LESSON

Nazy Kaviani: Women 101

I would like to comment, Nazy, on the prose-poem from your "Kissing all the frogs" series, a poem which begins: "There is a little girl, bright-eyed and hopeful inside of me."  I would like to make my comment by cutting and pasting a prose-poem I wrote on the child that is in me, a male of 65 in the early years(60-65) of my late adulthood(60-80). -Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia.

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MY CHILD CLOAKED IN MYSTERY

I now look on the period since the age of 48 as the greatest period of creativity in my life. Perhaps its source was in the many jig-saw puzzles I made in my middle to late childhood, or the tulips I drew by the hundreds when I was four or five. I had enjoyed those activities, but for some reason stopped doing them. I think it was their repetitiveness; I got bored with them. This recent creativity after age 48 may be a simple desire to move beyond those simple, mechanical tasks.

I'm not sure whether the explanation of the source of this new creativity is to be found in old memories or in trusting hunches and intuitions about my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps in part it is. Whatever the case, as Leon Edel writes "autobiography and ars poetica are one."1 -Ron Price with thanks to John Bradshaw, Home Coming:Reclaiming & Championing Your Inner Child, Judy Piatkus,, London, 1990, p.280; and 1Leon Edel, "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man," Internet Article.

There are probably many things

in those early years that

could explain the sources of

 this poetic burgeoning: two

 generations of writing, books

 and more books, my mother

 reading poetry in the garden;

 I can see her now with Edna

 St.Vincent Milay under the tree,

my grandfather's poem 'Seagull',

a restless energy that got tired

of sport and eventually career,

needed some place to go,

or perhaps it was not so much

these things, but: a great

weariness of life, an emptiness

that I fill with this sweetness

of words, this airy substance,

this vibration of utterance in

which I create a spiritual world,

some result whatever the thought,

some of my childhood cloaked

in mystery, a dance of aloneness,

a sacred silence where my mother

is gold, my father silver-haired

and we hold each other close,

absorbed, encircled, included

in all the colours of life back

in those first years of the

Kingdom of God on earth.1

1 the first years of the Kingdom of God on earth were in the years after 21 April 1953--a personal-historical view. 

Ron Price

1 November 1997

(upated for Nazy Kaviani

on: 6/9/'08)

Nazy jan

Unfortunately, I have this negative effect on women. Sweet and agreeable Mojgan is not the only woman who yells at me. But I must admit she is the loudest! :-) 

Feshangi

Ey Baba!

Mojgan and Feshangi:

Don' be silly! Baba, the writer in me is forever interested to see how people find and read me, that's all! I am honored beyond words that people do consider reading my scribblingns at all! That's why I asked Feshangi.

Not too long ago, a simple blog I had written about my interactions with my younger son were quite inexplicably picked up by KPIX (CBS) and featured on their site! I didn't realize this had happened until I started receiving some emails from mostly American readers, giving me feedback on the piece! I traced those readers to find out where the piece had been picked up, and it made me very happy. So I always ask people where they read my stuff, that's all!

My true blessing in life is that even if no other readers ever find my stuff interesting enough to read, my friends will always read them and give me support! Thank you so very much for your kindness and generosity.

P.S. I didn't know the sweet and agreeable Mojgan could yell, too! Sorry it happened to you dear Feshangi!

Dear Feshangi

Thanks for the clarification. I am glad you remembered that I did give my dear friend Nazy the rightful and well-deserved credit for this beautiful piece. I had even included the link to her blog.

Sorry I yelled at you my dear friend ;-)

Nazy jan

I went back to my old emails and found the email containing this beautiful article. Yes, your name and the link to your site were there. Sorry, it was entirely my fault. Old age plays nasty tricks with one's mind. I have kept this piece because it is very lovely and meaningful to me. 

Feshangi

Dear Ali P.

How good to hear from you! I am glad you liked this piece. Sorry for posing even more things to look out for in women! But look at it this way, this could be your map, your compass for your next try! I'm just kidding. Who am I to give others a compass?!! I am just as lost as the next guy, but I'm trying to make sense of it, with a little help from my friends. (See below)

Please come back and join the dialogue in the other pieces in these series on relationships. Your insight is much needed and appreciated.

Beautiful!

Moshkel 15 taa shod, valee beautiful!

:-)

Ali P.

Thank you all!

Dear Woman:

Thank YOU for reading my humble contribution and for taking the trouble to leave me a kind comment.

Souri Jan:

I thank you very much for your vote of confidence and for sharing my sher-gooneh with your friends. I am honored.

Dear Foaad:

How honored I am to see you here! You are so funny! I doubt you need any help, but I am glad to be of assistnce. A secret I must share with you is that it took me all the long years of my life to come to the conclusions I have! I think the least I can do is to share them with younger people so that they can spend their time a little more productively! Thanks again for coming and commenting.

Dear Tahirih:

I seldom get a chance to address you to tell you what an interesting woman I think you to be! You were not around for a little while and I missed reading your comments which tell me so much about the kind of woman you are. Thank you for your kind words of support.

Dear Amir Ashkan:

I am honored to see you leave me a comment. I'm so glad to hear a man's perspective on what I wrote. I do agree that "all the women inside of me" are the tricky parts about women! I was trying to break the mystery to the best of my ability! My struggles to fit my thinking inside the Feminist and Post-Feminist movements have not been very successful.

Do you know the Iranian tale which talks about a crow who unhappy with the way he walked tried to copy the way a partridge walked? He never learned how to walk like a partridge and in the process forgot how to walk like a crow! The moral of the Persian tale then is to stick to what you know and don't try and imitate what you are not or can't be.

I have been reluctant to join in the known definitions of Feminism and Post-Feminism, prefering to live within my own mental framework about women's issues and rights. I started working when I was 15 in Tehran against all norms and tradition, and have not stopped working to date. I lived in Iran for a while after the Revolution, and struggled to promote understanding and equality in places where I worked. I have raised two sons whom I would like to believe respect women deeply. With a few exceptions, I have seldom assumed a militant stance with respect to women's rights, but have tried to achieve the same through setting good examples, respecting all, and creating an atmosphere for discourse and understanding. I think women can do anything they want to do. Am I a Feminist? I don't know.

I continually see the little girl inside of all the women I know. When I talk to men who are more experienced with women, they tell me they see her, too! I agree with you wholeheartedly! It is risky business knowing a woman, unless you are willing to really really know her. In that case my little directions might come in handy!

Dear Javaneh:

Thank you so very much for your kind words. I read you often and find your views on life quite refreshing. Thank you for joining some of the discussions in these series. Please come back again soon!

Dear Rajab:

Thanks so much for coming back! There is no competition! Men AND women are complex and relationships are complicated, hence my humble effort to try and understand them!

In my next piece I will talk about men. You will see that from my vantage point, I see them as more complex and complicated! I think men share less of what they think and feel and this makes their complexity more complicated and less prone to decoding! Stay tuned and please do join that next episode! Be kind to me when you read that piece as, after all, I'm writing it as a woman!

Dear Azarin:

Thanks so much for your insightful comment. Hey, I don't want the little girl inside of me to grow up! There are plenty other sides to me which have reached maturity through experiencing real life and occasional pain. The little girl, the one filled with hope, stays!

Dear Feshangi:

Aren't you just a wonderful male reader! Heeh! All of a sudden, you managed to become even more of a favorite fellow Iranian.comer to me (if such a thing was even possible)!

P.S. I'm surprised, where did you see this piece before? I did publish it in my personal blogs a while back and also sent it to one of my friends recently. Any way you read it first, I am humbled!

Dear Anony:

While I respect your opinion, I disagree with it. Sometimes my women friends talk to me about their relationships and what is ailing them. In most of their stories runs a common theme. Most of us are at the height of our disappointments with men and relationships when the little girls inside of us are ignored. That's what I think.

good fiction, but not

good fiction, but not practical. usually people grow and mature and leave that child behind.

Dear Nazy

I have read this piece before and had loved it to no end. I did not know that you were the author. Well done! It is a beautiful piece.

I have been able to see most of these facets in every woman I have had the fortune of falling in love with, which have made me love them even more. I think because women have all these sides, dimensions, and characteristics, that to men they seem to be so complex and at times alien and difficult to understand.  

Feshangi

My dearest Nazy,

All these women inside of me thank you for your amazing expression of their emotion and this perpetual dilemma on who we/they really are and who we/they aren't! This dilemma of being a whole still being incomplete, always evolving in different or even opposite directions...but this little girl inside of me only wonders when she's going to finally grow up!

Take care, azarin

Complication and Complex are the same!

Nothing is complicated or complex. Even the most complicated or complex mathematical equations are made simple once "solved" much less a person ;-)

As we say in Farsi, moama cho hal gasht assan shavad!

Rajab; Complexity Vs Complication

Nazy's article shows that a woman is Complex, but complexity
doesn't always mean Complication. We tend to mix these two notion in our own mind.

It's true that we like to take just a simple value as a fact and it's easier for all of us (men and women) to deal with a one, and only one simple aspect. As soon as the word complex come in to the scene,
we find it too complicated to deal with....but again this is our duty to separate these two aspects in our own mind. Not easy, you will say:O)

Replace girl with boy

And the poem reads true for a man. Of course make adjustment to sultry and mistress!

While this is really a beautiful poem it can be a trap!

Men should not be told women are complicated. Men can be complicated too. Women can be not complicated too.

Who (man or woman) looks for complication?! The more complicated a wo/man the more headaches ;-)

Beautifully put Nazy Joon

I think all women reading your poem will be able to identify with you. 

Thank you for your eloquent words ... these things are  often forgotten. overlooked, maybe sometimes ignored by some, but they are all the pieces that make us women whole.

We see each other.

 Javaneh

What Nazy commands

I can sense Nazy's anticipation from the moment her words hit me. The realization that "There is a sultry woman, a seductress, a mistress, a lover, full of knowing touches and promising glances and welcoming kisses inside of me."

And what Nazy commands, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, is as clear as a lading-list: "Never ignore the other women inside of me."

The difficulty faced by a man who, like myself, is sympathetic to Nazy's lading-list is how to live with this good-girl-bad-girl. For the problem with good girls is that they are not real and waiting to fall, sooner or later; while the problem with bad girls is that they are just like us, men, with only one difference: bad girls are, unfortunately, waiting to be redeemed.

Post-feminism allows us again to speak of women as girls, period.

So true!

I loved it. I hope that we can extend this understanding to all humanity, we are never just one thing. Such a treat reading it.

Thanks,

Tahirih

thank you for sharing

I know, I for one, could use more lessons on women!

Nazy jaan

I loved this one. It's so poetic, so romantic and thoughtful that I don't want to say anything about, fear of touching it ...

I forwarded it (with your permission) to all my male friends so they will take better care of their wives who are also my friends :O)

how well and beautiful you

how well and beautiful you described yourself, me and many other women.
thank you,