the back alley

The lamp post stands tall into the sky. Tall yet lonely. Tall yet old, tall yet out of place if you take a glance at the new building built nearby. Tall yet failing to light a wide range around. The alley is dark a few meters away, even the circle around, you wouldn’t call bright or luminous, it’s just a hazy bright, an electric candle lit in the midst of the back alley. A few steps away from it and as the light grows weaker and weaker, the patches of tar, here and there to mend the pavement, which look more like these huge dots splashed over the dark surface, start to melt into the tar darkness gaining more and more weight toward the end, the end of the alley where a fence is raised high to make it a dead-end.
The weather gets darker and then brighter as lightning strikes the grayish clouds scattered here and there, far and away. Lights of the cars coming to a halt behind the traffic light, lights of the cars driving away and around, get blurry and blurrier. The rain has started. If you stare at that very hazy light of the lamp post for a while, you can see the rain pouring. The occasional sirens of ambulances and fire engines rushing through the wet streets are the only sounds disturbing the silence of the falling shower.
The clouds gradually put down their loads. The weather gradually loses its weight. Darkness gradually starts to fade, and the hazy light of the lamp post fades alongside in the first rays of light creeping over the alley.
Little pounds of rainwater encircle the mending patches of tar here and there on the pavement. Larger ones encircle the seemingly out of order ventilation systems left over the roof of the building to the right, making them look like kind of tiny watermills alongside the patches of grass grown here and there over the rooftop, grass green as those of meadows wet with the early morning dew.
The fence at the end of the alley glitters with drops of water still clinging to its metal net. So do the ones bordering the unattended-to back yards of the one or two shabby houses lining the alley to the left. Little patches of some puffy material you can see along the fence, one in the street, another one or two in one of the back yards. You are just imagining they are some wind-blown dry bushes, some wadded garbage, or maybe some outcast’s clothing, when one of them, the one at the foot of the lonely lamp post starts moving around, not any huge leaps, just minuscule crawls that you have to open your eyes and look a little bit more to grasp. You look a little bit more and there is no doubt that the tiny mass of the puffy thing is moving toward the fence. And then suddenly as if in a kind of an improvised play, the other two, the ones in the yard also move toward the fence, to the very spot the first one had started to move. You pay attention and there awaits them a bowl, perhaps of some food, now more of a soup with all the rain water added to. The two from the yard reach the bowl and busy themselves licking, sometimes playing naughty, most of the times just licking. The one outside, the one who had first started moving, has just stopped, you realize, a few steps from the lamp post, seemingly cuddling itself, taking a nap in the middle of the road.
A wind blows, some leaves move around the pavement. A towel is hung over the balcony rail of one of the shabby houses, the one to the left, with terra cotta bricks, one of the windows of which has a cracked glass, and the railings of which are rusted over and over again that there seems to be left nothing more inside their metal bars. You have missed who hung the towel there. Something moves along the building to the right, taking your gaze to itself. A woman comes out, a large throwaway plate in her hand, filled with something that looks like a puree of something. She moves to the fence, the puffy creatures move back, she puts the plate down, pours water out of the bowl, puts it back, moves the plate next to the bowl, steps back toward the building and goes in. the creatures move back to take their position. The other one is not moving, and then you see one more, all black, moving, over the huge metallic green crane parked in the middle of the alley, toward this other end, the open end. It moves mischievously, playfully, and jumps to the ground with the flexibility and strength of tiny kittens. It joins the crowd around the bowl. You look around and the towel in the balcony is gone.
Hours pass by. A young man appears from the building, the one to the right, the same one the woman appeared from. He walks the few meters to the other side, toward the fence, and as he walks these pigeons busy picking on the pavement scatter around, not flying by, just walking lazily a few steps here and there, just scattering. The man looks at the large plate, walks a few steps around, walks back to the plate, looks at the bowl, walks a little bit more around, a few more steps further, scattering the birds a little bit more, comes back to the plate, to the bowl, looks around, takes the plate, looks at it, looks around, smells the food, pours out the little water in it, puts the plate back, walks around, looks around, stops at the fence and then goes back to the building to the right. You look around and your lazy kitten is no more near the lamp post. You look around and your gaze gets stock upon the wooden plates blocking the window panels of this building under restoration. You wonder how does it look from inside, you wonder what can be going on on the other side. You steal away your gaze and you find your kitten, near the fence, its head bowed into the bowl. The towel is again on the balcony rail.
Hours pass by. You look at the alley and nothing is moving, all is still, all is safe. You take in the whole picture and can easily imagine Timbuktu wandering around the corner, shyly stealing some food from the large plate, yet leaving some, hiding in a dark corner to lie down, and feeling all the sadness of the world upon him as he sees the fences at the end of the alley as he little by little feels heavy under the spell of sleep. You look around and nothing moves. All is still. All is safe.
Minutes pass by. You are not looking at the alley. You are just dreaming the dream of Timbuktu. And then you are startled out of it by cries, loud, in anger, in desperation. The shouting goes on. You look at the back alley. All is the same. The shouting goes on and on, for seconds, for minutes. You look around and on the other side of the shabby buildings along the pavement of the newly-built huge chrome modern establishment on the other side, walks this teenager, his baggy jeans barely clinging to his waist, his white T-shirt two sizes large, his cap hiding his face from the heat of the sun. He is shouting into his cell phone, shouting, cursing, shouting, cursing. A man and woman, the man hugging the woman, both in swimsuits, lean on the rails of the rooftop to watch. The boy continues pacing up and down, all the time shouting and cursing.
You move your eyes from the street, from the building to your shabby back alley. You close your ears to all the cursing. The tiny creatures move around the bowl. The lamp post stands tall into the sky. The pigeons sit silently over the electricity line leading to the lamp post. And next to the fences at the end of the alley, you see this lump that you decide is one or another Timbuktu and is perhaps nothing but a dry old piece of a dead tree trunk.

a piece with two endings

Words are rushing to my head. Boiling up, up there in my head.
They keep coming, rushing, a stream, a flow, only a few nonsense, most lining one after another, as if ideas, in sentences, in paragraphs. My head is still lying on my arm, my body lying on the couch.
Words keep rushing and my hands are weary to start moving on the paper, on the keyboard; my body feels weak, every part of it, every tiny cell of it.
Words rush in and my hands still feel numb under the very same head that is weighing heavy with words.
Words rush in. i am writing up in my head.
The music soars high and i suddenly feel this urge to make love; my heart beat quickens, my chest feels heavy with its presence. The music beat, the words, the story, the urge, the desire, my heart beat ...
(1) My body just collapses under the pressure. It faints, not ready for all this.
The music continues.
My body just dies away with every note.
(2) All are rushing inside me, undressing me, softly, slowly, violently, quickly. the music beat, the words, the words, they are touching me everywhere; kissing me here and there;
I feel my heart pacing up to keep with the flow, with all that is running through me, my veins, my cells.
I breathe in, I breathe out. I feel the rush, i feel the words, the music, the story, the urge, the desire.
I have written my piece. I have had my orgasm.

Lover's Wine

lines of a poem by Charles Baudelaire,
Lover's Wine

Today the universe is splendid -
Without death, without hope, without brides,
We are grooms of a horse drunk on wine,
Galloping beneath this divine iron sky

...
Paris Review, summer 2007

dear life 94

dear life,
had i told you before that solitude is my best friend, giving me the gift of words and inspiration? my best enemy, reviving memories - memories i am happy to have lived through, sad to leave, so nostalgic to remember; memories i am sad to have lived through, happy to leave, so not so crazy about to remember.
and the amazing thing is that this solitude not only can bring you pain and joy in different occasions, it can push you in the middle of both at the same time, leaving you confused of how to describe yourself, your feelings at the moment, leaving you confused of whether to like the solitude or just run away from it? maybe it is all the pain that makes the joy so joyful! don't know. guess i am just losing it.

dear life 93

dear life,
coincidences, coincidences, again, again,
i am reading this book, The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton, (i just don't know how this friend of mine does it, proposing books that are just perfect timing, guess he knows too well!) anyway, i read about paintings of this guy, i look at his first painting in the book, and sth feels familiar about it, i keep reading and a couple of pages next there is another picture, and i tell myself, "this is the same guy whose painting my friend in spain loved, the picture of the lonely girl sitting on the edge of a bed," something in it just tells me so, a few more pages and there it is, the same picture, the very same that announced the exhibition we visited last year in madrid, the very same that exposed the girl's loneliness and sadness in big dimensions. the painter was Edward Hopper.
i open my emails and there it is, the weekly books update, and there it is all these articles and images of the bookcovers in different languages of "On the Road", a book by Jack Kerouac.
i walk to this bookstore, looking around, and in the literary criticism shelves the first book that takes my attention is "up is up, down is down" a glimpse of the literary scene of NY. i continue browsing, and i see this other book, "a short history of tractors in ukraine".
hours later in another bookstore, there it is a new publication of "On the road" with essays and discussions on it, the same i have read about in NYTimes.
guess, i should stop calling these coinicidences, it is just shared knowledge coming up here and there. of course it would, wouldn't it?

dear life 92

Dear life,
It was Saturday, the weekend; I wore my swimsuit (the blue one, do you remember, the one I bought a couple of weeks before leaving Tehran? no not for here, for the Fridays we were still to enjoy there) and headed to the pool on the rooftop to have a swim in the middle of a very low day, maybe to help raise my spirits. I had been told that the pool is busy during weekends, but nothing could have prepared me for the crowd I saw around and in the pool. No place to lie down for a tan, no way to swim, as people were hanging out, relaxing as of course it was their weekend, laughing, talking in groups of two or three. I stayed for while, sitting in a not-crowded corner away from the pool, reading and staring over the city of Washington spreading all around the building, but I couldn’t stay long, just couldn’t, not the heat, you idiot, you know I enjoy the heat, no, it was just too much to bear, the situation, I needed a swim to get this lowness out of myself, but instead I found myself going more and more down. The weekend is kind of our Friday, and for me Friday at least during this summer has been equal to throwing pool parties and having friends over, drinks in one shared bowl, Shatoot (kind of berries not found in this side of the world) right from the tree, kabobs and sandwiches right next to the pool, music in the garden, hookah afterwards, cakes and sweets, taking a nap - a day of fun and relaxation, similar to what was going on on the rooftop - and so sitting there I felt an stranger, just missing so badly our own pool which felt like a haven, surrounded with trees standing tall into the air, with the sound of birds hiding in between, and with friend’s laughters vibrating the air around, a joy that nothing in the world can make up for. So, yesterday I made a decision: no more swimming in the rooftop pool on weekends - at least not during the busy hours of the day, cause on Sunday morning when I woke up I so needed a swim that I took the risk to head upstairs, but it was eight in the morning and safe I was.

Dear life 91

Dear life,
Before leaving for DC, I made this decision of posting on my blog the interesting things that I read or hear. So from now on, some of my posts will just be notes on what I have found worth noting and perhaps links to the original articles.

A musical play by New Jersey Repertory Co. brings to stage lives of two rare book dealers. That in itself is amazing. But the point that took my attention is that these two dealers, Madeline B. Stern and Leona Rostenberg, actually read every book they got and sold. No more words on that!
The article you can find at: New York Times under the title “A Writer Finds the Rare Lives of Two Rare-Book Dealers Worth Singing About.”

Sex. That is an issue, a significant one in all our lives, right? No argue on that. But what are our reasons for having sex? (I know, some of you would now say “do we need a reason?”) Come on, have you ever thought about that? Now, psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin have carried out a research on the reasons why people have sex and they have actually listed 237 ones! Can you believe that? The reasons vary from “being drunk”, “to get things, like a promotion, a raise” (this is the case more for men, unlike the reputation that goes for women, or is it that women don’t confess to it?!), “burn calories” (you exercise addicts!), “making the partner feel good about himself/herself” (what sacrifices we do for people!), to even “wanting to feel closer to God” (can you believe it?). And the list is a not-yet-complete one, going on and on. So what reasons have you had for having sex?
If you want to know more go to New York Times and find the article “The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting”

A friend noted an interesting point the other night, one of these cultural translation barriers. What’s the English equivalent for مرام? I have been thinking it over and not any good ideas. Really, what is it? Anyone got any suggestions?

Language evolution. I remember how many lessons and articles we studied on the subject in school - not that I remember the contents, but at least I remember Chomsky and the fact that the subject like many other scientific ones is one of controversy. Anyway, there is a new book on the matter, “The First Word” by “Christine Kenneally”. The thing mentioned in the review I read about the book that made me think was the question the book author had put forward, “Imagine a group of infants stranded on the Galapagos Islands, provided with all the necessities of life but no access to speech. Would they create a language? How many babies would it take, what might their language be like, and how would it change over the generations?” The answers her interviewees provided ranged from no language to a complete one, but what I myself have been thinking about is: what does she mean by “all the necessities of life”? Does that mean stuff to just survive or stuff to live a normal life? Then if they are “infants”, who are to care for them so that they grow up in the first place? Necessarily there should be some adults, but would these adults also be lacking language or just restrain from using it (could they?)? Then would the word “stranded” have a meaning at all? Then again what does she mean by “no access to speech”?
When I read the word “access”, this thought string just brings this other word to my mind: “internet”! So do they have access for example to internet (isn’t it a necessity of life today?) books, newspapers, or any kind of written language, or nothing of the kind? I think it would be a more interesting case if we imagine them having access to written words and yet having no idea how to read them or pronounce them and having to find out instead of they themselves inventing their own. Anyway, the review of the book can be found at New York Times, “Language Evolution’s Slippery Tropes”

Dear life 90

Dear life,
Coincidences, coincidences, it’s as if they get going whenever I get to this other side of the world, or maybe it’s me wanting to get meaning out of everything, kind of a game to amuse myself.
On the plane I decide to sleep (not that I need to decide to sleep!), I wear my ipod earphones (ok, this is IranAir to London, not Virgin to DC, so don’t be surprised cause there are no music channels to tune into!), and the very first song I am hearing sings, “… go to sleep, everything is all right …” no 12 in a selection of 16 compiled by a friend who told me “the selection starts from a bad mood which I know you are in right now, cheers up little by little, to the best of moods in the last song” when he handed it to me the night I was leaving. (Funny, his choice for the last song, a recital of the famous poem “Howl” by Alan Ginsberg, which starts with the very word “America”) So, each of the songs on the selection had a word with me, no doubt, great choices, but to go to sleep to those very words at that moment was kind of reassuring.
In DC, the very first website that I check out is Villagevoice (ok, I confess, after my emails, of course!) and to the right of the screen I saw this movie ad which I usually would not check, but somehow the title is inviting, “2 Days in Paris” and the actress is "Julie Delpy", who has also played my top favorite movies, "Before sunrise" (1995) and its sequel "Before sunset" (2004). It seems that she always comes to screen during my strange emotional phases. Always. Strange. Anyway, I have to check out the movie. It is an emotional comedy, so it may not be anything like the other two, but just her coming up, right now, right here, that’s enough to make my day.
Last night, in a really desperate down mood, I choose this folder of Farhad music in another selection a friend had offered for New Year, which I had not listened to before arriving in US (software problems, no offense!) and of course you know how Farhad can help you feel more nostalgic and sad and cry as much as you like, but there was more to it last night; the album was his concert in US and the very first song was all about the concept of one’s home country, in which he sang, “What if one could move his home country with himself wherever he went?” not a bad idea, right? But then how could you get nostalgic about leaving it? Sad that no place smelt like it? Sad that no place felt like it? And yet happy that it is yours forever and it would wait for you to go back?
Coincidences or whatever, at least I have this game I can play with you and whatever you put in front of me in the solitude of this far away land.
Ps. Another coincidence just came up after I finished writing this and setting to work on the book I am translating. I guess just noting the sentence would suffice: “What difference is there now between what I am now and what this city will make of me: something that is happening to me right now and that, like the cows about to be sacrificed, I cannot see?” (The Tango Singer, page 99).

dear life 89

Dear life,
In Heathrow airport, between my two flights, I head towards the bookstore on one corner of the airport terminal. Let’s just not say anything of Harry Potter being here and there, everywhere. I open this book, Wall and Piece, by Bansky, which has pictures of different walls around the world (seems he is a well-known UK graffiti artist and this is a collection of his works). There were these pages on the Palestine wall, Occupation wall, whatever it is called, and besides the pictures what shook me were these sentences (I have forgotten the exact quotes, but I jot down the ideas):
Palestine is actually the largest open-air prison in the world – I had never thought of it that way, but when you think of it, you think that’s right and sad and devastating. But then again, this idea suddenly pops up to my mind: even if there is not a wall around your country, yet you are not allowed to travel freely or to have contact with the outside world, just because of the borders you live in and the place you call home, because politicians in and out decide so, isn’t it just some other kind of prison, less obvious than any other? And if you want to think this even farther aren’t we all living in some kind of prison, consciously or unconsciously?
Then there was this other information: The occupation wall is one of the world’s key attractions to graffiti artists, who travel to the area sometime around the year to use it as their free canvas. You think it doesn’t bother anyone and it even makes the wall more bearable, but then there follows words by a Palestinian: We don’t want the wall and you come here to make it beautiful? And then you think to yourself what use is it to make something so despised beautiful, doesn’t it make it even harder to bear, cause it shows you how others are strangers to your feelings toward that entity?
I am just thinking how different the world seems when seen from different points of view. How different.

dear life 88

dear life,
i am out of tehran again, i am in DC again, change comes again, new start again, i have to adapt once again, i have not to look back once again, i have to write to you in detail, this won;t work like this, anyway,
was just browsing friend's blogs as usual and look what i found: http://iranprison.blogspot.com/ the post dating august 06, 2007.
i sometimes think i don't deserve this much kindness. thanks parvaneh from miles and miles away.