Flowers for the Tomb of Hafiz II

My beau Ship my memory

Have we two navigated

These undrinkable waters enough,

Sailed our Ship of Fools

From beautiful dawn to sad night.

Appolinaire

After watching a soap opera (General Hospital), I feel ashamed of the human race. Or, should I say, ashamed of woman?

There was a "love scene"' that was incredible. The woman was essentially a Playbunny. She gave no evidence of character at all. They declared their love for one another without any feeling. He was portrayed as a rich but supposedly unprincipled man who wants to transform the Waterfront into a thriving center of restaurants and shops. She was very young and very pretty. They were standing on the Waterfront and he was "sharing his dream" with her. Incredibly, a handsome young man who was a few years younger than she was, and who was obviously passionately in love with her, was hiding behind some boxes, watching. He was wearing a leather jacket! She says, "You aren't going to do all this by yourself are you?" "No, I thought I needed a friend to share it all with." She: "You know, you aren't really as bad as everyone says you are." He: "I hope not." The young man in the leather jacket and long hair looked on jealously. The entrepreneur was in his early thirties.

Julian was 19 and Madame de Renal was 30.

The young man's passion is depicted as pathological. Woman as whore is portrayed as virtuous. Her infantilism and machinations are called love. Her lack of reasonableness, of perception, of intelligence, is called passion. She talks fast, and in a loud and shrill voice, and that is supposed to reflect her intelligence. All throughout the scene she is angry with other women and plots incessantly to capture the desirable man. And she flees from the man who loves her. SHE gets what she wants. The MEN are helpless pawns or impossible creeps. Enough.

When I was 22 years old I fell in love with a woman who ran from me. I allowed myself to be obsessed by her. But when I went out for the baseball team I met a blond, playboy pitcher who cured me of my obsession. And he had no idea that he cured me of anything. We were warming up one day, and because I was always thinking about her, I asked him, out of nowhere, if he knew her. I didn't say anything about our relationship. He said, "are you kidding?" and he began to recite the catalogue of his woes. He said that she was obsessed with HIM, and that he couldn't get rid of her. He said that she came to all of the games and acted like she was his girlfriend, even though they had only gone out on one date. He was surprised that she hadn't come to any of the practices that season! It functioned as a kind of satori experience for me (I was actually studying Zen at the time) and I stopped being obsessed with her!

The teller in the bank smiles at me in a very provocative way because she thinks I am rich! Just because I have a little more than four thousand dollars in my checking account, dress well, am charming, and don't work (She doesn't know that I am taking my summer vacation in the fall) She is such a fool. Yet I suppose happiness can start from something that is completely different from what we think we want. But how bitter and vengeful some people become when their idols turn out to be different from what they imagined them to be.

When we parted at our last meeting Soheila said: "It was better this time." Yet I begged her again to be my lover. I was discrete with my words, but not with my eyes. We certainly made love again, secluded among the branches of that large tree that is in front of the bookstore. When I told her that we would have to touch, and that it was the only way I knew of getting rid of this feeling of nervousness, she looked down at the ground, and her face and especially her forehead and eyes and mouth took on the beatific look that comes to her when her mind is suffused with poetry and her body is carried away with passion. And what did she do, later, with the passion? Did that sweet woman give herself to me in her imagination? Or did she simply make note of her condition and let it pass? It is said that woman is closer to her instincts than man is because of childbirth and all that goes with it, but I think that is wrong. Man is closer to his instincts because he must consummate the sexual act for the race to continue: if I were a primitive man, nothing but death could stop me from making love to her, because at the level of instinct, she represents my pride and reason for living. Only another man would try to prevent me from having her, and at that level I would certainly kill the man who tried to stop me. But I refuse to exist as a primitive man. That is why I begged her to say yes. It is the great sacrifice that woman must make to civilization: she must assent to man's love. She must forego that terrible pleasure of being taken.

I can understand that she would run from passion. She wants a respectable marriage, not a love affair. But she was ashamed of herself for being in the Computer Center fishing for men. When I came in, she sensed it immediately, without looking at me. She couldn't meet his eyes and just stared obediently at the floor. The young man walked out with a self-satisfied smile of amused vanity. HE certainly doesn't want an Iranian wife. She was obviously wounded by that. It explains a portion of her anger for me: I, who love her, get all of her despair, just as the mother who gives birth to her unhappy child, gets all of his despair. The young man could have questioned her sudden refusal. But nothing in him was even touched. I suspect that his vanity misinterpreted it as shyness and confusion in front of HIS attractiveness. That is the worst perversion that a young man can experience with a young woman.

Well, obviously it is just frustrated love speaking. I think I should back off for awhile. She needs time to experiment, even to study, or just to MATURE. She is so childish. But could it be that she is burning a path through Islam to me? After all, on the day of our first passionate encounter in the cafeteria she refused to answer me when I asked her if she had ever been kissed. Five months later, she informed me that she was just beginning to date. She said if she was meeting me for the first time, she would go out with me. But it was clear that she was playing games again. She wanted me to tell her that I wouldn't be emotional. She wanted me to pretend not to be emotional, to pretend not to love her, to torture myself with desire for her, while she feeds her vanity with my love.

I shouldn't love this woman. But I have to finish with this. I can't just forget. And I know that things that are really rare and beautiful are only obtained with great difficulty. But I also have to be able to see. I can't allow myself to be blinded by my passion if this is to have a good outcome.

I am toying with the idea of sending her flowers, with a message in French:

Si vous touchez les pétals de rose avec vos lèvres, la beaute se rencontrait; Si j'ai fait des bêtises, c'est a cause de la combinaison rare et éblouissante de beaute, de grace, et de vif intelligence qui est vous et qui m'ont inspiré. Ne haissez vous pas la déesse qui est la cause de tous mes chagrins et follies, mais c'est moi qu'il faut haïr pour la faiblesse de ne pas POUVOIR vous vaincre, NON!: INSPIRER. J'espere que cette note n'augmente pas votre détresse, et que vous ne me haïssez trop. J'ai l'audace même d'espérer que vous m'aimez autant que je vous aime.

Jim.

My vanity says that she will laugh at me. But the French will help, because her sister probably won't understand, and she can hide the letter before her sister can translate it. She might even be able to hide from her that it is from me. Then I will have a chance. But I have to call her very quickly afterwards. And if I have any luck, she will be alone. Love makes life so deliciously exciting. It almost makes the fear of ridicule disappear!

Yet the next day it all seems ridiculous. It isn't the fear that others will ridicule me. I am completely indifferent to that. It is the fear that she will ridicule me. That is the only thing that can make me pause.

But the deliciousness of it! I recognize in this my need to dramatize life. She is probably just a screen that I project my love onto. But if she can only see clear to love me, what ecstasy is possible for us both. If she laughs at me, or worse, scorns me, it will cause me infinite pain. And obviously, it will compromise my position at State. If I publicize my love, so to speak, then I open myself to even more scorn. Then there is the problem of my relationship to Judy. Without it, I wouldn't be able to pursue Soheila. I wouldn't be able to stand the long separations. Only a dreaming adolescent could do as much. If I were alone, I would have forced the issue long ago. Because I decided long ago that I want to live with a woman, and that Aristotle was right: only a god can live alone. I don't believe Nietzsche's revision: only a god OR a philosopher can live alone.

Mais si il n'y a aucune raison pour mon ésperance, il faut absolument que vous oubliez tout et que vous détruissiez ce lettre. Et je vous emprie de ne me pas haïr. Mais si vous m'aimez autant que je vous aime, laissez votre numéro de téléphone in my box in the math office. Je sais combien difficile cela sera pour vous, mais je ne vous téléphonerai jamais sans votre permission.

Vôtre Jim.

Is this a kind of voluptuous self-titillation at the expense of Soheila and Judy? I have come to the point where I don't care about reputation, job, anything. All I want is this ecstasy, but at the expense of everything.

I am worried that I am using Judy's love in some way that isn't good. Et en ce cas, je ne veux aucune relation avec vous et je veux pas vous revoir. But can I ENDURE this? Can I endure MYSELF if I don't send the letter? The other difficulty is: can I endure myself if I DO send the letter?

Drink wine, for a hundred sins veiled away from other men are better than flaunted piety and plain hypocrisy.

Yet, based on what Stendhal said, I shouldn't send the letter. But I will send the flowers. He said that letters give women time to think, and thinking always gives them reasons and methods for resistance. I'm not sure. I think I should send it anyway.

Love should be light and beautiful. Never heavy. NEVER serious. Therefore I absolutely forbid you to be angry with me or to hate me. If it is too confusing, etc.

I have a vision of myself as the Don Quixote of love. Sitting on my jade, alone in my backyard, reading Stendhal’s On Love and listening to Cimarosa's Secret Marriage. In love with a creation of my imagination. And trying to make it real with a letter. Yet not wanting to be SERIOUS. Not wanting to be like Werther.

At least write me a note explaining your sweet self to me one last time, and tell me again why I can't have my heart's one desire. Is it Islam?

I am unworthy of this bright star. I should be shot for insensitivity and stupidity.

I think the first part of the letter could stand. It shows a little humor and irony. I will send that part only- with no implorations.

J'espére que vous n'etes pas fâchée contre moi et surtout que vous ne me haïssez pas. Joyeux noël et UNE BONNE ANNÉE.

That is certainly enough. I don't want to appear calculating, obviously, nor too sentimental. That is what scared her off in the first place.

At some point it became clear that I can't send any letter. I can't even send the roses. It has something to do with the died blond hair. A suspicion of whorishness that I can't rid myself of. It also has something to do with another side of her, the side that went towards the man-child, the ten-year-old boy, as she called him. But she said that she never forgave him for insulting me and never talked to him again after that innocuous incident! Well, I also think that there is a side of her that is childish, virginal, conservative, even selfish. It may be that she DOESN'T think of me, that she is a barbarian! But if that's true then I am simply a fool, and then I must refuse to go that far with my stupidity. It isn't cowardice, it is simply the need to know her better, to be certain that she doesn't have a whorish side to her personality, that she isn't a hypocrite.

I also know that in three weeks time, I will be at State again, and there I will have a more organic possibility of making contact with her. I have always wanted her to come to ME. I told that to Hossein, almost with the intention that he broadcast it to the Iranian community. I want them to debate the issue, to be for or against me. It isn't lack of courage. It is easy to do something rash. Too easy.

She has no foundation. She is a naive GIRL. She couldn't be a wife to me, she is a slave, an Iranian woman. That means that they have killed her, she is dead. I can't resurrect her. In the furnace of my passion, she cried out, "get an American girlfriend!" I pleaded with her, "I don't want an American girlfriend, I want you."

I made a mistake when she said to me, "after just going to a concert, they want to do something." I was so shocked that I said, half jokingly, "tell them that you are waiting for someone in Iran." Her face flushed and I was certain that she interpreted my tone of voice and intention to mean, "tell them you are waiting for me." She said "OK," and it was then that I should have said again that I love her and that I want to go out with her, that I must have her, that I can't live without her. Well, obviously, I don't understand myself or her. I should shoot myself. If it weren't for Judy and Andy I probably would.

After reading over our encounters, it is obvious that I CAN send a bouquet of flowers. Just signed: your impossible Jim. With a card depicting Kay Nielsen's painting of sleeping beauty and the prince?

I would like to say more, but I don't know where to stop or begin. I have too much to say. And I don't want my letter shared with the Iranian community, or with anyone else.

I don't see how that could be interpreted badly. Why should I say impossible? But it isn't delicate either.

CAN I STILL HOPE? That would be the touch of romance. I should also leave out "friend." I am filled with a kind of exhilaration, yet I hope I am not doing something basically wrong or immoral. I hope I am not using Judy. And I hope it isn't an emotional rape of a child/woman of 25. Well, at least I know what I am doing. One year before 40. I know women. I can still remember the look in Deanna's eyes, 15 years ago, when she said that she couldn't figure out why she rejected her Hindu boyfriend. She described him with the tenderest words, and with passion. Even from a distance of 15 years, I can see clearly that her face and Soheila's face are the same. She married a rich man, dull and fat and insensitive. With three children, alone in her mansion, she is an alcoholic. She can't live without ecstasy. But she killed the man who loved her.

The painful thing is, that I don't even know if she got them. I threw away the receipt and don't have a telephone book. I don't remember the name of the place. An animated gay about my age, balding, wearing a red sport shirt, was the proprietor. I bought four red roses in a white vase. I suppose I should have sent any other kind of flowers. It is probably a sign that I am completely and idiotically Romantic. I know that all the Iranian men will assume that I am simply stupid.

It was the eyes in the library that decided for me. She must have been a hundred yards away. I just barely recognized her. But it was her incomparable eyes that reawakened my love. When she lowered her head, I knew that I had been given the sweetest gift that the universe bestows on mortals. And that the gods have favored me because for some mysterious reason I am able to receive it in spite of the greatest obstacle placed between man and woman: Islam. Well, in a gruesome kind of way, even I must be thankful for Islam.

I choose to make my life a romance. Yet I am buried in computer science. As she is. If she gets bad grades in her computer courses she will be upset and unhappy and she will react badly to my letter and roses. But if she gets her B's, she will be ecstatically happy over the Christmas break, and she will then be happy that I have gone this one step further. But if she gets very bad grades, she will be morose and neurotic. I also fear a scene with her sisters. If they are there when the roses are delivered they will taunt her and try to take the letter, etc. If there is at least one god who favors me, she will be alone!

Well, she said she is dating, and that might mean that she has a man that she doesn't love but whom she thinks will make a good marriage. If it's true, she will try to block the feeling of love that will surge in her heart and I will be lost forever. Because I won't allow myself to take her, even though I feel that she wants me to. It would be a disaster if I became an Iranian man instead of she a Western woman.

It is almost frightening the way my feelings swing from ecstatic longing to bitter disillusionment. First she is the sweetest, loveliest woman that I have ever known in my life, and then I hate her. Then she is a whore, a hypocrite, a blond lesbian whore, an idiot, a Middle Eastern religious fanatic. Will I be able to hold fast to my love or will I swing back to my hostile attitude?

I don't want to hurt Judy now either. I should probably forget for awhile. It is Soheila's turn to do some thinking.

This continual recording of thoughts and feelings, with only occasional references to what comes before, produces a more honest account because it prevents my intellect from changing things, from lying to draw a more flattering picture of myself. Some of it seems almost unbearable on rereading. But it was the rereading of these notes that was the deciding factor. I had forgotten the degree to which I had failed to love this wonderful gift from the gods.

My dream wants an angel, but Soheila is just a woman, and I have clearly failed her. It is I, and I alone who bring out the angel in this otherwise very ordinary woman. There is something fundamentally awe inspiring about her that remains hidden until the great sun of her beauty is coaxed from behind its cloud by the passion that my love creates in her.

I have treated her badly. I have been a poor lover. I went away from our passionate meetings with a mixture of awe and disgust. But, at bottom, the disgust was simply my incapacity to love her. Yet I fear that her thorns are the intractable backwardness of the Iranian culture, and that only a god could take her and live. But to remember the passion of this woman is to forget all of that, and yet it is also to feel infinitely unworthy of such radiance.

Sending the roses produced such an erotic effect on me, that I made love like a madman that night. Yet she was completely out of my mind. As I neared the orgasm, I realized that I was making love to her and that I couldn't stop without anesthetizing myself. Then I allowed her thick black hair, and her eyes to invade my consciousness. Our agonizingly sweet love dance appeared to my mind, with her face turned up towards mine, and I mounted to a kind of frenzied orgasm that seemed to be HER orgasm, and not mine. And I haven't even seen her for three weeks. But it was my perfect Persian beauty peering through the blinds of the library window, and all of the lust and passion of Persia flowing from her eyes into mine. I swore at that moment that I saw the same look in her eyes then that I saw the day that I told her I love her. It was a kind of furious abandon that I had never seen before in a human face. It was as if she looked out into a crowd to make sure that no one could see our passion, and finding no eyes, she allowed me to look at her face, the way a Western woman would allow a lover to look at her naked body for the first time. That face is imprinted on my mind forever.

I feel like calling her now, but I'm also nervous because I know it will be difficult, no matter what happens. There are so many possibilities that I have to just call, and react to her honestly, without premeditation.

So I called. Her sister answered the phone and as soon as I asked for Soheila, she became extremely distant, said she wasn't home and didn't know when she was coming back. It sounded like she pulled the phone away from her head so my voice could be heard by someone else. She answered me in monosyllables without any emotion at all.

I don't know why but this also is extremely exciting. It brings back the feeling that love is a kind of military campaign. She is like one of Stendhal's eighteenth century women. Her doubts must be conquered.

The small, terrible-eyed younger sister must have answered the phone. She probably prays 15 times a day. Enough for all three of them. She must have convinced ALL of the gods to hate me. If only the pretty sister with the intelligent eyes had answered the phone! Well, at least I know that the flowers arrived!

They are probably buzzing around the apartment like bees now. I didn't really say much. I just said that I can call back. Not that I WOULD call back. Maybe my letter is enough. After all, I just wished her a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and apologized for whatever it is that she thinks I did wrong.

I should wait for a few days. If she loves me, then her passion will become unbearable, as mine is. And if she doesn't love me, well.... She will be thankful but bewildered. No, I'm not sure what she will do.

Even if she doesn't love me, she will remember me for the rest of her life, because women live in their ability to inspire passion. She will invent and reinvent possible outcomes of our love to solace her when her youth passes.

Well, clearly I have become Werther again! How easy it must be for Don Juan! I almost envy him.

I only hope now, beyond all real hope, that she will be strong enough for my passion. That she will find the strength to make even the smallest step in my direction. If she can do nothing, then I will be left with a despair that I won't be able to master.

Again, it seems necessary to fall back on my teacher, Stendhal. He says that in his opinion a wise woman should never give herself in love until it seems impossible to resist her lover. He explicitly uses military symbolism when he says that any hint of duplicity from her lover gives a woman further strength to ward off her defeat. I think I can apply his teaching to our love because she is Middle Eastern. That is, first, she is able to love me even though I live with another woman, because she was raised as an Islamic woman. And, second, she has the same kind of passion that a woman of Stendhal’s time would have because she grew up in a quasi-theocratic society. But since I first conceived the hope that she might love me in return I have been haunted by another of his observations. He said: "Mohammed has killed love in all those countries that have embraced Islam."

I feel like Julian. I must go through with this, even if it means death. I don't need to listen for a bell to sound the hour. I will simply call.

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Nothing to show for a lifetime's love

But this broken bowl, these tears

Rumi

I called her, and it was difficult. We talked for and hour and a half, almost exactly. She acted the part of a Moslem woman who has to appear pure in front of her family and her culture, who has to talk with the possibility of her sisters hearing, and who therefore denied everything. Like a fool, I tried to make her admit her feelings. She admitted nothing, and decided our fate. After resisting my two year long siege, she finally put an end to it. She said the flowers put her through three days of agony. She said that she had to explain to her family, and she was very embarrassed. Her brother handed her a rose, and she was very happy at first. But when she looked into his eyes she saw that he was disapproving. Then, very abruptly, she said they don't get to see their brother very often but when they do he tells them everything even though it would be compromising to him in the world! I was stunned. I complained bitterly about the double standard in the Moslem world. I said I was going to hate Iranians. She got so upset that I had to back down. I said I didn't really mean it, that I was just angry. She denied all of her feelings for me. Nothing was left. We were just two disembodied voices crying in the wilderness. I told her again that she is the most beautiful of all women. At one point she said she felt like dying, and then I too said that I felt like dying. But most of the time it felt like I had to love her coldly, abstractly. I continually referred to her beauty, her....

That ugly, ugly family. My note was so pure, so noble, so delicate. They must have taken the note. Three days of agony. I am going to hate that country, those people.

My lesson is? It is difficult. My lesson again is my overwhelming capacity to live in my imagination? No, that isn't the lesson. Civilized man lives in his imagination. Imagination rules the world.

Just before we ended our conversation I said that no matter what it looks like I am doing, always believe that I tried to do something good for both of us. In a very quiet voice she said "all right." Then she asked if she could hang up. I said I want you to say "goodbye" of your own free will. She did. Then she said, "have a good day," and that hurt me deeply, but I realized immediately it was just a "language problem." I said, stupidly and sentimentally, "have a good life," and then I said, "no, have a GREAT life, for me." She gave a little laugh, and I said, "please, for me, have a great life, do great things." Then I said bye and she said bye. And I hung up. And then I cried. She couldn't feel anything for me, my Persian love. They wouldn't let her. My love is only intensified for this martyr to Islam.

I am so tired, so fatigued by all of this. It seems like I haven't slept in days.

I bared my soul again to this woman. I called her a saint. That sweet woman said that only a few are saints and I said again, you are a saint.

She said she couldn't be happy, that nobody is happy, and again, I begged her to be happy.

I asked her why her sister hates me. She said her sister doesn't even know what I look like! I questioned her about the time when I was with Hossein. She denied everything. She denied that she came to the class, she denied her friend, she denied everything.

I said her sister will tell and she said innocently that her sister tell not somebody and then everyone will know. Shit! My mind is wandering over everything and jumping around. I think it's not having the discipline of a native English speaker, for one and a half hours, that caused my English to lose its structure. And I am tired. One-and-a-half hours more of talk. But time has no more meaning now for us.

She said it was a wonderful thing for the RIGHT girl.

I told her I never go out on dates. Well, it was a fine dance. I told her she was pure, good, and again that she is a saint. That ugly family of hers! I hate them.

She kept insisting on making everything clear. I said I don't believe in the Moslem way of reasoning because it leaves out the feelings. Then instead of attacking Islam directly I just said, "if I say the moon is a balloon it is very clear, but the moon isn't a balloon."

I told her that she gave me a great deal of happiness, that just knowing her made me happy. She said she was glad for that. I think this is the best way. It's over. She said she will graduate next quarter and then she will go back. She said that life there would be impossible if they think badly of her. So this act could affect her reputation even in Iran!

She made it seem almost like a crime.

This precious Western culture that we have!

Seventy Eight

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