Читать книгу Solace of Lovers. Trost der Liebenden - Helena Perena - Страница 14

“From your perspective, I’m mad,

from mine you are all sane.

So I pray that my madness increases

and your reason multiplies.

My madness comes from the power of love, your sound reason from the power of ignorance.”

Al-Shibli (8^th cent. AD)

With tea and fresh dates, time passes unnoticed. At the same time, the continuous presence of a television, which, on countless channels and not unlike western media, delivers a galloping sequence of oriental imagery into my hosts’ living room. I see Turkish soaps with smart tough guys and blonde It girls, Kurdish pop channels with smiling PYD women’s battalions in combat training and fearless looking fighters with Kalashnikov rifles targeting an invisible enemy. And the stirring music that I had learned to love so much in Kermanshah. A deformed propaganda soundtrack of Middle Eastern killing fields, I now find it crude and oppressive, even in the knowledge that the Kurds are merely pawns to be sacrificed in a cynical proxy war, whose string-pullers are in turn manipulated by other puppet masters. Then, no less intolerable, advertising clips with a religious grounding from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates: a young man with black curls, rolling his eyes upward and reciting verses from the Quran to sugary synth-pop sounds and Café Mimi beats. White mountains of cloud pile up bombastically in time lapse, waterfalls plunge through jelly-green nature parks, pious hands open for prayer. Pilgrim masses move in an eerie, mesmerising circular motion around the Kaaba. An empty eye whose iris reflects a black cube. A maelstrom of millions upon millions of bodies around an impenetrable centre that startles me with an abrupt recognition of its significance – less from the everyday political context of the dissolution of old orders and borders, and more from the blatant exaggeration of religious symbolism I find revealed in these media spectacles. An obscene ride through hell that allows a vacuum, a non-place, a zombie spirituality of death to take shape, dissolving all signs of individual humanity until they disappear without a trace. The end of all stories. Chronicle of the void. Ashes of an extinguished fireplace in the icy glare of the screens. Only afterimage, empty gesture, parody. Cathode flicker. All trains terminate at the border. Ghabol nist.

How comforting it is when, later, I see an old man in a shabby suit passing by outside. He has his back turned to me and his hands clasped behind his back; gliding through his wrinkled hands are the clay beads of an old prayer chain.