Reflections Upon Reading Tamar Asadourian

Rainbows have sometimes told me

The grayness of their experience.

In another poem, titled “Rain Song,” she writes:

When thunder goes on,

The rain is yet in its party.

Only the poet in whose soul and essence unfold the mysterious workings of nature —which would seem to have been born of human emotional impulses — can be engaged with nature though living exchanges of thoughts and feelings. We might say, therefore, that Tamar was born of nature and assimilated into it. She is a living expression of nature, carrying within her soul the commonality of humankind and the universe. And if we were to underscore the fundamental significance of Tamar’s poetic natural philosophy, we must assert that it concerns the deification of nature, as a perfect manifestation of the unity of the emotional and the intellectual. As for achieving that state of perfection, one must cultivate an intimate understanding of mother nature’s charm and powers of enchantment, its multifarious manifestations and the secrets of their eternality.

No matter how mystical this may sound, the fact remains that the kinship between nature and humankind, and, especially, the spiritual flights born of that kinship, are indivisible. Tamar’s natural philosophy is not limited to her inner vision as a poet, but rather carries within it a living portrait of nature, equally eliciting lushest vistas of esthetic pleasure. It is difficult to determine which is the more pronounced in her works: the thinker? The artistic innovator? Or the author forging poetry of extraordinary beauty and resonance?

Yet, as it often happens with creative individuals, moments of happiness soar like meteors, only to come down and bring back with them ever-newer bouts of pain. As a rule, Tamar’s inner world opens before the reader without any masks, no matter how fraught it might be and what factors might lie behind its anguish. What aching frankness Tamar demonstrates, in reproducing the ever-mutable states of that inner world!

Troubled by woes, in the grips of psychic nightmares, Tamar casts her gaze toward the heavens, toward God, because once the stanchion of hope is lost, the person snarled in the contradictions of life extends her hand toward God, yet keeps her door open… before death — a testament to the fact that Tamar was not afraid of it.

Tamar’s talent as an author, and, specifically, a poet, has also found expression in her spiritual writings, in which she does not seek to prove the existence of God or to try to understand his essence, whether by reason, feeling, or creed. For Tamar, God is an indisputable truth and that’s that, and she does not require any proof for it. Her spiritual writings encompass her ideas about life and death, fall and salvation, and despair and self-motivation, all of which are parsed through the clash of emotions. Standing at the center of it all is Tamar, who asks the Almighty first and foremost to help those who are worse off, those who are more in need, and only then herself.

The devotional love which was born in Tamar through her deep reverence for God is also reflected in her writings dedicated to her mother. Indeed, to Tamar, her mother is a supreme symbol of virtue and kindness.

In a poem titled “A Gift of Love,” Tamar writes:

Your love keeps me warm,

When the sun is at its rest.

Tamar Asadourian was a musical prodigy who kept reaching exceptionally-high levels of achievement throughout her life. Anyone who has heard her piano performances will no doubt agree that music is a language which she mastered completely, and through which she fully expressed herself and captivated her audiences. Whenever Tamar played the piano, she seemed to make the instrument sing. And given her prodigious talent and passion for her art, she has had many successes, performing works by Armenian composers as well as a great diversity of pieces from the global treasury of classical music.

In its review of Tamar’s debut concert at Carnegie Hall, in 1996, when she was only 16 years old, Jed Distler of the New York Concert Review writes, “From the moment this calm, assured pianist entered the stage and unhurriedly took her position at the keyboard, it was perfectly clear who was in charge. Her diction and her harmonic pointing in the Partita’s famous opening bars literally shocked me out of my seat. The rest of the movement was played with a sense of concentration and genuine affinity for both Bach’s dramatic and contrapuntal genius.” In the closing lines of the review, Distler writes, “Tamar Asadourian is more than just a young woman who plays extremely well for her age. She is already an absorbing artist of uncommon sensitivity and intelligence, who is capable of stimulating, original, and often moving performances.”

In our age of incessant technological revolution, including quantum leaps in space exploration, the more the horizons of nature part before us, the more the human imagination faces the mysteries of newly-discovered phenomena. And because the secrets of nature stretch into the boundlessness of the cosmos, the idea of endlessness becomes more and more probable. Ultimately, it is extraordinarily-talented individuals such as Tamar Asadourian — individuals embodying the very spirit of mother nature — who will affirm that probability.