L’Arrogance De La Jeunesse - the Swagger of Youth: a Collection of Verse

By William Howard Kazarian

The fascination for poetry, along with classical music and liturgy, began at an early age. In this collection of verse and prose-poems, themes range from childhood recollections to contemporary issues to the whimsical. Larrogance de la Jeunesse -The Swagger of Youth: A Collection of Verse is a reflection of personal insights and eclectic perspectives drawn from a unique cultural background and a life enriched with curious, dangerous, and always enlightening experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477266960

William Howard Kazarian

Dr. Kazarian is an Assistant Professor of English at Hawai’i Pacific University. His novella The First Casualty of War: Aftermath of the Attack on Pearl Harbor was published in March, 2010; Antérieurement, Maintenant, et Plus Tard – Then, Now, and Later: A Collection of Verse was published October, 2011; and he has begun a sequel to The First Casualty titled Upon the Altar of Freedom. His research areas include Middle Eastern fable and psychology in literature.

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© 2012 William Howard Kazarian. All rights reserved.

All images are the property of the author and are not be reproduced without the express permission of the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 9/21/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6594-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6696-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012916277

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This collection of verse is an original work of fiction. All characters, incidences, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used herein fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Cover Art: Birds and Flowers (38 x 20 Chinese Silk Gongbi Painting)

by artist He Min. From the Oriental Collection of Dr. William Howard Kazarian.

Contents

Knowledge

On Reading and Writing Essays

Piano

The Literary Essay: W. Somerset Maugham: The Summing Up

Education

Constructivism: Theory and Practice in Higher Education

Education and the Learning Process

The Education of Teachers - Teachers as Agents of Change

Discovery

Aunt Dorothy

Time That Takes Survey of the World

War

Begotten By Despair Upon Impossibility

No Greater Sorrow Than Happiness in Misery

On Discovering the Brevity of Life

Poets Are the Trumpets Which Sing to Battle

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait.

Evil

Justification of Heinous Acts and the Stern Imposition of Reality

Folly

Cab Driver

The Wages of Education and the Poverty of Value

Deceit

From the Sin Grows the Commandment

To All Artists – True As Truth’s Simplicity

Honor

One Year in the House of Pain

Puowaina: Hill of Sacrifice

Three Guineas – Virginia Woolf

Viet Nam: Men, War, and Socialization

Youth in War: On the Fedala Road, Burmese Days, and Viet Nam

Shame

Hawai’i Parodies

The Indignity of Death

People

Discourse Communities: The Parliament of Fools (with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer) - Language and Socialisation

Work, Immigration, Gender – New Subjects of Cultural Politics

Writers and the People About Whom They Write

Still Life, Mary Gordon

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Lignum Vitae

Knowledge

The knowledge of man is as the waters, some descending from above, and some springing from beneath; the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by divine revelation. Advancement of Learning, I v.1, Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

On Reading and Writing Essays

Piano

The Literary Essay: W. Somerset Maugham

On Reading and Writing Essays

My essays, which of all my other works have been most current; for that, as it seems, they come home, to men’s business, and bosoms. Essays [Dedication]: Francis Bacon, 1625)

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the essay as a genre of literature is the unique service it provides. It is as Bacon notes that essays carry the currency (both of recentcy and of monied value) of thought and that they do return to the notion of human interaction and shared meaning. This is not to say that novels and poetry fail on these accounts; it is to say, rather, that through the essay, the individual writer is the primary character in the drama. It is a personal journey and exchange that moves along discursive routes with writer and reader meandering together side by side. Additionally, the essay, when well thought out and equally well written, carries with it a more authentic voice – it is the vehicle of the true speech of its author shared personally with the audience. At its highest, the essay reflects the wondrous and inspirational art form of the ancient chorus, of the orison and sacred prayer, and of the poignant and deeply moving soliloquy.

One of the difficult notions regarding the essay is how it is situated in cultural literature. It is not drama, nor is it fiction, nor is it reportage. If the essay is to be defined in any meaningful way, it might do well to examine what constitutes the body and the purpose of this medium. Rather than taking a compositional scalpel and carving out a rubric, let it be said that essays have certain elements about them that distinguish their form from the other venues. One method is to examine along chronological lines – that is, look at the development of the essay from early times along to the present. A careful reading of Michel de Montaigne provides great insight into the nature and character of both form and writer. Much of what Montaigne has to say about life and his speculations about himself offer a view into the scholarly, elderly, well-travelled and contemplative man.

Every man bears the whole Form of the human condition. Authors communicate themselves to the public by some peculiar mark foreign to themselves; I – the first ever to do so – by my universal being, not as a grammarian, poet or jurisconsult but as Michel de Montaigne. If all complain that I talk too much about myself, I complain that they never even think about their own selves. (Montaigne: On Repenting c.1575)

Here are the first clues that guide the reader into the realm of essay. It is this almost confessional aspect that drives much of what constitutes the personal narrative of reflection and exposition. In the continuum of time, the essay develops more along the lines of reflection cum analysis as is in evidence with the works of Addison. In an interesting and convoluted essay Nicolini and the Lions, the art of the essay acquires added features which separate it still from the novel and other literary forms.

I have often wished that our tragedians would copy after this great master of action. Could they make the same use of their arms and legs, and inform their faces with as significant looks and passions, how glorious would an English tragedy appear with that action, which is capable of giving dignity to the forced thoughts, cold conceits, and unnatural expressions of an Italian opera! In the meantime, I have related this combat of the lion, to show what are at present the reigning entertainments of the politer part of Great Britain. (Nicolini and the Lions)

In this way, the essayist employs a strategy of pseudo-representation – taking an opinion of a personal nature and moving forward through a device that is more of a metaphorical nature than that of specific, fact-based, straightforward reporting. Addison is bordering upon the storytelling aspects but in reality is merely couching his feelings in a humorous and ironic venue. On the heels of Addison and Steele came the incomparable Samuel Johnson who, armed with both wit and wisdom, brought about another golden age for this form. Again, the humble essay (as it might have been termed in earlier times) was now enjoying a limelight with its clarity, its reflection, its ability to move swiftly in and out of the lives of so many, to make descriptive and graphic images of scenes and sights, and to provide readers with that quickness of insight and understanding in such compacted verse. With the arrival of Lamb, Edgeworth, Hazlitt, Stevenson, and Beerbohm, the essay took added dimensions of truth through whimsy – revelation of spirit and of social justice in fresh and interesting ways. In her treatise for women (and any man who was not so pig headed and pre-disposed with himself), Maria Edgeworth’s thoughts are perfect examples of the new and added dimensions essays began to adopt.

Nothing provokes an irascible man, interested in debate, and possessed of an opinion of his own eloquence, so much as to see the attention of his hearers go from him: you will then, when he flatters himself that he has just fixed your eye with his very best argument, suddenly grow absent – your house affairs must call you hence – or you have directions to give to your children – or the room is too hot, or too cold –the window must be opened – or door shut – or the candle wants snuffing. (The Noble Science of Self-Justification)

Note the exquisite value of the last words – the candle wants snuffing – and the true value of essayistic reflection speaks volumes. It is the man who wants (deserves) snuffing. While Virginia Woolf was certainly her own person, it might be worth observing that much of her own style could be said to be derived from the likes of such great writing. But time is the great arbiter in the scheme of things and it points directly to the evolutionary status of the essay – more and more with each passing decade and each passing day how the essay moves to serve its diverse audience eager to share and engage in the passages that consume mankind.

The new essay (for lack of a better term) came about with the writings and serious reflections about topics ranging from social order-social chaos, to social justice and women’s rights, to colonialism and war, to the radical changes and challenges the new world was entertaining. As mentioned earlier, one great writer of this genre was Virginia Woolf whose landmark work helped to transform the nature of social order and the status of women. In Three Guineas, her words resonate in the hearts of women as well as men.

Daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon, and read and write your own language for your own pleasure, may we very humbly entreat you to sign this gentleman’s manifesto with some intention of putting your promise into practice? Here, if indeed they consent to listen, they might very reasonably ask us to be more explicit – not indeed to define culture and intellectual liberty, for they have books and leisure and can define the words for themselves. (1938)

The essay is a seemingly boundless vessel upon which to load and carry the vast thoughts and feelings embedded in ourselves and of our times. Tanizaki’s brilliant and beautiful recollections of old Japan and new reveal more insight than any novel or history book could ever aspire to. The journeys and wanderings of Thoreau fascinate readers and inspire writers to this very day and re-enforce the essayistic device of the journey itself to be manifest in modern writing. Life is a journey, a road traveled and a travel reflected upon as in the works of Fitzgerald and his own lamentations, or of White and his retraced steps back to the lake of his youth, or the very sorrowful remembrances uttered by the new writers like James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Philip Lopate. It is this last who captures the prose of the moment so ironically.

Like children forced to play the cute part adults expect of them, some old people must get confused trying to adapt to a social role of indeterminate standards, which is why they seem to whine: I’m doing all right, aren’t I - for my age? It is interesting that society’s two most powerless groups, children and the elderly, have both been made into sentimental symbols. In the child’s little hungry hands grasping for life, joined to the old person’s frail slipping fingers hanging on to it, you have one of the commonest advertising metaphors for intense appreciation. It is enough to show a young child sleeping in his or her grandparent’s lap to procure joie de vivre overload. (Against Joie de Vivre)

Situating the essay as literary or artistic form would be fruitless today. Because of its own uniqueness – its ability to capture, personalize, reflect, comment upon, hold up to the light – so many variant issues and aspects of human history and human issues, the essay will continue to evolve and re-define itself. If the essay is any one thing, it is the fact that it is transformational both for itself as importantly as for its audience. The essay is always engaging, pertinent, relevant, important, and demanding that one must continue to return to it – re-visiting the conversation, as it were. In so many ways, the essay serves the strongest emotional needs and responses – that the essay and the essay writer have so much affect upon the canon of literature, it is too little to say that this is one of the most significant ways we express ourselves and more to acknowledge the concept that what we are doing is sharing at the most personal level.

It is better to understand that the essay, for so many reasons, is the single most powerful force for human expression – more than likely owing its roots to one of the greatest texts ever written – the Holy Bible. While this may sound arch and vaunted, even excessive, it does make some reasonable sense. While the Bible contains accounts that may seem better suited to examination for meaning as stories, they are really the responses by writers (note the multiple) to different sets of issues and circumstance.

These are not anthologized works, but more, they are critical offerings, admonissions, reflections, and advice. If one were to examine a collection of essays, as has been the case in this text, then one would readily acknowledge that there does exist the essence of the very same sort of thoughtfulness, sorrow, desire, agony, musing, and hope as those sentiments contained in many of the holy literatures whether they are called the al Koran, the Torah, the Analects of Confucius, the Katha-Upanishads, or the Holy Bible.

Essays, I submit, are one of the most important aspects of literature and art. They go so far and so penetratingly toward defining what is, to human-kind, the meaning of culture. They represent what Matthew Arnold called the best that is known and thought in the world. Personally, the essays constructed throughout this text have aspired to define who I am and pray to be. I hope they have provided the reader with what I know and think and what I personally have reflected upon in my view of this world.

References

de Montainge, M. (Trans. Screech, M. A.). (1991). Michel de Montaigne – The Essays: a Selection. New York: Penguin Books.

Lopate, P. (1995). The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor Books.

Woolf, V. (1938). Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Piano

When I was a student in college, I was eager to study everything and try to learn as much as I could because I had already experienced the darkest side of inhumanity serving my country – what an incredibly stupid phrase – in country in Viet Nam…a muddle of green hills, choked cities, hateful people, endless plateaus of rice paddies as rich with claymores as crop and the constant black pyjamaed women planting or picking like primitive farm machinery and over the entire scene the only sane character a large water buffalo snot dripping thickly from steaming nostrils and more valuable than any other fucking living being.

There is a certain pride soldiers carry into the fields of battle which are not really designated as such until an actual conflict occurs and the sum total can be verified as a substantive body count – a euphemism for dead young combatants – where the true soul and heart rises far above the steam and stink of opened carcasses and ordure where some dipstick pulls out his two dollar harmonica and tries to blow a time despite the reality of no ear and missing front teeth – ass-wipe that he is does not even realize his own shortcomings from myriad sources such as inbreeding, clan affiliation, and no education beyond the sixth grade…or fifth possibly.

One of the worst strategies and I truly believe this might be the singular issue that could initiate the beginning of the end of what has forever been considered conventional warfare – the only profit from which has been some strangely good rock and roll music and healthy protest engaging in marching in good weather – but all of that stuff sits small compared to the monumental failure in drafting college students who might negotiate their options before killing…or pondering philosophically the rightness or wrongness of warfare by actually deliberating thoughtfully about how mankind deals with various and possibly contentious issues or the folly and silly territorial behavior which we usually relegate to lower forms of animal life.

But…and this is the key point…I survived and went on in life with most of my integrity intact – if I had any to begin with – but there was the reality of two elements that one, I was not dead and two, I was not crazy; but, on that second issue, I did not submit myself to any standard testing because I was seriously afraid of the outcome…so I submitted to returning full bore to my college studies, letting my hair grow very long, and reminiscing my past two years of sojourning as having wandered in and out of the streets of Paris while bicycling or somehow traversing across the significant areas of Europe steeped in study, rumination, and peaceful contemplation.

Strange how it does not take much in this world to make things as chaotic as a street riot in an Indian village plagued by rats who have consumed an entire crop of wheat, or a city gone made with disenfranchised youth who have been robbed of their legacy or perhaps worse…an entire country polluted and poisoned by the misaligned prophecies, edicts, and religiously inspired rhetoric of a sixteen hundred year old muttering through the matted beards of old men…a stuporous and venereal dream discovered in the desert by a social pariah and self-cursed wastrel whose only exit was to claim his ear to yet another god.

The strange and alluring beauty of education to me has always been the promised joy of revelation – an interesting admixture of perusing the great books and poring over the thoughts and notions of the world’s great thinkers both good and questionable, the gathering of methodologies of understanding, the tolerance learned through patience, and the ascending path toward an ability of understanding and winnowing the good from evil and measuring history with an eye of understanding rooted in the rich context of human events and consequence of action.

From the earliest age, I have always seemed to have some special reverence for the deep shadows of antiquity as in the church or the temples and shrines and the kinds of architectural structures about which my dear friend Tanizaki waxed so eloquently and devoted his own clear thought to in his works along with a faithful abiding love for tradition – of self, of culture, of purpose – and as easily would I realize and hold before me at the altar of goodness any relic or routine that is learning or education, or knowledge which early in life had become my one true savior – and in its own realm just a little different in degree between the difficult channels of navigation where we find ourselves between the sands of reality and the shoals of faith.

So again let me return to happier times of college years fraught with the usual bizarre and short-lived romances with women I thought shared my interest and – in the intermittency of so-called free time was devoted…yes, devoted to marching in protest…against racism, against war, against Nixon, against the prohibition of weed, against my own mother who I assure you was then, later, and at her demise many long years later, crazier than a drunken Korean dictator glued inexorably to delusional fantasies of a world under the leadership of someone as moronic and mercurially outré and otherworldly as Tammy Faye Bakker.

And here I am so many years later with tiers of accomplishments…fortunately few failures…and look now at the grand total of all this history interwoven with various shades of angst, nuances of disappointments, here and there an occasional triumph albeit only quietly personal…the haunting appreciation of never having served time nor felt locked away in either a prison or a marriage…dodging by sheer will or miracle the shrill nagging of any woman, the unceasing punishment of bearing the inane shortcomings and sins of relatives, or the foolish and seemingly random hurts and stupidities wrought upon me by strangers with whom I have never had contact…at least…yet.

Yet, there are still in me so many lingering issues which I find upsetting and unsettling and somehow still unresolved…because those are the facts in spite of how smart or clever or articulate or even lucky we might be – because it makes little difference along this crazy orbit of highway – call it what you will, that in sum, all of those noble actions, attempts, efforts, strides, and deeds of honor, nobility, and derring-do add up to little more than a crumb on the kitchen floor, a private oath promised to God in one’s hour of fear, or the heart-wrenching ache one feels in the dismay of unrequited love.

Let me here define love – break this very potent abstract term into some or all of its component parts and various meanings and illusions that affect all of us and blur the vision of even the shrewdest and most erudite individual who thinks he is somehow above it all – not touched or somehow remotely affected by an issue, or a person, or any number of infections which might brush against our self in time and perhaps unrecorded and unrecognized and as subtle and chimerical as a passing idle thought or worse…that unseen speck of germ which causes a ruin to match any Biblical event replete with ultimate devastation, wrath, and cosmic irony…for that is how love operates.

Perhaps one of the greatest of ironies