[...]ne 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
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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.”
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(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
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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
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[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
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the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.
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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
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(to address) unmarked territory and unmarked destiny
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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
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[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 s[...]