[...] 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[...]