Outside the temperatures had sunk to -5 C, it was dark and the pavements had turned slippery under the first thin dusting of snow. With each minute that passed, the 7 pm concert across the road in the palace chapel seemed to drift away in the stream of events unattended, on cold winter nights when the couch and a warm blanket beckoned.

The bell to the front door signalled that my husband had come home just in time to stop the slumber of bears. “Shall we go?” he asked rhetorically, infused with the heady energy of a clear winter’s night. The aperture for an evening out that had nearly shut now shot wide open, and within minutes we were making our way past the cressets that lined the path to the royal chapel.

Under the embossed dome with flickering candles inside glass holders, the discomfort of the hard wooden pews seemed the only reminder of earthliness. Thin whispers effervesced in the silence, until a lithe, pale man in a grey suit and sky blue tie broke the quiet with his shoe soles on the stone floor. He bowed to the audience, then turned to the harpsichord and sat down, laying soft eyes on the two rows of keys that had become lovers and old friends, in hours, days and years of practice.

Barely without a pause, he played the thirty variations on the opening aria, composed and published by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1741 as an antidote to insomnia for one of his patrons. By all accounts, at the outset Bach regarded this as a monotonous exercise, something like counting sheep. But maybe even the genius surprised himself.

I struggled to follow the agile fingers as they flew across the keyboards, often moving at a velocity and in contortions that made the performance seem like Olympic gymnastics. There was a call to faith in this music that challenged and sometimes even panicked me with its divergent melodies, but that always came together, acknowledging that the threads had never really been separate at all.

In the Variations I caught a glimpse of what polyphony can teach us. There is an aria, a harmonic interdependence, to which we all tend and in which we all move. If we do not recognize it, even fight it, there will be no music, only chaos and collapse. This part of who we are - every being connected, every note connected – must be acknowledged in an organized way in a score. It is the very frame by which independent rhythms and contours are set free to play.  We can be who we are – the variations - if we can acknowledge that we are humans first.

"The Variations" is published as part of a new series in my blog sharing reflections on the necessity of a global identity.

What does a child living in a small Albanian town that has stood since Medieval times see as World War II grips his home? The familiar stone walls that have always stood sturdy shivering night after night under the bombings. The skies and the earth that seemed to exist in a perpetual harmonious marriage suddenly pitted against one another. Familiar figures gone mad, turning on people they have known all their lives, or suddenly lifeless in heaps on the streets. Grotesque absurdities such as the severed arm of a British airman becoming "the hand that works miracles" in a monastery, to which people in desperation make pilgrimages. 

In Ismail Kadare's semi-autobiographical account, Chronicle in Stone (1971),  a child's world of magical timelessness struggles to survive as the drumbeat of war intensifies. 

This one will stay with me. In particular, the account of the town's medieval citadel taking back the city it had given birth to, as the townspeople seek shelter there:

The fortress was indeed very old. It had given birth to the city, and our houses resembled the citadel the way children look like their mothers. Over the centuries, the city had grown up a lot. Although the fortress was in good condition, no one ever thought that one day it would have the strength to take its offspring, the city, under its protection. That was a terrifying return to the past. It was like someone going back into the womb. (p. 188)

One hundred years after its end, we still live in its embers. For an event, so horrific and wrong that led to so many other horrors and wrongs, perhaps we must always. 

Below, a poem from one who was there, who lost all illusions perpetuated in the corrupt tales of heroic wars, and who summoned the courage to face the abyss in his poetry:

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.


Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.


In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.


If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

- Wilfred Owen, a poem written from Craiglockhart Hospital, 1917. Owen died in battle, one week to the hour before the signing of the Armistice one hundred years ago, today.

"You must read Austerlitz," they said, until it became like a mantra, so that inside I began to build up a resistance to the book, without even once having laid eyes on it. When too many people repeat the same sound, I seek other sounds and walk way. 

Yet, like all people through the ages, even those who claim that we live in a world that can be explained, I have often wondered how much I decide and how much is preordained, and, if preordained, by what. On some days, I insist that my journeys are of my own making, and on others this insistence seems a deficiency of the will to see.

A friend finally brought Austerlitz to me, and, as an act of resistance, which today I understand as fear of self-recognition, I kept it under a pile of other books, though its haunting black and white cover seemed to fly out of the pile like a genie that cast a spell over my thoughts.

One day, when the force of what must happen became too great to be held back, I began to read and came to a passage in one of the early chapters that explained everything:

"Since my childhood and youth...I have never known who I really was. From where I stand now, of course, I can see that my name alone, and the fact that it was kept from me until my fifteenth year, ought to have put me on the track of my origins, but it has also become clear to me of late, why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested to me. It hasn't been easy to make my way out of my own inhibitions, and it will not be easy now to put the story into anything like proper order."  - Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (Penguin 2001), pp. 60-61

It was Austerlitz's story, but it was also mine. 

I rest in the drone of bumble bees among the lavender. As Arctic forests burn it lets me forget. The cool intoxication of lavender runs through me like water over stones in a mountain stream, and forms a mirage as you first bloomed in the plump green of early summer.

Your flowers fell in bright yellow garlands, as at the return of war heroes to Imperial Rome. At first the trumpets sound, but, quickly tiring of their boastfulness, I silence them and return to my childhood bedroom, shared with my little sister, where Father read us bed-time stories of Goldilocks and Rapunzel. I see you in the tumbling blond locks of his stories, portrayed with relish, despite his balding head.

Your scent is pleasant, reserved and clean, like a woman in a tailored dress made irresistible by its restraint. Your flowers say “you can have it all” and your scent says “by being sparing.” The memory of you pours like a waterfall over the dust and whispers that secret to us, as the earth burns with greed.
​
I cut back your dead flowers in hopes that new shoots will come, and they do, but frustrate my hunger for yellow garlands with only greenness and leaves. There will be no more this year, because you want me to know that there is such a thing as enough.

You wait patiently as I struggle to stay with my own breath. Thoughts block awareness and litter my mind, like the tiny wild strawberries suspended like unknown planets at your feet. I run through my body from head to toe to convince myself that I am not my mind, but something in me is still unwilling. You wait at the portal, one of your heads bowing to the heat of the first morning sun. You already are what I seek, yet you know that I must discover it myself.

You are like my regrets: unforgiving as the carpet of thorns that covers your stems, so that there is nowhere I can grip without getting hurt; unravelling as I behold you, your colors dividing into a spectrum—of white, magenta and flamingo pink—like my original premises. You overpower the pain and uncertainty with the aroma of a pasha’s palace that infiltrates the surface of the coffee table before me, where exotic painted flowers take form in the tiles.

Your leaves cup each of my regrets like a raindrop, an offering to our sun god. Maybe they will evaporate, and then all that will be left is you and me in this temple of being.

Outside the temperatures had sunk to -5 C, it was dark and the pavements had turned slippery under the first thin dusting of snow. With each minute that passed, the 7 pm concert across the road in the palace chapel seemed to drift away in the stream of events unattended, on cold winter nights when the couch and a warm blanket beckoned.

The bell to the front door signalled that my husband had come home just in time to stop the slumber of bears. “Shall we go?” he asked rhetorically, infused with the heady energy of a clear winter’s night. The aperture for an evening out that had nearly shut now shot wide open, and within minutes we were making our way past the cressets that lined the path to the royal chapel.

Under the embossed dome with flickering candles inside glass holders, the discomfort of the hard wooden pews seemed the only reminder of earthliness. Thin whispers effervesced in the silence, until a lithe, pale man in a grey suit and sky blue tie broke the quiet with his shoe soles on the stone floor. He bowed to the audience, then turned to the harpsichord and sat down, laying soft eyes on the two rows of keys that had become lovers and old friends, in hours, days and years of practice.

Barely without a pause, he played the thirty variations on the opening aria, composed and published by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1741 as an antidote to insomnia for one of his patrons. By all accounts, at the outset Bach regarded this as a monotonous exercise, something like counting sheep. But maybe even the genius surprised himself.

I struggled to follow the agile fingers as they flew across the keyboards, often moving at a velocity and in contortions that made the performance seem like Olympic gymnastics. There was a call to faith in this music that challenged and sometimes even panicked me with its divergent melodies, but that always came together, acknowledging that the threads had never really been separate at all.
​
In the Variations I caught a glimpse of what polyphony can teach us. There is an aria, a harmonic interdependence, to which we all tend and in which we all move. If we do not recognize it, even fight it, there will be no music, only chaos and collapse. This part of who we are - every being connected, every note connected – must be acknowledged in a score. It is the very frame by which independent rhythms and contours are set free to play.  We can be who we are - the variations - if we can acknowledge that we are humans first.

Like a silk scarf that flutters carelessly in the wind, your petals won’t obey. They swagger in different directions—like wisps of hair left to caress the face—in a designer messiness that eludes over-thinking. At times you are as tan as a leather cowboy hat, and at others you aspire to the yellow robes of Eastern royals. I cannot organize you, characterize you or decide who you are.

Frustrated, I look to your stems to find the answers in your past. There I discover two types of stems: one is thick and yellowish, with large thorns widely spaced so they can easily be avoided; the other is thin and green, with thorns, like the small sharp teeth of a carnivorous fish, that pierce wherever one touches the stem. I discover that you have the flamboyance of a mutt, grown from parents of such differing temperaments that you toss your hands in the air and say “to hell with it—I am me.”

For all of your swagger, you haven’t lost your sweetness. In fact, the ants literally love you to death, and devour some of your buds whole before they have the chance to blossom. There is a callousness in the jagged stumps the ants leave behind, like the remnants of a forest fire.
​
But you are a survivor, and I meet you there: In the yellow shadows of the sky after a long, hot day, when the sun has burned through the cool blue, and you are still resilient with color.

In the batting of an eyelid, you populated your patch of the earth quickly and then you were gone. From the countless first buds, like a sea of white lights in the night, you seemed to straddle the long, slow work of evolution and were suddenly there, not in one or two but in plenty. I visited you each morning to watch a gradual opening, but you were in a different rhythm, or keeping ahead of all rhythms, like a face that has undergone age-defying treatment. You played with my ingrained sense of time – past, present and future – and claimed that such conventions were old hat. There was just you and the cascades of giddy pleasure that fell from your branches, forever in this fleeting moment.

The sweetness of your flowers wrapped me in sticky cotton candy - in too much there was never enough. Their opening was like the grand opening of a giant department store, offering early-bird discounts. The pollinators clambered over one another to get the most and the best, fastest. The usual graces – keeping to one’s flower or only climbing into a new one when it became vacant – were a wistful memory. The distance between wanting and getting vanished, meaning we were in danger.

You invaded the neighboring flower beds, offering no other justification than that you needed the space. I cut back your unsightly upshoots, the tiny angry thorns penetrating my thin garden gloves. But it seemed hopeless. You were like a hydra, with tendrils that beckoned to be cut so they could multiply.
​
Just as this wild dance was at its most virulent, your petals began to fall like young men on the battlefield, and within a day all that was left was a colorless bush. You retreated into the shadow of your dark leaves, empty as a widow. All’s quiet on the western front. The genie is back in the bottle. But your short life haunts my thoughts daily, and I meditate to still them.

You float dry in the small sea on my desk. My greed for your scent parches you, no matter how much water you get. Beheaded from that prickly body, your scent retreats into the water. If I drink it, perhaps I will taste you as you once were, but that is impossible, for I have taken you from your magic place, where the most extraordinary things grow knowingly out of a desert mirage.

You came from the Eastern fringes, that corner of my island that faces Mecca. There, your ruffled petals were like many whirling dervishes, dizzying me as I followed their contours in a never-ending flow. Your infinite swirling transfixed me, until I snapped the fingers of my intellect that said this wasn’t allowed. It was my tragedy, not yours. Other petals still swirl atop that bush, until the red fruit bulges out of the flowers like clowns’ noses, and the dervishes retreat into the memory of the roots.

You were unabashed magenta, defying the pastels of dust and stone. This could seem promiscuous, but flowers of the desert must flaunt themselves to survive. Chartreuse leaves covered in a barely-visible fur that kept vital fluids in and preying insects out, served as shade for the thick, grey stalks of a thousand hair-thin thorns. The roots had grown deeper than my spade could ever dig, and so I began to understand that you drank your magic from underground rivers.

The bumble bees lost their minds in your nectar. As they dug themselves into the heart of you, your scent intensified, overwhelming the air like incense. Even if I have the power to pick you, your intensity won’t stay in my hand, because you are like a prayer call that falls from the minaret.