shemdegi sadguri: georgia

It’s July 2010, and everyone is balmy in New York. I just moved into a huge apartment in Harlem with four guys I met under a year ago, and we still don’t have a couch. It’s a Saturday afternoon. Two of us are home, trying to read without dripping too much sweat on the pages. The Anthology Film Archives calendar sits on a stool. Desperate to get out, I flip through it. Sergei Paradjanov. The Color of Pomegranates (1968). July 17: 7:15 pm. I know I’d heard the name before, and recall my aunt having a large illustrated volume with one word on the cover: Paradjanov. This seems reassuring enough.

I awkwardly show the calendar to my roommate. I am not sure exactly how much we have in common. We decide to go. If anything, we can get Indian at Punjabi Deli afterwards. We are about ten minutes late.

A child dangles off a clock’s pendulum with an expression of amused stoicism on his face. The same child, a depiction of the eighteenth century troubadour poet Sayat Nova in his young age, climbs up a ladder to a roof covered in huge drying books. The pages flip and flutter like gigantic moth wings, revealing illuminated medieval manuscripts. Colored wool is thrown on silver platters, each drop of pigment loud and clear on the metallic surface.

My roommate and I look at each other, and realize that we are infected, even if we are not sure, not yet anyway, and maybe not ever, what exactly each step of this wild associative flight means. But we are willing to go with it.

The rhythm of a loom spinning white and red lace. One of six Sofiko Chiaurelis* holds a piece of red lace in front of her face. Another, this time male, tunes a kemenche. We were searching for ourselves in each other. The muse and the troubadour: sides of the same specter.

We exchange glances again, both of us filled with the sense that we’ve just stepped into something we don’t ever want to get out of. A man holds a peacock in his arms; the bird’s beak is in the man’s mouth. A yet another Sofiko, on horseback in a silver frock and head dress shoots a gun silently into the air as Shen Khar Venakhi (famous Georgian polyphonic church hymn), non-diegetic, sounds in the background.

What is this we are watching? How does it come together? Where can it take place? It is July 2010, but we’re in 18^th century dream-world Caucasus; it holds together because of the man whose inner world it strives to present and the man who presents it, unabashedly, confidently, in a frenzy that flows slowly and beautifully like the fabrics on the screen.

Sayat Nova (an adopted name that means “Master of Songs” in Persian), a celebrated troubadour (ashik), lived on the territory of Armenia and Georgia. Born in Tbilisi (akaTiflis). He composed hundreds of songs in Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian and Persian, still sung by traditional performers. Sayat Nova performed at the Georgian king’s court, and later became an ordained priest. He died in the Haghpat Monastery in Armenia.

A group of monks stands on stone steps sucking on pomegranates. They sound like carnivores. Two monks wash their feet. Two others carry them, piggy-back, to the grapes they are to start stomping.

Born in 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to Armenian parents, Sergei Paradjanov grew up in the same city. He lived there, in the Ukraine, and in Armenia. Paradjanov died in 1990, making four feature-length movies that are available to the general public (he considered his early films constricted and bad). He was in the middle of his final project, titled A Confession, when he died.

Aroutin chants the screen at a baptism. Some minutes later the Catholicos (head of Armenian Orthodox church) turns a glowing blue and falls dead. Sheep flock a small church with a cocktail-umbrella roof. The protagonist digs a grave.

Paradjanov spent years in Gulags, accused of pretty much everything from bribery to then-illegal in the USSR homosexuality. The Color of Pomegranates was banned by the Soviet government, and Paradjanov could not make another film until 1984. While imprisoned, Paradjanov made drawings, dolls, collages from whatever he could find. When he was released, but still not allowed to make films, he continued these pursuits. Most of his art, alongside with some furnishings from his apartment in Tbilisi lives in the Paradjanov house-museum in Yerevan.

A memory of childhood: the young Sayat Nova runs around with lavash bread hanging from his forearms.

Each frame is a carefully designed, brilliantly explosive tableau of color and texture. We want these clothes, we say. We want these sounds. We want a nautilus shell to cover one breast and not the other.

A final Sofiko stands over the middle-aged Sayat Nova. She wears a lavish green and gold garment, a wreath crowning her head of blond hair, a rooster perched on her shoulder, and spills wine onto the chest of the poet, dressed in a white linen tunic.

When we get home, we look up everything we can about Paradjanov. I buy The Color of Pomegranates. We rent Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, his 1964 film set in the Ukraine, and based on Ukrainian folklore. We steal a DVD with the other two films, The Legend of Surami Fortress, and Ashik Kerib, from somebody’s house. We don’t even feel guilty. We watch these films multiple times. I start wearing brighter clothes, long, flowing, patterned dresses in particular. Everything both of us know of Armenia and Georgia comes out. We buy books about Paradjanov, look up people he influenced, was influenced by. My 90-year old Georgian grandmother gets harassed almost daily for recipes and pronunciation advice. I get every CD of Georgian and Armenian traditional music I can possibly find. And yet, this is all not enough: we are sharing an obsession, but no matter what we read, look at, watch, we are too far away.

Neither of us has any money, but I’ve got a car. I sell the car. We buy two plane tickets for November 18^th-28^th, to Yerevan.

It seems nobody has thought this through. Some friends think we’re crazy, especially me. But we go. And we go to the Paradjanov museum in Yerevan, and then take a night train to Tbilisi, and amble about with no plan at all, and we go and meet relatives I have in the town of Tqibuli, and somehow, despite the fact that neither Georgia nor Armenia are anything like the movie, not now – and of course we expected this – I am changed by the experience of following this through. Somehow, this entire journey becomes a Paradjanov movie – less lavish, less bright and intricate, but I feel something impish in me come out, something brazen and dedicated. I write poems that could not have happened before. They are the only ones to get published.

I wonder if this is just a phase. After all, a movie is a movie. A director, however influential and insane, is a director. A year goes by. Both of us move out of the apartment in Harlem, to different boroughs. I spend my summer in a tent in Transylvania, digging up potsherds. I come back and go to the Russian store on 181^st street and meet a woman who works there, who was Paradjanov’s neighbor in Tbilisi; this woman has my name. And it is clear that this is not going anywhere. No place, no person has grown more true.

In November 2011, I find myself applying to PhD programs in Anthropology to focus on the Caucasus. This hardly follows a 2-year-old MFA in Poetry. I cannot possibly get in, I think. To get myself through the waiting game, my now former roommate and I start subtitling an old (Soviet) Georgian film, co-starring Paradjanov’s favorite Sofiko Chiaureli.

In midwinter, I find three prints I’d bought and forgotten all about in a notebook: two stills from Pomegranates, and a photo of Paradjanov himself. I take that as a good sign. I am right to.

It’s true, of course, that Armenia has claimed Paradjanov more so than Georgia has, and my focus, in the end, is the latter. But that’s not the point here: Paradjanov's films take the collective mythology of the Caucasus and bring it alive, without drawing borders. I think of the patterns, colors, music, language in these movies, and realize that all this was around me for years, since birth perhaps. But it took Paradjanov to wake me up to it. He has that effect on people, it seems, the effect of bringing out the origins, the mixtures we are all composed of, the imagination we had as children and perhaps have repressed. His films show that it is not at all a necessity to stick to some accepted notion of adulthood at all times. He gives us the time not to.

I may be naïve to place so much significance on one Saturday afternoon, on one film, on one dead man, but I will take naivety, if it rids me of staleness.

White doves flutter and flip over lit candles on a stone floor of a cellar. A mason finishes one of the walls. Sayat Nova stands in the cellar. Sing! Sing! says the mason. Sing! Sing! Die, he says.

* Sofiko Chiaureli was a famous Georgian actress; she appeared in three of Paradjanov’s films.

Ten days before I leave. There is now a whole separate page with my Georgia/Armenia travel journal, in case anyone was curious. It's still incomplete, but one has to start somewhere.

In the context of my impending project, I've been thinking a lot about the big bad guy I used to inhabit, also known as mother Russia, or "the old country". I realize that I am going to places that were tyrannized, partnered with or heavily influenced by that entity for quite a while, and looking at them twenty years after the whole thing went kaput, but from a weird perspective: I am a briefly-baptized-but-in-denial-about-it Russian [ethnic] Jew (even if I hardly practice the religion, my birth certificate says "Jew" under nationality... what sense it makes, I do not know, but it certainly makes it hard to assume a new national identity) who only encountered four years of the old regime (on its way out, at that), witnessed two currency reforms, watched the feeble attempts at privatization and erm, democracy come, nearly bloom, and quickly wilt, and got the hell out before darling Putin really "tsared" himself up, only to end up in another hegemonic landscape, which is just as heavily despised. And here I am now. Visiting the periphery. Watching places like Georgia slowly but surely take Russian out of practice. I can't blame them (even it makes it harder for me to get around). I just wish, sometimes, that I didn't come from a despot-land.