Letters April 2005
Pinnacle of all Nowruz giftsIn response to Azam Nemati photo: Dear Jahanshah, Thank you thank you thank you. I am delighted to see Mrs. Nemati as Iranian of the day and find myself writing to your letter section not only as a provisional but absolutely necessary means to let out but a fraction of the overwhelming passion build up in my soul, which threatens the devastation the very destruction of nothing less than my very unworthy soul, my finite and negligible being, nearly uniting me with my maker, but also for the sake of some possible poor soul out there somewhere who might have unwittingly missed this life-changing experience, this revelation of historical, biblical ... oh, why be careful, indeed mythological significance. Too often one says, perhaps as a matter of empty taa'rof, that a picture speaks a thousand words... and this in occasions not worthy of the truth in such sentiment, but only those who have truly lived through this particular irresistible life-changing experience and yet have by the grace of the lord almighty somehow managed to survive it in order to tell the tale... only those who have dared to stare with their naked unprotected humanly finite eyes into the majesty of the blazing sun and yet perhaps due to some inexplicable miracle still capable of going on in the accompaniment of the incomplete fallible earthlings on this negligible rock on the far side of an unimportant galaxy... only those select chosen few are truly capable of such utterance about the image and the word in earnest; only they can bare witness to the truth of what may be conceived of otherwise as but merely a figur! e of speech to throw about. So let me say it again, a picture speaks a thousand words... My unworthy self, currently buried under a heavy workload and negotiating existential deadlines, would not have written, could not have afforded to have written anything for any other occasion; but oh did you see those lovely, heavenly flowers of paradise, that unforgivable, violent, originary and relentless sex appeal, that longing for a melting unification with the arcadian other, that merciless desire that drags one down from the cool orbits of irrelevance and metaphysical contemplation into the particular, the human, now male, helplessly sexually charged body that my I is destined and damned with... and o the beautiful kind and gracious sentiments expressed in relation to the learned handsome son... together with all other subtle sensibilities aroused and sensations ignited which my vocabulary is simply too poor to express... all of this and more demand, require, necessitat! e a response no matter how provisional, no matter how shabby, no matter how incorrect, no matter how incomplete and earthly, oh Dr. Mirfendereski forgive me and this broken, incomplete, fragmentary grammar... --- and so it is so that I must humbly succumb: Mrs. Nemati is stunning and her likeness speaks volumes concerning not merely the classical, the romantic, the idealistic and the modern oh why the fuck not, the post modern as well... conceptualizations of beauty as such - all synthesized in one, as perhaps the incorporation of the absolute spirit that only an old and toiled classically trained idealist philosopher in the nineteenth century Europe could conceive of - but rather, it represents, no, rather presents nothing less than a perpetual revolutionary and yet always and again momentous shift in the paradigm of all theories of aesthetics encompassing east and west, north and south, heavenly and earthly... oh my senses, merci merci me... Thank you Jahanshah, thank you for this very pinnacle of all benevolent heavenly gifts, for this great late-Nowruz present... Now as I slowly come to my own after this uncannily sublime experience granted me by the occasions provided for by the ancient rites and customs of the place where history and mythology merge into one via the technology that enables this adolescent soul to part-take in this experience, I must admit that I am relieved in the knowledge of the fact that none of my friends were around just moments ago when I called up the Iranian on the world wide wide web... for I could swear by all the gods and the god that is the God, my kin and kind, I could swear by all and nothing that is sacred: that just moments ago I came to my own as I heard myself murmuring into the void of my lonely desolate room so sunken in this rainy April night: begu marg bar shah!
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