Our march, the march of the living, is under our ancestors’ blessing or, if we have abandoned them, under their heavy curse. Here:
If you ride out to hunt
Up free Masis,
May the spirits seize you,
Take you up free Masis,
And there may you remain.
This is stern King Artashes’s curse upon the bowed, complaining King Artavazd; a father’s curse upon his heir; the homeland’s brand upon sons who disown it.
This King Artavazd expected a happy, flourishing country from his father and inherited ruins. “When you went,” he says, “you took the whole country with you. Over whom shall I reign in these ruins?” From his father’s tomb he receives the only answer a complainer deserves:
When you ride out to hunt
Up free Masis,
May the spirits seize you,
And may you remain bound.
That is: may your ascent up Masis towards God be broken; may your malice imprison you; may you not be granted the sight of your God, because your words over your inheritance were not those of a ruling king but of a complaining slave.
Then comes:
Strike, blacksmiths, the hammer upon the anvil,
Strike the hammer—let the chains grow strong,
Let the accursed king’s bonds grow strong…
And so on.
Our march, the march of the living, is either under a blessing or under a curse.
William Saroyan’s language was far removed from these words in Classical Armenian.
Saroyan’s four- or five-hundred-word Armenian dictionary, gathered from paternal and maternal aunts and uncles, from fragments of a torn people, was far from encompassing these Classical Armenian, ancient realities, happened or unhappened. Farther still from this heroic song of legendary kings was his life as an orphanage boy: farther than Pacific California from the poor, awkward town of Bitlis in the Armenian Highlands; far as only ages can be far from one another, unfamiliar, alien, even hostile.
Yet something certain, bringing distant ages and opposite conditions close, making them kin and alike almost to repetition, a true power for that boy of the orphanage and street, who had nothing in his soul except unknowing courage, a power as inexhaustible as world and time, placed that daring youth precisely where only true kings and true poets stand: kings of word and kings of deed. The Armenian “ban” is both word and deed: kings of the capitalised Word. A word is not a word unless it takes the shape of a deed; a deed is not a deed unless given to words, crowned with words.
It is the place and moment of undertaking the world with an oath. An hour full of mystery and trembling. So one swears when inheriting a kingdom; so one trembles when stepping onto an unknown road. “Have you set off?” they ask. “I have.” “Do you know you have no companion?” they say.
“I know. If I had one, I would not set out. If anyone is lost, it will be me alone; on everything found will be only my name: William Saroyan.”
“Are you master?” is heard.
A displaced, uprooted people, bewildered priests, broken commanders, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, faded farms, inhospitable soil, poor trees, drunkards, horses, mice, loose women seeing themselves as actresses, armoured women seeing themselves as rulers, people assembled from scraps of memory, people emptied even of memories, voiceless singers, silent trumpets, sinners unaware of sin, lawyers ignorant of law, Christians, Japanese, Mexicans, Muslims, labourers… All frightened, all enclosed in casings by fear, the casings fragile, all defenceless, all poets, and before all of them the same magnificent monster called life…
“Are you master?”
“I am master!”
Mastery is not enough: 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 blossom, the pomegranate redden, the trumpets peal; the empty will fill with memories, those with memories with ringing, real, just and unjust life. They will deceive and be deceived, fall and rise, marvel and admire, slap their knees resoundingly: ah, world, world! No one must fear anyone. They will all shed their casings: the desert its dryness, the tree its barrenness, time its winter, people their armour of a thousand forms and names. Everyone and everything will bring their true selves out of their fortresses, and those selves will be childlike in purity and courage, a thousand times more beautiful than their hollow casings, which have taken a thousand forms and names: language, gold, religion, colour, moustache and beard, party, army, state, office… and idea, idea, presumptuous, pitiable as our short arms before our life, fixed and finished as death itself, final and perfect as the end itself—ideas and tyrannical guards over those ideas.
Only the brave are granted to be poet and king, king and poet.
Saroyan was not merely master of his words: he was brave as a soldier and commanding as a king. He overlooked nothing, disowned nothing, abandoned no one, either from his ancestors’ past or his own time. He created a world, and within everything and everyone in that world is he himself: his all-embracing mind, his great heart, his life-giving spirit.
He created his world from colours and sounds so pure and ringing, so rustic in their innocence, so childlike in their freshness. He populated that world, solely William Saroyan’s, with such children and adults of pure sky-blue souls that before it not only tyrants and oppression, vice and the vicious, but all of us with our poor everyday greyness become an anti-world and anti-humanity. That was how he participated in our life. He could say that before his sunny appearance, people and phenomena had an entirely different image in our eyes from the one they had afterwards.
He won. His people of short, lively, bold boys and girls ought to have faded and fallen silent after the genocide, yet he won and stood beside his brothers who had likewise won: Saryan, Charents, Khachaturian, Tamanyan…
If his living presence and work could not weigh like a stone upon anything or anyone in this world and suffocate them, that was nevertheless not his defeat. It was theirs: those obsessed with ideas, those inquisitors, tyrants, cannibals. For his upright, lofty presence, William Saroyan’s, turned their ascent into decline, their attack into retreat, their tragedy into comedy, their giants into dwarfs and their existence into a mistake.
And though humanity’s march today is the same heavy procession of tyrants and deceivers, helpless and presumptuous, mean and spiteful, encased and defenceless, victors and defeated, that it was during his warm, enduring, sunny life, one Mozart symphony, one peaceful year of sun and rain over that procession, one William Saroyan within that same procession are enough for Mother Nature’s purpose to be called good and humanity’s march a parade.