[...]us the lense on being)
the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe is the prescriptive utterance in the case of ajayeb, the ‘wonders of...’ translated from “ajayeb-e...” triggering the verb “ta'ajob” تعجب
(using Avital's words) But if we were to remain in this mood, then, despite appearances, we would not be awestruck, or even struck, by the [text]: we would have missed the encounter with it. In fact, our astonishment would mean that we took the entity of the ajayeb for an object, one created by an author [...] admire a product [by God] and be pleased by a cultural achievement.----Gazwini is making this mistake with God.
-how can we resist the “ta'ajob” or wonderment in reading ajayeb?
-we would not have allowed ourselves to be greeted by the enlisted creatures of ajayeb, be met by its poetic Greeting.
-reading the promises of ajayeb----(and keep in mind that) everything in the Greeting is offered to the greeted as a sort of promise
Ungleiche is a figure
by getting on top of the material, we have not let it speak its word
(not to master or master over the material of ajayeb)
“If we allow ourselves to be greeted by the poem instead of overwhelming it with our knowledge and facility for reformatting poetry according to cultural or philological codes, then we are faced with the enigma from which the poem cannot be wrested by our acquired habits of mastery.” (Avital on Heidegger's Holderlin's Andenken)
***Mastery is not a content but a habit.***
disposition from knowing is required if we are to let the word of ajayeb speak to us (in the form of greeting)
[as Holderlin announces that the “remains” for which poets are responsible.]----> memory (don't let engineers build you archives! (making it about grounding and historicity, instead:) let the poet be responsible for whatever has “remained.”) [this would be Holderlinian advice]
-inappropriable remainder(s)
memory/remember is sojourn
memory and its (peculiar) temporal climate
-how can we not situate remembrance as mourning? (as Holderlin teaches everyone)
remembrance =/=? joyous festivity [----the issue and point in project Persische Abend PARS VIDEO 2014]
the minute you see in a text (@Hoda, Sana, Ali having even) one memory that is clear and guaranteed --> your signals should go on: there is one unrevised (in an original form), no secondary revision, *pure memory* <-- this is a memory that is unnegotiable for them
*on Wind
wind, is a coming that arrives from the future
(compare “going” [staying behind] in Attar, Hafez, and Holderlin) [in San'an nobody is greeting, there is no greet-event. Attar misses: Greeting as pure letting go**]
(Avital on Holderlin:) “[...] in going, comes. Parting is not a mere leave-taking and empty staying behind. Parting is also not a mere going away and disappearing. The poet remains in the rustling wind. to the extent that he goes with its going. [...] Nonetheless. the poet stays with the wind. Accompaniment now shapes the Greeting. As the gusting wind is alternately a coming and a going. so is the Greeting a staying behind that nonetheless flutters away. becoming a going with. [...] The poet's staying behind is crucial. Staying behind is not meant to mark the isolation or even desolation of the poetic act. [...] Neither passive nor active, remaining behind indicates a way of going back, a returning to the source.”
-traveling to the impossible place of the other
-(wind) come and go without touching down or dropping anchor
-the agency, animacy and sentience of the wind is described by ajayeb's sensuous subjects within the wind. one feels enwrapped, enveloped in a sentient being that moves across vast distances, it comes and goes --> the materially textured poetics of description in the ajayeb-e bad باد
the poesy (~ fictional =/= truth, real) (Wahrheit und Dichtung) of ajayeb (are no longer distinguished from each other)
(greeting is the poet/artist's most essential mode of being)
a designed closure or reappropriation that locks the Other into a schema of subjectivity ---- at once promoted and subjected
*(re)fastened to the Greek origin
promoting the ousider to insider (who now holds an Ursprung and origin)
re-appropriation ~=?! an end to alienation {~=?=> the condition of possibility for totalitarianism} [Fynsk]
the illusion (and comfort) of noncastration
...................................
duty of deconstruction: the practice of non-avoidance
(duty =/= your nature)--> the duty of being unwelcomed
vomiting ~= healing
*after the 18th century (seems) all art (artists) wants to be:
•in the privileged place of nonrepresentational work. trying its self with the sublime, that which disturbs and devastates being
•performative = being + doing ~= becoming what it is
() parentheses:
•parental parenthetical remarks
•grammatically set to emphasize --> belonging to the secondary
•whispering ~ “this isn't much, but let me insert, inject”
•disavowal of the text
•denial
•confession
•pumping the text to its opposite meaning
•turns everything around --> a noble feeling
•
(Avital > Nietzsche:) destruction: commitment to futurity
affirms life, clears out the nonsense
=/= devastation: destruction without future
-if you are stuck with monumental history, and if you are burdened, carrying too much baggage (historically, aesthetically) ==> you are weighted down and cannot move forward
the image of hybrid being in ajayebnameh, half animal half human, is being both wild and tamed, vahshi-ram وحشی رام
...................................
(the word) wonder, it worlds.
...................................
work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)
in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...
(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)
gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled
hermeneutics =/=? epistemology
history of truth
*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving
(ajayeb-e chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه نخشب) [Moghana's work on mirror], [neiranjat نیرنجات and telesmat طلسمات (of Moghana’) ~=? ruse, tech],
[signifier of wonder:] mahi (ماهی fish) [reflection of the moon in water] --> mah (ماه moon) --> pointing at helal-e mah (هلال ماه half-moon) --> mouth of the beloved (یار yar) [registered in poetry of Sa'di سعدی] --> wonder finger on the open mouth
-also, Galileo's new telescope pointing at the moon (and sun-spots 900 years later than the chinese did,) and his pervasive approach to the knowledge milieu that he lived in, set the secular registers of truth
گفتم اگر از تو در خواهم شکافته شوی چه کنی؟ گفت شکافته شوم. بدو اشارت کرد و ماه به دو پاره شد
(ajayeb-e aab) عجایب آب
آشنا ashena (=/= stranger) in Farsi comes from the relationship with water and swimming, somehow knowing the water
cognition (in Greek cogn, ‘having learned’), in Farsi shenakht (شناخت) is rooted in water, ashena: shenavar dar bahr budan شناور در بهر بودن, floating body, -shenasi شناسی-
(ajayeb-e donya) عجایب دنیا
wonders of earth(?) --> ghul (غول), serial killer, house full of bones (horror story)
(after donya/[...]