[...]xtortionist
return of the dead --> disappearance --> ghost
return of desire --> obsession --> stalker
return of pain --> infection --> virus
return of the discarded --> waste --> vagrant
return of glory --> vindication --> fighter
return of the scene --> concealment --> criminal
return of dust --> mortality --> creation
return of instinct --> animality --> creature
point of no return --> irreversibility --> lost cause


masochistic skepticism
sadistic truth
(Mohaghegh's) *deception theory*


death of God + death of the Human + death of the Real ==> limitless epochal existential era of lying

existential forgery
ingenuity
deceit
treacherous play
fictive double-crossing
elaboration


(thief's, runaway's, insomniac's, hysteric's, sorcerer's, and other night-traveler's) sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals

morphologies of the night-traveler:
•the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation
•the exiles displaced from occupied homelands
•the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets each night (darkness = ideology)
•the slaughtered minorities traversed into non-being
•night-revelers عیاش
•

militant storyteller
phantom ancestors
phantom offsprings


nightclub: a place of nocturnal survival

club manager
lighthouse-keeper

(catastrophic imagination --> fable of) slum = the true face of the city

persecuted, transient, unrescued

(wunderkammer) a cabinet of curiosities (~/?= pandora's box) of subjects, objects, atmospheres, associates, body parts

ontocidal: decimation of Being, both individual and universal


medieval islamic world renders us countless templates linking night to sacred and profane realms: stories of augury, mantic beings, and vatic utterances in circulation from all sides

Thousand and One Nights
god's turbulent relation to obscurity

crescent moon

...brilliant speculative accomplishment of the Golden Age of Islamic Thought now a dark age of its own

معراج miraj (Mohaghegh's Dante's ascension)
sky-voyage of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upwards into heavenly spheres, filled with supernatural descriptive passages of guardian angels, paradisiac gardens, hell-bound valleys, meteorological orbits, fatal latitudes and meridians, and the gargantuan throne of God itself

night-journey: spiritual + corporeal --> prophetic night (of strange breathing apparatus <-- angelic wing)

angel's wing [that spans entire worlds] --reopens--> (the relational channel between) desire & fear
(descriptions of seeing an angel's body)
==> sarin, cyclosarin, tabun, soman
==> respiratory failure, diaphragm hyperactivity, fainting, pupil constriction, salivation, myoclonic jerks (muscle spasms), cardiac arrest
}--> synaptic breakdown ==> cholinergic crisis --> captive in a state of poisonous ventilation

buraq: a chimera of: animality + humanoid + gemological (multiplicies) + machinic + vegetal + spectral (virtues) =/= taxonomical purity of creation
•stretch the barometers of hybridity, androgeny, disproportionality
•zig-zagging, levitation, elliptical arcing
•like a horse, smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey. Its face was like a human's face, and its ears were like the ears of an elephant...Its head was of ruby, its wings of pearl, its rump of coral, its ears of emerald, and its belly of red coral. Its eyes were like glittering stars, and its tail of pearl, and its reins of light
--> vehicle to traverse from geographical to cosmological space

journey-to-the-center or exile-to-the-edge

[title]
*the old-hag world*
being-in-the-world = old hag with an ugly face, practice of seduction, artifice, cosmetic embellishment, optical tricks, enhancements

the designer, the seamstress, the architect, the sculptor, the illusionist, the surgeon, the perfumer --> surat صورت =/=? facade

[infernal-geological finale]
I heard a voice, whose intensity caused me to tremble with fear…I said, “O Gabriel, what is this terrible sound?” He answered, “O Muhammad, know that on that day God created hell, a rock slipped from the edge of hell. Until tonight it's been falling down. It has reached the bottom of hell just now.
#darkness, zolmat, rock
•pit's conceptual trinity
•hearing/listening is closely linked to ominous experience (the bell's toll, the wolf's howl, the thunder's rumble)


some passive surrender to vague faith
any suggestion of intuitive-experiential awareness (gnosis)

subject caught-between

sitophobia --> the fear of eating anything
aquaphobia --> the fear of drowning everywhere

between lamenter and euphoriac

islamic insistence on the concealed (unseen face of God) ==> profuse dissension, variance, discord, agitation (infinite faces)

lohe mahfuz
the guarded tablet
quantification
institutionalized record
universal finitude

1. artifacts of hell
◦camphor --> link between the demonic and the aromachological (mastery of the psychological effects of fragrance)
◦chain --> experience of ligatures, cords, shackles
◦nail --> impalement potential
◦stones --> crushing effect
◦drink boiling water (hamim) and filth (ghislin)
◦devils force-feeding them Zaqqum
◦demons were placing fiery bits of corpses into their mouths
◦ichor was dripping from their tongues --Mohaghegh--> ichor interestingly refers both to the mythic substance that runs in the veins of pagan gods and the putrid discharge that oozes from fresh wounds
◦hell-dweller: scorpion, ideal killing-machine, back-biter, poisoned tips
--> ***nonstop leaking of the inward outward***
2. body parts of hell
3. topographies of hell

Mohammad's night-journey's hellscape, vivid orchestration of space
[...]in one direction, a “river of bile, blood, worms, and fire[...] boiling together, putrid and revolting” alongside another “black and rippled with fire[...] growling at itself with clamour and terror”

experimental cuisine (demand a certain oblique consciousness from the participant)

angel physiognomy (multi body, collective chant) ~= underworld scorpions
atonal angelic larynx ==> non-harmonic, anarchic, cacophonous image of the heavens (--Mohaghegh--> divinity as noise)
•prophetic listener (body became organs of hearing, schizophrenic audition of شش جهت six directions)

wind of barrenness
rih al ‘aqim (from the species of criminal wind bad-e dabur, God sends it to destroy things)
•blows throughout the placeless realm
•particular condition of absence (in taxonomies of ruin and chasm)
•their moon-like faces
•innumerable

[*]veil: transcendent invisibility, receptacle of competing backstories (of shame, conspiracy, superiority, covert, elite)

galleries of self-covering demonic beings

Gabriel: angel of revelation (oversees:)
•khasf خسف sinking into the ground
•maskh مسخ disfiguration of features


astigmatism (a type of refractive error, retinal tearing)
cartographical layerings



(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)

(old) god [divinity cults of ancient worlds]: signposts of an extra-human imaginary ==> consciousness trespass beyond itself

in the face of the night's obscurity (when the all-seeing shuts its eyes)
pastoral life turns murderous (at dark)

signaling the absence of fairness...
blurring of omniscience...
delay of verdict...
aimlessness of quest

•blindness to fill the void of divination
•wandering, detour, or stillness to fill the void of odyssey


Sin
moon-god
•enigma (“he whose heart cannot be read”) --> epistemic
•futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal

somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)

(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space


in theo-terrestrial plane:
[...]