Hi mom and dad, So here is the thing that happened in the last week since we spoke about the piece of writing I have been asked to produce for the event at the Asian Art Museum tonight. You may recognize a few lines here and there as your own... or at least my adaptation of your stories :-) Its a bit esoteric, but so is the nature of the thing I am trying to describe. And so it is... Love, Sahar Maman-bozorg was the small consolation awarded us for agreeing to turn in at an undignified hour on those nights when our home filled with friends and neighbors. A grandmother knows the turn of a child’s laughter bending to battle the seduction of sleep. On these nights, while laying in the dark next to her, I focused my gaze on the bright outline of the door, beckoning the light to carry with it the muffled murmur of voices, laughter, the soft tap of spoons against glass and music billowing from below... straining to hear every sound and silent pause littering the air between here and there. We ached a child’s ache to be among them. To escape the dark that enveloped us now. It was her voice that soothed heavy lids and brought us comfort on those nights. She told stories so rich in detail the images still come to life: the brave young warriors in black and gold on great white horses trimmed with pomegranate tassels; beasts half- man half-goat as startled by us as we are of them when the veils thinned; a curious fish who dared to wonder at a world beyond his little pond; orphaned princes with gleaming white hair; magical feathers of rainbow hues that turn to flame and beckon to us the great rising hen; and of a legendary band of rebel birds on a journey to find their leader... Maman-bozorg’s stories carried us away, they dared us to remember, and they brought us home. I would have her remembered. Ordinary people who pass like a soft but persistent wind over skin. We take them deep into our lungs and pass them on to the blood that runs between and among us. In fact, we’ve tracked that twisting double line back in time. Through it we remember: the eternal return, the joy of becoming. A patchwork collage of stories that make us up. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful,” wrote the man who proclaimed God dead as the veil of Truth crumbled around him with the force of his love for an astounding world, and for the extraordinary people who live silently in the shadows. Nietzsche’s slow death began in one terrible instant the winter of 1889 after witnessing the violent Sahar Driver 1 beating of a horse by a coachman, which left him sobbing and holding fast to the horse’s neck in an epic and timeless embrace. Nietzsche was never the same again. I would have his gentle heart remembered. In 2006 a cadre of the French hacker-artist underground collective, Urban Experiment, set out to restore the Pantheon’s 19th century clock, which had not rang out in over thirty years. They worked hidden from view, moving quietly under the streets of Paris like rats through a series of underground passageways, catacombs and sewers -broke into the grand building from below and spent months in a secret workshop quietly resuscitating the beating heart of this comatose city. Woke it from its slumber for the first time –tick-tock- since the world saw African independence, Vietnam, the student movements, black power and the walk from Selma to Montgomery, the Stonewall Riots, Apollo 11, the 8-Track, Motown and Woodstock. Dignity and purpose, two hands on a clock, rotate around a single axis. And it rang loud, the reverb pulsing beyond the city’s limits to caress the cheek of a fearful mother in Pyramid Lake, to wipe the tears of a suicidal soldier in Falluja, to stir the passions of a generation just waiting for its time... in Tehran, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Egypt. The echo resounding as far as Greece, Brazil, the United States. That year, snow fell in Argentina for the first time in almost a century. But some feared the tremble of this newly pumping blood. The Pantheon’s director, anxious at the uncertainty of this quantum kiss, hired a clockmaker to restore our beating heart to its broken state, left to whimper softly as a dying horse. Its hands remain frozen at 10:51. I would have the old rebel spirit that runs through these romantics remembered. The Universe is a very big place. In fact, it is expanding, speeding up at its edges and furthering the distance between bodies, longing for each other like lovers. But we have always been a defiant and curious kind. Seeking the edge of the world we traveled across oceans in massive ships, across lands on horse-back, camel-back, with bicycles, in automobiles, trains, then planes, space shuttles, and stations. And when our bodies kept us earth-bound, we built satellites, interstellar telescopes, and massive tunnels so we could look further into the past than ever before, so close to creation we could see it brewing in the distance. At this very moment we are tearing through space. Starlight, nothing less than history, betrays itself. The far edges of an explosion racing to reach us. When it does, it will be nothing but fossil light, they say. Neither here nor there. The ultimate riddle. This is why the sky is black. Black is home to the coming light, forever arriving. I wonder, maman- bozorg, when I catch your reflection in a window and turn to find I am alone, if it is the pluck and drive of a defiant and curious kind, racing time to touch for a moment the one she loves. In those schizophrenic days, as sentimentality surfed over the sinkholes of our compassion and we lost more of our brothers and sisters to suicide than war, we wondered why we felt so alone. We tried to forget. We tapped the veins of the earth like a crack addict and pumped oil to motor toys and soothe our penetrating sorrow. We remembered the old stories -of great and powerful men who wielded swords, taking much, giving little. We did the same. We ran out of oil so we made gunpowder, tanks and missiles. We stole from each other. Wondered at the hollow ring fading flat in our chests. We tried again. We built networks, grids, interwebs and military-industrial-techno- corporate-media-proto-digital-nanobiotic-complexes... we got caught. Millions of us were forced from our homes of generations to go hungry in shantytowns to make way for dams that would power the homes of a future belonging to only some. We grew companies so powerful they could own our ideas before we even had them. We watched violence on screens for pleasure. We were taught to fear friends, to hurt our loved ones. We longed for each other through pixels and code. We ached for touch. When we lost our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers believing freedom was a thing that could be possessed, our leaders told us to go shopping. We did. Those of us with the most became suspicious of our neighbors and we clutched our possessions tighter to our chests. Those of us with the least grew desperate, knowing freedom and dignity to matter more than life. Many were forced into cages for yielding to them, clawing and tearing like animals at our insides. We changed the rules: in Vietnam, at Breton Woods, Hiroshima. Some of us welcomed the cameras on every corner, the drones overhead, the bugs in our phones, because we believed the laws were meant to protect us. Those of us who sat in high-tech prisons refusing food - San Quentin, Pelican Bay, Corcoran- had a different story to tell, one of fossil light. Those of us in Evin, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo grew stronger with the pulse of their beating hearts, tick-tock. I would have them remembered. With stitched brow, we wrung our hands. Our hearts raced with guilt, fear, shame. We shared anxious whispers with our friends. We followed the rules. We signed petitions. We made phone calls. We turned off the news. We felt the changes occurring to the colors of the morning sky, to the stench in the air and the burn of sun on our skins. We cried when finally a black man was voted into the presidency. We felt something again. We danced in the streets. We shook hands. We passed friendly words. We believed that yes, we could. And when he drew us nearer to war, we hung our heads. Insanity, we’ve been told, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We tried something new...A woman, who finally escaped from her enslavement in 1849, taught us something of freedom. The taste of the Philadelphia morning dew on her tongue grew stale and festered. So she turned around and went back for her family weeks later recognizing that if there is one among us who is not free, then not one of us is free. By the time of her death in 1913, Harriet Tubman had led well over 700 people to the free states, traveling by night and guided by nothing but the North Star. She was plagued by dizzy spells and bouts of intense pain in her head throughout her life, the result of a severe beating when she was young. Later when she underwent surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, she refused anesthesia and preferred to bite down on a bullet instead, just as the soldiers she loved had been forced to do. I would have her brave heart remembered. In those hesitating days, we worked hard. We paid attention. We took small steps. We wrote, across walls, on pages, online. Some of us made music, made movies, made friends. Others of us sang “Ala Akbar” from the rooftops at night, shaking the earth, beckoning sleeping cicadas to claw their way to the surface. Some of us cried out in the streets “no justice, no peace,” like howling wolves daring the rest of us to remember, set flame to our bodies, stepped in full view of the world and screamed “ya basta!” In music, a reprise is the reiteration of a section, a repetition in song that brings the comforts of familiarity. Franz Liszt, the 19th century composer and arguably the most technically advanced pianist of his age, was a visionary. His creation, the Symphonic Poem organized music around a brand new idea: Thematic Transformation, a reprise always repeating but never quite returning to the same place where the song first began. Liszt’s playing at the time had an unprecedented effect on people. Many witnesses later testified that his concerts raised the mood of audiences to a level of such mystical ecstasy that the reaction could only be explained as mass hysteria. Such is the way of a typhoon, of the bridge between old and new.bozorgsilence. In Azerbaijan, Bulgaria and Tajikistan, people gathered and lit candles, drew their loved ones nearer. When the levees broke in the summer of 2005, Mexico offered $1 million dollars; Peru and Russia medical equipment, doctors and water; Iran and Venezuela both millions of barrels of oil between them. And for a moment, we remembered the dark night sky, home to light –forever arriving. If you happen upon this story one day, I hope your people are safe. I hope the stories guide and the tick-tock of bells ringing anew shake loose your coagulated blood. If you notice your breath hesitates for a moment, or that your skins warms just so, or that the center of your chest tightens softly, don’t be afraid; it is just the smile and embrace of a friend, black-tipped fingers reaching to touch the ones she loves, the tremors of a ringing clock, neither here nor there, a reprise made significant only by the weight of remembering, by the pace of the stars racing to overtake us, and the comfort of that dark night sky. “Pa-sho.” Wake up, she says softly, nudging me from a deep sleep. “It’s 10:52. Take a deep breath. Wash your face. Today, we’ll make fesenjoon. And you can tell me a story.”
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 21:30:46 +0000
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