[...] 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 tribalis[...]