OBSERVER

The Riddle of Natanz

Forget all about stories of nuclear complexes, underground chambers and uranium enrichment centrifuges

01-Dec-2008 (4 comments)
I have always been drawn to those who are dangerous in some way: those who love too passionately, who think (and act) too radically, whose imaginations are easily heated to incandescence. So I should not complain when I get burned and lose everything. We need to experience the “Grand Passions” at least once in our lives. We need to live life at white-hot heat to feel that we are truly alive and human. “I am alive, therefore I bleed. I am human, therefore I weep”. But what I value more than the “grand passions” of Life is a subtler form of emotion that is paradoxically more potent than passion. I hesitate to call it “tenderness” because that word has other implications, but I have no other word large or clean enough to describe it. Physical consummation is no more than a crude metaphor for this Love. It flows from the most vulnerable places in us, those of least resistance which, I suppose, we have to call the “soul”.>>>
Forbidden Love

Another look at "Vis and Ramin"

01-Dec-2008 (one comment)
The Persian romance of Vis and Ramin, which has influenced the European legend of Tristan and Isolde and the Georgian tale of Visramiani, was composed in 1050's by Fakhraddin Asa'd Gorgani in Isfahan, Iran. It is one of the oldest examples of forbidden love in Persian literature in which a man passionately falls in love with his sister-in-law. For this reason, Vis and Ramin has not been welcome by the Persian literati in the past and present. Nezami Ganjavi (1141-1209), who wrote his romance Khosrow and Shirin, more than one century after Vis and Ramin tries to distance himself from Gorgani as follows>>>

POETRY

اتو کاری
01-Dec-2008 (2 comments)
این روزها کار و بارم شده
که کابوسهایم را اتو کنم
خوابهایی که در آنها قوز کرده روی زمین
اتو می کنم چینهای صورت مادرم را
شب تا صبح، و قلب مچاله ی خودم
و نقشه ی چروک دنیا را
>>>