Adios.

Seven Songs for Seven Months.

Tis Indeed.

It takes a crane to build a crane
It takes two floors to make a story
It takes an egg to make a hen
It takes a hen to make an egg
There is no end to what I'm saying

It takes a thought to make a word
And it takes some words to make an action
It takes some work to make it work
It takes some good to make it hurt
It takes some bad for satisfaction

It takes a night to make it dawn
And it takes a day to make you yawn brother
And it takes some old to make you young
It takes some cold to know the sun
It takes the one to have the other

And it takes no time to fall in love
But it takes you years to know what love is
It takes some fears to make you trust
It takes those tears to make it rust
It takes the dust to have it polished

It takes some silence to make sound
It takes a loss before you found it
And it takes a road to go nowhere
It takes a toll to make you care
It takes a hole to make a mountain

La la la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la la la life goes full circle
Ah la la la la la la life is wonderful
Al la la la la

Jason Mraz, Life is Wonderful, MR. A-Z

Amoo Norooz.

You Took So Long. (I needed to pee.)

Here I am. 2 am. Taking a bath.
All the classic elements are present, as they always are, as most classic things often are. The fluorescent light, the dusty mirror, the white that is everywhere and the nothingness that prevails in its entirety. So all things limp together to make the only possible.
First plunge.
So this is how the first dive feels like. Immersion in the richness of the pure purifier. Hmm… the drops of water, propelled from the shower, land all so lovingly on my face, which even though underwater, still welcomes their feelings. A thousand little dots on a thousand little nerves. And so why isn’t the brain stopping?
I think of a beach, thousands of miles away. Not a stupid New England beach, not a Laguna sort of palm beach either, with bikinis running around, and wannabes trying to be pretty and catalog-looking. No, this is a beach that is wholly mine. No one else matters now, or ever, as always, as ever. Khazar might do. I’ve learned how to drive. The car is huge, a Buick perhaps, but stick shift. I make fun of people who don’t know how to drive stick shift, and make such a deal out of driving nonetheless. The car is right on the sand, on the beach. Its tire marks are all over the place. The windows are down, but I have not yet dared to open the doors. Some music is blasting. Not the stupid teenage-angst-delayed sort of rock music that feels itself to be omg sooo cool, or so angry or emotional, but something meaningful, mellow, that forces one to think, to think hard, but not about the music or its lyrics. The seat is put back. I lay down. Someone special might be there, but “special” only by virtue of my opinion, not of his own merit. We’re engaged in thinking, connected in this abstract world where our thoughts mutually take us. It’s not exactly sunny. And not particularly cloudy either. It is this room, this bath room, magnified to the infinity of the sea: white, windy, noisy, shallow, empty. So I project myself. Once again.
And I gasp out for oxygen.
My body looks so dead against the colorless water, against the reflections of this nothingness that is reflected on and within the water. All would be lost, only if the showerhead stopped spilling noise.

Second dive.
And if I succeed now? And if thoughts end, if that biggest nerve of all stops feelings, resigns, and leaves me be? First concern: what would others think. Well, not that there is any note left or anything, but there is a copy of Boof-e-Koor next to my bed. Oh shit, someone’s definitely going to blame Hedayat for leading the youth into despair and encouraging suicide. They won’t know I’m only on the first chapter. Okay, no, I can’t do this…for the sake of literature. And what about that paper due tomorrow, that talk I have to give in a month, that party I need to attend this weekend, that trip I have to take, those people I have to host, the mushrooms I’m going to eat, the paintings we’ll do together, on each other? No, surely this is no time to leave.

Oxygen.
But it would be dramatic. A masterpiece, like I’ve never have. Like I will never have. It’ll be a sonata in its own right. A czardas played with such utmost emotion. If only I get the first four bars right. It’d be a manifestation of the nonexistent pain that I showcase when I draw her body. Those sketches are not masterpieces. This will be. This will speak volumes about how pain didn’t really matter, or exist, but that there was concern regarding this lack of pain. Pain is fine, you can deal with it. When you don’t have it, when you are totally fine, when you care for nothing and no one and when you don’t force yourself to not care, or to not remember, then you don’t know what you are dealing with. The unknown scares us, throws us unto the welcoming hands of despair –despair again- and now, here, in this white room, against the purest of purifiers, immersed in a colorless liquid, we lie.

I want to get air, but no, not yet, not yet.
The same Buick, now on a road. Perfect asphalt, perfect day, going up a mountain. Up and up, until fog ensues, struggles, prevails, brings the Buick to a total halt. Curtains drop, curtains rise. It’s the Hudson River; I’m sitting on a crappy MTA train whose tracks are only yards away from the water. There is fog everywhere. I see the water, its little insignificant waves, and then it is all lost to the white fog. The water becomes one with the fog. They’re different, yes, but they are from and for one another. Take one away and the effect is lost. It’s like this room, now, here, where the fog is slowly prevailing, has prevailed. The scene looks like music. Music from Mussorgsky. Every scene I see from the window is a tableau at an exhibition. Remains of docks, water studios and wooden structures look so sharp, so existential, where they stand at the border of liquid and fog. Who knew vapor, with all its emptiness, all its vanity, could do this? But then what is vapor once light comes, once the sun shines? Once it is warm.

Head out of water. I now hear the noise of the shower externally, as if it is real. Shit, I’ve been too slow: the water’s almost spilling out of the tub and my brain is only too awake. I let some water go. I position myself. There would be no shame when they find me like this. I won’t cringe or cover. Adam and Eve will be proud of their prodigal son.

Ok, round three.
I think of moving. All those boxes, all that dust. I wonder why there was never any anxiety, any excitement. We were moving. Like always, for always, and that was the fact of life. Is, is. Is a fact of life. The boxes are under my bed. What will they do with the hookah? With my paintings? With the books? Who will take care of my books? Will they rip Boof-e-Koor apart? I must take the hookah to the loft; it can help us paint. It’ll be great. But not now, it’s too late now, isn’t it. I’m not getting out of this tub. Unless I text her and tell her to come take it. It’s in the second box from the left, the largest one. It will be obvious, you won’t have to look for it. Yes, the tobacco is there also, untouched since the summer. I know. But hey, now we have some use for it.

Where is my phone?

Chopin. That’s what I hear under the water, this fourth time. Chopin. It is not the funeral march, but something very similar. Very exquisite. Very piano.
I should be hearing Wagner. That’d be more fitting, more dramatic. This is the most important event of my life, after all. It is my death –whatever of it is “mine,” unknown.
And slowly, there appears my mother’s face. Now I’m not thinking of my mom, about my mom, but in the face of her. She is the world, and I’m thinking in the face of it, in awe, in disappointment, and all that I see in her eyes. She really does have the most beautiful eyes. The sweetest look when she calls us “Asal.” If there is one thing I wish to inherit, it is perseverance. But look, here I am, learning to live by mastering how to die. Is this giving up? Hardly. This is divine. This is philosophy and religion combined. This is god at his most present moment. This is where I stop owning myself, when I let go of consciousness. This is how I can live like you: without guilt. Only if I die. Or if I live dead.

Within my death. Whatever the word “my” means there.
I’m plucking my strings this time. No Chopin now. This is Kereshme. It’s composed for right before the sunset. That’s what I’m hearing. No, this is what I am playing. Shush. How about the neighbors? The guy downstairs? The world that is not used to your scales? Ok, hushed. I was not screaming. I dig my index nail into my thumb instead: no one ever asked, but yes, that’s how you know I need to play. The whole night I was digging my nail. Memory is a strange thing. It’s alive. It creates, invents, but also, sometimes, simply remembers. It’s most effective at deleting though. And so what is true? What remains true? We can only qualify. Truth is qualifiable, but not ever identifiable. Soundtrack changes: Persian Children Songs. No, maybe a bit more serious. It’s Shahr-e-Ghesse. I’m the rammal, the mullah, the clown, the lover, the beloved, the elephant, the carpenter. I’m the moon. And I look just as white, and just as bright, here now, against this meaningless body of water.

The most annoying thing about death is that it is irreversible. You can’t actually see what happens next. When you ruin something, you do a thing irreversible: you can’t go back and live the dream again. You have ended it. Ruined it. Suicide.

That and That.

یک لحظه ...
یک زخمه ،
یک روزن .
می شکفد خورشید در دل

آن لحظه ...
آن روزن ،
آن زخمه .
می کشاند ، می رباید ، می رهاند تا ابد

آن و

آن...

A moment...

A pluck of the string,

An opening.

Light shines through the heart.

That moment...

That opening,

That pluck of the string.

Draws in, lures, releases for ever

A monad.

Hossein Alizadeh 2008

werd.

why you tryin to bend down for her, ma nigga, when she aint even worth liftin up?

Despair.

Texts:

Part One:

“To despair over oneself, is despair to will to be rid of oneself --this is the formula for all despair...A person in despair despairingly wills to be himself. But if he despairingly wills to be himself, he certainly does not want to be rid of himself. Well, so it seems, but upon closed examination it is clear that the contradiction is the same. The self that he despairingly wants to be is a self that he is not (for to will to be the self that he is in truth is the very opposite of despair), that is, he wants to tear his self away from the power that established it. In spite of all his despair, however, he cannot manage to do it; in spite of all his despairing efforts, the power is the stronger and forces him to be the self he does not want to be. But this is his way of willing to get rid of himself, to rid himself of the self that he is in order to be the self that he has dreamed up. He would be in the seventh heaven to be the self he wants to be (although in another sense he would be just as despairing), but to be forced to be the self he does not want to be, that is the his torment --that he cannot get rid of himself.”


Part Two:

a)

“No matter how much the despairing person avoids it, no matter how successfully he has completely lost himself (especially the case in the form of despair that is ignorance of being in despair) and lost himself in such a manner that the loss is not at all detectable –eternity nevertheless will make it manifest that his condition was despair and will nail him to himself so that his torment will still be that he cannot rid himself of his self, and it will become obvious that he was just imagining that he had succeeded in doing so. Eternity is obliged to do this, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity’s claim upon him.”

Or to put this in more magnificent words:

b)

“…when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then --whether you were man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or independent, fortunate or unfortunate, whether you ranked with royalty and wore a glittering crown or in humble obscurity bore the toil and heat of the day, whether your name will be remembered as long as the world stands and consequently as long as it stood or you are nameless and run nameless in the innumerable multitude, whether the magnificence encompassing you surpassed all human description or the most severe and ignominious human judgment befell you—eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether you have despaired in such a way that you did not realize that you were in despair, or in such a way that you covertly carried this sickness inside of you as your gnawing secret, as a fruit of sinful love under your heart, or in such a way that you, a terror to others, raged in despair. And if so, if you have lived in despair, then, regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you –or, still more terrible, it knows you as you are known and it binds you to yourself in despair.”


Part Three:

“…to be ignorant of being in despair, is the specific feature of despair.”



All texts by Søren Kierkegaard, the father of Existentialism, as many view him to be.

Oral Delivery No. 26.

Then Why This Cage?

ُText #1:

The self thus was reoriented from an identity grounded in intersubjectivity toward one based on objective attributes which would be gained through experience. The subjective emptiness is tolerable as the center of existence when the self understands itself symbolically as a sign through which the Other is mediated. But this emptiness becomes intolerable when the intersubjective relation is broken. The subject is then driven into a state of paranoia toward the Other and compulsive desire for object, experience, or material state which will fill this emptiness. This compulsive desire ultimately consumes the subject, since fulfillment brings the triumph of the sensate over the symbolic, and thus the death of the self. The subject becomes the objective attributes, which s/he desired, and in so doing enters a state of objectivity, which constitutes the end of the symbolic self.

Text #2:

مرا گويي "كه رايي؟" من چه دانم

چنين مجنون چرايي؟" من چه دانم"

مرا گويي "بدين زاري كه هستي

به عشقم چون برايي ؟" من چه دانم

منم در موج درياهاي عشقت

مرا گويي "كجايي؟" من چه دانم

مرا گويي "به قربانگاه جان ها

نمي ترسي كه آيي؟" من چه دانم

مرا گويي "اگر كشته خدايي

چه داري از خدايي؟" من چه دانم

مرا گويي "چه مي جويي

دگر تو وراي روشنايي؟"... من چه دانم

مرا گويي "تو را با اين قفس چيست ؟

اگر مرغ هوايي؟" من چه دانم

مرا راه صوابي بود گم شد

ار آن ترك خطايي من چه دانم

بلا را از خوشي نشناسم ايرا

بغايت خوش بلايي من چه دانم

شبي بربود ناگه شمس تبريز
ز من يكتا دوتايي من چه دانم

Oral Delivery.

از آن باده ندانم چون فنايم

از آن بي‌جا نمي‌دانم كجايم

زماني قعر دريايي درافتم

دمي ديگر چو خورشيدي برآيم

زماني از من آبستن جهاني

زماني چون جهان خلقي بزايم

تو آن نوري كه با موسي همي‌گفت

خدايم من خدايم من خدايم