Ksenia Nekrasova: a beautiful soul

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(Painting by Lagha Sadeghi)

Ksenia Nekrasova

How can I write?
The paper is so small
and the sorrows of the world so great
they reach up to the stars.
How am I to fit the whole sky
into my little notebook?

For most of her tragically short life, Ksenia Nekrasova lived in abject poverty without even a bed to call her own, totally dependent on the generosity of friends. She published only one slim volume of poems during her lifetime. Derided and dismissed by most of her contemporaries, she enriched the lives of a whole generation of poets in ways which only later (after her death) bore the indelible signature of her unique vision.

Hers was a truly singular voice in twentieth century Russian literature: fresh, natural and childlike in its directness. At a time when Russian imaginations were obsessed with monumental visions of Soviet grandeur, when Poetry was forced to conform to established political and ideological norms, Ksenia Nekrasova was an advocate of all that was intimate and homely, small and personal. She was the friend of roadside flowers, of people walking home from work, of wooden houses with chickens at the doors, of flowering lilacs and wild garlic.
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Like her poetry, she was innocent and wild, original and unconventional, pledged to her verses through all disaster. Poetry came to her as naturally as breathing. She jotted it down on any scrap of paper that presented itself: the backs of letters, bus tickets or shopping receipts.

“Are they my poems?
or me myself?
It’s all the same:
the difference is only one of form.
Apart from that
there’s nothing
but withered petals
on the floor.

In physical appearance, she was modest and small, with dark liquid eyes. Her disheveled appearance, poverty, and strange habits made people assume she was mentally ill. Her voice, always in the minor key, had a distinct singing quality like someone telling a fairy tale to a child. It was composed of rounded vowels and long expressive pauses. (Marvelous were these pauses). When she recited her verses, the index finger of her hand moved if she was conducting an invisible orchestra.

The stories she told of her “idyllic childhood” were without number; but the reality was quite different. Few poets had lives of such tragedy and hardship. Abandoned by her parents at a very early age, she spent her formative years in a state orphanage before being adopted by a middle-aged teacher and his wife.

But there was a lingering (and often repeated) mystery in Ksenia’s past. She had distinct memories of being visited at the orphanage by a richly-dressed woman who brought her lavish and expensive gifts. There were also flashes of a forest monastery whose vast congregation stood up in unison to bless her with thundering applause. Whether the memories were true or not we do not know, for the fictions within which Ksenia Nekrasova lived were not known to everyone. Years after her death, wild stories were still circulating that she was the illegitimate daughter of the last Tsar, or alternatively, of Grigori Rasputin.

If there was ever a time when she was genuinely happy, the War turned everything to ashes. Together with her husband and young son, Ksenia found herself in Central Asia, washed up in the vast tide of refugees fleeing eastwards to escape the German advance. Disease, hunger and desperation were everywhere. During a heavy bombing raid, some flying splinters from a floor blew into her, killing her only son whom she was cradling in her arms. The hands that held the child received the full force of the blast, and Ksenia never again regained the full use of them. (Her childlike, chaotic handwriting dates from this time). Shortly afterwards, her husband’s mind became deranged beyond all remedy and she could no longer care for him. Inconsolable with grief, she broke her mind on the memory of her loss.

Where are you...?
How many times must I call you?
How long must I wait for a response?
If I had a hundred hands
I’d search for you
Through every blade of grass
And sift the dust grains of the earth
Through my fingers
To find your eyes again.

Now began the darkest season of her life: interminable months of wandering through unremembered cities, sleeping in the ruins of deserted buildings, searching for any piece of rancid food to quench her hunger. Her intermittent headaches became more frequent and severe. At times, the tide of depression threatened to overwhelm her.

The rain beats heavily on the roof
The night is black behind the window!
And once again those thoughts –
Terrifying spiders
emerging from dark corners
O God!
If only you existed!

Alone, without friends or family, she set out on foot for Tashkent, where by some miracle, she was found by a local family who took pity on her and cared for her needs. As a result, her health began to improve and her mind to brighten. There came a day when the mist finally lifted from her eyes, and she was able to write in her diary:

How beautiful the world is!
If somewhat lonely
among these stars and rocky planets’

It was in Tashkent that she met Anna Akhmatova who immediately recognized her unusual talent and furnished her with letters of introduction to important poets. Ksenia could not contain her joy. She began to indulge in the wildest hopes! Before long, she was pursuing her dreams to Moscow where, on the recommendation of a friend, she attempted to gain admittance to the Union of Soviet Writers, without whose endorsement no-one in Russia could be published.

She was fortunate in finding writers such as Stepan Shchypachov and Leonid Sobolev to fight her cause. Her most loyal friend, Mikhail Svietlov, gave a stirring speech to the Union in which he spoke of Ksenia’s desperate material circumstances. Those poets who called her uneducated and naïve, he declared, were guilty of envy. Whatever any of them said in public, they were all secretly jealous of her poetry because no ambition could make her simplicity their own.

The day came when the chairman of the Soviet Writer’s Union, Alexander Fadeyev, invited her to visit him. Ksenia arrived with violets twisted into her hair. She waited outside the house for hours before summoning up the courage to enter. Fadeyev had never met her before, but talk of her poetic powers had penetrated even to his comfortable office in Moscow. When he finally received her, he was overwhelmed by her childlike candor and charm. Ksenia was a revelation to him. The facts of her weaknesses, her wounded voice, and above all the purity and directness of her poetry, made such an impression upon him that he kept her for hours, refusing to let her go, asking her to recite another, and yet another of her verses to him.

When the time finally came for her to leave, he told her in confidence that he had never heard anyone recite their poetry with so much love. “Don’t worry, Ksenia”, he added, “your time will come. Have faith”

But it was not to be. The members of the Union refused her application for membership. Her poetry, they said, was naïve, ridiculous and far too concerned with western bourgeois matters. Her blank verse was wild and chaotic and could not be taken seriously. Many of them tapped fingers to their heads, sniggered, and aired rumors of her madness.

So Ksenia returned to her rented room in the basement of the Writer’s Union, a room in which there was nothing but a single mattress redolent with damp and despair, a room as narrow as one might have expected of a cupboard used to store linens . She told her friends:” I sit here on the floor and put my board on my knees and write. I live well enough”.

Content with the barest, she now asked for nothing. Her salvation, she decided, lay scattered in the pages of her notebooks to which she confided the contents of her soul. Happily, her disappointments did not destroy her joy at being alive, fertile in imagination, a human being with a face and a name.

I touched your hand
And every lilac blossomed
The hawthorn hid its thorns in blooms
And in the twinkling of an eye
The whole world turned into spring...

From this time onwards, she refused all invitations to appear at the fashionable soirees of Moscow writers. “Hope”, she said, “is sooner found among the comfortless than among those who have made themselves at home in a world of greed and hypocrisy”. Spurned by the Union of Soviet Writers, she now began to spend more and more time among the artists and painters of the capital who, recognizing her unusual artistic sensibility, took her warmly to their hearts. They fed and clothed her when she needed it, paid her bills, and gave her somewhere to stay. Many of them (such as Ilya Glazunov and Robert Falk) painted portraits of her which were so stunning they drew all eyes.

In Falk’s famous (1950) portrait of Ksenia, she is shown wearing a red flannel dress and a necklace of pearls. In fact, the poet had made the necklace out of dried beans strung together on a piece of thread (a feat of which she was justifiable proud). The red dress, made famous in one of Ksenia’s later poems, was a gift from her friend Lila Yahontova.

Ksenia spent the last days of her life in dire poverty, always listening for a knock at the door, or waiting for a letter that would confirm that her poems were at last to be published.

At the very end of her life, Destiny seemed at last to to smile upon her when she gave birth to a baby boy, the greatest joy of her life. Ksenia had such wonderful plans for them both, but her dire material circumstances could not be overcome. She was forced to place her son temporarily in an orphanage while she searched for a flat. And it was while she was preparing and decorating a room for them both that she suffered a serious fall, from which she never recovered.

The poet Nikholai Aseyev wrote of her:

“We waited such a long time for a poet like her to appear; and when she did, we put every obstacle we could find in her way.”

She died on February 17 1958 at the age of only 46.

Almost twenty years later, the Union of Soviet Writers admitted her as a posthumous member of their organization.

I shall live a long time, I think
For I am a morsel of Russia
And rivers of pine resin
Flow freely through my veins……

Ksenia Nekrasova 1912-1958.
(Forgotten Poet)

© Ryszard Antolak

Iran, King Kong and Paradise Lost

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For Darius Kadivar, whose tireless efforts to persuade me to write this article finally bore fruit. With warm thanks. - RA.

In the latter years of his long successful life, Merian C. Cooper - the creator of the epic film “King Kong” - developed an inconsolable longing to return to the Zagros Mountains of Iran and live out his remaining days among the Bakhtiari nomads of the region. The idea haunted him periodically. All he needed, he used to tell his old friend Ernest Schoedsack, was to “buy horses, a few flocks of sheep”, and (because of his growing frailness) “get a couple of good Persian doctors”. But the dream with all its endless possibilities was never realized.

Cooper had first visited Iran in 1924 to film the movie “Grass”, a documentary about the Baba Ahmadi branch of the Bakhtiari tribe. Their epic journey over the mountains between Ahvaz and Isfahan every year in search of grazing has been described as “the greatest migration in modern history”. Images of tribesmen throwing themselves into the rushing Karun River (along with their livestock), and footage of them climbing the glacial face of the massive Zardeh Kuh in their bare feet, thrilled audiences all over the world. Grass became Cooper’s first commercial box office success, and on the strength of it, he was given money to complete other film projects (of which King Kong became the most famous).

In real life, Cooper was bigger than any of his movie creations. He was distinguished as a Hollywood film producer, movie innovator, explorer, war hero, adventurer, pioneer of commercial air flight and much more besides. The new biography of him by Mark Cotta Vaz is entitled “Living Dangerously” and this is a very fitting title. Because for most of his life, Merian C. Cooper lived “on the edge”, at the extremes of life: he needed to take life-threatening risks in order to feel truly alive. Life in Santa Monica and San Diego bored the pants off him and he was forever planning to escape.

In 1924, from his tent high up on the Zagros Mountains, he had written in his diary: "You risk your skin, and in the moment when life balances with death, no matter how afraid you may be, you get a touch of the animal value of existence ... wind and rain beats on your face as you brace yourself ... some man trusts you above all other men and you realize what friendship means. These are the seconds which give zest and fire to existence ... These are the moments when conscience and memory alike are drowned in the fine, physical or spiritual beauty of life..." (Vaz p6)

Cooper had experienced those heightened moments of existence before (in 1920) when as a volunteer in the Polish Air Force, he had flown dangerous missions against the invading Soviet armies. He had also experienced such moments on his journey with the Bakhtiari. He even envied one of the Bakhtiari leaders, Haidar Khan, who seemed to embody everything Cooper was looking for in life. (Some of Haidar’s qualities later found their way into the character of King Kong). But he could never find the heightened awareness he so craved anywhere else (except, perhaps in his cinematic imagination) although he longed for it until the day he died.

Cooper’s two companions during the filming of “Grass” -- both Americans -- were the boyish, excitable Ernest Schoedsack (who did most of the camera work), and the enigmatic Marguerite Harrison, who put up half of the money for the enterprise.

The three characters had met four years earlier in Poland, during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. Cooper had been instrumental in creating the Kosciuszko Squadron: a group of young American airmen who had volunteered to help Poland in her hour of need. From their flimsy wood and canvas airplanes, they had bombed and strafed the advancing Soviet armies of Semyon Budienny, which were attempting to turn Poland into another Soviet Socialist Republic.

Shot down over the Ukraine, Cooper was captured by the Russians and dispatched to the Gulag. There, he was saved from starvation through the intervention of Marguerite Harrison (a mysterious American spy who may also have been working for the Soviets). He eventually escaped, and after crossing the northern Russian wastes with two Polish friends, found safety in neighboring Latvia. He returned to Poland a war-hero, and was decorated (along with his squadron) with the highest military honor the country is able to bestow: the Virtuti Militari.

Marguerite Harrison had put up half of the money needed to produce “Grass”, but only on the condition that she was allowed to take part in the expedition, something to which Schoedsack objected. (During the journey, he was constantly irritated by her habit of applying make-up before every filming and generally treating the expedition like a family holiday). But his objection was over-ruled, and on December 14th 1923, the three Americans arrived in Shustar by boat to start filming.

Every year, at Norooz, the Bakhtiari nomads, 50,000 men, women and children (together with half a million animals), began an epic journey over the Zagros Mountains in a search of grazing. In their path lay two great obstacles: the treacherous fast-running Karun River (half a mile wide) and the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh mountains, fifteen thousand feet high. They divided themselves into 5 separate groups, each taking a different route across the mountains. Cooper and his companions accompanied the Baba Ahmadi branch of the tribe from the start of their migration north of Ahvaz all the way to the plains of Isfahan, filming the whole journey with hand-cranked cameras supported on shaky tripods.

In the course of their journey, Cooper came to admire Haidar Khan, the tribal leader of the group. He was particularly impressed by the older man’s physical presence: very hairy, “like a gorilla”, Cooper remembered later. But in the presence of his nine-year-old son Lufta, the chief’s whole demeanor changed and he would become soft and gentle in speech and actions. The relationship between this father and son became the central focus of the film Grass.

The first obstacle for the group, the crossing the dangerous Karun River, took almost a full week. It was achieved by constructing flimsy rafts from inflated goatskins, a method Alexander the Great had used two thousand years earlier. So strong were the currents, that several tribesmen were swept away and ended up smashed against rocks. At one point, Cooper and Haidar, both stripped to the waist, raced one another across the river to the opposite bank, the older man surging ahead to win and uphold the dignity of his tribe. Cooper was exhausted by the swim, but Haidar, to Cooper’s amazement, returned time after time to help others on the other side. "Here, in danger,” Cooper observed (clearly overawed by Haidar’s natural physical powers), “[is] a man, by glory!"

Cinematically, the highpoint of the journey was the crossing of the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh, the last great barrier to the land of grass. The Bakhtiari left their tents and other belongings behind in order to travel more lightly and began their ascent of the almost sheer glacier face of the mountain. Most of them attempted the climb barefoot. They were assaulted by wind and snow. At night, they slept out under the stars. Cooper thought he was living a maddening dream. Finally, having reached the summit, they looked out before them and saw a sea of grass stretching across the horizon in a vast, tight arc of green. Cooper wrote in his diary: “Here was the prize of the gallant fight. Here was the land of plenty. Grass and life!” (Vaz 129)

The journey across the Zagros changed Cooper forever. He came to idealize the way of life of the Bakhtiari people. He was acutely conscious of the immensity of their possessions: the sky, the grass and the mountains disguised as clouds. He was also saddened (and angry) at the realization that their way of life was coming to an end; and the modern world was coming to throw this culture of a thousand years onto the dung heap of history. Something of his anger went into the final scenes of “King Kong”, when the giant gorilla, threatened by the flashing weapons of modern technology (guns and planes) makes his final, defiant stand on the topmost pinnacle of the Empire State Building.

Cooper later admitted that despite the millions of words written about the symbolism inherent in “King Kong”, the film was really just a whopping great yarn. Nevertheless, it was one that resonated with audiences all around the world who saw in it something more than mere surface gloss.

The film script for “King Kong” was written by Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth, who based the dialogue on conversations she remembered between Schoedsack and Cooper on their voyages of exploration. Her husband, (Schoedsack), did most of the camera work. Marguerite Harrison, the “unwanted woman” on the Zagros expedition, was the inspiration for the Fay Wray character. The personality of Kong himself was partly based on Paul du Chaillu's description of the death of a gorilla in his book "Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa", which Cooper had read as a 6-year-old boy. The gentle, human side of the animal’s character was modelled on Haidar, gleaned from glimpses of his relationship with Lufta (his beloved son).

Despite all his many accomplishments, however, Cooper always felt that he had left something of himself behind on the plains of Isfahan. In 1947, he began to make preparations for a re-make of “Grass”, but hastily abandoned it after learning that metal bridges now spanned the Karun River and a railroad had been built through the Zagros Mountains. The Wilderness had been brutally destroyed! There was no where else on earth to explore. Cooper, always the adventurer, turned to the only uncharted area left - the human imagination (which for him meant the cinema). He explored that exotic realm with all the creative resources at his disposal, leaving behind him a bright catalogue of marvelous and unforgettable films.

Ryszard Antolak


Reference
Vaz, Mark Cotta. Living Dangerously. The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper (Villard Books. 2005).

The Old Man and his Neighbour

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There was once an old man who had nothing in the world but a few acres of land, a dutiful son, and one horse. The horse was a magnificent animal, however, and the king offered him a great sum of money for it. But the old man refused. The horse was a family member, he explained. It was not for sale.

Next morning, the old man woke up to discover that his horse had run away during the night! A neighbour rushed to comfort him. "How terrible for you!” he exclaimed. “Now you have no horse and no money. It's terrible what has happened to you!"

But the old man merely shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad”, he answered. “All I know is that my horse has gone and I have no money left. "

A few days later, the farmer's horse returned, leading six beautiful wild horses behind it. The neighbour told him they were worth a fortune. "You were right, old man! It was not such a bad thing after all that your horse ran away! Now you have seven fine horses in your field. It was a stroke of luck that your horse ran away!"

But the old man merely shook his head slowly. "I really don’t know if it’s good or bad”, he answered. "All I know is that my horse has come home with six other horses”.

The next day, the farmer's son was trying to tame one of the horses when he fell off and broke both his legs. The neighbour immediately rushed to comfort the old man. "Oh, you were right!” he lamented. “It really was a terrible thing that your horse returned with six more horses. Now your son has broken both his legs. You'll have no-one to help you in the fields. How will you survive the winter? It's terrible that your son has fallen off his horse!"

But the old man merely shook his head slowly. "I don’t know if it's good or bad”, he answered. “All I know is that my son has fallen and broken his legs. That's all"

The very next day, the King declared war on a neighbouring country. All the young men were immediately rounded up and sent to fight against the enemy. The farmer's son did not have to go, of course, because he was an invalid. When the neighbours heard the news, they went to the old man and said, "You were right, old man! It was a stroke of luck that your son fell and broke his legs. Now he won’t be killed in the war like our sons. Your son will be a comfort to you in your old age. It was lucky that your son broke legs!”

But the old man merely shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. All I know is that my son doesn't have to fight in the war. That's all”.

But the neighbours were still unconvinced……………..

Forgotten Exiles

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Turkmenistan has long been a place of compulsory exile for poets, revolutionaries and writers. Over the years, countless thousands of Poles, Russians, Germans, Chechens (and other nationalities) have been forcibly deported to this distant corner of the Soviet empire to silence their voices and suppress their activities. With the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the old Soviet Union, they are (at last) able to return to the lands of their ancestors if they wish; and most of them have done so. Only the Poles remain, abandoned by the International Community (and their own Polish Government), stranded in the most repressive and isolated of all the former Soviet Socialist republics.

Once the most far-flung, southerly region of the Russian empire, Turkmenistan still has the air of being somewhat on the periphery of the world. Its capital, Ashkhabad, is a soul-less city of Soviet concrete with a distinct feeling of impermanence about it (the result no-doubt, of the 1948 earthquake that demolished the city). There are few cars on the broad tree-lined boulevards. The ever-present dust of the great Karakum desert hangs oppressively over the city, turning the air at times into a soup of suffocating sulphur. This is a place that has long since resigned itself to the despair of barrenness, and only waits expectantly for the next chapter of its history to be meted out.

Waiting for me at the airport is Pani Irena, an elderly member of the Polish community in Ashkhabad. She was deported here in 1946, a victim of the Soviet-engineered wave of arrests that awaited many Poles who chose return to Poland after the war.

Although she has never seen me before, she picks me out from among the crowds at the arrivals gate and calls out to me (by name).
“How did you know it was me?” I ask, when I finally reach her. Her smile is broad and infectious, revealing a prominent gold tooth. “Who else could you be but you?” Her logic is unassailable. She speaks in a luxurious, old-worldly accent that is found today only among the oldest members of émigré communities. She hands me a small bouquet of wild flowers with the dewdrops still clinging to them like living pearls, and embraces me as if I were a long-lost member of her family. I am humbled and made silent by the gesture.

Security in the arrivals hall is surprisingly tight in what is, by European standards, just a small provincial airport. The boys in smart suits are eyeing me intently from the entrances, and I feel out of place among the colourful Turkoman crowds bustling around me.

“They are always suspicious of everything”, Irena explains in a low conspiratorial tone as we head for the taxi. “Nothing very much has changed here since the Soviet era.”

Her voice, I realize, is the only thing about her that is still young. She is matronly, composed of rounded forms, but comfortable and loose in her own body. Her hair, stained with an immensity of grey, is drawn up tightly on her head in a neat bun. Her unnaturally pale cheeks are veined in a watered ink. I wonder how old she can be. Seventy? Eighty? It is difficult to tell.

As we drive through the rambling assemblage of suburbs, shadows are already beginning to tug at the corners of buildings, and the sun is low over the Koppe Dag (the mountains that separate Turkmenistan from its turbulent southerly neighbour, Iran). Despite being on the edge of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, the city is remarkably cool and green at this hour. There are narrow irrigation channels criss-crossing the roads at regular intervals, and old established trees line the boulevards, giving welcome shade from the sun. One cannot, however, escape from the Orwellian presence of the nation's eccentric president-for-life, Turkmenbashi Saparmurat Niyazov, whose image is reproduced everywhere. “We even have a statue of him made of gold”, Irena tells me dryly. “It revolves in a full circle every 24 hours so it is always facing the sun…..He is supposed to be the light of our nation, you see!” She laughs sardonically.

There is a bitter edge to her laughter. During the Soviet era, no one was permitted to speak of the mass deportations to Turkmenistan. Even today, no one does so openly. Freedom of speech is non-existent here. There’s no right of assembly, no right of association. Every organization has to be registered with the state. The country has been slow to throw off its old Communist habits.

Once arrived at her apartment on the second floor of a modest housing block, Irena draws the curtains and (at last) begins to breathe more easily. Tomorrow, she tells me, she will introduce me to her circle. But in the meantime, I must be hungry.

She begins to take over the kitchen, as women often do, and asks me to help her chop some vegetables. I bow to her authority. We dovetail splendidly: I cut, and she prepares. The luxury of exotic cooking smells begins to infiltrate my senses and I know we are going to get along famously. Within an hour, we are eating our our “plov” (a local rice dish) by candlelight, the Turkish coffee is served, and we begin to talk.

“The first wave of political prisoners came here from Poland in the mid nineteenth century”, Irena explains. “They were revolutionaries, sentenced to hard labour for taking part in the 1863 Polish Uprising, which was bloodily put down by the Russians. They were forced to make the journey on foot. Hundreds of them perished during the building of the 700 km railway across the Karakum desert from Ashkhabad to Krasnovodsk. Later, other groups joined them, in 1903, 1921, 1935, and 1948. At one time, a tenth of the population of Ashkhabad were Poles”.

Irena knows her dates from memory. The still, deep river of her heart hoards its images and reflects them in a language that is simple, but powerfully effective, because still raw. Here is a woman whose life stands for something. For 15 years, she has devoted her energies to documenting and preserving the names and histories of the exiled. Her stories are without number. She keeps scrawled notes in faded children's jotters, hidden from prying eyes between the volumes of Russian Poetry on her bookcase. She brings them out and we go over the manuscripts together, correct references, peer myopically into maps sprawled across the living room floor

“No-one knows how many of us are left, because all archival material is considered secret. Any information we have has had to be passed by word of mouth. Hardly anyone, for example, has even heard of the mass deportations here in 1921, even though they were some of the largest. They occurred just after the Polish-Russian War when borders were established for the first time between the two countries. Poles who found themselves on the Soviet side of the border were deported to Kazakhstan, Uzbekhistan, Turkmenistan, Siberia - god knows where else. Most of their names are lost. We don’t know what happened to them”

Hours pass, talking of distant, but not-forgotten wars. Irena brings out sepia photographs, more coffee-and-cream than black-and-white, and enlarged to ridiculous proportions. We talk of the millions who lost their lives during Soviet and Tsarist eras, their names unregistered in any account book, buried without ceremony or marker in mass graves all over Russia. “If we do not remember them,” she says, “who will”?

She is a religious woman. But it is a faith expressed less in words than in the silences between them. She has nothing with which to confront the events of those years except her simple faith in a god, she says, “who betrayed them”. She uses the word “betrayed” with strong emphasis. “One day”, she adds, “God will take them into his arms and beg forgiveness for having forgotten them”. She looks directly into my eyes. “You and I will remind Him”
“What kind of God do we have who can be so... unjust,” I ask delicately?
She thinks for a moment. “You are talking about a God ‘up there’ in Heaven judging people’s actions in accordance with human concepts like Justice. That’s a naïve notion. That kind of God doesn’t exist. It’s enough for me to remember the millions who have died and been murdered to know that God exists… and is not just. It is we who must be just.”

She releases the hair from the bun on the back of her head and it fans out freely around her. The glow of a distant youth begins to emanate from her presence. She must have been beautiful in her youth.

What are her chances of repatriation to Poland? She makes a gesture of despair with her hands. “It’s possible only if a county or a district (in Poland) invites you over, offers you a place to live, and a job, and social security... before you can even think of applying. Who’s going to do that? It's hopeless. And we can’t travel anywhere else abroad because our wages are too low. She points to a photograph on the bookcase of two beautiful women with dark hair and poppy coloured lips. “My daughters. I am too old now, of course. But I would like my daughters to have a better life. We would even go to Russia if we could. But you have to show a birth certificate proving that you were born or have relatives there".

In the bloom of the candles, she looks young, even girlish, but is now visibly fading. In an effort to raise her spirits, I begin to tell her stories of my journey to Ashkhabad: exaggerated anecdotes involving lost companions, mysterious visitors and confiscated hand luggage in Istanbul. She begins to smile, and we are soon both transformed into schoolchildren, giggling and rocking against one another. I continue in the same vein for a few minutes. But when I look up, I find her fast asleep on the sofa, a cushion cradled in her arms like a child, her mouth slightly open.

I acknowledge my affection for this remarkable woman, forty years my senior. I feel a great spaciousness of soul in her, and a purity of being which I recognize but cannot convert into terms of my own reality. The varieties of love are so manifold that we do not possess the words to define all of them.

I cover her with a blanket, blow out the candles, and wander off to my room. Dawn is already in evidence. From my small window, the Persian mountains across the border hang weightless and rosy in the fresh morning light. It has been a very long day.

Ryszard Antolak
© PSA

The Young man and the Mighty Oak Tree

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There was once a simple young man who lived on a vast, dusty plain. Beside his cottage grew a mighty oak, the only one for miles around. In winter, it protected his home from the prairie storms. In summer, it gave shade from the fierce glare of the sun. The tree was everything the man had ever wanted. It met all his needs. It was large enough to provide him with firewood from its fallen branches; and it had many strong boughs, which the man occasionally cut to make furniture. It was good and strong, noble and tall. Everyone who passed by the cottage remarked upon the beauty of the old oak, which pleased the young man, for he loved it dearly. The oak tree was his whole life, his constant companion. He liked nothing better than to sit in its shade and read a book. He was very happy with his tree.

One day, the young man decided to make a chair for his library. So he took his saw and went out to the tree. As the metal bit into the thickness of a branch, the wood snapped off as if it were brittle, shooting painful splinters into the man’s face and eyes. He was surprised and hurt. Wiping away the tears, he looked at the wood and saw it was riddled with small holes. The man knew in his heart that the wood would never serve for furniture. But he dismissed these thoughts from his mind and returned to his books.

A few weeks later, he tried again (for life presses on). He went out to his beloved tree and began to cut another branch. Just as before, the wood shattered and sprayed him with its sharp splinters. But this time, (because he was prepared) he turned his head and the splinters (sharp as kitchen knives) showered him on the back of the neck, drawing blood. Again, he looked at the wood, and once more, he saw the same pithy, brittle mass of holes and cavities.

Gradually, the man learned from his books that his precious tree was unwell. It had become diseased - infested by an insect (the prairie oak flea) that was known to cripple oak trees, but not to kill them.

As the months passed and the disease progressed, the man was conscious he was getting less and less of what he needed from his tree. Its leaves became thin and scattered, and could not provide shade from the hot glare of the sun. Storms came. But instead of sheltering the house, the oak let loose its weakened branches onto the cottage roof with a loud and angry thunder. Once, a heavy limb crashed right through into his bedroom in the midst of a storm, and the man had to spend a cold, miserable night waiting for the daylight in order to mend the hole.

But the man continued to love his tree. It was beautiful. “It is my oak, and I love it”, he said to himself. “I know it has a disease, but that’s not the fault of the tree. I chose to build my home in its shelter, and now I am committed to staying with it whatever the winds of Destiny may decide.”

And so it was. The man now decided he would live with less furniture in his house than before. He read his books sitting on an old fruit crate instead of a chair. In winter, he went about the house wearing many layers of clothes to keep himself warm. He learned to sleep lightly, always listening for any crack in the oak wood that might cause the next bough to break above his head. It was worth the sacrifice.

Until one day, a passing wagon stopped, and an old man with a face as wizened as an ancient oak tree asked him, “Why do you stay with that sick tree? It causes you so much pain, and there are so many things it can never give you?”
“I love my tree,” answered the man. “It’s the disease that I hate. The tree is beautiful and good. And it is my life.”
“But look,” said the old man in the wagon. “Its wood is rotten. Its shade is useless. Instead of sheltering you, it harms you in storms. You have no decent furniture because its wood is so pithy and brittle.”
“I have learned to separate the disease from the tree", replied the simple man. “If I didn’t do that, my heart would surely become embittered.”
“But if the disease is separate”, asked the man in the wagon, “then tell me, where is your tree without the disease? I don’t see a healthy tree standing next to a disease. All I see is a pithy, bug-eaten tree that can barely stand on its own. If your tree is such a good provider, then why do you have so little, and why is your roof patched and leaking? Why do you have no decent furniture in your house? Why are you always frightened that a branch might come crashing through your roof at any moment? Is that any way to live your life?”

The man thought for a while. He looked around at the cold and empty shack his home had become and at the miserable state of his own life. He sat down on a rotten log and began to weep. “You know” he said, “maybe you are right. No matter how much I say I love that tree, it can never give me the things I need from it. I guess you’re right. The tree and the disease are all the same thing. I don’t have a tree and a disease. I have a “diseased tree”. And the longer I stay under it, the longer I’m going to live without the shade, the shelter, and the furniture that I need. One day soon, I’m going to be conked on the head by a falling branch and that will be the end of me. Maybe I need to start looking for another tree to give me what I need...”

With tears in his eyes, the man began to pack a suitcase, and before long, he had set off to look for another place to build a home. In time, he found one, with a healthy maple tree growing nearby.

He hated the idea of building a home all over again from scratch, but he was a courageous man, and was firmly resolved to try. It was very hard. After a few brief months, however, he had built himself a brand new home, shaded in the summer, shielded from winds in winter, and safe from storms. The tree was not a noble oak of course, but it could provide him with all the wood he needed for his furniture. Bees even came to suck nectar from its blossoms. Very often, he would sit contentedly in the evenings under its extensive canopy and write letters to his friends (who also had problems with their trees). He wrote to them about his beloved oak, and about the deep peace he had found in the shade of his simple unassuming maple. The man was content.

As for the oak tree: it continued to grow in its same spot, dropping its branches during every storm, just as it had before. Just as it always would in the future.

Retold by Ryszard Antolak

February 10th

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I am a child of Siberian exiles. Many of my ancestors are buried in the cold soil of that bleak land: all of them exiled against their will by a ruthless totalitarian state. Siberia is in my blood. Its winds blow loudly through my soul.

On this date in 1940, five members of my family, together with almost half a million other men, women and children, were forcibly taken from their homes at gunpoint, packed into cattle trains, and transported to the forced labour camps of northern Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their crime: that they were Polish citizens.

They were given no hint or warning of what was to come. The vast operation, carried out all over eastern Poland on a single night under cover of darkness and snow, had been prepared months in advance. It was first of four mass deportations of the population resulting in the incarceration on Russian soil of almost two million Polish citizens. They were taken away so no trace would ever remain of their language or their culture in the territories occupied in 1939 by the Soviet Union.

You are not likely to have heard any of this at school, or read about it in the mainstream history books. Britain, the US and the Soviet Union colluded together for almost 50 years to cover up, or obfuscate, the details of the crime. Even in (Soviet- dominated) Poland, until as recently as 1989, it was forbidden to refer to any part of this story.

All the arrests on that fateful night, February 10th 1940, followed a basic standard pattern. At four o’clock in the morning, when the whole family were asleep, a loud knock was heard at the door. Three or four soldiers entered, armed with pistols. They herded everyone (including children) into one room and put them up against the wall in their nightclothes. Meanwhile, the house was searched and an inventory made of all the family’s assets. They were then ordered to dress warmly and given fifteen minutes to gather together their belongings and prepare for what they were told was, “a long journey”.

It was snowing heavily outside. The temperature was minus 40 degrees. Two horse-driven sleighs stood waiting to transport them to the railway station. Once there, they were summarily loaded onto cattle wagons (thrust tightly in a standing position, one person next to another) like sardines. It was not uncommon for seventy people to be packed into each wagon, families with children. There was often no room to lie down, or even to sit.

In the centre of each cattle truck stood a small stove, the only source of heat. For ventilation, there was only a tiny window near the ceiling covered in masses of barbed wire. A rough hole in the floor served as a toilet. The doors of the wagon were padlocked loudly and not opened again for three days. Some of the children began to faint from lack of air and water. The men beat loudly against the doors in desperation, but to no avail. Finally, after four days, the train began its passage northwards to the frozen wastes of Siberia, a journey that was to take upwards of four weeks.

Many, however, did not survive to reach their intended destinations. The children were the first to succumb to the intense cold, the lack of air and the scarcity of food and water. Now and again, the train would stop at some abandoned station in the wilderness, and the doors unlocked to allow the passengers to dispose of their dead. The earth was frozen hard, and it was not possible to give them a proper burial. So they merely covered the bodies in a light sprinkling of snow, said a few prayers over them, and continued their journey northwards.
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The story of their exile, the miracle of their eventual release, and the desperate attempts by hundreds of thousands of them to cross Russia to freedom in Iran, is a subject too vast to outline here.

But few of those who managed to escape from Siberia ever saw their homes again. By a cruel twist of fate, their political destiny was sealed in Tehran in 1943. In November of that year, the leaders of Russia, Britain and the USA met in the Iranian capital to decide the fate of Post-war Europe. During their discussions (which were held in secret), the United States and Britain endorsed Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in eastern Poland. They decided to assign Poland to the zone of influence of the Soviet Union after the war. Poland would lose both its independence and its territorial integrity. The eastern part of the country, from which the exiles to Siberia had been originally expelled, would be incorporated wholesale into Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Polish government was not informed of the decision until years later, and felt understandably betrayed. 48,000 Polish soldiers would go on to lose their lives fighting for the freedom of (among others) the very nations whose governments had secretly betrayed them in Tehran, and later (in 1945) at Yalta.

February 10th may not mean anything to most people. But in some households such as mine, this date on the calendar can not be allowed to pass without solemn remembrance and reflection. Siberia is in our blood. Its winds blow coldly through our hearts.

© Ryszard Antolak
(picture: Nikolai Getman)

Thought of the Heart

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For our ancestors in antiquity, the mind was often believed to reside in the heart (the center of the human organism), and not in the head. Many so-called “primitive" peoples today still believe this. So when a philosopher such as Zarathushtra entreated us to "ponder with a clear mind on the best of things", he would have been pointing to his heart, and not his head, when he said it.

To ponder something “in the heart” is very different from pondering it "in the head”. Something that is "learned by heart", for example, means the learner is totally involved in the process of learning, the heart (or sometimes the lungs) being regarded as the seat of his soul where all the senses commingle. Related to the heart, the cultivation of a "clear mind" can refer not only to a "heady", dry, intellectual, logical kind of thinking, but to a wisdom of the whole organism, symbolized by the heart which sits at the centre of the body: to that "mingling of wisdoms" (so beautifully described in the Avesta) as constituting the state of Haurvatat (immortality).

Of course, poets have long known this. A whole vocabulary of "heart thought" was developed centuries ago by the Persian poets and philosophers. Alexander’s invasion of the East all but put an end to this school of thought. But it re-surfaced in the 11th century. A philosophy of the heart continued to blossom among poets and thinkers in Persia, in the works of such philosophers as Suhrawardi, who tried to revive so many of the ancient concepts and make them acceptable to a hostile Islamic public (and for which he was duly executed by Saladin at the age of only thirty-nine). It re-surfaced also in Medieval Italy among the "Fideli d’Amore", the philosophical group to which Dante and his companions belonged. But the obsessive rationalism of the Enlightenment suppressed its development and banished it to the distant borders of poetry.

In Western Philosophy, the idea of the "thinking heart" can be found as far back as the works of Aristotle, for whom the heart was the organ of aisthesis, “dhawg” (the Persian term), or "heart-savour", which meant at root: "taking in" and "breathing in" - a gasp, that primary aesthetic response.... taking to heart, interiorizing, becoming intimate with.... so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul"
(James Hillman. The Thought of the Heart. Ascona: Eranos Foundation 1981 pp 31-32)

Later, in Sufism, Dawg was defined as "creative intuition". It meant literally "tasting", but attained the meaning of "heart-vision": direct experience of Truth beyond Reason and physical senses. Dhawg could be attained only by "taste", not solely by learning, and led to the idea of "divine intoxication".

To turn to our own time, the idea that we only think with our heads is fast becoming a quaint and antiquated concept. Today, we are beginning to re-discover the faculties of the heart known to our ancestors. Over the past ten or twelve years, images of the heart as “only a pump" have had to be radically re-examined. Research published in the American Journal of Cardiology is showing that the heart possesses its own kind of independent thought which informs the brain. It may even have its own memories. The head and the heart exchange information via the vagus nerve, a "cable” of thousands of scintillating neural filaments working in both directions. Each organ affects the other, and they work hand-in-glove.

If we banish the idea that the “mind is wholly in the head” then new doors begin to open, and new insights are revealed. Rule of the Heart (Xshathra, in ancient Persian thought) becomes defined as the coming together of all wisdoms, rational, emotional, sensual, mythological, spiritual, psychological etc. It is not at all a sentimental or overly-emotional response to experience.

If we confine our ideas of "a clear mind" merely to what is narrowly logical and rational, a wealth of meanings can be lost, leading to a rigid kind of one-dimensional thought..

“We are bereft in our culture of an adequate psychology and philosophy of the heart, and therefore also of the imagination. Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts, because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels...if we would recover the imaginal, we must first recover its organ, the heart and its philosophy"
James Hillman. (Thought of the Heart p.3)

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Sara Alavi Kia)

Aphorisms 2

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To love without covering up one’s eyes – that truly is a great art.

You can drink from a carafe if you grip its neck and press it to your lips. But if you want to drink from a spring, you have to get down on your knees and bow your head.

It is better to lose your life beneath a tattered tree you have planted, than to wander in the desert believing mirages to be your orchards.

Truth is not just knowledge, it is life itself.

No one can destroy a nation without the co-operation of that nation's citizens.

I have seen carrots and turnips cut into the most elegant patterns to place into a broth: stars and numbers, burning hearts, and crosses… Even so, the carrots and turnips remained just carrots and turnips.

Imitation of those who have introduced something concerning the overall development of mankind is not imitation, but humanity.

The spirit of a nation is like water – if you sweep it from the hills into a valley it will erupt into the sky by the measure of its debasement.

Not everything super-logical is anti-logical.

If human speech consisted merely of a certain number of words and certain combinations of expressions (as certain wise men would have us believe), there would be no difference between literature and mathematics: literature would simply be faulty mathematics!

The best healer is the one who is himself the medicine

To have a heart, one has to use it

There can be no progress without heresy.

A nation consists not just of what distinguishes it from other nations, but also of what binds it to other nations.

Love is like coal. When it is lighted, it burns; when it goes out, it leaves a dark stain.

The poet and the prostitute are alike: both sell priceless merchandise for a pittance.

He sleeps best who does not know how badly he sleeps.

There is no worse nonsense than educated nonsense

Those who profess most faith in doctors are the healthy.

The way out is through the door you came in.

The Zoroastrian Houses of Yazd

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Sometimes old buildings possess the virtue to express far better than words the fears and uncertainties of nations or religious groups. The old Zoroastrian houses of Yazd are one such example. Civil and religious persecution have dictated the style and pattern of their unusual architecture. Memories of repression are encoded in the design of their thick adobe walls. They are voices frozen into stone.

Yazd is situated on a high, arid plateau at the interface of two mighty deserts (the Dasht-e Lut and the Dasht-e Kavir). It was once an important station on the Silk Road, famous for its fabrics and textiles (1). For many years, its splendid isolation protected it from political upheavals in the rest of Iran. After the Mongol invasions that saw the total disappearance of Zoroastrian populations from the provinces of Sistan and Khorasan, Yazd emerged unharmed, protected by its vast expanses of featureless desert. It became a haven for Zoroastrians from all over Iran. In this city of walled gardens and turquoise domes they continued to practice their religion and customs relatively undisturbed. Most of them still spoke Dari, once the official spoken language of the Sassanian court, later confined solely to the Zoroastrian populations of Yazd and Kerman (though fragmented into countless local dialects) (2). The pleasant oasis city drew many artists, poets and sufis to the safety of its walls (3)

The region’s prosperity and isolation lasted until the beginning of the eighteenth century whereupon two hundred years of political and religious turmoil ensued which decimated the population. Yazd suffered attacks from Afghans, Zands and Afshars, to name but a few. The Zoroastrian population was subjected to additional hardships. As a religious minority subject to discriminatory laws, it found it had as much to fear from its Muslim neighbours as from the foreign forces armed against it. It took extra measures to protect itself, a fact reflected in the community’s unusual domestic architecture (4).

Yazd is famous for its unique sky-line of badgirs: tall, elegant wind-towers intended to catch the slightest movement of air and direct it downward into cool underground chambers. The houses of the region have great vaulted talars that open out onto spacious courtyards containing pleasant water features and gardens. But the older houses of the Zoroastrian population are significantly different from those of their Muslim neighbours.

In 1963 when professor Mary Boyce arrived in the region to study them, she discovered gloomy, fortress-like buildings virtually devoid of any furniture or greenery. They were low and airless. No badgirs adorned their roofs. The primary consideration of the builders had been defence. The ideal solution would have been to build upwards, erecting high, tower-like houses as are found (for example) all over Scotland. But in Iran, Zoroastrians were not allowed to build their homes any higher than a man could reach (or any taller than the houses of Moslems). They could only build outwards and downwards, creating dark honey-combs of subterranean rooms with adobe walls several feet thick to withstand attack. The Zoroastrians were physically greater in stature than their Moslem neighbours (“mighty men”, as Mrs Boyce calls them) and they could well have put up a fight if they had to. But it seldom happened. The penalty for killing a Moslem was certain death: to kill a Zoroastrian meant incurring only a modest fine, usually waived by the authorities. Better, therefore, to prevent attacks in the first place

Entry to the houses was via a single door from a narrow lane just wide enough to allow a fully-laden donkey to pass. The Law stated that the door of a Zoroastrian dwelling could be secured by only a single hinge, so a series of doors had to be built (one after the other) in the interests of safety. Finally, at the end of a gloomy corridor, a narrow door - the smallest of them all - led into a bare, central courtyard or rikda.

There were no widows. Sometimes glass bottles could be seen protruding from the walls of the entrance lane. But these served as spy-holes rather than windows, defence being uppermost in the minds of these persecuted inhabitants. The only light to enter the house was through the tiny courtyard or via irregular gaps in the doors or ceilings. In some of the buildings the courtyard had been covered over completely to prevent intruders gaining access from the roof. The result was total darkness and oppressive claustrophobia. It is ironic that Zoroastrians with their sophisticated theologies of light should have been forced to live in such shadowy, enclosed buildings.

Bicameral fortresses
The oldest standard form of Zoroastrian house described by Mrs Boyce dated from the early nineteenth century. All other houses were variations on its basic design. It was known in Dari as a do-pesgami (or “two-chambered” house) on account of its two open pavilions facing each other across the rikda. These were known invariably as the pesgam-i mas and the pesgam-i vrok (the ‘great’ and the ‘small’ pesgams) (5). Both had domed roofs to help minimise solar gain and speed up the loss of heat from below.

The pesgam-i mas (or “great pesgam”) was so called not because of its size, (which was often smaller than the pesgam-i-vrok) but on account of its greater significance. It was the room set aside for religious observances and where the ritual vessels, the afrinigan, the bowls and spoons etc., were kept. It was never built facing north (the direction of evil); and was always hidden from the doorway so that no non-Zoroastrian visitor might set eyes upon it. Clay rectangular pots in which grasses were sown at major festivals were secured high up in its corners, a welcome relief from the monochrome grey of the house.

The great pesgam was considered pure (“pak”) and hence no-one in a state of ritual impurity could enter it. Its floor was of plain earth. Brick, being a man-made material, was considered unsuitable as it offended the Zoroastrians’ feeling of harmony with Nature. The age of a house could often be estimated by the height of the great pesgam’s floor. This was always higher than the floors of the rest of the house, a consequence of the fresh layer of soil that was spread upon it every year during the Farvardagan festival (the festival that welcomes back the spirits of the dead). (6)

Opposite the pesgam-i mas was the pesgam-i vrok (or “small pesgam”), a secular pavilion dominated by weaving looms with threads strung from wall to wall across the room. Zoroastrians were forbidden by law to practice any skilled trades, and hence were forced to rely upon weaving (as well as some farming and cattle-droving) to earn a living.

There were various other rooms around the periphery of the house, all of which Mrs Boyce describes meticulously in her article. What is striking about them is their emptiness: the almost complete lack of furniture, decoration or even cupboard space. In the bedroom, clothes and linens were stored in cotton bundles along the sides of the walls as if its inhabitants were ready at a moment’s notice to flee for their lives. This was often the truth, for persecution was endemic. In their haste they often buried valuables under the floors, hoping to retrieve them at a later date. This knowledge gave rise to the belief that all old Zoroastrian houses contained “buried treasure”, and ensured that they attracted the attention of potential burglars. Somewhere in the house, however, there was usually a panahgah (a concealed room) where valuables, wine - and even children - could be secreted in times of trouble.

Another room commonly found in these buildings was the ganza-yi punidun. It was nothing more than a simple stone hut. Women would pass the first few days of their menstrual periods here, segregated away from the men. But by the 1960s this architectural feature of Zoroastrian homes was already passing into memory. Mrs Boyce once asked a young Zoroastrian girl what purpose she though the structure might have served, and received the reply that it was probably “a hen-house”!

The only heated room in the whole house was the long narrow kitchen (or pokri) with its aromatic bread ovens. The weather in Yazd could be bitterly cold in winter, so the family would often congregate here in the evenings. Its fire was never allowed to go out.

Many of the laws discriminating against Zoroastrians (and other religious minorities) in Iran were still in force at the end of the nineteenth century. A Zoroastrian had to dismount from his donkey when approaching a Moslem. He was not allowed out of his house on rainy days because the water from his clothes might “contaminate” believers. He was compelled to wear distinctive garments to identify him as an outsider. He was not allowed to wear a hat or shoes, unless they were torn. Even eye-glasses were forbidden him. Subject to the notorious jaziya tax (7), he was kept firmly in poverty: a second-class citizen in his own country.

But when restrictions upon them relaxed at the beginning of the twentieth century, Zoroastrians again began to improve and upgrade their homes. The do-pesgami developed into chor-pesgami (or four-pavilioned) houses, upper stories were built, courtyards opened up and badgirs added. Water ponds and gardens began to appear to grace the inner courtyards. Life began to return to normal once again. Mrs Boyce reminds us at the end of her article that:
“Persia, with its love of gardens and flowers, was Zoroastrian before it was Muslim; and it was poverty and oppression that forced the Yazdi Zoroastrians into their small bare, fortress-like homes, without a blade of greenness to relieve the monotony. [But] as soon as pressure on them slackened, they created houses with gardens again.” - Mary Boyce, 1964

Notes
1. Marco Polo, who visited the city in 1272 called it “a noble and considerably sized city”. It was famous for Yazdi, a silken fabric embroidered with golden threads.
2. Dari differs from Farsi in possessing fewer borrowings from Arabic. Over the centuries, Dari speakers have experienced extensive political pressure to yield up the
language. Today there are less than 10,000 of them worldwide, most of them in Kerman and Yazd. Dari belongs to the N. Western Iranian language family and is related to Kurdish Gilaki and Balochi. It is not equated with the Dari spoken in Afghanistan.
3. A few of these Sufis built influential monasteries in the district. Some of them, like the monastery of Sheikh Ahmad Fahadan, can still be seen today in Yazd.
4. The Zoroastrians of Yazd distinguish between two kinds of Moslem: the najib (kind, generous) and the na-najib (the opposite of najib). They attach these names to several villages in the district and travel considerable distances to avoid contact with na-najib communities.
5. Mrs Boyce sought out the correct Dari words for many of the domestic objects she wrote about in her article. She was helped by two primary source books:
Soroushian, Jamshid. Farhang i behdinan. Tehran 1956, and
Ivanow, W. The Gabri dialect spoken by the Zoroastrians of Persia IV. RSO, xviii (1939)
6. These basic house designs are peculiar to Yazd and are not found among the Zoroastrian houses of neighbouring Kerman. If they once existed there, they probably disappeared in the 18th century after the massacre of the Zoroastrian population by Mahmood the Afghan.
7. The heavy poll tax inflicted upon most non-Moslems.

Source:

The Zoroastrian Houses of Yazd. by Mary Boyce in
Iran and Islam (In memory of Vladimir Minorsky).
Edited by Bosworth, C.E.
Edinburgh University Press. 1971
Printed in Great Britain by T. & A. Constable Ltd. Edinburgh. Scotland. UK
(ISBN 0 85224 200 X)

© Ryszard.Antolak
antolak@blueyonder.co.uk

Lament for Forugh Farrokhzad

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[She] loved as in our age
People already do no longer; as only
The wild soul of a poet
Is still condemned to love
(Pushkin)

Ever since her tragic death in a car accident in 1967, Forugh Farrokhzad has been drawing thousands of visitors to the Zahir-al-Doleh cemetery in Tehran. They come to lay flowers, recite poetry and light candles on the grave of the poet who has become an inspiration to women, not only in Iran, but wherever women’s rights are severely curtailed. If she had survived her car crash, the poet would have celebrated her seventieth birthday this year.

Forugh Farrokhzad was one of those poets for whom Poetry (with a capital P) was not solely about the "writing" of "poems" or versification, but about living life to the full without compromise or equivocation. She once wrote:

"I believe in being a poet in every moment of my life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behaviour has nothing to do with their poetry. In short, they are only poets while they are writing their poetry. When they have finished writing, they turn back into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, short-sighted, miserable, and envious people. So I do not believe their poems. I prize honesty in life, and when I find these people making fists and various claims - in their poems and essays - I get disgusted, and I doubt their veracity. I think to myself, “Perhaps it is only for a plate of rice that they are screaming.”

Forugh Farrokhzad, and also Marina Tsvetaeva, (with whom she is often compared), believed one could be a poet without writing a single line of poetry. For these women, Poetry was a vocation, a way of life: a unique way of perceiving the world (and ourselves with it) as a seamless unity of being. Just as the written poem uncovers hidden connections between apparently disparate elements and unites them into a meaningful work of art; so the poet gathers up the scattered elements of his own life and makes from them a new living entity, open to infinity. He makes a poem out of the details of his life, and attempts to live it with all the heightened passion and intensity of feeling he is able withstand.

Forugh knew the consequences of dedicating her life so completely to Poetry. As a woman, it meant renouncing the traditional roles of wife and mother Iranian society required of her. On a more personal level, it meant abandoning her only child whom she loved to distraction. She made the choice in full consciousness of the consequences, writing about it with her characteristic brutal honesty:

I know a weeping child mourns
The loss of his mother,
Yet, tired and despairing
I set out on the road to Hope.
Poetry is now my love. Poetry my lover.
I leave everything behind to follow it.

Her actions, which remain as controversial today as they were during her own time, had tragic repercussions for her life as well as her sanity. As the years went by, she became increasingly haunted by the enormity of what she had done: that “sin” (as she called it) which she both detested and exalted at the same time.

I sinned a sin of pure pleasure,
In an embrace that was fiery and wild.
I sinned in the arms of one
Who was hot and avenging as iron.

In that dark and silent seclusion,
I sat dishevelled by his side.
As his passion was poured upon my lips,
and I lost the sorrow in my shattered heart…

I sinned a sin of pure pleasure,
next to a shaking, stupefied figure.
God only knows what I did
In that dark and silent seclusion!

But her poetry became enormously enriched as a result. She showed a generation of Iranian women that their lives did not have to revolve around their children or the kitchen sink. In the details of her own life, she demonstrated the possibility of extracting the utmost from every moment of existence.

It has been said that the poet’s main task is to make us aware of the breath of eternity that hangs over all that is truly alive. If this is the case, then Forugh Farrokhzad fulfilled her role as “eternity’s hostage, captive to time”. She gathered up the shattered morsels of eternity that lay within her own soul and held them up to us in “wet and trembling hands” (Pasternak)

Her poetry (like her life) veered wildly to the far-flung borders of passion, which she documented with meticulous honesty and ruthlessness of vision. Her life was tragically brief. She lit up the literary sky magnificently for a brief moment, and then went out forever. But that unique light was never forgotten. Every year on the anniversary of her death (February 14th), people gather at her graveside in their hundreds to light candles, lay flowers and mourn her passing. The sky comes down among them to lay a covering of soft snow. After so many years, Forugh Farrokhzad is still sorely missed.

I will come, I will come
I will come again
and this time my hair will smell of the soil;
and my eyes will be black
with the knowledge of the darkness;
I will come again
carrying the branches I have gathered
in the woodlands behind the wall.

I will come, I will return,
I will come again,
and the entrance will be filled once more with love;
And I will greet once more at the gate
All those who are in love
And the girl who is waiting at the gate;
I'll greet them all once more.



© Ryszard Antolak

In praise of "wobbling"

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To wobble: verb (intrans)
"to incline to one side and then the other alternatively; to be not properly balanced; to oscillate; to go unsteadily; to be inconsistent; to rock...."

We wobble, hobble, totter, vacillate, stagger and rock from one incomplete idea to another, from one revelation to the next (and sometimes back again) until we find the truth.

I revel in that progress. Isn't it part of being human? ("If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise" - William Blake). The secret of life is being proficient at this "wobbling". To live is to "wobble", to hesitate, to try to find the balance, but never really to achieve it. This "trying" is the dance of life. Ultimate rest, true balance, is death. Everything dead has achieved its ultimate gravitas; is settled and motionless. Rest for the heart is death.

In music, I love best the irregular beat, the hesitancy, the tempo rubato, rather than the regular, hypnotic sound of the metronome which is like the dead mechanical pounding of pistons. What is dancing if not the aesthetic of wobbling motion, meaningful beyond words? And the dervish dance involves a wobbling of perception in the dancer between the sacred and profane, between heaven and earth, ecstasy and finitude.

And what of love: that sweet, fumbling, hesitant, chaotic dialectic of giving and taking? Kiss another human being on the hand (or gently on the cheek) and you turn the regular rhythm of their heart (or yours) into a truly wobbling tempo rubato of the blood. Is mystical love any different?

I am always moved by children (and young animals) taking their very first steps, uncertain on shaky legs, not knowing yet what all this tottering is about, but revelling in it. We are all like that in our adult lives.

I try to keep away from those who are unerringly consistent, those who never change their minds; those who are always right (even 90% of the time).

Our flight through Life is seldom as straight or as smooth as a blackbird's swoop; it's more like a butterfly's - inconstant, vacillating, hesitant, honest, idiotic and crooked: in a word, very human. And perhaps - who knows - this is another evolutionary gift to prevent us from being picked off too easily by those predators in the spiritual garden who would try, for their own sinister reasons, to predict our progress.

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now (it is too late)
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has - who knows as well as I? -
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift
("Flying Crooked" by Robert Graves)

Long live the swagger and the wobbling yet!

© Ryszard Antolak

Aphorisms

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Literature has no need of great writers, only of great writing

The Muse is the only woman who can make a man conceive.

Stupid ideas, written stupidly, are harmless. But beware of stupid ideas written with talent.

The Beautiful is that to which one cannot add or take anything away.

Lies are corrections of the Truth.

Geniuses leave no schools behind them.

Those who want to shine have to burn first

Live the biography you would write for yourself

There are writers who write and speak quietly, but whose silences are deafening.

Two idiots will never bore each another as much as two educated people.

Whether you throw a stone or a diamond into the water, the ripples are the same.

The only people who can change our maps of the world are explorers and bad printers.

The Devil never sleeps….with just anyone.

Some people’s lives are a long journey from Sodom…. all the way to Gomorrah.

Truth is always naked: no wonder people divert their eyes from it out of prudery.

Lies always sound more logical than the Truth.

Even the most beautiful legs have to end somewhere.

Those who fall madly in love were already a little mad before they fell in love.

Nothing is able to move a man more than the tears of a woman he has begun to love; and nothing irritates a man more than the tears of a woman whom he has stopped loving.

I suffer therefore I am.

There is no need to hurry: wisdom always arrives late.

Some people dedicate their entire lives to digestion.

A man has no other choice but to be a man.

Soon, no-one will ever be forgotten; everyone will become a statistic.