignorant of sin, lawyers ignorant of the law, Christians, Japanese, Mexicans, Muslims, cultivators... and all of them, scared, all of them covered in fear, their shells fragile, all of them defenseless, all of them poets, and in front of them all the same magnificent monster called life...
- Are you a master?
- It's me.
The Lord is few - I am them, they are all Saroyan, they are me, William Saroyan. they will all testify that I am with them. I will pass through them, and the desert will bloom, the pomegranate will turn red, the trumpets will sound, the idlers will be filled with memorials, the memorials will be ringing with true, just and unjust life, deceiving and being deceived, falling and rising, wondering and admiring, and clapping their knees, oh world-world! No one should be afraid of anyone. They will all shed their shells - the desert - dryness, the tree - barrenness, time - its winter, people - their thousand-faced and thousand-named armors, everyone and everything will remove their authenticity from their fortresses, and their authenticity will be childishly pure, childishly brave and a thousand times more beautiful from their puffy shells that have taken a thousand names and names - language, gold, religion, color, crop, party, army. state, office... and idea, idea, pretentious, poor as our short wings before our life, stable and complete as death itself, final and perfect as the end itself, ideas and tyrannical controllers over those ideas.
Only the brave are given to be poets and kings, kings and poets.
Saroyan did not keep his word - he was militarily brave and royally orderly. He didn't ignore anything from his ancestors' past or his time, he didn't deny anything, he didn't leave anyone. He created a world and in everything and everyone in that world is himself, his comprehensive mind, his great heart, his life-giving spirit.
He created his world so clean and ringing, rustically so naive, childishly so new from colors and sounds, purely William Saroyan's world he inhabited with such small and big of pure blue souls that not only tyrants and oppression, vice and vice, but also all of us, our poor, with our grayness, become anti-world and anti-human in front of that world. He thus participated in our lives, and he could say that before his solar appearance, people and phenomena had a completely different image in our eyes than after his appearance.
He won. Kodak, his tribe of agile, courageous boys and girls should have died out and remained silent after the Genocide, but here he won and stood next to his brothers who also won: Saryan, Charents, Khachatryan, Tamanyan...
If his living presence and work could not weigh down like a stone and drown nothing and no one in this world under them, it was still not his defeat - it was their defeat, those ideologues, those inquisitors, those tyrants, those cannibals... because his upright and high presence of William Saroyan made their rise a fall, their attack a retreat, their tragedy laughable, their giants dwarf and their existence bug.
And although the march of humanity today is the same heavy procession of tyrants and deceivers, incompetents and ambitious, scheming and vindictive, vindictive and defenseless, winners and losers, as it was in the sun with its warm and lasting life, but a Mozart symphony, a year of peaceful sun and rain on that procession, a William Saroyan in one and the same procession, are enough that the counsel of mother nature is good and the march of humanity will be called a parade.