The game goes on
We try
and go on because it’s Nowruz!
March 21, 2005
iranian.com
Zendeh baad zendegi.
-- Shahriyar Qanbari
Aqelaan noqteye pargaare vojudand, vali,
Eshq daanad ke dar in daayereh sargardaanand.
- Hafez
There is a chessboard and some cannot play, because their condition
for counting voices to mark up points must firstly await until
the king of the other side is already mated, not there anymore,
in what seems to be a misunderstanding of the very principle of
the ethics of chess, or shatranj, as a game.
Now, the king is a figure that ought
not move or be moved much, and the life of the game depends on
the very survival of the king, but wanting the game over, the
nihilistic approach in the crisis of values beyond a systematic
thought patterns,
as apposed to what the nobles saw as game.
The modern Persian variation on the game inflated into the private
and now public sphere has come through an actual populace uprising
lead by the intelligentsia against the king and other oppressors
wherever they may be in the name of a player as such, perhaps
or may be for the sake of the every last player - the opinions
amongst
the pieces vary on the subject. But most importantly this new
opening, wound, and the other of the game, has also been evident
in the
relationship of all Iranians to women, no matter what their ideological
capital for the justification of the black or white squares they
happen to occupy, may be.
In fact the king does exist, but in spirit only - for none and
all to see. It goes on, whether one plays or not - and the chessboard
is not hard to make. It is through the mother that we are, some
say reborn, obvious enough, but it takes spirals and revolutions,
ecstatic violence and drunken orgies, in the name of sobriety,
to remind us that the king is in fact a ghost, as Khayyam who fixed
our calendar knew, but the game goes on, and whether we play or
not... to be as to act noble.
She calls on Marcellus’ lines, “thou art scholar,
speak to it, Horatio, speak to it,” to begin her lectures
on literature and philosophy every Thursday.
Well: the game is at an end, a wind goes in and out, and we try
and go on because it’s Nowruz!
To be
Baad?
To be it? Shall, baad? To be the river, the wind? To go? Invisible
but moving?
Or to stand still and
to be?
That is not the question, I know.
 Some burned in fires, some hid behind their mothers, some arcades
are no more, and that was only last year. Some songs are kin to
ghostly and some a little off, sickly, half-dead, but then and
then, at and to the origin of the orient twisted and tied, ecstatic
and disoriented, and with an impressing promise of equilibrium
on the first day of spring - at least that’s
what the pire maghaan guyad:
On whatever square you sit,
Or even if you think you are in control,
Eide saide Baastaani,
Or the birth of mehr, springs and fountains,
Be hamegi mobarak,
Har ruzetan nowruz
Nowruzetan piruz.
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