«Thou art a red flower of the field, a lily of the vale!»

The Color of Pomegranates

The Color of Pomegranates is how the poet would describe the color of blood. He could use directly blood if that's what he wanted to say, but then you'd think of blood as what it is, not as what it could be, or what it should be. For the poet, blood is something else. It is, for instance, tears, which don't have the color, but have the substance, the pain and the fatality of blood:

My tears are blood because of thee, my reason is o’erthrown.

This is a verse from the great poet Sayat Nova, who implores someone to acknowledge that they are loved by him:

Speak but one word, to say thou art Sayat Nova’s love.

It is excruciating to read, albeit in English, the exaltation of this 18th century Armenian monk, looking at a woman, and telling her what he sees:

Thy waist is like a cypress-tree, sugar thy tongue, in sooth;
Thy lip is candy, and thy skin like Frankish satin smooth.
Thy teeth are pearls and diamonds, the gates of dulcet tones;
Thine eyes are gold-enamelled cups adorned with precious stones;
Thou art a rare and priceless gem, most wonderful to see;
A ruby rich of Mount Bedakhsh, my love, thou art to me.

You reached one of the highest climaxes of poetry when you can see the world in someone. Those whose heart is stone, as Sayat complains in the next strophe, will see here cheap metaphors: lip as candy, skin as satin, teeth as pearls... When you can get there, however, when you can elevate your soul to such gripping associations that transfigure mere words to become visions, the letters become alive, the sentences become their literal meaning, the world acquires its fifth dimension of depth and relief, and everything speaks to you. Finally, it is beautiful. Finally, it is true. Candy is tasty again (it is not anymore beyond your teenage), satin is smooth, pearls are pure, your vision, your poem, becomes a celestial wink from the universe with you at the center of it.

What do you do with this? The point is not to get there, at the apex, it is to be there too. And to stay there: Que ma joie demeure! Maybe Siddhartha found a way to take permanent residence. For everybody else, the experience is punctual. You feel it for a fleeting moment, and then you're back in the everyday vulgarity. I believe the most necessary, the most irresistible urge once you are back from such a journey, is the testimony. It is to share, to say what it was, how it was, to get back there again in memory and feel a bit how it was again, when you were trodding the tip at its tippest. And that's why poets write poetry.

Maybe as a matter of evolutionary design, it seems that the most natural recipient for such anguish of expression is, precisely, the person who inspired it, who fueled it with her mere presence, just because she is «A golden cup, with water filled of immortality.» It is so touching to read Sayat beg in the corridors of time: "give me that, give me at least that, give me that you take this poem. I am nothing and you are everything. Do what you want with me. But can't you at least hear my poem?"

First hear my fault, and, if thou wilt, then slay this erring man;
Thou hast all power; to me thou art the Sultan and the Khan.

Did she? We don't know. Probably not. Beautiful happy stories do not get recorded by God as great pieces of literature, which seem to be instead His taking notes for later. Why should have she, anyway? Because it is, like her, beautiful. Sayat was not beautiful. She was: satin skin and golden eyes, oh I can imagine her all right. But Sayat's vision of her was at least as beautiful as she was:

I sit me down, that over me may fall thy shadow, sweet;
Thou art a gold-embroidered tent to shield me from the heat.

Can you picture him, the monk, in the torments of his time, also immersed in the background brutality of the senseless, eternal violence (He was beheaded by the shah of Persia, the Iran of the time)? Can you imagine him in the heat of the Armenian desert, craving for some relief of his soul, consumed by his existential agony. And just like you immediately feel swimming in paradise by merely finding a shadow when tortured by the sun, he felt this inner transformation of all that is inside him, just by looking at a woman passing by. «Thy rays have filled the world; thou art a shield that fronts the sun.» Someone stronger, bigger, more radiant than the sun. How beautiful. How relatable.

Still, Sayat's muse—the one he objectified, we would say nowadays—probably remained little moved by such extraordinary introspection of one's internal struggles with existence, of such immersion of oneself into sensory assaults. He told her she was «A young vine in the garden fresh [...] Enshrined in greenness, and set round with roses everywhere», and she probably laughed at the stupid, exaggerated display of performative petulance. But not all is lost. She is gone, and so is Sayat, but not his spirit and neither her wild, indomitable beauty. All this is universal. What Sayat saw, felt, understood, we can too:

Thou art a red flower of the field, a lily of the vale!

The woman as the red flower and the white lily, I don't know what it tells you, my reader, but to me it speaks as loud and clear as if I had written this myself, instead of finding it in a many-centuries old song from a monk to his fragment of infinity. I am sure, therefore, that it also did speak to many since Sayat had this vision of red and white flowers assembling a rapturous bouquet, and to many more who will likewise—after us—bleed to someone: You are the rose and the lily. You are the thorn and the satin. You are Mount Bedakhsh and the Armenian sky. This is an everlasting floral and philosophical composition, with its intemporal sweetness and sting, its immortal fragrance, a thread throughout times, that connect us to Sayat and to all those before him and all those after us.

One such link in the chain is the cinematographer Sergei Parajanov, the poet who directed the movie Նռան գույնը—The Color of Pomegranates—dedicated to the life of Sayat Nova. This is pure visual poetry. Each frame is a painting. The symbolism is everywhere. Through the colors, first, as the title reminds us.

One central theme is—like Sayat's love song—the woman, for whom «The world is sated with the world; my heart its hunger keeps.» The director cast his own muse Sofiko Chiaureli—a beautiful first name—in this role of incarnating tour à tour tsarina and commoner, temptation and purity, fire and velvet, damnation and salvation. Rose and lily.

There is no story, that is to say, no "told story", everything is just simply shown, instead. You make up the story. You have to figure out what the woman means when she looks at you from behind her gloves or when she plays with her rings and jewels or shoots her pistol or performs strange incantations with all sorts of utensils, in the kitchen, in the barn, in the palace, in the market, in the fields... What do we know about what a woman wants?

What is clear is that she is cosmic attraction. This is physical, and sets the tone ten minutes into the movie. We accompany the poet, still a child, intruding into the baths, the type of those you find in Tiflis. Males are all muddied in tar, cover their genitals and are rubbed to be cleaned off the dirt. Back to a shot of the child peeping through the window, and then to the female body. We see an upside down—and thus, dizzying—close-up on the breasts and belly, one breast exposed, the other covered with a shell. The color of the skin is that of a light suntan except for the breast itself, whiter, revealed here under water droplets, with the reddish-brown erect nipple as a ruby rich of Mount Bedakhsh, the body lying on water flowing from the baths. The scene is like so many others, a painting, as there is no directed motion—no camera motion—but this is not still, there is stationary motion, of the water flowing and glittering in the background, and more intensely, of the belly breathing thrillingly, with spasms, as if the model, whose face we don't see, seems to know that she is under scrutiny of someone. This someone is the child, who does not know if to become a man, a poet, a monk or an animal.

After this shot, the facial expression of the child is remarkably captured in one of the greatest scenes ever put on film. His head slowly, resolutely locks onto the sight, as water darkens the dry wall behind him, figuring bodily functions submerging his feelings, and his expression struggles between pain, surrender, shock, ravishment and fear. In one word, disappointment at innocence lost. Ask a child to perform this on screen. This young, unknown, actor—Melkon Alekyan—could. Look at the still frame above. Don't we see the dismay at the absurdity of the miracle: "Is this why you brought me into existence? To be haunted by this?" The movie returns to the breathing breast but now under heavy water falling onto the shell and splashing a milky, soapy stream gushing down the midline of her torso, from cleavage to navel. The poet has known sin.

This is the only direct nudity, but the theme is recurrent and is often explored much more brutally than through an explicit display of a naked body. The movie does not shy from direct clashes with eroticism, violence and death. The chonguri, a sort of guitar but with a half-spherical resonance box, is repeatedly cast in the role of the figurative female breast. Following his vision, the instrument is withdrawn from the child by the woman, whom he tries to embrace but can't, being too small and still impotent. She then exhibits the guitar in a new setting, now with adults contorting on the floor as she caresses the sphere held at the height of her chest, with delectation. In another scene, with her hands painted in red, she rubs motifs on the guitar that evoke the nipple and areola.

Some interpretations here see the actress as impersonating the poet himself, Sayat Nova, and this is indeed as she is cast in the credits: "Poet as a Youth". She is given this sort of androgynous look that makes it receivable. The poet becomes the muse, sees himself in the muse. This also agrees with the immediate continuation of the movie that displays a powerful verse:

Մենք միմյանց մեջ փնտրում էինք մեզ

which translates as «We were searching for ourselves in each other...»

One could provide a full reading of Sayat's life through the visual poems and cinematographic constructs cleverly assembled by Parajanov. It is not only the visuals—through their stunning colors and scenic shots—but the deep symbolism, that makes it pure poetry. And not even only this. Sounds also offer a unique and distinct sensory voyage. The Eastern music, the metalic chords of those forgotten instruments, the melancholic longing of the wind, the fluttering of the leaves and the water flowing everywhere, the fruits being crushed, the unintelligible language... It is an experience by itself to only listen at the movie, without the images.

The chapter of the child's education is another deep and inspiring exploration. «Books must be well kept and read [...] Without books, the world would have witnessed nothing but ignorance.» The child is seen bringing books on the roof of the church for them to dry following an apparent accident that led to flooding the treasury. The burden of his learning is depicted as him ascending fragile and adventurous ladders with heavy books. On the top of the church, symbol of wisdom, he is seen crucified in a surreal scene with books hanging from all sides, with the wind flapping through their pages. If there were one possible depiction of the Holy Spirit on screen, this could be it.

This brings us to the next stage of life, adulthood, which touches upon themes of obligation, duty and responsibility amidst what youth perceives as action and realizations.

Rooftop scenes are numerous, symbolising probably one's achievements at the summit of human's institutions, and how the poet deals with that once there. In the two visuals which I chose basically randomly—almost any picture from the movie provides an invitation to its interpretation—one sees on the left the elevation of the poet who—through his more noble and more pure activity—ascends to greater heights than the bulk of other people, to whom he, however, serves as a guide or inspiration, as they are about to undress like him. On the right, we have the opposite transposition where the poet stands beneath the workers, who reap or clean the roof. The fruit of their labor rains on him. In this case, he holds a less dignified position of possible impending fall, and pauses as a sacrificial element, as emphasized by the lamb similarly hanging in a passive and hopeless position.

Throughout, we see the poet alienated or at least separated from his companions. He holds a special place in society, as his contemplation or introspection fatally lead him to ostracization and estrangement from the profane. In this subversive scene below—which retains much of its beauty and evocative power as a still image—one sees the poet standing aside, carrying the weight of his studies as well as of solitude, only ever so slightly elevated by standing on a broken and fallen stone. In contrast, his peers are enjoying with gluttonous appetite bright-red pomegranates which, in the movie, they suck avidly, producing distasteful noises. In the next close-up, we see him battling with doubt, incomprehension and, ultimately, breaking the fourth wall and querying us directly: Am I doing this—existing—correctly?

A striking passage that should concern all of us, is the scene where, at the highest stage of his achievements and social position, at the zenith of his maturity, the poet meets with a first forewarning of his own end, prefiguring his own demise through that of others. The beautiful image below shows the parallel of the man so close to death as to be already gone, with his blueish skin, holding his cane—or responsibilities—but on the point of letting it go. In the second plane, the hand still alive, will similarly loose grip. Even if we are not dead yet, the tomb is already there waiting for all that we hold dear to fall into. Us included. Especially us.

The next and last stage of life is the old age, where none of the vitality and strength of the young age made it, but none either of the aspirations, temptations and yearnings have left either. This is the cruel stage of the final steps, leading to renunciation and abandonment. This is when understanding and realization come with no fulfillment:

Ամեն ինչ տեսա հստակ և տարօրինակ կտրուկ, և հասկացա, որ կյանքը լքել է ինձ.

which translates as «I saw everything clearly and strangely sharply, and I realized that life had abandoned me.» The physical appearance becomes that of an old man, with grey hairs, white beard, wrinkles and a sadness in the gaze that turned from commiserate to pathetic, from universal to selfish. The scenes below show the poet as an aging adult, now a monk. On the left, we see him estranged from his peers, still and again. On the right, we see him focused on his work, away from the women, which are gropped by a mysterious character, in full military attire and also including golden but tiny angelic wings. This is the young, seductive womanizer who has his way with girls effortlessly, but also without passion, as if it would be a hobby or pastime. His eyes are covered. He does not see what he does. In contrast, the priest does not look but sees everything. The women have cups which they lasciviously caress themselves with. This seems to portray a mingling of holy rituals with desecration, turning cups and wine from the mass into fetish and inebriation, ecstasy and sexual euphoria. It is not clear if the mysterious angel is the desire of the monk, the corrupt institution feasting on secular impieties or just someone trading immortality for a Carpe Diem. Some say it is the angel of death. In the snapshot captured, the poet is still facing away, but the seductive pull of the sensual world will prove too strong and he will ceremoniously turn towards the women and their playboy as they enter into orgasmic rapture. He will not join, only surrender to the humiliation. Beside him, the wall of the church weeps on the statue, sheltered in its alcove.

This beautiful next scene is highly figurative, and I read it as the credo of the original sin. It follows a burial where it is revealed that «The World is a Window». Through this window, we see this spectacular path of scorched grass, light but essentially dead, cutting in two a field of rich soil, dark but fertile. The chonguri, which you remember represents the female anatomy, is taken away from the poet by two children who are two angels. Before seizing the chonguri, before taking this away from the disorientated poet, they expel him, they push him down, on this bright but narrow band that leads to nowhere. They tease him, and they disappear, running, in the dark fields. The field on the left is before we live. The field on the right is after we live. The narrow patch of dim light and arid vegetation, of raucous earth, is when we live. It looks brighter but actually is a path of desolation. The poet walks down a little while, looks backward at the place and time were there once was unmistakable, universal wonders and joys of his youth. And finally, although indecisively, he follows the playful angels into the terrifying unknown, which, however, seems the only salvation.

At this stage, there is only death left. I have not shown any visual of death, which is also recurrent in the movie, as I find it too aggressive to share here. This involves contorting fishes, slaughtered hens and decapitated rams, whose heads are lined up on a fountain, with their expressionless stare simultaneously looking at the void of impending destruction just before they got slaughtered, and at ourselves. The death of the poet is also quite graphic, amidst live-slaughtered poultry, which you can see just have had their throat cut by the cast before being hurled onto the scene, as they spurt out blood in their frenzied agony, one even lashing at the face of the actor who is lying on the floor. Soviet films in the late 60s were clearly not of the type with disclaimers of no animals having been hurt during production. As I said, the movie is as aggressive and violent as life itself. This is the sort of extremes that great artists ready to go to the end of what their art demands, can sometimes access to.

In fact, we have witnessed the poet dying the entire movie. The only time he was fully alive was when he was a child. We see him many times come back to life, precisely as the child. We also saw him die a first time, which is the picture I showed above where he frowns in the baths at the painful realization that he has now been expelled from the garden of Eden, and will remain forever in pursuit of its renewed knowledge and experience. It is therefore no surprise that the passing of the poet is accompanied by his angelic young self, hovering over him. The young poet holds his wings in his hands and we understand that he is about to pass them to the old one, who has now completed his poem.

The last world of the movie is «Մեռի՛» (Meri!), meaning "Die!" The last image is the profile of the lily woman, oblivious to all that has happened.