[...]irculation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)

journalism = represent + narrate

(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them

(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***

proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)

*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals


*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•

(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence

(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”

...................................

collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood

global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)

one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission  =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)

(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}

zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark ages
}--Ghazzi--> forked historical consciousness : (an understanding & speaking of) “history = a series of junctures scattered across time”


(the problem is) ***historical consciousness*** --> orientational
“bestows upon actuality a temporal direction, an orientation that can guide action intentionally by the agency of historical memory” (Rüsen)
1. make specific references to historic events (compare them to the present [==guide==> political action])
2. *making references to “history” at large*

[*]zigzag memory structure: deploy mnemonic spins to reframe historic events
•establish equivalent between the present and the past [--!--> (fundamentally despotic?) technique that i also use in lecture performances]


authoritarian populism


(Hegelian) [*]action: pursue one aspect of history + breaking away from away from another
1. (modern) revolutionary: telling a new story, (--populist--> focus on) *exclusionary politics*, once the leader is in power the objective is to prolong the idea of historic juncture --justify--> continued exclusion

populist --Laclau--> (invocation of)
•people = empty signifier
•leader = embodiment of people's agency

***rhetoric of resentment*** --> victimhood
[*]resentment: an emotional-moral framework --aim--> continuously regenerate the felt intensities --underwrite--> demands for revenge + lamentations (of victimhood)


***nationalism ==> populism***

(many countries) national identity (& militancy) is intertwined with:
•narrative of self-victimization --
•invocation of trauma

victorious victimhood ==fuels==> aggressive militancy
for example --> Israel: nothing counts as evidence as one's own empowerment, one is always under threat, if Israel cannot maintain the omnipotent position that its victory offered (1967) it would be under existential threat

anticolonial nationalism (or postcolonial populism)
•past injury (“We have been oppressed” ==> “re-empower ourselves again”)
•decades after independence --still--> fixated on the anticolonial moment ==> perpetuate a sense of victimhood }--> to mask authoritarianism

victimhood
•Hindu nationalism --> reformulated history from a focus on colonialism and postcolonial nation-building into a narrative of victimhood that blames historic Muslim invasions for the decline of Hindu civilisation and nationhood
•China --> reformulated its school history textbooks to stress victimhood and humiliation through the idea of China's “100 years of humiliation” in reference to Western and Japanese invasions
•United States --> nationalism often takes the shape of antipathy to government that is enmeshed with an ideology of liberal individualism
•
}--> ***logic of empowerment*** (--permeate--> economies of visibility)


***memory narrative***


iran --> shohada شهدا martyrs of iran-iraq war --> after the war became the picture of collective victimhood (“heroes = us”)

Erdogan's speech
“we have been tested by fire” (--?--> Siavash's fire trial is populist?)
~= “we have been tested by enemy”
~= “evil forces”


(from) populism --to--> neofascism
(from) generic rhetoric of an unidentified enemy --to--> articulation of an identifiable foe (who is met with political violence)

authoritarian state apparatus [= political system + culture + institutions + ?] --allow--> smoother way of operationalisation of narratives (about the dangers of adversaries)
-exactly what kind of state apparatus we have in iran?


historical victimhood --> resurgent populist discourse
•people have been enduring victimhood for too long
•fateful junctures throughout history
•authentic great path
•urgency of message
•

animating rhetoric with self-victimhood ==produce==> divisions (men =/= women, us =/= enemy, etc.)



exclusionary politics <-- homogeneous community (=/= alien intrusion, outside forces, immigrants, minorities, etc.)

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Kundera
is humor modern?
*humor is not ancient* (?!)
“whatever humor touches it ambiguites”
humor = ambiguitor

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globalization =/= cold war
globalization =/= enlightenment (“universal humanism + rationalized tech ==> freedom for all”)

cold war = a meaningfull relation between ideology & power [==give==> orientation + identity --> normative approach to global phenomena]
geopolitc + ideologic borders
=/=
globalization --> completly different political behaivor (definitions of national goals, friend and enemy, etc.) --> pluralist democracy (differences + contrasts) =/= social democracy (erasing differences)

globalization = attitude حالت =/= meaning
[cold war: “world ~= (a sort of) problem” --> behaviors had] meaning ==> (base for) power

cold war: war ==> identities
globalization: conflits =/=> identities

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two points
•artistic research: a form of art that uses knowledge as its main medium
•artistic research has no relation to the unknown (=/= an idea of research im in which one faces something unknown or new therefore needs to research)
•my work (in general) has been about the critique of engineering (the talent of engineering)


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thinking with traps [working title]
Allow me to make you a trap. I think traps and lures are interesting to think with when one is oriented toward a nontransportive investigative work. What I mean by nontransportive investigative work is a mode of approach to “getting to know” something [*call it research] where your subject does not speak plain to you, and you, nor your work, do not intend to transform them. The question of “what is interesting for them?” raises up immediately. This question emerges in all sorts of domains of social life. As a bullshiter [*a technical term for performance-lecture: an art of interweaving logos] and program-coordinator and educator in the art sector (ZUYD Toneelacademie Maastricht), I am permanently positioned to ask this question. For this I have found the notion of trap particularly useful to think with, especially in environments where participants entice each other in their subjects of knowledge by means of an adaptable cunning intelligence.


Somewhere between fairytale findings, animal associations, and dictations from Benjamin Alberti, Eva Hayward, Marcel Detienne, and Vinciane Despret, I am thinking about traps as zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts, made-up things that entice meaning across species. Trap-making is the forms of knowledge of the back-tracking of a fox, of building a fishing net, skills of a weaver, a carpenter, polymorphism of an octopus, and the rhetorical tricks of a crafty charlatan. The trap-maker imagines what is the perspective of a radically different being. If you make a trap for other animals you are fully engaged in multi-species perspectival game. You think about their bodies engaged in a perspectival communication. I argue, lures are needed to convey meaning. In this sense, lures and traps are mimetic devices, they are enticements of meaning, and we have mimetic participation with them. Mimetic is the opposite of semiotic. In mimetic participation, one does not ponder about the symbolic relations hidden in the game, but rather one is caught in its form. But this form can still be meta and not literal. In my understanding and use of lure one is not necessarily fossilized by this seizure. It is a form of figuration by trying to enact. It demands enacting something outside of you. A mimetic preoccupation is something that you cannot stop following. [*The fashion industry, marketing, conspiracy theories, art, psychology, and hunting, are all about mimesis.]


One mimetic form that I have been caught in is an old figure of children's fairy tale, Cinderella--during her confinement with the evil step-mother and two step-sisters. Cinderella is my ancestor and heritage. I was exposed as a child to Disney’s version of Grimm’s recollection of the story, which was the very last Disney movie that was officially dubbed in Farsi before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voiceover in Farsi was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in the Tehrani cabaret voice-performances. Her voice has a radically different feeling than its English original. In contrast to how “childish” the mice sounds in the movie, Cinderella's articulations are perceived much more “adult,” sexually textured, of how a young female sounded like in the Iranian consumer culture of the 1950s. Recollecting that Cinderella now reveals something else that corresponds with my research, an attic bestiary, a mini universe of meanings and beings with whom she is in conversation with and in a permanent collaboration of worlding.


Cinderella lives with the precarity of a family who torment and insult her on a daily basis. I kept asking myself, why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she is capable of knowing new things about the animals she lives. She incorporates a form of transhumanity that lies in (1) the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she is not a master of nor can she escape from, and (2) in the way animals give her power and meaning. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? A skilled practitioner of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. A Cinderella who does her job is bizarre. It engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of evil circumstances. Not considered as a victim, she becomes much more present, inviting more interesting questions about her labor of knowledge production. This opened for me a space to think about her inhuman gesture of endurance, her know-how of being in a world that proliferates with chaotic zones of improvisation with animals. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of imagining what animals are capable of, with and because of her labor. This is her mice-trap. Steeped in routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals, her technique of trap-making is not a category of human behavior, but a model for a form of intelligence. I argue that as a lover and interlocutor of mice, her traps are in the form of a net in which her subject becomes entangled. Lures are frequently needed to prompt meaning to an animal. Cinderella to the mice, is an alluring producer of sociality. Her mice-trap produces the meaning of the social. The mouse is captured not as prey but as material comrade and ally.


[....]


Sometimes there is no maker behind the trap. They are created by the world, by random, emergent, coalescence of elements in the environment. In a witness-fable by Kelileh o Demneh we have a moment of problematization of cunning intelligence. The story goes, once a fox was walking down his forest when he noticed animals were escaping from something. Upon further investigation he found out they were running from a special sound that scared them, a loud drum. At this stage, he is curious but vigilance and not afraid, because he knows the forest is all deceit and trickery. His inner thought is opportunistic or playful, he thinks there must be something juicy there that I can get my hands on. Lured in the other direction than other animals, he goes to the source of the sound, and puts his paws in it. He realizes that the sound was created by the force of wind moving a tree branch to hit the remains of an animal fat and skin caught in the branches. Disappointed and victorious, he calls the illusion and moves on. Here we have the fox revealing the techne of the lie: an assemblage of skin, fat, tree, and wind, that others are trapped in. What is the problem with the fox? What kind of wit or intelligence does he possess? Is the fox detached from the mimesis of the forest? How do we not get caught in certain traps? My question here is, in which context do you say yes to the trap?


The fox of Kelileh o Demneh is smart, someone who embodies “metis.” Metis is ancient Greek for wiley intelligence. Metis [pointed out by Detienne] refers to patterns of thought relating to an effective adaptable cunning, the exact opposite of contemplating about unchanging essences. The art of metis encompasses a coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviors that cultivates shohood (intuition شهود), makr (cunning مکر), ferasat (perspicacity فراست), farib (dissimulation فریب), badiheh (improvisation بدیهه), hushiar (vigilant attention هوشيار), be-ja (timeliness بجا). In the world of Kelileh o Demneh you are a hunter and the world is made of traps and animals are full of cunning. This is precisely the metis’ field of operation, a world of movement and ambiguity in the battle of perspectival will. For the Greeks and Kelileh o Demneh, continuous metamorphoses is the name of the game. A disconcerting divided shifting world of multiplicity that creates (1) polymorphous monsters (mistrustful mobile elusive beings) and (2) metamorphing minds (mistrustful mobile elusive minds).


The notion of metis that we have is articulated in Greek deities powers. It is the form of knowledge of Athena, Hephaestus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Prometheus. The Greek gods often found themselves in either position of victory or as vanquished. Metis is the power of binding in situations of confrontation.


The fox and octopus master of bonds


Trap is polymorphism, the opposite of what it seems to be, in Greek, dolos mechanos. Dolos readers to cunning, that which is woven, braided or interlacing. It is about the ancient techniques of fitting together different pieces that articulates a whole. A skill of making knots, meshes and nets that surprise, trap and bind. A net is the invisible (mesh of) bonds, the favorite technique of metis. Bond is the combination of two things, weave and twist.

...................................

[*]bond = weave + twist
[*]net: invisible (mesh of) bonds <-- favorite technique of metis


arm = bond
every part of its body is a *bond* which can secure anything (but nothing can seize)


*fox = a living bond* (can bend, unbend, reverse its own position at will)


Oppian is all about bonds, ropes, cords

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Cinderella’s position neither victorious nor vanquished.


I use the word “trap” because it is more problematic and dangerous than lures


[For the record, Plato completely opposed the idea of hunting with traps, because these techniques were thought to cultivate cunning and duplicity which were against what a virtuous political man should be. For Plato embodiment was a form of distraction to true knowledge.]

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The cunning of “getting to know them” [...]
You politely approach in order to get to know them, research as a lure for yourself to be transformed by the encounter. The nontransportive investigation is in fact full of transformations.


It is important to think about traps not as something great and necessary, but in a sense that we should be able to recognize and choose sometimes not to do it. I think we need lures, because the world is transient, shifting, disconcerting, ambiguous, and so are we. The question always is which trap are you caught in? How does it look like? Are you alone in it? Which Cinderella is making you a trap?

...................................

________________

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points
* define cunning intelligence
   * greek notion of “metis” (you are a hunter: the world is made of traps and animals are full of cunning)
   * bonds --> fox + octopus
   * fox forest story kelile demne
      * is fox detached from the mimesis of the forest? Is this what critical intelligence looks like? by putting his paw and breaking that fragile assemble of skin, fat, tree, and wind. he reveals a lie. what other animals are trap engagers?
      * in which context you say yes to the trap?
* differentiate metis from Cinderella’s mouse trap (mechane, techne)
   * * trap as research method, but it has a double bind, it is as much as a lure for oneself as for the other
   *



my mimetic preoccupations --> with memory


(from mnemonic devices) to mimetic devices (lure)
mimetic participation with X
(with lures and traps we have mimetic participation)


a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle
diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)


you don’t get necessarily fossilized by it


mimetic =/= semiotic
enacted showing other than you (=/= telling)
figuration by trying to imitate
to copy = mimesis + techne
(summoning =/= mimesis)
getting caught in a form
it is form, but it is not about form
industry of fashion is about mimesis
problem of realism =/= problem of mimesis

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________________

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2. a better mouse trap
Cinderella

...................................

and now I tell you...
what exactly a trap is made of...
text: condensed, everything

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1. mouse trap
◦diary of Cinderella, a lover and interlocutor of mice
who is a mouse lover, a mouse career, a mouse interlocutor (somebody who listens and tells stories), but she is also a shepherd.
◦“which trap are you caught in?” is always relevant question
2. spider web




1. Benjamin Alberti
◦minoan culture (pottery in ancient Greek)
◦artifacts and appendices --> traps
2. Eva Hayward
◽animal thinker
◽transanimality
◽[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*
3. Marcel Detienne
◦[*]metis: intelligence which operates in the world of becoming, in circumstances of conflict = forethought perspicacity + quickness and acuteness of understanding + trickery + deceit
◦[*]trap = polymorphism (the opposite of what it seems to be)
◦dolos mechanos
◦(dolos -->) [*]cunning: woven, braiding or interlacing, *fitted together* <-- ***ancient techniques that use the pliability and torsion of plant fibers to make knots, ropes, meshes and nets to surprise, trap and bind*** <-- the idea that ***many pieces can be fitted together to produce a well-articulated whole*** (~=? art)
4. Vinciane Despret




dictionary of crafts and arts (D+A)
extraordinary gesture of collecting and describing in details the skills and techniques of not the elite but the ordinary craftsman
older styles of trap-making
it is important to include the violence (asymmetry) of trap-making, that it is not a consensual relation to the other


kelile demne
indian courts to teach the young princes the art of cunning
putting your paw in the source of the thing (fat)
what is the problem with the fox?
what kind of wit or intelligence is that?
are there other ways of reading random combination of environmental elements that signal something accidental to you and orient the other animals in the forest?


once you starting thinking with trap, you start to see them everywhere?


you are always trapped, the question is which trap are you caught in?
can it be dismantled? do you bring others in it?
do you move with the trap while being stuck in it?
which Cinderella is making you a trap?


--> a way of thinking about ways of being with technical objects without mastery or understanding them or being an engineer. we are not in a engineering relationship with traps, we are in heuristic relation with something that catches you long enough.


teasing with the negativity of traps (the entrapment)

...................................

we are not having engineering knowledge about the technicality of the object (trap), we are moved by the heuristic fascination for it.
temporarily
“the negativity of the trap” :
violence of trapping
not voluntary
surprise

...................................

kelile demne
fox sound in forest story


we are always related, composed into something
the bullshit of “freedom”: if you’d be free, you’d have no story, no connections, no memory.
it is a kind of story that more than anyone the marketing industries today wants us to be free --> freedom is the cornerstone of consumer culture


for me: trap is at the core of understanding knowledge, of the relationship to the other, to crafts, to art


trap: corpus of zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifact
the trap-maker imagining what is the perspective of radically different being
if you make a trap for other animals you are fully engaged in multi-species perspectival game
the body is fully engaged in a perspectival communication


perspectival battle of will
construction of affect
being in relation to “variety”
when you are in the business of trap-making you are in the realm of knowing different things (differential, different things that have little to do with each other)


incite, to cite, to bring the source of others
to incite: to encourage violent behavior by unorthodox behavior

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trap research
1. physical body, sensual relationship
2. (literal/virtual) abstraction: you turn the environment into an abstraction to construct something through it
1. abstraction: an erotic lure for the soul
3. mimesis: how meaning is formed
(--> propositions)


lure
in the sense of house of candy in Hansel and Gretel


to be able to be caught in traps, even if their are accidental, just created by random, emergent, coalescence of elements in the environment. sometimes there is no maker behind the trap.


making images as lures for my research
“making” is not an expressive medium (not a medium of communication), but a research tool
(Line) “gentle trapping towards something you want”

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Despret
she asks how scientist relate to animals when they do field study
your test experiment is a form of a trap that you gain knowledge from
is there a way that we can ask the animal what interest them?


if you are investigating, how to make conjectures? conjecture: a kind of temporary hypothesis that allow you to go to the next
investigative research: your subject does not speak english to you --> what is interesting for the other


art of the lure
art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve (and have no intention in helping you)
to solve the enigma (of the raven, or the artwork of the student) --> you have to make interesting and radically speculative choices in how you produce knowledge about the work of others


fishermen and hunters, at the edge of the forest or the shore, where animals come to check out the other realms, is where they build the trap
--> fishermen and hunters are the original thinkers of this kind of intelligence, you transform knowledge by learning from animals. it is prolonged, practical, and crafty

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spider
expert at waiting ---> go to Cinderella’s waiting
building environment from body liquids --> becoming bodily = the near-by-ness of things
=/= fox: suspicious

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being lured into desiring and trusting <-- this is basically the game (at the school)


critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
fox --> lure
octopus --> best lure-engagers (they love the trap, they can’t get enough of it)

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the O
the curved lips
apprehension of that which to be embodies


to be trapped = to be situated
situatedness =/= positionality

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we are not fully intentionally engaged with things
what we do is not intentionally all the time

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all of this is not contextualized in adult political discourse, but I put it in children fairy tales (the Cinderella)
this is where I want the notion of trap to be situated (comprehended).

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________________

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Enrica's transcription



trap in relationship to knowledge, art

...................................

Trap is a zoo anthropo biomorphic artifact
if you make a trap for another animal, you think from trans species perspective
it is a dangerous game
a body fully engaged in a perspectival communication

...................................

perspectival battle of wills


trap making = in the realm of bridging different sort of knowledge that has nothing to do with you
•To cite =/= to incite (unorthodox behavior)




Searching paths:
•bodily capture
•violence of the construction
•mimesis : how meaning takes form




But also traps get me trapped
lore - hansel and gretel’s house: doesn’t look like a trap but …
sometimes there is no maker behind the trap (is this a scandal? is this emptiness?)

...................................

how to make you interested in my trap/chapter?
images making/painting as a research tool/assemblage
gentle trapping yourself to where you like to stay

...................................

Vinciane Despret, “What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?”
a conversation between scientist and animals in wild
your text experience is a trap, something that you gain knowledge from. Is there even a way to politely ask animals a question?
investigative research - how to deal with another subject that doesn’t even speak English to you? what trap am i being constructed into? what is the raven interested in?
and we are different things


the art of the lore and the tricks, learning from enygma - I’m interested in how do you produce knowledge from the work of others? [Sina, in the position of coordinator of the Master/educator]
edgy (transsectoral worlds): the edge of the forest, where sea and forest meet - where hunters/fishermen meet (...)


FOX suspicious - someone who s smart
“Sina, don’t be tricked!” my mom would tell me
a lore into desire
my needs =/= lores


OCTOPUS
best engagers
tentacles

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Abstraction as an erotic lore of the soul
eroticism is here in the book
an open trap in the forest as an open mouth that names the apprehension that embodies
to be situated (how you are trapped/Haraway, how do you receive ranges from the environment you are caught in) VS positionality (i’m white, 40 years old, Italian, … and than you speak from that - it actually excludes possibility of hybridization)
we are not available to intentionality all the time [i need to take some time to think with this sentence]


time focuses on individual
trapping implies relationality
a trap/trapper/the trapped ones

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a story from Kalila and Dimna: rabbit, mouse, frog are trapped together and they bond about how to get rid of it. eventually they start to move from within it (not from escaping the trap) as a monstrous hybrid.


Fables: Cinderella precarious situation
I want to break with Artaud idea (“to be powerless” is a bad idea): plea for traps:
care, writing, work happens when you are trapped!

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________________

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trap


[*]trap
(enigma of the apparently inexplicable behavior) --> *how to ask the ravens, with the same politeness, to take a position in relations to all the possible conjectures of the investigation?* how to ask them to teach us the good explanation, the right motive? ==> the researcher will have to learn the ***art of the trap and the net*** = the art of the lure and the trick = ***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]

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strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]

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to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]


to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)

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the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones

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---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage

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THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?


(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?


why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?

...................................

bird people
,
fox people


,


‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse of friendship and enmity, the visible anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it in a game-theoretic-semiotic linkage, relating and tying together issues of voyeurism, surveillance, violence, mediation, and predation in poetic itineraries.


reading and greeting

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________________

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metis

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speeches (logos) and artifices (mechane)


dolos, mechane, techne, kerdos, apate, aiolos, poikilos, haimulos
quick, supple, wiley, deceitful, to confront the unexpected on every occasion,


wiley intelligence: effective adaptable cunning =/= contemplating unchanging essences
(patterns of thought relating to metis:)
craftsman's skills
theogony
myth
sovereignty
metamorphoses of a marine deity


metis: Zeus’ first wife


metis =? zerang زرنگ, rend رند


[*]wiley: a mind able to twist and turn in every direction


forms of knowledge of Athena, Hephaestus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Zeus, Prometheus --?-->
•a hunting trap
•a fishing net
•skills of a basket-maker
•skills of a weaver
•skills of a carpenter
•the mastery of a navigator
•the flair of a politician
•the experienced eye of a doctor
•the tricks of a crafty character such as Odysseus
•back-tracking of a fox
•polymorphism of an octopus
•solving of enigmas and riddles
•beguiling rhetorical illusionism of the sophists


(Greek's) ancient technical traditions --> particular type of intelligence: *objects which must be dominated by cunning*
(Detienne's research) to define one major category of the mind


practical intelligence manifested in the skills of the artisan (---> go to 3D hacker)


metis: coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years --> applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting, ambiguous


routine
chancey inspiration
changeable opinion
charlatanerie


dexterity
sureness of eye
sharpwittedness
}--Plato--> belong to a type of cognition which is alien to truth and quite separate from episteme, knowledge =/= Aristotle's “practical intelligence”


Plato
skill: *starting from the Forms, produces in the world of Becoming* creations that are as real, stable and organized as is possible


greek deity ~= ***Powers (power of binding) in a situation of confrontation*** --> find themselves in either position as victors =/= as vanquished (=/= Cinderella’s position neither victorious nor vanquished)


reality whose limitless polymorphic powers render it almost impossible to seize ==> cunning intelligence ([*]askew: adopt an oblique course, to bend intelligence, ready to go in any direction)
*intelligence attempts to make contact with an object by confronting it in the guise of a rival(= connivance + opposition)*
cunning intelligence (metis) ~/=? trickster, deceiver


[*]dominate: to enclose it/them within the limits of a single, unchangeable form within (his control) + he proves himself to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary

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Zeus’ metis
nothing can surprise him
nothing can cheat his vigilance
nothing can frustrate his designs


Iliad's man of metis: vigilant premeditation (=/= impulsiveness)
•displays a greater grip of the present (where nothing escapes him)
•more awareness of the future (several aspects of which he has already manipulated)
•richer experience accumulated from the past


(Iliad's art of the charioteer -->)
pukine: *dense rich compressed experience*
kairos: fleeting opportunity
metis: catch kairos by surprise (to seize)
poikilos: shimmering sheen and shifting movement [--> *the fox has a mind which is poikilos* ~~> crafty]
aiolos: many-colored (versicolor), marked with colors that overlap [--> all creatures whose wriggling and moving mass is never still: worms, horseflies, wasps, swarm of bees] ~~> he whose cleverness enables him to turn his hand to anything


*comparing the future with the past*
*too look beyond the victory*


Prometheus: the one who reflects in advance =/= Epimetheus: the one who understands after the event (Prometheus's twin brother, his double and opposite)
--> prometheia of man: radical ignorance of the future


cunning's field of application: the world of movement, of multiplicity, of ambiguity (==> metis)
(for the greeks:) continuous metamorphoses is the name of the game + only like could be affected by like
==> a polymorphous monster (mistrustful mobile elusive being)
==> a metamorphing mind (mistrustful mobile elusive mind)


shimmering nature of metis is a mark of its kinship with the divided shifting world of multiplicity


[*]poros: the discovery of a way out (water is very good at poros, finding passage)

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semantic field of cunning intelligence (metis of Iliad + Odyssey)
1. look beyond the immediate present
2. multiple (many-coloured, shifting)
3. duplicity of the trap


dolos --> cunning
kerde --> tricks
kairso --> ability to seize an opportunity

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Treatise on Fishing (Oppian)
Treatise on Hunting (Oppian2)


hunting and fishing (originally) provide the model of intelligence


baits, nets, weels, nooses, snares


dolos, techne, mechane --> in the world of animal & human


**relations of force are constantly upset by the intervention of metis**


metis of fish can take a thousand forms


angler-fish
tongue disguised as food
fleshy appendage growing on the fishing frog is a true fishing bait and as such has a double character: to the little fish it looks for all the world like food but it is food which soon changes itself into a voracious maw


fish = ambiguous creature
sea (...the world of animals) = world of metis
human = hunter/fisherman confronted with a world of traps and at grips with animals full of cunning


Oppian --> it is by *techne* that the octopus merges in with the rock to which it clings


hunter:
1. agility
2. dissimulation: the art of seeing without being seen (dokeuein: to be on the lookout, on the watch)
3. vigilance (mind full of finesse [like fine sugar])


Plato violently condemns line fishing, the hunting of aquatic creatures, the use of weels, the hunting of birds and all forms of hunting with nets and traps, he does so because all these techniques foster the qualities of cunning and duplicity which are diametrically opposed to the virtues that the city of the Laws demanded from its citizen.
(Detienne)

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*fox* and *octopus* -->
in Greek thought serve as models, the incarnation of cunning in the animal world
fox --> reversal (technique of reversing oneself)
octopus --> polymorphism (symbolizes the unseizability that comes from polymorphy)


reversal
•the way fox catches bustards --> it droops its head downward and gently wags its tail, deluded bustards approach this object which they mistake for one of their own kind, fox suddenly turns round
•(foxfish?) fish turns itself inside out like a glove, so that the interior becomes the exterior: the hook falls out


fox
[...]it lives, in its intelligence, in the depths of an earth which is admirably laid out. The dwelling that it digs itself has seven different entrances linked by as many corridors and the openings are situated a long way from each other.
[...]The fox is not to be captured by ambush nor by noose nor by net for it has no equal in smelling out an ambush; it is clever at severing ropes and escaping death through the subtlety of its cunning tricks.
(Oppian > Dettienne)


fox's escape = olisthcinein (in greek: an athlete whose body, rubbed with oil, slips through the grasp of his adversary)


--Detienne--> *it was not in nature that the Greeks found this type of reversal behavior in animals, but rather in their own minds (in the conception that they formed of metis)*
(metis is not something that is “out there”? ---> go to ajayeb bestiary)


octopus
(to the Greeks) octopus = a knot made up of a thousand arms, a living, interlacing, network, a poluplokos being (coil چنبره snake with its coils and folds, labyrinth, Typhon: multiple creature “with a hundred heads” whose trunk tapers out into its eel-like limbs)
*octopus mechane: enables it to merge with the stone to which it clings
*octopus logos: poluplokos
-it too knows how to disappear into the night, but it is a night which it can itself secrete (the ink, this dark cloud, this impenetrable night which defines one of the essential features of the octopus and of the cuttlefish)--> *pathless night* --> metis: only they can discover a poros
cephalopod -->  *oblique creatures*: they have neither front nor rear, they swim sideways with their eyes in front and their mouth behind, their heads haloed by their waving feet ==> confusion of directions --> aporia (aporai)


living traps --> they exploit a device (that Plutarch calls) sophisma: fish lurer


fox + octopus --define-->
•a type of human behavior: *present a different aspect of yourself to each of our friends*(!)
•a model for a form of intelligence (i call it *coiled intelligence* هوش مارپیچ) --trap--> the net in which his adversary becomes entangled [=/= chamaeleon: metamorphoses produced by fear]




fox + octopus --> *master of bonds*
[*]bond = weave + twist
[*]net: invisible (mesh of) bonds <-- favorite technique of metis


arm = bond
every part of its body is a *bond* which can secure anything (but nothing can seize)


*fox = a living bond* (can bend, unbend, reverse its own position at will)


Oppian is all about bonds, ropes, cords
pieces are joined end to end to form the “well twisted withies” (which the good hunter always carries with him)


Hermes: living web of interweaving (sumplekein), stations himself *close to the door*, mobile as the mime


[*]lecture-performance: art of (bending and) interweaving logos


the fisherman's “cloud” is the unyielding answer to the “cloud” of the cuttle-fish
*It is only by himself becoming, by means of his net, a bond and a circle, by himself becoming deep night, endless aporia, an elusive shape, that the man of metis can triumph over the most cunning species in the animal world.*
(Detienne)


[*]metis: intelligence which operates in the world of becoming, in circumstances of conflict = forethought perspicacity + quickness and acuteness of understanding + trickery + deceit


[*]trap = polymorphism (the opposite of what it seems to be)
dolos mechanos


(Detienne's research: recognize and explain -->) stability of terminology


world of appearance + Becoming


by means of rhetorical ploys sophist can make the weaker argument triumph over the strong ---> go to Kelile Demne cunning intelligence


(dolos -->) [*]cunning: woven, braiding or interlacing, *fitted together* <-- ***ancient techniques that use the pliability and torsion of plant fibers to make knots, ropes, meshes and nets to surprise, trap and bind*** <-- the idea that ***many pieces can be fitted together to produce a well-articulated whole*** (~=? art)


pliability انعطاف
polymorphism
duplicity + equivocality
inversion + reversal
}--> *attributes of curve*


ultimate expression of curve --> the “O”, circle: the bond that is perfect because it completely turns back on itself, is closed in on itself, with neither beginning nor end, front nor rear, and which in rotation becomes both mobile and immobile, moving in both directions at once
--> giving birth to its opposite
“machines” --> properties of the circle


-gu --> used to indicate curving
-kamp --> used to refer to whatever is curved, pliable or articulated
the fossil of fire goes back before the wild-life

the history of fire related to the history of forest

In the 1950s, government officials in Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca--in southern Mexico--blamed forest destruction upon the local indigenous communities. Fire, as a symbol of disorder, became the target of state control and the subject of a state-sponsored discourse of environmental degradation. [...] Fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. [...] The vision of fire as destructive, part of the state narrative [...] How has the memory of the traditional use of fire by indigenous communities been suppressed? [...]State political myth has obscured community memories of fire as a force in the forest, and as a tool for human use. [...] Why the indigenous communities of the Sierra Juarez no longer talk about the long-term history of their forests. Clearly, the communities internalized parts of the state-sponsored degradation discourse. (However, discourse analysis is not enough; it is all too easy to treat discourse as a monolithic structure of ideas[...] ) [...] These discourses require a threat, a source of chaos and disorder to which the moral regeneration of the progressive discourse can provide a solution. In the case of the Sierra juarez, forest fires provide this opposition. [...] It is exactly this resistance of the natural world to discursive domination that is one of the themes of this article. [1]

[1]ANDREWSA LVADORMA THEWS - suppressing FIRE AND MEMORY: ENVIRONMENTALDE GRADATIONAN D POLITICALRE STORATION INT HES IERRAJ UAREZO F OAXACA, 1887-2001

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Jinn older and Man

ecology of the Jinn


(Qur'an)
raging fire
scorched by burning fire
striking sparks of fire
and roasting at hell-fire
the fire of Allah, kindled
...



bringing together of two homogeneous blocks of material in a given, already-inhabited space

as if we knew what space and time mean



“the desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice. [...] the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.” (Meloy)
(what the design of fire is as expression of? what shaped fire? ice?)
(we are shaped also by fire)

how you go from lizard to bird?
it must have been through the behavior of lizard that ‘birdness’ has come to be possible. a certain trait of behavior have allowed the lizard find itself in the air.


ice age
story of fire, story of grass, ...

after the establishment of a land-based flora (Middle Ordovician period, 470 million years ago) and permitting the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere it permitted the possibility of wildfire.

Fire also became more abundant when grasses radiated and became the dominant component of many ecosystems, around 6 to 7 million years ago;

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electrical fire



conflict between the “junk” and the “text” that seemed to fascinate

...................................

how to write cold with fire? the medium of fire is incompatible with that of the paper. paper burns fire off! the combustion emerging elements energized by their contact fuels a sudden blow of increase in their excited entropy. flame. action is the breeze that death digs. foam knows no halt. the focus is noised and seeds location. place penetrates in shattery nozzles originating from thousands of nowheres. inferno's insurance is about aggression of hot.

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A) Accident, Action, Adrenaline, Aggressive, Aid, Aircraft, Alarm, Alert, Ambulance, Apprehension, Arson, Ash, Assess, Assist
B) Bad, Barricades, Battle, Blacken, Blame, Blanket, Blast, Blaze, Blister, Blow out, Breeze, Burning, Burns, Bystander
C) Car, Careless, Catastrophe, Caution, Challenge, Char, Chimney, Choice, Claim, Conflagration, Consume, Consumption, Contain, Control, Coordination, Crackle, Crash
D) Damage, Death, Destruction, Detect, Dig, Direction, Dirty, Dispatch, Drama
E) Electrical, Embers, Emergency, EMT, Engulf, Experience, Explode, Extinguish
F) Facts, Failure, Fared, Fascination, Fell, Fierce, Fire-break, Firefighter, Fireplace, Flames, Flammable, Flash, Foam, Focus, Fright, Fuel
G)
H) Halt, Happening, Holocaust, Home, Hose, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
K) Kindle, Knowledge
L) Laboring, Life-threatening, Lightening strike, Limitations, Lives, Location, Losses, Luck
M) Malfunction, Matches, Mechanical, Medical attention, Memory, Mesmerize, Misery
N) Needs, Nine-one-one, Noise, Nozzle
O) Observe, Odor, Ordeal, Origin
P) Paramedic, Penetration, Place, Police, Potency, Potential, Prevention, Progress, Prone, Pumps
Q) Quench, Quick
R) Reaction, Repellent, Requirement, Residue, Risk
S) Safety, Scenario, Set, Shatter, Shelter, Siren fire truck, Situation, Smell, Smoke, Smoke jumper, Smokey the Bear, Smoldering, Smother, Sprinkler system, Statement, Stop, Strategy, Strength, Stressful, Stretcher, Suffering, Susceptible, Swath
T) Tactic, Target, Terror, Thick, Threaten, Trailer, Training, Trees, Trench
U) Uncontrolled, Urgent
V) Victim, Vigilant, Volunteers
W) Watch, Water, Weakness, Weather, Wilderness, Wind, Worse
X) X-ray
Y) Yelling
Z) Zone



(Ajayeb)
Know! That I saw in fire many benefits, insomuch benefits that ‘he’ set in fire, the intellects of India and Greece erred and prostrated this fire-thing and this betrayal stayed in magus [Zoroastrians] and they became fire-worshiper until it became certain that the God's guidance offers and just with reason alone work cannot be done fully and if they worship fire of its benefits then in mud there is more benefits than that and in water more benefits than there is in fire and if The Creator wants to make wanderers of a folk he infects them with a substance as he infected the Indians with worshiping cow and Christians with worshiping the hoof of Christ's donkey and the pagans with worshiping idol and matter
and we shall mention the attributes of fire and its properties:
Know! That fire has taken the whole world of universe and no stone and no wood is not uncharged with fire. If a fool takes a piece of wood and asks “where is fire?” I say the way of everything is in manifestation as when two woods strike together made of Margh and Afar,[1] fire will appear or hit stone to metal

[1] According to Jashn-e Sadeh recalls the importance of light, fire and energy; light which comes from God is found in the hearts of his creatures. --> Hushang and the origin of fire

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we are too abstract, we are thinking yes there are things out there wild or whatever. then we must be surprise to see that the abstract far thing is made of flesh, quartz, or fire.

unlike camels and rats and sheep, other four legged or mammals, fire is not designed for something, the way organisms evolved to have meanings and representations to each other. fire embodies a vast place in our material and industrial and semiotic world but itself is not a creature of evolution. it knows nothing of symbiogensis nor of molecular compartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.

every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work

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(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> databases that survive --> promises of futurity --> tech --> black-box is always about the-envelope and the-beyond --> going back to the cave --> monotheism invented darkness (praying in the dark marked singulaity of worship as the begining of subjectivity) --> there is a sudden big shift from telling-stone to talking-fire (introducing the spectacularization of truth-event, where risky aesthetic of fire coded as masculine is traded for a mutuality of slower wilderness a more feminine trope. the telling-stone proposes a totally different ecological model than the survivorship narratives encoded in the trial of the talking-fire. truth became untouchable visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is beginning to loosen its materiality --> accumulation of synonyms (before language) --> metaphors given birth slowly --> from the Pleistocene to Ordovician --> the accumulation of oxygen --> fire was permitted to exist --> etc.
(keeping a fire burring for a long time is a very strange thing to do. it is utterly Paleolithic to do keep fire, making it stone. it was Muhammad who turned off the lights, literally. when he was born, one the oldest Zoroastrians fire temples suddenly extinguished for no apparent reason. the blessed dark. the box, fire, both are means to have access to the inaccessible. #Muhammad inception/birth had to be connected to a supernatural event.)

(talking) fire --> speech
(telling) stone --> written

in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.

(fire suppressing) an older ecology of reflection (namely the stone)

the telling stone is the same as spirit stone(?)---non-animal container (@Karin)
(stone is related to the spirits of the ground. the prisoner who throw a pebble into the pit, the pebble's sound is going to tell about the depths and darknesses that the human, on death sentence, does not have a long enough rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” (related to the earthly stone =/= fire that perpetually evacuates) (it is not that of the introvert stone and the extrovert fire, but the opposite, stone was social and fire allied interiority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject comes from? it comes from the mediation.) --> use me --> industrialize with me --> technologize with me --> stone-tech are 1.5 million years earlier than fire-tech --> with stone you can't reach the sky but by controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)

we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)

“After you die, others live.” (Sina)

old world's arboreal simians, monkeys

Anthropos

cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world.

Agonic / Hedonic --> my Köln group, agonistic doctrine challenges that mode of personality

ontogenesis---extended in human (the specialized and scheduled development of physical and psychological traits that appear, disappear, or stagnate during the life cycle of the individual.) --> Neoteny (a “state of newness"--a retardation of certain parts of the maturing process.) preprograms life stages, so that our becoming is a lifelong process.
-developement of the self in terms of harmonious relations to other species and nunhumans.
-ontogenetic agenda --- (The agenda is a given; the support depends on a social readiness to nurture, itself a product of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths correspond to the ontogenesis. in Ontogeny, timing is everything---narrative.
-aspect of the ontogenetic self---(the modern world has lost the ways to guide the) new person emerging at each stage
[from kinfolk complexity and elderhood to medically sustained old age] -- i myself have turned to old folk to do storytelling, as necessity(!?)

one emerging in Pleistocene, is about perceiving one's place in the scheme of things (and not sending people down the pit into darknesses)

WE NOT ONLY LOOKED ‘AT’ ANIMALS, WE ALSO LOOKED ‘INSIDE’ THEM, realizing that they were more kin than indicated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)

attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)

inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.

human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic

(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes

Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

trees structure space

**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)

“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]

mammalian ecology

[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]

a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)

a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity

secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)

(with our) hopes and tropes

boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]

humans’ mimetic participation with fire

infinitely complex affinities



to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller.) so talking is about the talker and telling is about the told, the ear.
(you *ask fire questions, but you *listen to stone what it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since you are under its spectacularity and authority, superior to the (inflammable) world, became the domminent contemplated object, administrating conditions of existence, you can never touch the fire, you can never become ‘bodies’ with fire, it is immune from human activity, endusing one-way communication (auto-governed gusture of comminution), garanteeing an abstract condition of hierarchical power. but stone ‘is’ for touching and bodying, sensuous touch is the matter of stone, intimacy*, sensuous intimacy with the stone, sensuous proximity)
---(rock in water : reef)
-transcontextual; transcontextuality = tanglement {figures running in opposit directions but held together}


nature is a context
*past is a context

*the landscape is full of ghosts (whether we want it or not)
mediated forms

Some examples of exothermic processes:
-spontaneous combustion (~= fire)
-Nuclear fusion (~= sun)
-(in this writing, i am going to take a defenition of fire recovering it from bible, that of the spectacle flame that of the material of specter in the Qur'anic Jinn, and not other forms of exothermic processes)

the issue is reversibility
(“evolution” inevitable? Irreversible?)


[title]
•A Materialist Inquiry into the Beyond
•A Mineral Inquiry into the Beyond
•Genealogy of a Worship: Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone
•Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone - Genealogy of a Worship
•Ajayeb-e Atash
•Fire and the Transcendental Subject
•Zolmat and the Appropriation of the Elsewhere
•Fire and Different Internals of Being
•Black-Box and other Human Extensions



genealogy of a worship (fire)
how can one pray ‘to’ animals? (~ prey upon them)
how can one pray ‘to’ elements?

amenity (of stone) (=/= enmity of fire)



*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory of defeat; transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest;) is exactly the cancelation of an agonistic notion of defeat (in Shahnameh: dishonor = defeat --> the defeated = the monster, the ‘Div’)
‘agon’ in Latin literaly means arena of competition, the scene of contest--meydan? what would be (the instrumental) relation to the mode of destruction in Shahnameh's kind of fire?


Indo-Iranian register of fire worship (around 1500 BC)
-fire burns (ever) upwards
(Sadeh festival, Shahnameh, Iran)
-Sadeh: fire-related festivals celebrated throughout Greater Iran and date back to when Zoroastrianism was still the predominant religion of the region. (Wikipedia)


Lindsey Collins [on intersection of illness and landscape]
wilderness therapy (in cancer activism)
a feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity
-recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies ==> ecologies

“recovery climbs = embodied practices of resilience + interrelation” =/= survivorship narrative

(for Woolf) illness: emergence of new landscape (you discover “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life)



fire's dictatorship in Siyavash story, a fire's aspect as instituted social order

*trial by fire
trial by mountain [~= rock] (slow wilderness) -- suffering and healing in difficult landscapes (Lindsey Collins - phd) -->{climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with disease --- wilderness therapy creates what she calls a **slow wilderness,** in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity. -- it is about making permeable bodies (+and landscapes through their interactions.) --- climb: embodied practices of resilience and interrelation ==> a different ecological model: working with the limits and obstacles that illness brings =/= repudiating illness in favor of ***survivorship narratives***} --> there is a moment in Shahnameh highlighting this narative---can we look at the story of Siyavash, his fire-trial, against Sudabeh? Siyavash raised by masculine figure Rostam cannot love the feminine processes of Sudabeh, (she wants him, in an experimental [sex] erotic participation, her attempt at melting his moral ice, which we later find out fire cannot melt***) to break the fabric of obligation (his intense commitment to the father-king combination) =/= tribalism, betraying the patriarchal arrest (the myth of a single god/father and patriarchal faithfulness - *the myth of the strong personality*) ==> Siyavash--patriarcal type of guy who doesn't know how to greet her snaky figure politly--excuses himself of a vital encounter and sustains an ascetic subtraction, and lets Ferdosi--alwayes on God-Fire's side--execute Sudabeh through the bad boy Rostam hyper-masculinity itself. Siyavash/Rostam is utterly non-queer, Siyavash: Rostam's pet project, domesticated, passes the exam. Sudabeh is shocked and screwed-over by the narrative and spectacularisation of the fire's truth-event in an “enactment” plotted by Ferdosi--she is done, she doens't have a deal with fire. She is accused of being Eros, of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality, the chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scold, the toothless crone her mouth wind-full of speech.
smell of Sudabeh: moshk, golab, sharab, infinite odors--she is ‘full of it.’ drugs, toxins, rumorous texts, etc. smell of Siyavosh: nothing. neutral. sober. his silence-treatment appeals to the big father. (king's nose. smelling as justuce method? objective observation, provisional logic of nose, smell of smoke, and fire)
Rostam takes no delight in Sudabeh's voice since its register is nothing sweet nor low.
Siyavash corresponds to a set of idioms and is enraptured in the movement of certain silences in which he can grasp only certain falsehoods or menaces.
so Siyavash is ready to go to-the-fire but not to-the-woman.
(never hesitant, even kills his own son by ignoring his signals) Rostam never daird to look the devil in the eyes (---Sudabeh had?)

the Sudabeh's case is a non-agonistic agon, not to be fooled by its decieving differences from Rostam's combats--both are competition as a form of exclusion. in her case we see forms of social conflict in gender, class, race, and even material relations, (she is not relating to fire) leading to her losing the boy's game.

under the barbarous mathematics of Rostam, her figure fades into aspects and grammar of men,

fire signaling essence, essencing being (of her, his, it)
[things are still essencing at the distance---what Rostam radically is unable to understand]

(a network of relations and nonrelations depends on the way we address how Ferdosi greets Sudabeh, failed in the exam and examination ==> fire creating a network of relations [Rostam, Siyavosh,] and nonrelations [Sudabeh, King,])
-what are the conditions enabling the delivery of the Sudabeh [to the beyond (of Shahname)]? (of greeting her?) which poetic sites [we don't want to enroll]? (we don't want to enroll in Rostam's department. the tragic hero, he ‘hits’, always after to save his sovereign, good at haft-khan, ending beasts [we are interested in the beasts, and not in his “seven” trails], so hurried in killing that he finshes his own son, not invincible to treachery and that is his end. but what was treachery again? (in Shahnameh) anything other than athletism and boys sord play: female “mouth”)
-Ferdosi resisting any project of fusional gathering
[unlike Sudabeh, Tahmineh--Rostam's wife--was after having a child with him. she gets a pass, passing Ferdosi's test of maternity. is Sudabeh's fault that she doesn't want to mother? And Rudabeh wants Zal az far as he plays the classic male role model in stealing her?]

[there is a moment in Shahname when it conjoins women and [disgust?], enmeshing them] [and why am i taking upon myself to defend woman? interrupting the abyssal enjoyment of the poem in punishing Sudabeh?]----of Ferdosi not allowing a feminine drift and deviation, from the Law. ***it's Father Time.
--> am i reclaiming otherness by enforcement? (recover her? =/=? understand her) why zoom in her? why teaching myself how to trust and desire her? (allowing myself being lured by her. why it is imperative to let ourselvse to be lured by the “her-idea”?) (is Ferdosi mobilizing forces in iranian hearts? militarize them? “jang-avari”) (the point is not to take critical power in disclaming the fire that valorized Siyavash and then take Sudabeh's side. rather the point is to energize the experiences of metamorphic transformation that animated fire of the fire-temple in the mind of Ferdosi. by participating in Sudabeh's case, her assemblage, i am also recovering my own capacity to care for Ferdosi's fire too and accept being mystified by its telling flames. [end of Sudabeh part])

in a world where humans were increasingly rendered particularly lively (than the creatures without nervous systems ~= objects) with intense awarenesses, fire seemed to be even more lively, with an access to a/its/the beyond
(from stone as a fellow being to the fire the authority figure---by the end of Pleistocene)

(Jesus) will baptize you with fire. (the Old Believers)


moses in fire: stop the representation! stop the constant demonstration! show me body! show me a flesh i can feel! put your hand in the fire moses! i am that which is not burning your hand. i am what that lies beyond. you are my creation, you are of mediation. if your body was my creation, your hand would burn.
it is told that Zaratustra had a fire that was everlasting and would not burn.

باور ‘bavar’ ba+var (var = tested ~= just or fairly judged)
Ibrahim's case is a *warm var

water trial, drowning women to examine if they are witches
water+fire trial -- azmun-e ab-o-atash آزمون آب و آتش



The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian Period witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Fish, arthropods, amphibians, anapsida, synapsida, euryapsida and diapsida all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean but eventually transitioned onto land, and by the late Paleozoic, it was dominated by various forms of organisms. Great forests of primitive plants covered the continents, many of which formed the coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. Towards the end of the era, large, sophisticated diapsida and synapsida were dominant and the first modern plants (conifers) appeared.

The Paleozoic Era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic extinction event. The effects of this catastrophe were so devastating that it took life on land 30 million years into the Mesozoic to recover.[4] Recovery of life in the sea may have been much faster.[5]

[4] Sahney, S. & Benton, M.J. (2008). “Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time” (PDF). Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological. 275 (1636): 759-65. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1370. PMC 2596898free to read. PMID 18198148.
[5] http://www.economist.com/node/16524904 The Economist



not a naturalistic schema of the geometry of hot point, nor a geometric schema of naturalistic fire.



i am loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from greek geometric,) i am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (in the San'an text, the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced.)



greet and grid you

...................................

a word on anxiety*

For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, anxiety deals with “nothingness.” It is a breakdown of both world and self. For Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest of a piece of the world is expressed in the tendency towards order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity. Deleuze and Guattari echo this diagnosis when they claim that striation is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies and erects the constancy and eternity of an in-itelf.

[can we say that the whole enterprise of the beyond is a striation of the unkowable, motivated by anxeity?]

The affect can be inhibited; it can remain in consciousness but attached to another idea, or it can undergo transformation, notably into anxiety.

automatic anxieties

poetry of the others

...................................

my text, like Mohsen Feyz (one of the most brilliant students of Mullah Sadra) will wait for me at the end, greet me at the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat وعده‌گاه قیامت (The Resurrection, The Last judgment)

like Mohsen Feyz (one of the most brilliant students of Mullah Sadra,) I hope to meet again this text as it is waiting for me at a “beyond” that Mullah Sadra beautifully and rigorously theorized. At the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat, at The Resurrection, The Last judgment, this text will greet me, as all writing is resurrected and approaching their authors, while we tremble together to the other-side.
#For those who love stones.



better that your tomb be the hearts of men


a symbolic geography of the land of fireplaces, poses a landscape which creats its own generation of eyes.

their minds each a fireplace

...................................

Sohrevardi, in one of his stories, proposes a creature in darkness with no senses, blind and deaf. still he recieves a mail, an incoming call, in the dark.

elsewhere, the agency of fire (khasiate fa'ale atash) <-- bizari az khala (abhorrence of vacuum/void?)

the extraordinary honor of fire is because of its ability to move more sublime than any other. fire is related to movement. stillness is darkness and lack of ‘cause’ --> if you move, you create the ‘cause’ of movement in the world, in the beings that sense that movement, interpret it, and absorb your movement: the movement is semiotic, because it generates/proposes/sustains/initiates causality--not in the sense that your movement has consequence, but it that it risks semiotically in the eyes of the beholder a causation ‘of’ movement prior to the mover.

tabiate atash shabihe jan ast (nature of fire is like essence of life)

(for ancient iranians) fire became thus Qibla

fire: atashe mahsus (sensable fire,) khalife anvare maghul (deputy of intellectual illuminations)
(not stewardship?)

(Empedocles) “only with fire fire can be seen.”

...................................

(what complicates?) the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions

the expansive fields of immanence and trancendence we can read in fire fossil


our contract with Allah

with fire we are at a testing site, at least of the the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture, fire is a testing device for subsidiary admission policy. this function or figure is precisly that which permeats modern existance

...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification

contaminative and communicative

...................................

in talking about our agreements with fire, i like to read how our rapport to the beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)

what kind of grid the fire produces?

beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***

testability? we want everyone and everything tested

after testing the fire...

monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,

[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness


the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire

what ciruits are installed by this?

how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?

what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?

what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?

how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)

interpretation <--?--> experience

fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation


...................................

[Serres]

technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]


siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)


transsubstantiation

...................................

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

...................................

against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs about stone triggering often ideas of rigidity ~= stupidity:
aghlesh par-sang barmidare عقلش پاره سنگ برمیداره (crazy, imagination, thinking, excess,)
divane sangi be chah miandazad... دیوانه سنگی به چاه می اندازد... (stupidity, tool, irreversibility, questions of agency and responsibility,)
naravad mikhe ahanin dar sang نرود میخ آهنین در سنگ (stupidity, penetration,)
shamshir bar sang azmudan شمشیر بر سنگ آزمودن (uselessness, stupidty, destruction, test, inattention,) [~= shekar zire ab penhan sakhtan (شکار زیر آب پنهان ساختن --> story of the apes, Buzinegano Kerme Shabtab بوزینگان و کرم شبتاب) ~= mosht dar tariki zadan مشت در تاریکی زدن]
sang az pase divar andakhtan سنگ از پس دیوار انداختن (uselessness, wrongness, chance,)
pay dar sang amadan پای در سنگ آمدن (random trouble, naturaly unforseen hardship, cripeled,)
sang dar kise kardan سنگ در کیسه کردن
del dar sang shekastan دل در سنگ شکستن (to keep quite, benefit of silence, resist speaking the rumorical utterence,)
dele sang دل سنگ (cold-hearted,)
آتش از دل سنگ بیرون آوردن atash az (ضمیر چوب zamire chub va) dele [darune] sang birun avardan (possiblity through work, interrogatory turture,)
sang سنگ =/= la'l لعل --how?--> sang (in Pahlavi) ~= value
sang سنگ =/= abgine آبگینه (glass, mirror, sky, diamond,) (سنگ آبگینه sange abgine: a rock to create mirrors with, abgine ze sang mizayad--khaghani آبگینه ز سنگ می زاید)
sange emtehan سنگ امتحان, az sang birun amadan از سنگ بیرون آمدن, bar sang zadan بر سنگ زدن (trial, test, valuate, messure, quality check,) --?--> related to mine and mineral that gave metal and gold (in many parts of iran sang is the unit of messurment for water ---> go to Dehkhoda) (sang is just a mean to put other things in weight, due to its abundance and nonshiny surface in front of reflective materials: diamond, water, etc.)
sang dar darya andakhtan سنگ در دریا انداختن (positive chance, relying on destiny, butterfly effect, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang andakhtan سنگ انداختن (causality, scale, benefiting from the nature, lever, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang bendaz baghalet baz she سنگ بنداز بغلت باز شه (stupidity, uselessness, unrewarded hardship, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang az mum sakhtan سنگ از موم ساختن (impossibility, stupidity, wrongness,)
sang bar shishe zadan سنگ بر شیشه زدن = not drinking wine anymore (breaking the wine glass) (sometimes stone has come to mean the wine glass itself: sang ~= bade باده)

sange ghali سنگ قالی (to put a rock on an iranian carpet so the wind doesn't take it away. the stone is invited into the culture. doesn't matter why. it is there sitting with us.)

as a unit of measurement, it apears that in farsi stone associates with quantitative nature, and in Ajayeb (therefore) fire with qualitative production of nature(?)
atash is pure quality
sang has no quality, it has only quantity
---this is undermind:
a trip to the archive of stones, muze jawaherat tehran (Treasury of National Jewels موزه جواهرات ملی ایران)
ahjare nafise احجار نفیسه (diamond, gold, etc.)
ahjare karime احجار کریمه (zomorod زمرد, yaghut یاقوت, la'l لعل, etc.)


exposure to its antibodies
risks contamination

...................................

(to address) unmarked territory and unmarked destiny

...................................

stones tell destinies, they are old old old, they are carriers of memory, witnesses of the past, no to wipe out its rough-edged remainders

another take on rock: Stromatolite (are the real telling stone, once bacteria) --> fossilization (~= stone) {structure, morphology,
(gaining sale [Stromatolite is bacteria preying] --> predation --> Multicellularity)
-distinguish between biologically formed and abiotic stromatolites is (hopefuly) still open
•a stromatolite from 2000 million years ago made by a comunity of bacteria, the same bacterial who produced oxigen (that we have in the atmosphere today) (Lynn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlxqeSXyPd8)
•landscape made by bacteria: cyanobacteria became the first microbes to produce oxygen by photosynthesis. (although the excess of free oxygen was toxic to anaerobic inhabitants, therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth's history.)

Stromatolites (/stroʊˈmætəlaɪts, strə-/[1][2]) or stromatoliths (from Greek strōma, str?ma, mattress, bed, stratum, and ?????, lithos, rock) are layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria.[3] Fossilized stromatolites provide ancient records of life on Earth by these remains, some of which may date from 3.7 billion years ago.[4][5] Lichen stromatolites are a proposed mechanism of formation of some kinds of layered rock structure that are formed above water, where rock meets air, by repeated colonization of the rock by endolithic lichens.[6][7] (Wikipedia)


*oxygen

[img https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxygenation-atm-2.svg]

O2 build-up in the Earth's atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago (Ga).
Stage 1 (3.85-2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere. The oceans were also largely anoxic with the possible exception of O2 gases in the shallow oceans.
Stage 2 (2.45-1.85 Ga): O2 produced, and rose to values of 0.02 and 0.04 atm, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock.
Stage 3 (1.85-0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. There was no significant change in terms of oxygen level.
Stages 4 and 5 (0.85-present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.[1]

[1] Holland, Heinrich D. “The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903-915.


metazoan phyla : animal

history of life is tight to hisory of oxygen --> fire
Aerobic metabolism is more efficient than anaerobic pathways

Abiogenesis: the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing


*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)


(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire

...................................

[with Guy Debord]

fire media theoretic

‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)

(its social practices)

fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”

therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it

thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)

[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)

fire's mechanisms of contemplation

(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)

it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity

mystic order ~?-> spectacular order

the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real

diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame

what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond

(fire, we are) governed by its agenda

***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)

-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence


from vision to wisdom
categories of visulaity took human cognition hostage, gave rise to a metaphysical tradition/abundance imposing itself upon existence, regulating the perception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead

abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance

...allegiance to the frozen

(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]

still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)

fire, transforms the world, not in terms of changing manifest matriality, rather the mind and thinking

fire in its temporal animation renders space fixated, giving the illusion that (visual) animation = life {~= spectacle}


the fire spectacle colonizing our participation with the beyond, colonizing the way our flux of senses make tentative contact with the other sides,
(what a stone suggests? the senses that never stop participating, never stop throwing themselves beyond the immediatly visible)

every phase of existence

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[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” Rumi wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mullusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality [~-> mutation is not random])

(Waddington then launched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.

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...a perceptual game of risking linearity, collapsing discovery and jurisdiction (a judiciary not a branch of any map of governance)

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(Haraway on Burning Man:) Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, te killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire is our times are at stake.
[]three icons (suggestions by Haraway, three “-cene” tuned tor the touch of its critters):
1- ‘missing ice’ of the Capitalocene
2- ‘flame’ of the Anthropocene
3- ‘red clay pottery’ of the Cthulucene




(Conley >) Rosolato treats perspective in terms of the origins of sensuous affect:
infant's projective activity + infant closes its eyes to fend off menace, hence negotiating with the real in a space and time prior to the mirror stage

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The artful sandwich of Rostam-rock-div provides a thinking mode of who-caries-who: whose being is dependent on whose existence. The earth that the Rostam is laying on, is sacred, on the hands of an ancient creature, who has a very delicate way of “wounding” very much different than Rostam’s quick hit-man style.[23] The div does not “end” Rostam as efficiently as the protagonist might have done it, but introduces the intermediate being of the lithic and the riddle. The div engages in a game. Rostam wants to kill. Finish a job.

The techno-sci-story of the bacteria producing the air, earth and mitochondria,[24] is the one I like to delink-with the Rostam of Shahnameh from its chain of meanings and relations to the div that he must kill. The Rostam-stone-div compilation is about the abyssal div’s death-forming and life-forming powers. Rostam, himself coming from certain transvaluative body-buildings, is taking a nap on a billion-years-old stromatolite. Is the div’s self a form of fossilization story of the now? “Do you want to go to the mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.

The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.

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“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy

more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*

[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized

Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥

Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”

better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)

(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature


(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness

“do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”


in my work the technique of storytelling: to create a stage for a wider out-of-control explosion of gesticulating arms

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    “wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need you attention. unplug your modem. slam shut your self-help books. quit standing around like a wall trout. get to work.
    invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed racoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
    mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
    let black widows live in your soffits.
    lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
    admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
    crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
    take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these things so that we may speak.
    the human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
    close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware ont only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote bi[...]