Untitled — “Agreement, Fear, Psyche”

Azar 1394 · Nov–Dec 2015

Translated from the Persian original.

1. Agreement:
If you're interested in social issues, please don't read the rest of this text, because my piece isn't social at all; the same goes if you're feeling fine, because further on I'll probably ruin your Friday eve. You may be a very busy person, or maybe your time is mostly free. Maybe you're busy because you have big motives and goals, or maybe it's out of need and hardship that you don't notice how your day turned into night. And if your time is free, it may be that you're of no use, so your schedule is empty and no one calls on you, or it may be your laziness and apathy and coldness that keep you passive. But in any of these cases, it matters to you what state you'll be in in the near future, say, two hours from now.

2. Fear:
The overwhelming majority of people have something to lose, but they don't think about losing it, because they've thought about it so much that little by little it has slipped out of their conscious mind, and even though this fear has taken up permanent residence in them, much of the time they're happy and fortunate.

3. Psyche:
If you're interested in psychological and scientific topics, don't read the rest of the text. Whether your brain or your body can play host to another being is treated in psychology and psychiatry as one or more illnesses, and well, nobody these days goes to an exorcist or a charm-writer for their insane behavior, unless the doctors have given up on them.

4. Delusion:
As far as I've read and know about ethereal and supernatural beings, either they can't reach us, or they can but, since they see no profit in where our lives overlap, they don't want anything to do with us at all; or, since they vibrate in higher and thinner strata of existence, we're trivial to them, and so they aren't counted as a big threat to us. And so, except in horror movies and fortune-telling sessions to track down the heart of a beloved, his or hers, we basically have nothing to do with each other.

5. The question is why two hours from now isn't scarier than two years from now. The answer is: because it's more predictable. But that's just a statistical, offhand way of looking at it, because as I see it, two hours from now is just two hours after two years ago.

6. The sun is probably the element of nature closest to affection and warmth and the giving of life, and the word mehr, which literally means the sun, evokes affection and security in its sense, and for that very reason is read as the sun. But a device called a magnifying glass gathers this affection into a focal point and creates a scorching furnace in which not only is the sun's kind and generous nature nowhere to be seen, but it shows no mercy to any object or living thing.

7. It doesn't matter whether darkness is an essence in itself or the absence of the essence of light; darkness exists, and just as from an hour before sunset to an hour after it the half-shadow on a meridian turns into absolute shadow, you could be in the dark half of life within two hours.

8. Satan probably settled things with himself, with God and the angels, and with humans millions of years ago, and so he goes about his usual routine. And my question has always been why we always consider only two poles for the world, evil and good, and don't consider any spectrum at all in between.

9. Guest:
You feel you have a guest, inside your head. Someone you host, whom you feed and give a place to; you haven't been paying attention to it, either you've been busy or you haven't had the patience for it. It hasn't been offended, it doesn't expect much of you, it hasn't said anything either. You don't remember when it came, maybe when it was small; it didn't matter anyway. Now it's grown, but it can't be seen; it's in your gray half; you are only two hours away from it.

10. While you were asleep, while you were busy, it poked around this side and that of your brain on its own, looked in the drawers, figured out what goes on in your head, saw what you'd hidden where. It is like a magnifying glass that concentrates all your strengths and weaknesses into a focal point, and through it, from the shadow inside you, it sees everything, and lays everything out side by side, and suddenly you see that everything has conspired, and in a dark focal point something satanic has happened.

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