The Return of the Lawyer

Posted on by
Reply

It's been two weeks (and fifteen hours and thirty-three minutes) since my return to Ottawa, and two weeks (and fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes) since the basic elements of this email fell into place. That I have not yet been able to put my thoughts to paper – paper … how quaint! – is due as much to the ever-useful “I have been busy” trope as to sheer mental laziness, spiced with a hint of my unsettled life in a new job while staying at a hotel (waiting for the apartment to become available).

I'm back in my home and more-or-less native land (for the uninitiates, this is an allusion to Canada's national anthem. The English version. The French version refers to “porter la croix“, which isn't really my thing. I digress.) and waiting for the culture shock to hit. I suspect it will, sometime around February 10; but for now, the charms of Canada's National Capital Region are mitigating the disorienting impact of not having the Alps and the Jura and Lake Geneva all around me. Ottawa in summer is beautiful, active and busy. My daily walk to work takes me alongside Parliament and across the Ottawa river, and from our offices we have an unbroken view of the entire valley – the Gatineau Hills to the left being the only bumps in an otherwise unbroken flat horizon of green and gleaming water.

There are good restaurants – better than I recall – and passable cafés here and there; grocery stores are big and offer a bewildering variety of choice to someone used, in his daily shopping, to the Migros or the Coop around the corner. The fresh fruit and vegetables do not taste of anything, to be sure, and while cheap, the quality of much of the food leaves something to be desired; but these are minor quibbles – unless you live on a farm in Italy you are not going to get tasty tomatoes and so there is no point in dwelling on it. What you miss in terms of taste and quality, you gain in terms of choice, and that, at least, is something.

(Not all is bleakness on this front. I have waited four years to indulge in my biggest Canadian vice, the Liberty yoghurt – at 8% fat, it is certainly not “diet”, and as it comes only in 500 gram tubs, it positively invites gluttony. That and President's Choice Butter Cookies. And Tim Horton's plain donuts. And large juicy steaks.)

The greatest bonus of being back? I'm still size 32 in pants and have regressed to being “small” in Ts and shirts. At some point in the distant past, size 32 indicated a 32″ waist. I suspect it still does in some parts of the world. Not here, apparently – at least, no longer. Despite the fact that almost nothing I owned four years ago fits me and that I am at least five kilos heavier than in 2003, miraculously I have remained the same “size” here in North America. Now isn't that a boost to my ego. There is more. In Europe, I gradually began changing over to “large” in some clothes. Not here; I used to be a Medium, but five kilos and four years of gym later, I have regressed to Small. Oh joy. Now I can really enjoy my Liberty yoghurt.

So these are the positives, and for my own sake – not to sound too Pollyanna-ish – I have to linger on these before mentioning, in passing, the less salutary aspects of my return. The Return: aye, there's the rub.

I leave aside, for the moment, the grander philosophical question of whether one can ever “return” anywhere, unless of course one limits the meaning to the physical “go back” rather any deeper notion of “recapture”. For I am “back” in Ottawa only in the sense that I used physically to live here: but I am not back, because I am not who I was, and Ottawa is not what it was, when I left. We are discovering each other anew … but, I will leave this point for moment.

But on to the physical journey back.

So far as I have been able to gather from years of reading and travelling and “self-improvement”, there are three types of hell: the Hell Divine, the Hell Human, and the Hell in limbo.

The Hell Divine is your usual, run of the mill fire and lava and brimstone and impaled bodies, devils prodding sinners with tridents, Satan chomping on traitors, home od sodomites and fornicators and usurers and popes or other divines of various persuasion kind of thing. This is the hell of Dante, of St. Paul, of Zoroaster. The smell of sulfur. You get the picture. Even for an Arnie-admirer like myself, this is too strong a picture – somewhat unsubtle one might venture to add, a tad overwrought, a pinch too much. I like my hell a bit more elegant, if you will.

Well, leave it to an ugly toad with crooked teeth, bulging eyes, a sulfur breath and a predilection for mass murder to devise an understated though far more troubling hell, the Hell Human. In what must be the only line in his massive outpouring of Mots – the cognoscenti among you will have guessed who our hellish author is – that does not concern himself, Jean-Paul Sartre (the self-same toad with attitude) described hell as other people. (Mind you, it is possible that in this, as in much else, he was plagiarising his long-suffering companion Simone de Beauvoir. L'enfer, c'est les autres she might have sighed as Sartre brought yet another left-bank waif into their matrimonial home to pork, with Simone the feminist looking on. But it was Sartre who gave it wide currency. Well, bully for him, for nothing explains the human condition, and the Hell Human, better.)

But neither Hell can claim the level of torment, of sheer pointless torture, of that greatest of hells, the Hell in limbo.

Just imagine: a cavernous hall of endless dimensions; masses of unwashed aimless wanderers; waiting, waiting, waiting forever for nothing at all to happen; going round in circles; being treated like cattle; being pushed and prodded and searched and stripped and tagged and examined and zapped and rayed; eyes glazed; sweat dripping from every pore; feet and ankles inflamed; interminable, endless (the redundancy is for effect), waiting, waiting, waiting; the stale air; the overpowering, dizzying odour of fried and burnt flesh and of vats of boiling oil … Welcome to the Modern Airport.

Every time I think I have hit rock bottom in my airport experience, the Gods intervene to teach me humility. And we are talking about someone who has assiduously, almost religiously, stuck to travelling only in “developed” countries. Next time I cross the pond, I'll try an oceanliner.

I don't want to end on such a negative note, so a word or two on work. I'm learning a whole new discipline and new procedures, and of course trying to familiarise myself with the lingo/jargon as I go along. I cannot claim a great sense of joy and excitement each time I utter the words “I don't know what I am talking about” – fifty times a day, by the way – after fourteen years of practice. At the same time, it is certainly good to be back on a learning curve, sometimes struggling to keep my head above water, often simply listening and absorbing.

A student of mine at Science-Po wrote in his class evaluation that “the Professor is too full of himself.” (In a subsequent email to me he suggested that he might have been too full of himself to have made such a comment in the first place, but that is a separate point.) No danger of that now. It is an eminently humbling experience, throwing myself into a new field and a new role. Where it goes in the end, I do not know; for now, it's both challenging and interesting.

Next Episode: “The Highlander” , a journal of my travels in and about Scotland

Dr. Borna Meisami Fard

Posted on by
Reply

Ah, love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?

Father, husband, son, brother, and a true Friend, Dr. Borna Meisami–Fard joined Eternity in our hearts on 1 July 2007. Born forty years ago on 28 May 1967 in Tehran, Iran, Borna and his family came to Canada in 1984. He studied at the University of Toronto and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1992. He then pursued his dream of specializing in orthopedic surgery and established what was to become a thriving practice in Toronto.

In an age of Identities, he eschewed labels and wove his own cultural tapestry out of a deep love for his land of birth and an equally deep commitment to his adopted home; never losing touch with the one, never losing sight of other, he made both Iran and Canada his home and native land. But there was more, much more, to him than all that.
 
Despite the impositions of a demanding profession, Borna's guiding axiom was that “life demands to be lived”. An avid traveler, a passionate humanitarian, a connoisseur of fine food, a sailor and skier and all around sports fan, a keen observer of national and international issues, a voracious reader of history; but above all, a friend, a companion of stormy nights and of sun-drenched moments, an endlessly patient support, a pillar of the community: Borna was a compleat human.
 

And over the past three years, he became complete. He married out of love a woman out of legend; the arrival of their daughter rounded their happiness eighteen months ago.

Shattered and disconsolate by his loss are Dr. Marjan Tabatabai, his wife; Ava, his daughter; Dr. Tina Meisami–Fard, his sister; Dr. Iraj and Mrs. Badri Meisami–Fard, his parents; his family and relatives spread across this Mortal Orb; and the many friends gathered and nurtured with unfailing attention and support over the years. Not one soul touched even briefly by his kindness shall ever forget that Moment; thus he lives on as he leaves us.
I have lived and have not lived in vain …
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire …


Roma Eterna

Posted on by
Reply
It is said that when John Glenn, the first American in space, flew past Italy, he checked his wallet to make sure it was still there. (Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, would probably have done the same, had he been sober; Valentina Treshkova, the first woman in space, might well have done so in between her bouts of hysterics and throwing up.) It is a cheap joke, of course – John Glenn would not have been carrying a wallet – for, after all, I have been to Italy eight times (including three times to Rome and once to Sicily) and have never had a wallet, or anything else, stolen.
 
Still.  Like most cheap jokes, there is an element of truth in it – I mean, in addition to Gagarin being drunk and Treshkova in tears.  We found that out the hard way, when I was in Rome with my parents, sister and brother-in-law.
 
On the morning of our third day in Rome, my mom put quite a lot of cash in the purse to go shopping.  Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for some Roman purse-snatcher,* my mom did not find anything to her liking.  We went for a walk, and something not so funny happened on the way to the Forum: in the literally two minutes that my Mom was looking at the inside of the Curia in the Foro Romano, someone helped him or herself to my mother's purse and glasses.  Back to the apartment; cancelled the credit cards; filed a police report … and, to my parents' enormous credit, we were back in the city being tourists within a couple of hours.  Naturally they were both very upset, but they put their happy faces on and enjoyed the rest of the trip. 
 

* “Roman” in the sense of someone in Rome.  Roman friends of ours insisted that it was not the Italians but some undefined foreigners who are responsible for the crime.  But then they would, wouldn't they.

 

What is there left to say about Rome that has not been said a million times over the past two millennia? 
 
And can one improve on Byron or Fellini?  
 
Elsewhere I have lamented the “anecdotisation” of experience, and pointedly refused to describe those moments in my life that had to be lived through to be really understood.  There have not been many, to be sure, but each time I sit down to write something about a place or an emotion or a person, I have to wonder if I am turning a moment of personal experience into an amusing anecdote for its own sake, and whether in doing so, I am somehow losing the spirit of the moment.  But then, if one starts with the premise that pretty much all that needed to be said about Rome has already been said, and better, by others, what is left but the personal and the anecdote?
 
What is worse, I don't have any amusing anecdotes to impart.  Aside from the stolen purse, the rest of the trip was fairly calm and uneventful.  We managed to hit some of the major sites without too many problems; we avoided the highway banditry of Italian touristaurants by carefully following tourist guidebooks (there's irony for you), and thus ate well and relatively cheaply; and though I had excellent tiramisú, I still have not found what I could describe definitively as the best I have had. 
 
I am left with three observations.
 
Galleria dell'Accademia is where, in Florence, the David is kept, as well as several incomplete works by Michelangelo.  I had seen the replica of David in the main Piazza of Florence before; even so, I was unprepared for the real thing.  Vasari, the great art critic, has said that to see David is to face perfection; one might as well give up on all the rest.  I should not go that far, for Michelangelo's other works, Pieta and Moses, are nothing to shake a stick at.  And yet, there is something haunting, deeply striking, about David.  As to its technical perfection there can be no doubt – but there have been many technically proficient artists whose work have not lasted even past their own lifetimes; indeed, as Clive James has observed, technical proficiency is probably the one thing that genius and mediocrity have in common.  
 
Michelangelo once said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”  There are four unfinished examples of his work in the Accademia and, looking at those and David at the same time, you suddenly realise what he meant.
 
Much has been written about the sense of proportion in David's construction.  Indeed, right beside David, there is a version of Pieta that, in its absence of proportion, immediately underlines the magnificence of David … and also that this other Pieta could not possibly have been the work of Michelangelo.  What is striking about the proportionality of David is not so much that the hands and the feet and so on are proportionate to one another – that would be easy to get – but that, knowing that his 5 meter statue would be put on a pedestal, Michelangelo structured his David to seem proportionate from below: If looked at straight ahead, the head is disproportionately large; from below, it all looks harmonious.  
 
And the head … we have all seen pictures of the furrowed brows, the intense look, the turned head … the sling slung over his shoulder and the rocks in his languid hands … now, this is the essence of genius.  He captures a moment; a moment in movement; a moment of emotion.  Standing in front of the statue, walking around it, your eyes are transfixed by  that look in the eyes of the marble statue.  My mom asked a question that, at the time, seemed strange to me, but upon reflection, hits the bull's eye in respect of Michelangelo's strength and artistry.  She asked, “so who was he?”  I asked her, “you mean, David?”  She replied, “No, I mean him.”  The determined youth with the furrowed brows; him.  That five meter block of carved and chiseled marble was almost real, almost alive; it holds within it, and on its skin, the expression of a real young man who modelled for Michelangelo.  Who was he?  Who knows?  And yet, like Mona Lisa's smile, those brows and those eyes convey across the centuries an emotion as raw and as immediate as if the young man were right in front of you, glaring, determined, impetuous.
 
The Vatican houses two of Michelangelo's other masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta.  The Sistine experience is one of those moments that defy description; in fact, I think all art commentary and all movies about the famous ceiling should be banned. (There is, in the awful movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, a particularly odious scene where Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston – the marbles in the quarry he was working in had more character than he did – sees the “creation” scene in the moveme nt of the clouds.  I choked and had to stop the movie for a few minutes to regain my breath.  Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II was excellent, though.  I mean, a pope in full military armour – how could you go wrong?) 
 
The Pieta sits behind bullet-proof glass in St. Peter's Basilica.  I am not a big fan of St. Peter's.  I find the “mine is bigger than yours” lines in the middle aisle (“Notre Dame of Paris comes to here, while St. John's of New York only manages to be half as long as St. Peter's”) unseemly and faintly grotesque.  The fine bronze Baldacchino might well have impressed me if I did not know that the bronze to make it was stripped off the roof of the Pantheon, in my view the finest building in Rome and among the finest I have ever see.  And then there is marble to the right of us, marble to the left of us, marble in front of us; into that valley of death rode – ahem, sorry, got carried away.  That's the problem: the architect got carried away.  Almost everything in St. Peter's is too much; not as much of a too much as the Gésu or the St. Ignatius Loyola churches – that would be even too much of a too much – but still, too much.  Almost, for there is the  Pieta, which is just perfect. 
 
And I mean perfect not just in a technical or an artistic sense.  Here is where I am not certain Vasari had it right.  Because while David packs a big wallop of artistic and emotional impact, the Pieta has all of that, and more.  For one thing, it is on a human scale; for another, both in composition and in construction, the Pieta is far more fluid than the David.  If one observes a moment – strong, though it may be, but still a moment – in David, in the Pieta there is a whole drama that is unfolding in the folds of Mary's robes and the falling arms and legs of the dead Jesus.  The Pieta is behind bullet-proof glass because it has been attacked several times.  Attacked.  A statue.  Unthinkable, in the abstract.  But then, stand before it for any length of time, and the thing overwhelms you.  More than all of the blood and torture in Mel Gibson's Passion; more than all twisted crucifixes; more than all the Sunday morning sermons of the agonies of Christ: this piece of inert marble moves you; makes you tremble with pity, and then with rage; and across four hundred years, shakes you to your foundations.  Even for a rationalist like me, the Pieta is powerful propaganda; good then, that it is hidden away, behind bullet-proof glass, in a corner of a an all-too phallocentric church in Rome.
 
The Moses is not, at least in my view, one of Michaelangelo's best works.  It is impressive, to be sure.  But, I confess, seeing it left me unmoved.  Certainly my lack of reaction was not because of its history.  The Moses was meant to be part of a far larger group of statues made for the tomb of Julius II, the warrior pope (who had also commissioned the Sistine Chapel).  But when Michelangelo and Julius were not fighting over money, they had artistic difficulties, and this battle between the stubborn artist and the pope-in-armor went on for a decade – until the good pope died.  And then there was no money; and Michelangelo was in one of his funks; and there were other priorities … well, in the end, even though Michelangelo lived on to be 80, he did not finish a lot of the statues in the group (and three of these ended up in the Accademia, one in the Louvre).  The only one that was finished was the  Moses, which ended up adorning the tomb of Julius, now dead for thirty years. (The smell must have awful ….)
 
The interesting thing about the statue is that Moses appears to have two horns.  I actually do not know Michelangelo's reasons for the horns, but there are two intriguing precedents, neither of which, I am certain, Michelangelo knew of, which makes the whole thing even more interesting.  The first is this: coins struck under the rule of Alexander also show him with horns – in one set they are highly stylised, but in another, they are clearly ram's horns.  What does this mean?  Not clear.  Even more fascinating is the only extant image of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire.  It is indistinct, battered by sandstorms and rain and wind and the hammer of the invader over 2,500 years.  And yet, unmistakable: his crown is resting on two horns on his head.  What could this possibly mean?
 
And the most spooky thing of all: Machiavelli, whose tomb is practically next to that of Michelangelo's in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, noted that the two greatest law givers in human history were Moses and … Cyrus of Persia.  Did the horns symbolise anything?  How could Michelangelo have known of Cyrus's horns?  Did he know of Alexander's?  Are we in Dan Brown territory?
 
Or is there some other, totally benign, explanation?
 
After Rome, I went back to the English castle at which I taught international trade law last year.  The programme was slightly different this year; but the students, much like last year, were bright, articulate, curious and motivated.  It is a strange thing, to be teaching first-year law students nearly twenty years after I myself first went to law school.  It is a humbling experience to come across students already so accomplished; it is exhilarating to be challenged by their idealism; and their optimism is not only refreshing but positively infectious.  It is a hokey thing to say, perhaps, but at the end of every class and every course, I become slightly more optimistic about the future of my profession, but also of the world we live in.  If a refurbished Tudor Castle in the bucolic East Sussex country were a microcosm of our troubled world, we should have nothing to worry about.  I will banish any contrary thoughts from my mind, at least for the next few months.

How Green Was My Valley

Posted on by
Reply

This post started as a commentary on my last major travel, in January, to Dubai to visit my relatives.  The composition of that post was delayed by a combination of laziness, lack of inspiration, and a number of minor excursions here and there (Paris to teach, Verbier and Les Contamines to ski).  Nearly three months later, a New Day is upon us – Spring arrives in a few hours – when a young man’s fancy turns to love, and that of a newly minted 40-year old to finishing long-begun blogs.

‘Tis true.

This past January I turned 40.  Hard to believe – especially as I do not feel a day over 39 – but there you have it.  I could go on either lamenting the onset of middle-age (assuming I last to my eightieth), or celebrating it (40 is the new 25, I am told, with more money and fewer pimples); I could, like so many prophets before me at this same age, wander off into the desert, or climb a mountain, or be lost in a thick forest, in the hopes of seeing a burning Bush or a shimmering Gabriel, or gaining 400 pounds and being deified; I could wax philosophical about the Meaning of Life, or lose myself in a haze of hedonistic romps … I’ll spare you all of that and simply note the occasion.  And, also, note that I spent this milestone with a dear aunt whom I had not seen for over twenty years, and cousins who, last time we spent time together, were six year-olds climbing all over me at my grandmother’s place in an old quarter in Tehran.

Just seeing them again after such a long time was probably the best gift Providence (and Visa and Aeroplan) could have given me.  My youngest aunt was, and remains, the very personification of kindness, warmth, and generosity.  The older of my two cousins still had the same infectious laughter that I adored; the younger one and I talked and bonded as if there had not been a gulf of twenty-four years between our last two visits.  My uncle was sensible and calm as I remembered him; and I met my cousin’s husband and, I hope, made a new friend in him – a kindred spirit despite our vastly different backgrounds.

As for Dubai – well, I had to eventually see what all the fuss was about.  The only thing I could say is that one marvels how the Bedouins of this otherwise desolate land have managed to persuade the world over to come and invest in their corner of the Arabian desert.  One wonders about countries with so much more natural wealth (one across the Persian Gulf comes to mind) that … ah, but the thing is so obvious as not to bear further observation.  Dubai: not my cup of tea, but impressive nevertheless.

Upon my return from Dubai I had to get ready for a series of lectures at the Science-Po in Paris; I also spent some time in Verbier, one of Europe’s most well-known ski resorts.  Unfortunately, snow conditions were, and remain, less than ideal; at the same time, it was good to have a place to go to weekends.  And walking up and down the mountain to get to the apartment certainly was helpful in bringing the 40 year-old waist-line under control.  Along with my season’s pass at Verbier, I also got passes for some of the other ski resorts in the region.  This is why last weekend I went to Les Contamines, one of the most beautiful ski resorts in the Alps.  And it was my drive to Les Contamines that inspired me for the title of this email.

“How Green Was My Valley” was the title of a wonderful, and wonderfully sad, 1941 movie starring a young Roddy McDowell.  The title was a lamentation, somewhat ironic, about the passing of a way of life in a coal-mining town in Wales.  The title, and the movie, came to me as I was driving down the Arve Valley, oddly green up to 1800 meters, listening to a Donna Summer song from the 70s on Nostalgia radio.  The song reminded me of the first time I had heard it; how utterly carefree I had been, in that summer of 1976, newly returned from the US.  It was a time, at least for me, when hope had dominion; the world was a kinder place, or at least it so seems at such a distance.  I was smiling nostalgically in the car, remembering the passing of a way of life; recalling, not without a measure of irony (for all was not well in my idyllic world, as we were soon to discover), how green had been my valley.  Here I was, thirty years later, driving through an unusually (for this time of year) green valley that, oddly, sadly, I knew better now than the valleys and the mountains and the streets and the streams whence I had sprung.

I wonder how much longer the Alps will retain their winter luster; whether the Mont Blanc will remain blanc for much longer.  It has begun to snow again in the region – now I have to worry about my cherry blossoms – but the glaciers have already receded dangerously; “how green was my valley” would be the lamentation of a new generation used to whiter mountains and gorges, who would perhaps mourn the passing of their own way of winter life in due course.  Be that as it may, they, like me, will no doubt find new valleys and new vistas to explore, new worlds in which to prosper.

It is in that somewhat bittersweet mood that I welcome the arrival of a new day, and a new Persian year; it is, however, with considerable hope and optimism that I wish all of you the best for the coming year.