PRELUDE
Amir Parsa: Prelude to the Manifestoes II
In the coming weeks, underfire will launch into its analyses, queries, interventions, polemics. Challenges and critiques. Retorts and rebukes. Participants will throw around words and expressions like these – without the quotation marks (which is the very downfall of their argument: keep the marks there!): “the West”, “the Islamic World”, “the Middle East”, and a whole parade of others. There will be plenty adjectivised versions of human entities, there will be acquiescence to dominant conceptual frameworks, there will be plenty of free marketing and advertising for a whole bunch of systems of belief or movements by continuous discussion of their pretty dismissable tenets and foundations. Landmasses and geographical bodies will bear the names given to them by their most recent conquerors, and folks will be “writing” with much evocation of the various rights and wrongs in/of nation states and systems.
I, prelude-man, in this my soliloquy, in the prelude not just to underfire but to the Manifestoes, would like nothing more than to give myself the right, I, Parsa The First, Parsa I, ushering in the Death of my Authorial Self and the Sacrificing of my Literature for the Purpose of the Clear Communication of Ideas, to just outlaw some these practices and lay down the laws, oh yes that would be sweet, lay down the Laws Governing the Discussions. That, though, is just not my style! And so in lieu of that, I want to share with all of you a totally stunning but real scene that I experienced a few months ago in what we would call a war zone.
Truly an unforgettable spectacle, an intervention of the most flabbergasting kind – the one that lets you not only not forget it, but lets you not go on without an examination of your practices, especially those that have to do with the use of words, and of writing in general. It was in a geographical region that shall go unnamed – it doesn’t really make any difference, as you’ll see. I did chance upon the scene as I was just snooping around, my freelance self. After the witnessing, I ran to my hidden abode and just put some notes down in a, well, notebook. I wrote it in the present tense, to capture its immediacy. I want to just relay those notes, without embellishment. Just to set the scene: this was a pretty much ruined part of town, ashes, burnt-out components of a whole variety of objects (and perhaps people), devastation, utter numbness on the part of anyone who would venture those ways. You could occasionally hear rockets, gunfire, rounds, somewhere out there, hopefully far from where you were. No downpour of bombs, not again, not yet. And so the quick venturing out, and then the quick venturing back. Armed conflict: its very presence, its traces, its din, its horror, its stench. I am not, forgetting that underfire is all about armed conflict. Again, this is a true story – and I urge all to ponder its many layers of meanings and challenges to any scriptoral practice. read more
I, prelude-man, in this my soliloquy, in the prelude not just to underfire but to the Manifestoes, would like nothing more than to give myself the right, I, Parsa The First, Parsa I, ushering in the Death of my Authorial Self and the Sacrificing of my Literature for the Purpose of the Clear Communication of Ideas, to just outlaw some these practices and lay down the laws, oh yes that would be sweet, lay down the Laws Governing the Discussions. That, though, is just not my style! And so in lieu of that, I want to share with all of you a totally stunning but real scene that I experienced a few months ago in what we would call a war zone.
Truly an unforgettable spectacle, an intervention of the most flabbergasting kind – the one that lets you not only not forget it, but lets you not go on without an examination of your practices, especially those that have to do with the use of words, and of writing in general. It was in a geographical region that shall go unnamed – it doesn’t really make any difference, as you’ll see. I did chance upon the scene as I was just snooping around, my freelance self. After the witnessing, I ran to my hidden abode and just put some notes down in a, well, notebook. I wrote it in the present tense, to capture its immediacy. I want to just relay those notes, without embellishment. Just to set the scene: this was a pretty much ruined part of town, ashes, burnt-out components of a whole variety of objects (and perhaps people), devastation, utter numbness on the part of anyone who would venture those ways. You could occasionally hear rockets, gunfire, rounds, somewhere out there, hopefully far from where you were. No downpour of bombs, not again, not yet. And so the quick venturing out, and then the quick venturing back. Armed conflict: its very presence, its traces, its din, its horror, its stench. I am not, forgetting that underfire is all about armed conflict. Again, this is a true story – and I urge all to ponder its many layers of meanings and challenges to any scriptoral practice. read more
Amir Parsa: Prelude to the Manifestoes I
Long ago, long long ago, friends and colleagues, and a very very very long time ago it was: I made up my mind, resolved a critical issue, fashioned a response to one of my central preoccupations:
It was in the coffeeshops of Vienna: among the elderly folks bent over comatose reading their papers, the aroma of their coffee, the heaviness of old-world establishments implanted in their concepts and world views, almost blind to all that surrounded them, in a metaphorical fogginess, not to mention the literal, enveloping the place, I, a young directionless lout in a corner booth reading my Kafka and my Nietzsche, in the corner booth I was saying, feasting on a cheese sandwich, all I could afford, taking one bite out every few minutes, to make the sandwich last, as long as possible, and, in fact, paying less attention to the books under my eyes than the eyes of the people around me, and their gazes, their untold tales, their sadness and their daze (the story of my life!); it was in the cafes of Paris: so long removed from the mythological people and events that surrounded them: with the cliché but o so true brooding poet across, the students and their perfectly lined notebooks, the philosophers – yes, there is a place where philosophers are a breed, and hang out, and read, and: are not considered fools; it was in the diners: of where else, but of the city, New York version: next to the New York football Giants’ fans and the Jets’ fans and the Mets’ fans, with the good people of the nypd and the attorneys and the workers on their breaks, blaring above us, behind us, all around us, the unbearable blasts of the all-news channels and their tickers, making these same good people comment on ‘them terrorists’ and ‘those damn idiots’ and the rest; it was in the recollection of a day in Tehran, one, only, when I sat in a long-lost coffee shop, where, supposedly, other scribblers of decades-ago had also sat; before the ocean in Samana, on the Eastern coast of la Republica, Dominican version, seeing before me the great expanse of ocean, green-blue and the sky, cyan and purple, under the palm trees, by the hammock (and not in), it’s true, not a sound around, not a soul around: I had resolved, this I had done, in these corners of the world: I had resolved: read more
It was in the coffeeshops of Vienna: among the elderly folks bent over comatose reading their papers, the aroma of their coffee, the heaviness of old-world establishments implanted in their concepts and world views, almost blind to all that surrounded them, in a metaphorical fogginess, not to mention the literal, enveloping the place, I, a young directionless lout in a corner booth reading my Kafka and my Nietzsche, in the corner booth I was saying, feasting on a cheese sandwich, all I could afford, taking one bite out every few minutes, to make the sandwich last, as long as possible, and, in fact, paying less attention to the books under my eyes than the eyes of the people around me, and their gazes, their untold tales, their sadness and their daze (the story of my life!); it was in the cafes of Paris: so long removed from the mythological people and events that surrounded them: with the cliché but o so true brooding poet across, the students and their perfectly lined notebooks, the philosophers – yes, there is a place where philosophers are a breed, and hang out, and read, and: are not considered fools; it was in the diners: of where else, but of the city, New York version: next to the New York football Giants’ fans and the Jets’ fans and the Mets’ fans, with the good people of the nypd and the attorneys and the workers on their breaks, blaring above us, behind us, all around us, the unbearable blasts of the all-news channels and their tickers, making these same good people comment on ‘them terrorists’ and ‘those damn idiots’ and the rest; it was in the recollection of a day in Tehran, one, only, when I sat in a long-lost coffee shop, where, supposedly, other scribblers of decades-ago had also sat; before the ocean in Samana, on the Eastern coast of la Republica, Dominican version, seeing before me the great expanse of ocean, green-blue and the sky, cyan and purple, under the palm trees, by the hammock (and not in), it’s true, not a sound around, not a soul around: I had resolved, this I had done, in these corners of the world: I had resolved: read more