The Humours of Sufism in Iranian New Wave Cinema

The prophet Khizr Khan Khwaja by Anonymous

"I know you've been dreaming of me. But don't take it seriously. You know that dawn is when God visits his devotees. And divides the daily bread among them." Spoken by a Sufi Mystic who appears in dream visions in the Iranian film Pari by Dariush Mehrjui

Interestingly, this brilliant film was originally adapted from "Franny and Zooey" by J.D. Salinger without authorization, by iconoclastic and renowned Persian film director, Dariush Mehrjui. The film was adamantly attacked on all sides, by both Salinger's lawyers and Islamic approval. It seems that artists are often at work portraying characters and illustrations of their own internal struggle, where in this film, Pari, a young aspiring theatre actress drowns in pseudo-mystic emotionalism surrounded by a family of intellectuals and artists. Pari (a Persian name meaning "mermaid") finds herself swimming in over her head, a being caught between two worlds, and wishing to unite with her beloved uncle who took his own life. Indeed, the auteur filmmaker, and artists of a higher order conceive the focal point of their internal development, interwoven with an external social conflict, as a kind of dreaming, where it is seen through towards the dawn, beyond both the day of social tension and the night of inner turmoil.

For a great wealth of film reviews on Dariush Mehrjui's extraordinary work visit The Film Sufi

_________

a Fellini-esque mindtrip of character haunts, my feet dragging through superstitious nostalgias and the blind opacity of lost friendships, tragic wants, and open futures.

"Fellini, la Grande Parade" by Jean-Pierre Dalbera

black and white fur, white and black fur, the coloration of his follicles, a childhood escape through naming, and here he is again, in full glory, my dead companion of all things meditative, a leader in the subconscious wave of true surrender to the spiritual laughter of play 

Myojakdo (Painting of Cats and Sparrows) by Byeon Sang-byeok

here he is, I can feel his warmth in that little heart beating patiently between two rib cages of delicate whimsy, and he leads on through the empty darkness, a labyrinth of hollows beckons me forward, through to a sweetening, mental taste

_______

“I saw the trunk,”
Her Hindu elephant from outside
Walks coolly from music’s grand Guest

At the public house,
In the window,
A final flicker before traversing the footboard
loosened with railroad age
           Over the national telephone of spiritual callings
           Abused by electrified tradition
           Stunned in the tingled alcoholic flame
                  In isolated, deserted and abandoned bodies
                          Whose spirits bore a frail passage,
                          engraved in the air of soundless rhyme

A knowing
Ever thoughtless to the strength in pure being,
To grasp coldly into the summer’s beaten plea
           To sustain our musical sharing
           In human heaven’s piercing
                  Through the empty eye holes
                  Peering with my mirrored face of light
                          Radiating, through absolute darkness
                          as a visible cry
                                 To haunt our sacred sanctuary

“That inebriated muse!”
Drinking the words of men into her silent womb,
To fixate her fingers into the cross
           Formed over a chest glorified with Catholic warnings
           To relieve one’s self of the world
           and ask divinity to replace human desire

To become one collective struggling
As a unified presence,
Whose heart remained fixedly sanctified
           Before the death of the Mother and the Father’s bared ghost
                  Pictured as a beacon
                  Blended into our animalistic foresight

excerpt from "An Unknown Pleasure of Respect"

Persian Mysteries and the Immortality Rites of Zoroaster

Tower of Silence (Dakhma), Mumbai by Cornelius Brown

“…never age and never die, never decay and never rot, ever living and increasing, being master of its own wish: when the dead will rise, life and immortality come, and the world be restored to its wish.” 

Yasht 19.2.11. James Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, Part II, The Sirozahs,Yashts and Nyayis; Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXIII (Oxford, 1883), p.290

__________

It is 12^th century Persia, the continental-temporal mirror image of 21^st century Canada. After a lesson on the estate, I a youth of educable age, begin to row across a placid lake with my father. The day is warm, with cool breezes flushing our skin in a mixed haze of natural praise and remorse for the end days of summering. My father, a muscular, bearded intimidation of manhood, speaks with the grazing lurch of intense commanding. As we row, in separate crafts, the waters turn rapid. In that moment, he begins testing me on my learned material. 

The oral literature of the day is mind-bending and terse in its memorable strings of morality, geography and spirituality. I’m able to recall various characters and events, and as I extrapolate, the waters toss and turn unexpectedly. At my wavering voice, my father’s eyes brim with the frosted fire of dark Persian mirth. Yet, as soon as I veer into future’s allusions, spouting the literary names and waves of later centuries unheard, a fire burns in his eyes of serious intent to quiet my youth’s wandering. As he reaches out to grab me into his craft and row back ashore to the consistent presence of historic symmetry, we are both swallowed by the apparition of a waterfall along the other shore, pouring us downward with the turbulent waters in a vein of undone chronology and placeless imagination. 

World According to Avesta by Orijentolog

I call out the names of literary history upwards along the upended future. Until the 21^st century’s own dawning, my mind, feckless among the archaic forms of Iranianization, is unceasing in its deliberations on the foreshadowed youth of humanity. I turn and writhe with ancestral might into the sheer unknowable mists. My father has since disappeared, and in that silence I begin to know my name.  

_________

Driving out demons with Masonic symbology
         Over the infinite sands of civilization,
         breathed and created out of time
In the sun’s ravishing corner of a universe,
         un-tempted and forever at a loss
                Between the child’s two eyes
                closing
On death and the holocaust of our forsaken government
         Laughing at the trees’ roots


When stretched to the bottom of India’s or Africa’s wells
         Ousting up the belief in life as a drunken tragedy
                              Yet, be not humourless
                              nor without comic sophistry


In the dance and song
         Come alive by the sexual majesty
                              In theatre’s delicate ways,


To present the creative being
as one with truth’s bold and upheld music
         Reflecting back in the caged mirror
                              A creator anew

- excerpt from "From Behaved Freedom to Absolute Nonsense"

The Universal Energy of Non-Violent Technology

"In the 1950s the scientists who created the atomic bomb offered a promise, by splitting the atom we could have a limitless supply of electricity that could end pollution and bring peace to the world forever, but after the disaster in Japan, that dream has never looked more like a nightmare."

- Narrator in "The Thorium Dream" 

_______

A map, from overhead, spells a loose bombing pattern over the destroyed ash of a once proud Western city. The doomsday vibe is instilled pervasively, even from twelve thousand feet. I descend. Hooded, disguised in the female clothing of a conservative Iranian Muslim woman, I defy gravity, bounding over farmyards and plains with ghastly unconcern for my step. American, I daydream momentous bravery in the hook of Ali, the most famous American Muslim. Finally, I arrive to a gathering of young people my age. Crowding around a midday fire, we clumsily fiddle with various instruments. Curiously, I see an old friend. People begin to single me out. “Play this! Play that!” They stammer, belligerent with string and reed instruments sounding off into unbroken landscapes, the sobering spring sky presses coldly on my uncovered scalp. Every instrument I touch is in disrepair. Unable to make a clear sound, I move on to alcohol. 

_______

Ash

"Dreaming of ashes omens woe, and many bitter changes are sure to come to the dreamer. Blasted crops to the farmer. Unsuccessful deals for the trader. Parents will reap the sorrows of wayward children." (iDream)

_______

nervous mule-packed, people's spread,
glum rising, toward peak's,
unearthed sudden, as an island explosion,
tectonic wires flattening,
the disbelieving abortion!

the worshipped spring,
overloaded with unfound substance,
anonymity, in a human non-being,
a wasted mold, singing on the harmonious road,
to the past, when the all-encompassing now,
expressed self to a universal song

archaic, yet everlasting
and then, always gone,
fizzed out in the solar flare

pop flash, grazed heat from the mythological
drumbeat, groundless vibrations,
mounting birthless, made from dark matter,
living only to the taste,
dust on the wordless tongue,
a silence, encased in an echo
never bound,
we, fortunate,
binge on the profound.

- excerpt from "internet current"

The Ascension of Living Myth

Attar of Neishabur

"Yea, ev'n the abstract Forms that Space and Time
Men call, Weal and Woe, Virtue and Crime,
And all the several Creeds like those who fell
Before them, Musulman and Infidel
Shall from the Face of Being melt away,
Cancell'd and swept as Dreams before Day."

- excerpt from "Bird Parliament" by Farid ud-Din Attar (translated by Edward FitzGerald)

_______

Four massive peaks lift into the untouchable sky with such lofty height. This is the Eastern gateway and riverine border into the Canadian Rockies. In between two strong, unearthly peaks my cousins and I rest, having climbed afoot to the base of a glowing summit ahead in the crystal blue sky, cloudless and serene. Atop a rock-spurned crevasse leading into a valley gorge, we find a curious green-hoop tunnel net. Its loose thread flows welcomingly calm in the whipping winds. Instead of continuing upward I take a chance at descending through the unusual contraption. Leaping into its circular folds with another cousin we are cast into a semi-suspended state, gliding carefully above the chipped stone, shifting boulders and overhanging vegetation. We softly exit the net tunnel from its organic spindly bottom, dusting ourselves off in wishful camaraderie with the mountain prairie gold snow grassland. My oldest cousin decides to descend through the hoop alone and with swift might, overconfident and unthinking. He cascades heavily, knocking against the back of the mountain while encased in the mysterious, protective green netting. With a hard thud, he injures himself upon the ground, weak with delirium. A time after, I ascend, lone to the place where my cousins and I once found the curious organic net. Instead of looking through the downward spiral, I look up towards a distant peak amid the quartet of towering ascension. At the summit, a wild enormity of avian flesh flaps it's wings. The sight sends me into uncontrolled stupefaction, dizzy with groaning delight: a myth comes to life!

______

Bird
"Birds are usually considered a very good omen for the dreamer to receive and this is doubly true if the birds are brightly coloured, singing, and flying about." (iDream)
Mountain
"If you ascend a mountain in your dreams, and the way is pleasant and verdant, you will rise swiftly to wealth and prominence...To awaken when you are at a dangerous point in ascending, denotes that you will find affairs taking a flattering turn when they appear gloomy...Mountains can also symbolize a higher realm of consciousness, knowledge, and spiritual truth." (iDream)

______

predicated on human life,
a delicacy, of what worth?

to live the most real dream
inspired and enforced,
to prepare a day and night

ocean's curse praying in public, before the all-knowing tremendous falling
into outer loves and inner minds
born of hearts, and wonders, worrying and dying, striving and being

wake

- excerpt from "human life" 

In Our Colors and Dreams We Are All Daughters of the Sun

Belghies

"How did you learn to weave so well?"

Aman/Amanagol

"I've been sitting behind the loom since I was a kid. My mom is a good weave. She weaves rugs, you see in a dream."

Belghies

"I don't dream of rugs. I had a dream about you a few nights ago. You were flying with a lot of birds. I shouted, "come down." But you didn't pay attention. Suddenly, I was as on top of a hill. There was a wedding down there. It was a beautiful wedding. I ran towards the bride and groom. Then I saw you. You were sitting under a tree. There were birds all around you. I ran towards you. Then I just woke up."

- from "Daughters of the Sun" an Iranian film by Maryam Shahriar

___________

A few friends and I cut through the wild coastal thicket. We are scrappy ruffians and troublemakers, lifting the unmarked passageway with careless abandon through brier patch and horizontal woodland vines. A walk through the forest such as this spells mischief. We come to a house and trespass eagerly. After entering the house and snooping about, the residents return home. It is a Chinese family, home from a dinner in well-dressed attire. We scram and they barely notice without taking much heed to our presence. My friends turn back afraid of any more close calls. I wander off, aimless into the unending chaotic web of brush. 

Years later, I exit a farmer’s market with a girlfriend. Our friend, an East Indian man picks us up in an SUV. As we drive along, he manages to pick up another friend, East Indian as well. Getting seated in the car, he passes snacks through the car and then makes an incredibly demeaning, however unintentional comment towards the girl in the car. We are all stricken with disappointment, as he quickly corrects himself. After an uncomfortable silence, he is let off out from the car earlier than expected. On the side of the highway, he stares at me bitterly and says, “When you look in its eye, ask yourself, do you see a snake?” 

The last image of the dream, in a split second, a painting appears, gold painted with foam matting, a white stripe cuts vertically and pushes across horizontally at about the middle of the painting, on the other side of the stripe is a deep, patchy red, each with a bright yellow capsule shape embedded into the color plates. 

__________

Forest
"Dreaming of a forest signifies a feeling of being lost or confused. You are having difficulty finding a solution for a situation or problem and do not know how to conquer it." 

Serpent

"A powerful dream symbol associated with feminine energy, healing and spirituality...In the long run the snake may be a positive symbol, it may represent difficulties that lead us to the center of personality and result in feelings of completeness." 

(iDream)

________

gasp.

and no more 

in the walk 

to ultimate freedom 

awaiting 

pleasant as her dream 

beckoning 

the wall 

to no more, 

no more 

destind failure or washd up foolish hunger

“and where was our lost flesh sent to? 

to what mind do we owe the greatest thanks and hate”

- excerpt from "complete erase."

Changing the Subtle Body of Dreams

“Visualization is like a language that you can use to talk to your subconscious. Your subconscious is the part of your brain that’s in charge of a lot of things, but one of the things it’s in charge of is your body’s unconscious processes. How much oxygen you need is not a conscious thought…how much your heart beats is unconscious…We’re being run by a brain that we can’t talk to, but what I’ve realized is visualization is like a language that you can use to talk to your unconscious…Visualization is the universal, or symbols, is the universal language for people that don’t speak your language, your body doesn’t speak your language…look at the picture…look through it, let your subconscious absorb it for just thirty seconds, and then close your eyes…and you do it when your mind is calm and powerful and relaxed, your subconscious understands…”

- Jon Gabriel, Author and Weight Loss Expert


“The #1 best way to digest stress hormones is sleep, and deep sleep will metabolize excess cortizol and epinephrine [stress hormones] better than anything else…sleep as long as you need to and whenever you can.”

- Dr. Christiane Northrup, Best-Selling Women’s Health Author

From “Hungry For Change” ONLY 7 DAYS LEFT TO WATCH FOR FREE


"Rest During the Day, So You Can Sleep Well" - Shirazian Proverb

_____________

I am at the dinner table of my grandmothers in Upstate New York, it is a large table where all the extended family eats for holiday celebrations. I am sitting next to my Father, who is curiously interrogative as to why I am not eating. I begin to tell him about vegetarianism. I say to him that since I can’t eat what’s on the table, which appears to be a meat-based, carnivore’s delight as usual, I am not only handicapped that I can’t eat, but as a vegetarian I must eat more frequently than meat-eaters. This puts me at an increasing disadvantage for when there are solidified times when eating becomes an event and there is not much to eat, so not only am I extra famished because I haven’t eaten, but because I need to eat at a different frequency. I go on to add conversational topics on the experience of being vegetarian. After which I am shown to a mouse cage. The cage is covered in glass walls, almost resembling a reptile or spider pet’s home. All at the table seem to be watching, as I reach into the mouse cage, though there is no mouse, I am reaching for something to close the cage, though as I do, the cage gets bigger and I become smaller. As soon as I am aware, I am in the cage, lying over the pine shavings.  

____________

in a relationship that hovers above

our felt dreaming 

days that drift perfectly

to reflect the pain that grows in scams

of conversed soliloquy heights,

and merging, thoughtless to a secondary grin

she mumbles across the thin lips

a fan of starved off love 

in the dry heat of shocked suburbia 

20 rooms

holding the fact of disassociated family praise

and social malaise

ruining the worst trial

into a gross and thick tide

sucking back the curling emotional stupidity

- excerpt from "Lotus Feed" 

Dreams from an Iran Brutalized until Unconscious…Still Speaking

Narrator

“For more than two years now, the Iranian state has tried to crush the dreams of freedom which arose in June in 2009. Dreams, such as those which others in the Middle East have seen come true this year.”

Pahvan Fahimi – spokeswoman for grieving mothers

“He was a child of 19, preparing to go to university. He hadn’t fulfilled any of his dreams. Who killed him? On whose orders? Why? I ask all of you. What was he asking of this country? Only peace and freedom of thought.”

Narrator

“Bahar is a student and a rapper. Like most young people, in 2009, she dreams of a different Iran.”

Bahar – student and rapper

“Like an enchanted castle crumbling it took just 6 or 7 hours to erase hope. And all those who voted for Moussavi realized it was just a dream.

The Islamic Republic has always been a nightmare for me.

…they’ve done all they can to try to take that hope from us... It will go on and on, until you scream your deepest feelings, you see freedom, and you’re no longer afraid to speak your mind. And that’s the day your hope will become reality.”

From “Letters from Iran” an Al-Jazeera Documentary

___________

This week, from March 20-23, it is Persian New Year, or Nowruz.

New Years

Happy New Years!
Persian, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese
Many in One.

May the New Year live up to its Name.

_________

I am outside of the concrete square homes that the Maya people of Xmaben, Campeche in Mexico construct as a symbol of prestige beside their grass huts, however they don’t live in them. They used to hang my hammock from wall to wall, but before sleep each night, I was visited by a local girl. A small, petite young lady with unmistakably Maya features, she used to send me sweet smiles and laughter from outside, beckoning me to join her in the night. I wanted to marry her. I gave her a jade ring and consummated our innocent feelings. In my dream, I feel as if we are married. After I leave the village, I find myself in a furnished bedroom in a Mexican city. In it, I await my other love, a Spanish woman, a few years older than I, with a gorgeous wit. It seems we have married as well. Our life, however, becomes overly domestic and soon I wait for her, to find only our empty abode. 

As the dream cycle continues, I attend a high school reunion. I am excited and confident to see my old friends from the days of superficial cliques and institutionalized learning. I tell people I married twice in Mexico. They don’t find this surprising from me, and go on to talk in their circles of indiscernible chatter. I later return home to my mother’s house in this same town. My stepfather and her watch television as usual. The television portrays ghastly scenes of war. Children, it seems of Southeast Asia, are being run over mercilessly by tanks, their bodies scarred with burn marks and ash. I react, abhorred and deeply offended by the mindless atrocities that we are witnessing via television, and my mother cries, but my stepfather watches without emotion. I leave. 

_________

Dreaming, Composing Poetry, Meditating

I pass my days
Contemplating the dead students of Tiananmen
And the Green Wave
Childless mothers silenced
Full of blood

A body
Language of resistance
Firm as the vicious fluid of life
Soft as the flesh
Emaciated with the steel of tank tracks
Or torn open in a single kill shot

Or E. Mehtari
Whose stern face became lip-bitingly serious
Upon mentioning the “trouza”
In English, rape

How he holds back tears
A fight against self-pity
The death of the ego
Asking, “where is God if not in you”
Yet, when asking you fall headlong
Into your deathless presence
Where you cease to be this body of crime

Ponder yourself
As the total equation of here
In the moment
At one
With the ground of all being

We humans
Why do some attain self-realization?
Only upon being split in half?
Sundered in shreds by our fellow man?

When did this arcane spiritual responsibility bestow devils of such wonderful emergence?
The Ahriman is certainly turning in its cemetery
Sheathed in female coverings and riot police uniforms

In these pain-ridden lands
Whose story immediately translates into our one story?

Throughout human history
In reclaiming that story
Allowing the truth to resurface naturally
As a feather, thrown with a handful of stones
Over an open lake
Thick with the opacity of crude oil

Hardening urges of those who sleep,
Still, sitting
Upright I petition the burning skin of my Love
To recede into her inmost self-forgiving

Be healed
With the same immediacy that one may feel oncoming death
Approaching with futile procession
Toward the white of their eyes

With equal subtlety
Plunging their ethereal hand
In the porous open of their now entered body

A mere passage
For the voice of all truths

For the Peaceful Youth Protestors Around the World

Egypt and Iran: Two Lingering, Unforgettable Dreams

Two Dreams remain tightly etched in my memory, their content is also woven together within the intricate fabric of our now stirring collective mind, struggling to feel the common breath burn on the backs of our billions enslaved by poverty, war, greed, corruption, hypocrisy, malignancy, and on and on.

1)

I am within the house of my formative years, the beginning of schooling. It is a small house, cornered in an older, character neighborhood embedded in a seaside forest. The basement beckons me inside, yet I forget the actual content of the basement, except for the stairway down. Underneath, there is a flooding, a cesspool of oceanic imagination, swelling and swiftly carrying me into its drift. I see light from outside filling spaces marked by life and activity, those areas not reaching the natural light are dusty, dank and unused corners, filled with heaps of abandoned material. I find myself, as if swimming towards the light, to escape the basement of this house, and this memory.

Emerged, I swim across the surface of a great lake. The water broths and foams beside me, a plethora of life makes itself known beneath my feet treading the water. Then, a great lash as if from the lake floor catapults into the air a fantastic protrusion of flesh from a mythical beast, a loch ness of sorts reveals itself, yet does not harm me. I suddenly begin to see another side to the lake. All of a sudden I am carried in, as if involuntarily by a sweeping undertow.

I reach the other shore finally, though disfigured with fatigue and the nausea of being spun throughout whirlpools of fear and fascination within a lake of dreams. I am at the foot of a great cliff mountain springing up along the back of a cold-looking fortress. Next, I am unconscious, being taken to another basement. In this basement, I feel as if I am in Iran, the waters before me and the landscape prior to my incarceration reminds me of a very recommended film, called the "Lover's Wind" about the ancient civilization of Iran and natural landscapes of Persia. The film's incredible story about how it came to light should be read in complement.

I am imprisoned with other Iranian people, we are to be tortured. The basement windows along the edge of the roof resemble those of my childhood home, only now there are bars and the places of darkness are filled with mirrored rooms stretching as if infinitely, occupied with other prisoners, all of whom wear eyes of tortured pain.

I imagine the blithe reception to this childhood home, returning to its driveway, the neighborhood feel, the flowers and summer air, the large stones to sit on and the humming insects over the plain grass.

2)

My wife and I are in a room that resembles an actor's dressing hall for a theatre. We maintain an air of prestige, as actors or members of a theatre will. The mirrors are lit on their frames with gaudy light bulbs and the rest of the room feels turn of the century French, similar to the era in which Cairo, Egypt's downtown core was built from the ground to honor the architectural culture of its French colonialists.

We step out, led by an eager individual, who masked, invites us to walk with him on the street. As soon as we step out, we are in the midst of Cairo's Abbasia neighborhood, essentially the core of downtown, including Tahrir square and Muhamad Mahmoud Street, the current center of the crisis.

I know this street, this was where I saw a concert by El Tanbura. The mud of this unpaved road is not smooth, it has large bumps and divots, making even walking in it a curious adventure at times. The local youth walk down its narrow lane barefoot, smiling and wondering with mysterious humor. The foreign presence is immediately detected and is a center of fascination which equals my fixation with the imperfect dirt road ahead.

We move out into the street, I find myself edging into a crowd of demonstrators. We are suddenly in the thick of a mob of protesting Egyptians in Cairo's ongoing clashes with police. I feel gripped with fear at having my wife with me. I am separated from my beloved by the zing of a tear gas propeller wafting smoke and the sonic punch of a rubber bullet passes by me following. In the middle of demonstrators and police, I stand crouched low to the ground, reaching out to my wife. Rubber bullets and tear gas continue to rain throughout the quaking ground zero of protest in Egypt.

Skimming past abandoned riot police shields, I grab my wife's hand and we run into a dimly lit government building. I feel I have walked into Trostky's room in Mexico City, there is murder in the air eternal, a chipped skull and stray bullets encase the ambiance with a suffocating, dead air. We wander the halls and rooms only to find remnants of assassinated officials, burned intellectuals, tortured youth maimed beyond recognition. It is a breeding ground of hate. There is no escape.

Dream of the Enlightened Persian

Arriving at an idea upon which all may Dream

Original story of an initial arrival

To Canada! Without place or concrete plan to find one, he begins with the simple purchase of a vehicle, to roam the entirety of this vast nation without foresight or reckoning with fate.

First night in Montreal, a dream;

An Aboriginal elder, playing his frame drum in the dream fog of a striking, celestial presence, tells him repeatedly "...this is the land of the Buffalo." He repeats, "Respect this, the land of the Buffalo."

Out of all destinations, traveling throughout the country, without ever having even known anything about Canada, he arrives in Calgary to live. Calgary is an auspicious place with respect to the Buffalo. The traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes Calgary and the surrounding region, bespeak a plains culture which has honored the Buffalo like none other. The last herds still roam in the northernmost regions of this province.

He goes on to talk about his travails as a boy of only 10 years when the Iranian revolution began. He tells of how he was forced to read in the dim light of a locked vault; a tunnel wherein subversive books were protected by his family. Therein he caused such foment in his mind that would have never been possible in the veiled reality of the Shah's theocratic mental confinements. So, as a true seeker, artist, visionary and dreamer within his growing heart, cultivated by the creation of literary might found in the truth of so many ingenious ghosts unveiled by sanctimonious literary iconoclasm. He remained trapped as it were, underground, with thoughts hailed as mystery in the whisper of a clouded heart.

Yet, his traumatic devotion to the tunnel-enclosed vault gave seed within the dank depths of his early budding mind. With practiced devotion he went to the darkest places in the world, hidden under inhumane truths silenced by war, poverty, corruption, hypocrisy, and censorship. In Canada, specifically in Calgary, he was led to the traditional womb of our Mother Earth among the plains Buffalo culture. Led, as it were, unaware, under the inverted belly of the Buffalo. The hide blanket of the Sweat draped over his unknowing spirit and found in him a place where to confront his mental wound, to rise from that vaulted literary wisdom, and see an inner light reflecting from within his own self as the sensory magic of spiritual knowledge. Upon exiting from the womb, blinded, suffocated, and nearly maimed with the burn of volcanic rocks aflame, his healing journey had commenced, and the vault of his childhood swung wide in the clear open before him as never before as he entered a newfound paradigm of artistic awakening through the dream of a music-theatre production with us all.

As a man who has experienced Sufi tradition in the mountains of Kurdistan, the poetry of my new friend has proclaimed a clear vision directed to all who may listen. In his voice is a uniqueness, an artistic dreaming forged by a soul strengthened and clarified within the tight impasse of as yet unraveled knots of complex human suffering. His voice reminds us of places beset with burdens so immense as to drown many a human heart in endless sorrow. Still, in his voice is a passion enduring with deft creativity and boundless truth-seeking that is infectious and empathetic in its wisdom. He now seeks shared visionary exploration, a lyrical orchestration towards a lasting expression of a public dreaming.   

His story was shared in the name of the passing artist and Sufi healer through the music of Sayed Khalil Alinejad; who was recently killed by the still repressive government in Iran. His murder is an outcry of world shame, an example of absolute heresy against the human spirit by the glowing red eye of a deeply traumatized society, living earnestly, without repose in the recesses of a hellbound subconscious blur. This honest-hearted musician and spiritually expressive man was told before the incident by a fellow Sufi that he would burn in hell, a few weeks later, he was burned in his home with his son. To a person of spirit, we have to wonder, how in life he spoke through music, and how Death became the last tone vibrating through the soul of his forever respectful listeners.

It is said that the character of the American Buffalo, unlike all the other animals and creatures of the North American plains, would charge headlong into an oncoming blizzard, while all others will flee. The American Buffalo will find its way through the worst of storms, earnestly engaged in the collective healing met between the spirit of the storm and the spirit of its own animal nature. With the strength of the Buffalo, he passes through to the bounty of a naked Earth on the other side. We have to wonder if people like Sayed Khalil Alinejad have tasted an ardour similar to that of the American Buffalo, braving the worst of storms, and have become as a message of this near-vanquished Spirit to the people of the Earth and Sky.

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