[...]onsciously tolerable, ad hoc hypothesis: to save it from being falsified [<== introspection illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymical in Jung) transformation of shit into gold. [in Freud: ‘sublimation = plasticity of the sexual instincts’ ~/= in Lacan: ‘sublimation = (usually cosmic?) process of creation in ex nihilo style’ : an object (manufactured or not) defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (empty canvas) --> sublimation ~ dismissal/Verwerfung: obsessional relational behaviour attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness (of Das Ding) ==>? religion/art...
**penis sublimates into seriousness**, adolescence into poetry, emotions into mystical art into dominance,,,]
◦repression/suppression: subduing in the unconscious (under the influence of the superego?)
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)
•

•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
•other defensive mechanisms: compartmentalization, defensive pessimism, exaggeration, minimisation, postponement of affect

*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, reducing anxiety


ego: part of our psyche that is reality based



[title]
methinks

...the absence of mercy

complain =~ elegy =~ prayer (---> desire to future)
(elegy assumes that there is something in the information that makes a difference and not in the receiver of info.)

(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...

(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience

he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت

a fanatical response to the storm


a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]


mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.

sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...

with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?

the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment


(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]

...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas

to become an echo of a profound legacy


we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?

which archive remains in fire throughout?

-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience


an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)


(mysticism) an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.



THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy

the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?

modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..

counter-veiling definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing.

these preferences: on some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?


(this talk might be) a critical rant

(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity

sacred crimes

one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body


never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence

irrational desire of a no-man's land of an eternal immaturity


(an existential evacuation)
committing oneself to erratic wanderings in the desert => translation of a familiar topology into an ontological modality?

the extravagant paradox of proximity and distance
(interiority and exteriority, presence and absence)

civilizational taxonomies (--> versus animist taxonomies, in Attar's animal-birds)



the (sacred boundaries of mysticism) and mystic boundaries of the civilized city
the peripheries of the city became mystic/sacred


mystical channels*


they present worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori

two irrational analytical strands:
(1) to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically imagined space (San'an's biography missing in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya--Attar's obsession with biographies, he is drugged by bios, totally high---he can't let go of them, he cannot detach from the absents, the paternals? his master-complex? has he forgotten to mention his teacher, San'an, in Tazkirat al-Awliya? --Attar is himself San'an? drugged and doped by tastes and spices of his shop, his establishment. OR San'an is Ibn-Sagha (ابن ساقا)? (Ibn-Sagha was a Islamist jurist who lived in Baghdad 11th century, lived Muslim and died christian.) Attar's engagement with remembrance and bios --> is the San'an's narrative also about forgetting? Tazkirat (تذکره) --> Tazakor (تذکر) --> remember! --we are now on how Attar's San'an influences Hafez--(حافظ) The Memorizer. Hafez loves the story of San'an the non-memorizer, San'an loses his ‘hafeze’ (حافظه). (according to Hafez and San'an, the best student is the one who doesn't remember. precisely because they are trying so hard to remind San'an of what they thing ‘he’ is) --> [Indian MATSYENDRANATH amnesia tale, tells the story of a yogi who falls in love with the woman kind--one of his students puts makeup and dances his memory back to him. he must become the woman. there is a queer moment in the origin story of the San'an, which Attar censures(?). he erased his name from the black-list of death-‘the forgottens’, then danced for him as a woman-story-teller. (muse is the mother of memory.) the class struggle has obviously a Bollywood touch to it]-->Attar's source and storage?)
regarding Hafez and San'an, the poet must leave the home, the poet must travel foreign zones, and stay in the foreign. (this is, by the way, Heidegger's reading of the poet.) and that is also one Heideggerian poetic demand that Hafez is failing to reconcile with, when he is turned back, not having the balls to cross the Indian ocean.
(2) importance of an elite rhetorical plane

initiatives towards the horizons of a mystical inquest


(cinematic) mystical landscapes
(what kind of mystical landscapes I am exploring in San'an's story?)


the dominion of the partially unseen


guarding its inner workings and trajectories
(the cinematic openness also is) guarantor of its constant mutability(?)



the exoteric logic of interiority (reigning since centuries in Iran)


for only the buried dimension is sovereign

secrecy =/= lie
(I am a fan of lie and against secrecy)
talk about a theory of lie
(a talk about a theory of violence)



[the issue of: opposite, omen, and alarm (in art)]
omen =/=? artwork
(omen is a phenomenon that is buried to foretell the future, isn't that an attractive trap for artist's self grandiosity?!)
omen has a binary answer
omen =~ ‘audire’ (Latin root, to listen)
omens come in the artistic and poetic production--in the poiesis--when the artist is young: the fabulous age of self-assertion, and he or she starts way to big and later is abandoned or abused by it.


(enforcement of an elusive stance from within) the self-enveloped site of the event----the artworks become closer to omens


at once episodic and veiled, protecting their right to invisibility above all else


(perceive themselves as) the merchants of the unreasoned experience.
(as opposed to the mechanisms of instrumental reason) ---- omens


Literatur(ware)haus
warehouse vs. Haus
(at the house of being)

warehouse of the irrational, a cellar-arena of provocation and unrest

I don't have an eloquent language--I am not in the house of language, but Attar is

transmutative
depthforming


sudden exposure to exile space

a postcultural interaction (?) --with no proximity to the past or known present
(am I trying to create proximity to history in my lectures versus my non-proximity in earlier visual works such as “vagabond” 2011 Tehran)
is that to adopt an ******existence without context******?
(in lectures, am I un-separating myself from my own history?)


*reverie (=the mind flees across secluded planes)

exile space =~ refuge, solitude, immobility =? nondialectics


[on Vagabond] --> http://www.sinaseifee.com/Vagabond.html
-domination of the partially unseen in my own film, ‘vagabond’
-did I believe that only the buried dimension is sovereign?
-continuously interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility
-minimalist side of mysticism --> stillness is a catalyst for acceleration?
-nomadic dispositions
-suspended (=the chasm of self-consciousness)
-


aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy
where is the cinematic-mystical ritual happening?

profound separation from the networks of social reality
the subjects betrays its own history

interrupting the transmission of the episteme


the result of mystic disjointment => a renovated perception of all activity as self-forsaking (Tark-e Nafs? ترک نفس), (such that all locations appear scorched in turn)

stab-through and un-brace one once was

San'an's mechanistic commitments, he need to first book out of a place in order to write text, or to book himself in again
the San'an's poem's ‘Will' = instinct for abandonment and anonymity
is this instinct predicting what Attar will write? or explains *why he writes?
[writing as an act of memory and perform?]

the mystic event is predicted by an instinct for abandonment and anonymity,
at the same time it mutates the urban environment in which it stage its runaways line.
the cityscape is cast into the frenetic rush of this disavowal, to the extent that it becomes the equivalent of the desert

what are the indentitarian qualifiers that San'an wants or needs to chain-break?

to be honest, Attar's San'an's poetry, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions. [he wrote his poem in a time when the highly religious Sheikhs would go to monasteries and get drunk with the non-Muslims, getting high with the nonhuman. it is Seljuq (سلجوق) time, medieval Turko-Persian. The Seljuqs were educated in the service of Muslim courts as slaves or mercenaries. The dynasty brought with itself a sense of revival. Under the Seljuqs, New-Persian became the language for historical recording. Attar (عطار) means herbalist, druggist, perfumist or alchemist, and during his lifetime in Persia, much of medicine and drugs were based on herbs. Therefore, by profession he was similar to a modern-day town doctor and pharmacist. Rose oil means ‘attar’. Attar died a violent death in the massacre which the Mongols inflicted on Nishapur in April 1221.]
-in his Birds epic, he is bringing an instinct coalition that translates all movement into a devouring collectivity --> the logic of their fading (--of the birds) is the same explosively that that fuels their inception, (why the birds must gather in the first place?!)

once-mystical and now-postmodern tribalism (?)

(“I” threatens the nomadic workings of the pack event)
[there is a pack-event in the San'an's students]
self = migratory sensibility of a subjectivity adrift

the exile does not need to exist / the community is desperate to exist (which is why it degenerates into totalitarian declarations--do the San'an's students have that?)
is Attar, in his poetry, obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)? (when he repeatedly tries to synthesize an “authentic” discipleship, ﻣﺮﯾﺪى, Anhängerschaft?, for the San'an's “teachings”) --whereas the exile, the animal, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion --> carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity



رسوایی - using treachery for the sake of vitality
(‘Verrat'--betraying the student, in order to produce truth-event)

going into vicious levels of self-consciousness

between all the lines of statement that Attar constructs, what is being suggested in his music or words?


San'an, taken by otherworldly crafts that signal him to become (gracefully) transfixed

‘naaareh’ - نعره
far cry from the mystic's encounter with divinity

disavowal of (an explicit) narrative (trajectory)


[sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material] *mystic* =/= or? =~ *postmodern* [obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialistic]
is there in postmodernism then an alternative version of mystical experience?
...


feeling like a foreign body, until you find a job?! (Attari as a job)


let's jam on this


this story is prior to psychoanalysis (?)
positionality, placements, displacements

a system that doesn't have access to its own knowledge



historical struggle for the definition of the real


I can't keep clean boundaries


rituals (of promise and contract), (things that) must address anxiety --?--> a religious stamp


what is the San'an text promising the Other? (like every text does, every utterance)
what it cannot *not do?


my childish playful inventiveness and its relationship to weakness.
so I come up week, saying ‘let us do this or that,’ but that is a will to power (?)


we are here to understand the appropriation of meaning.
what does or does not belong to the protocols of reading, etc.

(think in terms of de-appropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when assuming responsibility for the work or thought of another) is that what I am practicing encountering the work of Attar? as an ally or ancestor or an unknown sidetrack of writing


different modalities of love and loving

I guess what I wanted to ask you is your love

I have been teaching Islam to you?! in a shattered and transgressive way
of course this not teach-according-to-definition

of course every demand is the demand for love


the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to be thinking, reading, running after them.
(I am reading the enigma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.


I am taking in terms of constructions and phantasms

everything that comes at you, which is persecutory, is absorbed. that being able to crucified by the other.
doesn't have an experience to fire aggression

is it possible to be kind in a non-manipulative non-cognitive or non-calculative way?

San'an was booked “elsewhere,” he had a transcendental hearing, he had to take a call
[we should here study a ‘hauntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)


از شبح به شیخ

از صنع به صنعان


صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon’ is the ‘visible image’ (in ancient optics and theories of perception) [the visible image is what appears to operate San'an's dream]
-why eidolon has the tendency to become an idol that talks back? (San'an practically encounters an eidolon and converts it to an idol. what Tarsaa asks San'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی‌)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)

[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)

a mapping is going on

his cognitive defend system is down (=/= ‘rend’ رند)
رند =? idiot [~=? the one who cannot be tricked]
[rend: the paragon of indifference; an iconoclast; an informal trickster; prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy; he is forever scorned but *shows no sign of injury*(?!); he is without shame or conformism; he is vivid, energetic, guiltless]

and the question of technology?
how technology breaks up and breaks into all sorts of metaphysical premises

San'an is at a primal scene of aggression?
provoking hostility
there is no sweet device that should supposed to suspend hostility, there is no magic flute in San'an story
why am I taking so many detours? whether this is describable at all

discursive formations

the teacher vs. trainer
the teacher that asks for your interiority**** (love?) any kind of transfers of emotional funds. or other economies of approval

Attar, the great and complicated poet

also my own attachments to certain formations


what kinds of poetic bodies Attar sacrifices?
what cognitive back-up system he uses?
and so on
(the students) cannot cognize (San'an's program)

forecloser, foreclosing you
توقيف

distribution of value, action, and non-action in San'an


to discover San'an where it dwells, what kinds of figures and disfigurations it is responsible for, and what else does it mask culturally?

we also add on cultural anthropological tracks to see which cultures or groups-psychologies practice San'an's teachings and in the service of what--what kind of will to power. because rarely something is practiced and it is not in service of some sort of buffing off a self or something.

(does San'an practice the will to obedience and to listening?)
what (the hell) does he want (from Tarsaa, from her Being)?!!!

to let the other go

I am talking about Attar so we can properly lose him (this is not about finding)
I have to exhaust, frustrate, and abuse my own mystic or non-mystic tendencies and preferences in this
this is kind of a *synonym-finder* machine

we are looking for mutations of San'an's work

after he dreams...
the event (‘vaghee’ واقعه) has (already) happened, he travels to ‘understand’ the “event” and not to ‘find out’ --- (we can also critique ‘event’ or ‘vaghee’ as a violent and omnipotent sublime or a happening-art, versus the fragmented phenomena---associated with femininity)
“tafaroj” (تفرّج) or wondering around in Rome, very different than Sohrevardi's order --> http://sinaseifee.com/sorkh.html
[San'an with a damaged GPS system--why he goes to Italy?]
he is walking the walk,
how does he get through the borders!?
was it a ‘Road to Canossa’?
(Humiliation of Canossa, refers to the trek by Emperor Henry IV from Speyer to Canossa Castle in Emilia-Romagna to obtain the revocation of the excommunication imposed on him by the Pope Gregory VII. He was forced to humiliate himself on his knees waiting for three days and three nights before the entrance gate of the castle, while a blizzard raged in January 1077.)

San'an's event could be that he must encounter the alterity (~= absence of the same) --> he needs the absence of his students and the absence of himself and the absence of his God.

*****Tarsaa takes away San'an's human ID, his masterhood, his members [his parts: his pupils, pencils, penises], (that's why he must remember? his ‘members’ returning to him? what is he composed of anyways?!) [memory is a way consistency maintain itself---are we having a disjunction?] [he makes contact, and contact is the mediu[...]