Eyes of Saturn
Ali Sahebalzamani
As far as milestones go, thirty-one is not one, but that is how old I will be when this issue reaches you. It will also be my seventh birthday in my new home; again, not an appealing number unless one is superstitious. Truth be told, I do not even feel that I have become a year older; my view of time corresponds more closely with playwright Samuel Beckett’s: it’s not a new year, it’s the same year, same days, happening over and over. The attentive reader might have already deduced, I am not inclined to look back and reminisce, nor to look forward and hope, but I do look, I cannot help it. How much looking can one pair of eyes do? If only there was a limit to what one can see.
In his magnum opus Moment of Freedom, Jens Bjorneboe—the Norwegian prophet of the end times—presents a fictionalized and poeticized telling of his own wandering life as “sailor and wanderer, apocalyptist, troubadour, and hurdy gurdy enthusiast” during which he saw too much. In the telling of his tale, he resorts to star signs: “The horoscope at the moment of my birth, in Red October, between world wars and revolutions, showed that Venus stood in Lepus, the Sign of the Hare, under Michael’s Sword, which augured long journey and that I would often sleep alone. At my birth the stars Astarte and Moloch stood in Aspis, which foretold revolutions and wars, bayonets and blood, burnt cities and fleeing mothers, as well as long trains of refugees who would fill the roads in many lands. The planets Shiva and Baal stood in Carnifex, presaging a time of slavery and prison, with millions in captivity, surrounded by endless barbed wire. The planets Uranus and Pluto entered into conjunction in Pardus, and slowly proceeded on their way—as agents of the heavy elements uranium and plutonium—through Lupus and into the constellation Arachne, where they brought to pass cities leveled to the ground and charred bodies by the hundreds of thousands.”
I do not know with such detail what stars I was born under, but I do know that I was born immediately after the last instance of trench warfare in history—a bloody war of attrition between Iran and Iraq, complete with the use of chemical weapons and all other sorts of atrocities we humans like to inflict on one another. This war itself came to pass after a bloody revolution had already wracked the country of my birth, preceded by a relatively long period of secret police disappearing free-thinkers, imprisoning writers, and so on. Also, in the year of my birth, our fellow humans were busy murdering each other in Bosnia, in Afghanistan, in Chechnya and Dagestan. One would think I was born under the same unlucky stars as mister Bjorneboe. But no, he was born in 1920 and I in 1995. He also wrote in that same book that he had seen enough. The narrator which is him and also is not, is an alcoholic; he is a man with holes in his memory who is being pulled apart by the desire to forget everything and the conflicting desire to compile an exact record of everything; every brutality, every injustice, every single act of arbitrary cruelty committed by his fellow beings. Mr. Bjorneboe did not survive long enough to see the advent of social media; his ambition would be rendered moot in this age of voyeurism, when everything is recorded and posted somewhere or other to be watched over and over again by eyes like Saturn’s eyes per Francisco Goya or Ivan the Terrible’s eyes per Ilya Repin’s depiction. Today, I think, we can all say with stolid certainty that we have seen too much.
On the eighteenth of February, I saw a ten year old child offering a most eloquent eulogy for his mother who had been shot to death at a protest by government forces in Iran. The boy said his life will always only be ten years long because that’s how long he had a mother. I have not been able to digest what I saw in that video. On the nineteenth of February, I heard news that my most intimate friend had attempted to take his own life in Tehran. I don’t think I have quite been able to digest this either. Also, right around the time when the physical copies of Peyk #221 made their way to our readers’ mailboxes, I had the honor and pleasure of participating in a students’ music recital at PCC organized by my beloved friend Kourosh Taghavi. I got to sit next to him on stage and play music. I don’t think I have processed this either. So many unprocessed things on my mind, my RAM is overloading, eh? I think I have made the point I set out to make.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, I cannot say happy Nowruz. But I must point out, in closing, the true, pagan sentiment of Nowruz: that of new beginnings.
