From a contemporary writer, Kand-o-kav dar Masa'el-e Tarbiati-ye ( quoted by Reza Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals)
There is really no possibility of another letter. Besides, it isn't totally out of the question that she has left a message in my box. But I doubt it. Because I'm certain that she loves me and therefore she is too emotional.
Your lies amaze me. You swore that you "never discussed this with anyone." I can't forgive you. I've said things to you that were meant for you alone and you've shared them with your friends for your petty vanity. You lie to me so easily. I turned my back on you once with the utmost cost in pain. You used the word "agony." So do I. You could have avoided me that day but instead you showed me, again, the sweetness and light that is the very heart of the universe. Your brother is right. No man can resist that. That is what I mean when I say that you love me. A woman only shows that to her beloved, unless she is a whore. Are you? Then go back to Iran. There will be a man who will have enough money to buy you.
Well, this always changes to vitriol, hatred.
I suppose our last encounter symbolizes everything.
How lightly you treat me. How easy it is for you to make a promise and break it. You are "oriental," amoral, contradictory, above all, hypocritical, "all things to all men." I have long suspected that Iran belongs within the Russian orbit. You are NOT Aryan -- even Hitler needed oil! You cannot be westernized.
Well, this has obviously nothing to do with HER!? Yet it is true. Hossein and his amoral sensuality coupled with hypocrisy. His childish feelings, his bisexuality, his unabashed longing for money coupled with a love of poetry. Oriental sensualism. How clear it all is.
I think you've been unkind. I know it's true that we barely know each other and I hope you let your brother read this and everybody else for that matter. It's true that I've been courting you from a distance, that you don't want to see me. I've done everything in my power NOT to make you uncomfortable....
My heart isn't in this. Now I know she won't leave a message or a note. I even suspect that she is laughing at me. It seems now to be a long exercise in futility, in imagination gone wild.
I made the real error of not pushing her last fall. She said she wouldn't go out with me. I should have pushed her then, but I didn't really want to because of Judy. I wanted an imaginary love. I think this has been simply that. I feel ashamed of myself and angry with Stendhal or, really, woman. I should hate Soheila, but I can't bring myself to hate her.
The Iranians are animals. What could be clearer? I've always avoided them before. Why did I have to chase one?
I write this without looking back because I imagine it will bring more insight later on. I want to be surprised at my stupidity, I want to discover myself naked as in the dream. I don't want reason to cover the truth with plausibilities.
When I said, "Maybe you were right in what you said, that I only fell in love with you because you were unattainable," she looked up at me and then past me. Her face had a slight look of concern, as if she were looking at storm clouds and it was as beautiful as I've ever seen it. I wish I had told her how beautiful she looked. But it seemed throughout that she was mocking me. She was so different from what she had been on the phone, so light. I asked, "Are you angry with me?" She said, "Don't say that, I've already forgotten," and my feeling became, "She doesn't love me, she mocks me, I've made myself into a fool for a coquette." She said, "All my friends tell me" (I, naively shocked) "I mean my BROTHER tells me I've done something, so if they think so, they must have a reason." I said that I was in a romantic mood, that "I don't usually do things like that." She said, "They were beautiful, it was a beautiful thing to do, but not for me," and she looked down as if she isn't worthy of me. The entire affair is so confused. I complained of never getting to see her. I said, "I thought you weren't attending classes this quarter." She looked off, as if she were looking into a hostile world and said, "Good." I've seen Hossein look like that, I don't know if it's a hurt look, a feeling that is associated with an ugly, Iranian society, an impossible destiny.... I don't really feel concerned about it anymore. It was, really, my personal opera, my creation, but she simply wouldn't allow herself to be loved, or certainly not allow herself to love me. I needed passion and drama so I created them but my creation was a failure and that means I am crushed further by the indifference of people, the world. I was certain that she loved me.
And I just bought a little book by Michael Polanyi called, The Tacit Dimension, which attempts to validate this process of intuitive knowing. I'm still certain that she loves me but my CAPACITY FOR CERTAINTY is wrecked. NOTHING is certain now.
She could hide herself and observe and listen to me because I teach with my doors open, often, and she could see me through the windows of my classes.
Well, the sinus over my right eye hurts, Judy went to Canada for ten days with Andrea, and my mother gave me $10,000. I'm in pain and lonely. I'm not in the mood for romance and rapture.
A mad dance.
Since Judy has gone, I can see clearly, how the split in feeling comes about. A woman sets an emotional tone to a man's life: just being with her does that. Soheila would be faster, and, Iranian. Like Hossein. Apart from that, she would be naively materialistic and very domineering about it. I've let her dominate me emotionally already. It would just be more of the same. I think it is impossible except as an affair and a slow coming together. Is it an attempt to put everything together with two relationships? One domestic, the other sensual. Yet it's true that Soheila could change and come slowly to my side over a few years. She is Moslem and therefore expects me to share Judy?
Certainly Soheila would never allow herself to be a second wife. Even though she's Moslem. Young women are far too demanding of destiny. They don't see the opportunities that destiny presents to them and by getting what they think they want they provoke their own destruction. They get him but they ignore the little imperfections, like alcoholism, or the fact that he is a gangster. He pretends to be what they need him to be and then just does what he wants. Many of these men are true barbarians who beat their wives, threaten them with violence if they try to leave, break down doors, etc. Yet being a mistress to the man they love is impossible for them.
So why am I such a great analyst but weak on action? Well, did I ever want to be Don Juan? I've always admired Werther. Love or nothing. And I never scorned masturbation. I wouldn't allow my sexual instinct to lead me. I know it's possible to control sex without masturbation but I was afraid that if I suppressed sex completely it would make me intolerably aggressive and that it might damage my sex drive. And I've always been an insomniac. I've never wanted to feel dominated by a woman through sex.
Most conventionally beautiful women confuse sex and power. These women are either very lonely and bitter in old age, or they wield power over a family via a powerful husband. Witness the lengths various divorced women go to get even with their husbands: a Governor's divorced wife refuses to get out of the Governor's Mansion, Henry Ford's wife takes great pleasure in exposing his nefarious business deals.
Soheila says with her pleading eyes: you aren't what I need, love isn't enough. She pretends to herself that if she falls in love it will be with a pretty Iranian boy or a handsome young American. But really, love has no meaning for her. And how painful and embarrassing for her it is to have to face that so squarely.
Yet the ironic and even humorous part is that I would be a magnificent catch for her: a lecturer in computer science who will inherit a million dollars. I'm vigorous and young looking. But I'm not rich, yet. Soheila has no idea that I will be. I have never even hinted about it. It's wholly insulting to marry a woman who knows you're rich. Then it's only sensual and exploitive, and essentially obscene.
Now that I am sitting here alone, it is so clear that men and women must be partners first and yet tragically almost, they must also be sexually compatible. As long as women sell themselves and men buy them, they will be FRIGID and men will be unsatisfied. And everyone is affected. Like a disease, it attacks all levels of society, it vitiates all relationships. It is truly a plague, as Wilhelm Reich called it. The apparent winner, the young woman, loses everything, and especially her humanity. She loses every opportunity to love and she doesn't grow.
As Santayana says, we are all so very capable of lying to ourselves and to others in so many imaginative ways. Be it ever so! And one must search for and create happiness. But to find happiness we have to be aware of the disease, the plague.
What Polanyi says about tacit knowing seems particularly valuable for me here. It may, of course, simply be the obvious restated by a respectable philosopher and therefore seemingly profound when it is only trivial. However: I think that Judy and Andrea have given me a very precise knowledge of the feminine personality. I have watched Andy grow from three to fourteen years old. I have been with them constantly for 11 years. I am adept at reading a woman's face, intuitively. As Polanyi says, we don't have to know HOW we know what we know. An athlete isn't conscious of how he moves his muscles to throw a ball.
Therefore I am NOT living in my imagination. She has caused me to believe that she loves me. She DOES love me and therefore she is the worst kind of coquette imaginable.
Certainly the world is full of coquettes. They teach their sons that a woman is a very desirable sexual object who plays by no rules except those dictated by biology, or the satisfaction of the cunt's desire. He then pursues woman on that level, and he is turned into an animal because she exists as an animal.
Polanyi's contribution to this is that I, because I have had so much experience with women, and because I've lived with Judy for eleven years, and because I've watched Andy grow, I am FAR LESS apt to make a mistake than an ordinary man, and therefore this is definitely NOT just my imagination, but in fact ONLY a man like me could take the time, would have the necessary patience, to discover a woman like this, a Middle Eastern woman. Only a man with my sophistication and experience, with my love of the feminine, with my history of unrequited love and a rejecting mother, with my current stability.... all of these combine to allow me to fall in love with this woman, to entangle myself in her cunt-world. Every little sign she gave, even her great satisfaction in saying about the "ten-year-old," "I never forgave him." Just because he made me angry and jealous. The little wave, the little look she gave me in the cafeteria. Any woman who doesn't love is always careful NOT to do things like that. Well the list is endless but it is all an example of Polanyi's hierarchical, tacit knowing. The phoneme, the word, the sentence-grammar, style, content. Soheila and I exist at the phoneme and word levels with quite a few sentences, maybe a lot of sentences that create a style but whose content is inchoate, only constructable by inference, really unknowable, because it is only the level before that is clearly Polanyi's "open inference."
So she is obviously lying. I might almost say to her, "Now that I've caught you in a lie, I know that you love me. I know you lie easily and without conscience. And I know what your brother and friends are talking about now. They feel very strongly that you are lying to them and to me and to yourself. After all, the ego wants what society tells it to want, the ego has a passive side. It denies sexual feelings continually; sexual feelings for relatives or anyone else who isn't judged to be appropriate."
She is pretending to herself that I am too old. And she can't allow us to be friends because she doesn't trust herself with me. But, of course, I can't really know.
I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed it very lightly. She turned crimson. I said, "I would like to give you a hug," and I put my right hand on her other shoulder. She wiggled away like Andy might, her face no longer flushed but as Freud would say, now it was her cunt that was flushed and without shame, because she was being a "good girl" and pushing me away. Her face had that look of sexual passion that it had at various times during our first long talk in the cafeteria. But now it was laughing. "Don't embarrass me," she said. I let her feel my strength as I held her very briefly but firmly. Then I let her go in a little dance step, giving her fat arm one final squeeze. I was amazed, by the way, at that sensual, fat arm. It makes me imagine equally fat, sensual thighs.
A woman was prattling on the radio about male sexuality. "Men are just like that, they are just men, they are hopelessly uncomplicated sexually." Coming after, "fat, sensual thighs," you might think she has a point! Yet what is the meaning of prostitution? Is it only a peon to male simplicity? No! It is WOMAN in the act of simplifying sex. A MAN must at LEAST have an erection. Happy is the man who can simplify sex! Only MEN seem to be capable of complicating sex to the point of having an orgasm at a fire! What woman would stage a mock hanging of herself to enhance her orgasm?
Women like to unmask men. Where he idealizes they concretize. If he is a General, they see only the man and the sexual man at that. And they feel infinitely desirable. What woman doesn't feel somewhere, at some time, that she has had a man who would die for her, a man whom she nevertheless despises?
What extremes men go to for women! And yet this radio-woman is ready to overlook everything. She is probably married to an ARAB! MEN created love! Christ! Yes!, Christ himself created the religion of love! Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Petrarch, Robert Browning! Men have been the greatest lovers.
Women are far more vain than men, far more practical. And their sex seems to be more of a concrete thing, something that can be protected, bartered, bought and sold, or given away. And they are obsessed with monogamy. They seem to either associate sex completely with power, position, family, or they are prostitutes! Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are simply Flaubert and Tolstoy. Tolstoy's wife was a monster. She was completely without....
Soheila has always represented for me.... She is a kind of longing. I thought, no, I was CERTAIN that you loved me. (!) I just wrote "you" instead of "she!"
I was certain that she loved me. And now? I'm not certain that she doesn't but it seems futile. What is the point to it? My life is just a longing. Computer science is absurd for me. I have allowed myself to work too hard.
I've refused so many women. I want something divine, unreal. Dulcinea, Laura, Beatrice. She can only symbolize it. She flees because that is the only way she can give me what I need. Love from a distance, a dream. Is that all I need?
I am alone for ten days, Judy and Andy are in Canada, I am on quarter break and she can't come to me. And I refuse to take her. The Gods are unkind.
Women are seldom seen with men, there are few couples, no lovers, and at dusk Teheran becomes a city of males, prowling in groups or loitering. The bars are exclusively male... there are no women, and the lugubrious alternatives to sex are apparent: the film posters showing fat Persian girls in shortie pajamas; nightclubs with belly dancers, strippers, kick lines... the Iranian is a stupid starved creature for whom woman is only meat... an ugly monomaniac with a diamond tiara, who calls himself "The King of Kings" is the answer to government, a firing squad their answer to law
Reza Baraheni
The Crowned Cannibals
Sitting alone, without Judy, after only two days absence, it seems clear that Soheila couldn't fill this space. She must see that.
Yet any woman can fill part of the space. And habit is some of it. But at all costs, I must be a man of thought, and she couldn't provide the stability for that. Whether my model is Montaigne or Rabelais. But there is no need for a model. I will break any previous mold.
I don't need marriage, certainly. The only reason it even enters my mind is that she might need it to become a citizen, to free herself from Iran. But I wouldn't want to be bound to a woman legally. I don't want the government in my life.
But my "idealism" has defeated me. It has been my hubris. But it has also plunged me into the heart of life, and birth and death, love, hate, blood, tears, pain. It is my destiny, and I can't leave it in the lurch.
Maybe mathematics and computer science are necessary for me after all, as a balance for the confusion of my emotions.
I need to create, to live passionately. Stendhal made his life into an Opera. I too need that.
I notice that she is tied to me even in her little gestures and uses of words. When Larry Andrews passed us in the hall, her hand went out the same way mine did when she and her sister passed by me, pretending not to see me. She uses certain expressions and words that only I use, which proves that I live in her as she does in me. She said, "I will drop a note in your box." I used exactly the same expression when I suggested to Hossein that she could do that as a next step in our relationship.
She said that she liked me very much. At least I have that. But that isn't enough.
This is a kind of passion of the imagination! I still don't understand it.
She pulled in her teeth with her lips in a sucking movement that I've never seen her do before. It was accompanied by a kind of giggling. I felt that it meant that she doesn't love me. That she was allowing herself to be ugly in my presence, thinking of her future lover. Was she straightening her teeth!? But it was a purely Iranian gesture. She turned her head to the side. It was the kind of expression one doesn't show in public. It must be the influence of the veil.
She said, "I THOUGHT I could take 4 courses this quarter." What did I say? "I THOUGHT you were dating," "I THOUGHT your weren't seeing your brother?" No, it was something more obvious.
Why has she repeatedly and clearly pushed me away? "I don't want you to make a special trip just to see ME." "Just because I want to talk to you, don't think it means I love you." What could be clearer? Why is she doing this? Why am I doing it? How can I love a woman who simply won’t return my love? Is it because I feel that she loves me and is restrained by Islam, Persia?
I think that her passionate declaration, "I like you very much," was her avowal of love. "I don't understand why you don't want to be my friend," I said as we were parting. "I could help you so much." A kind of awkward silence followed. I was reaching because I knew that I wouldn't have another chance. "You could help me too." I said it sweetly and with feeling. "I'm not the kind of man who would push you. I wouldn't press you to do anything, you know." I've said that so many times. Was it then that she said, "I like you very much?" I doubt it. Was it then that she said, "I handled it badly, I DO want to talk?" I don't know. Or was there simply an evasive silence?
She becomes the pale lover too when I see her for the last time, 70 yards away, in the gloom. And I can see that her body is limp and throbbing, passive to her heart.
Even Ali hates me, what better proof that she loves me?
As Santayana says: "If images were things, as the Idealists try to persuade themselves, we should but need to watch them grow in order to observe and understand the deepest secrets of nature: but images are signs, and happy the man who can interpret them!"
Somehow I can't shake the feeling that she can't love me because I'm 38!
Like many young women, Soheila doesn't know what's good for her. She doesn't love me if she thinks she loves Robert Redford.
Of course, she might simply be a Princess de Cleves who will NEVER tell the duc de Nemours that she loves him. Then the question of ..... Yet I can't believe that any....
I was fantasizing about how I would have left her in the hall, if I had known that I would never see her again!
Why is it that when one's deepest love is rejected it makes one feel suicidal? And why am I using the pronoun "one?" Because it is impersonal, and gives me distance. It describes what IS, without the beautiful form, the luxurious hair, the magnificent glance, the imperious eyes, all in that frail, human form, like a leaf in the wind, yet so strong. She faces so much pain, deprivation, separation, that her entire being has become ennobled; her spirit is rarefied, pure, a white flame. She is like a goddess of strength, yet weak in her glance into chaos, into the despair of her country, her Cross. Her weakness is real. It balances her greatness and drags her into the furnace of the common: whether it is her instinct to preserve the Iranian race - a purely sexual urge that tells her that she could never love me - or a memory of her family that rejects even the idea of an American mate.
I feel ennobled and greatly honored to have touched this suffering being, this avatar of woman: Eve, Laura, Beatrice. Yet I see, and suffer from her weakness. She is human, like Christ, yet she hasn't felt the message of Christianity: that even god-man can doubt, can be wretched.
You've caused me a great deal of pain by not allowing me to see you. I am mature enough to accept the inevitable but I resent the feeling that you are hiding yourself from me, as if that is the only solution. Please don't reject me for the embrace of Persia and Islam. Is it your brother who is behind your rejection and fear of me? Does your brother have an American girl friend but tell you that you can't love me? Please don't let this terrible injustice continue.
Well I don't think this means anything. Even if it is true. How can I hate them? What is my love if not a love of Iran, Persia? The wish to hold this noble Iranian creature in my arms isn't based on a hatred of Iran. It is based on my wish to give and to take the gift of life from her.
Yet she is my poetry and exists for love alone. No!! She is ONLY poetry because she doesn't love me -- AND because I refuse to rape her.
In Iran, the murder of love is obvious. The entire population has succumbed: love IS sex. Is it true then that Soheila can only see my love as sexual desire? Because Islam teaches that sex is lawful only in marriage? Yet she said once, in the French Conversation class, that she could understand a marriage without church or laws. I think I said, (no I never did), that Judy and I aren't married.
Love MUST simply be sex for her: Islam allows marriages of just a few days or weeks! The little green book of the Ayatollah Khomeini says that students certainly should be allowed these short marriages. So it must be true that she allows herself to be married for a few weeks to an Iranian man who wants her. The book says that if an Iranian woman has sex with an infidel it is a terrible sin but if an Iranian man has an American WIFE she is just considered to be a whore if she doesn't convert to Islam. And even if she does, the marriage isn't recognized by the Iranians. So how could Soheila possibly understand that love can be more than sex?
Well, for all I know, she is a disciple of De Rougement! I wanted that conversation. I should have known it wouldn't take place, that she would betray me. Vida Behnaz won’t even say hello anymore. She turns her back on me when her friends are with her! She is nothing more than a whore! It is such an insult to be treated as a forbidden object, someone to be denied in public, as Vida Nazafarin has done also. How will I react to Iranians in the future? But I couldn't possibly attack Mandy and Albert. They are Iranians but Jews. I might let them know about this and that I think that Iranian women must have the right to have American boyfriends and to marry American men without losing their families and becoming outcasts. Otherwise I won’t accept Iranians as ....
Money and power are the aphrodisiacs of women. The beast in woman needs to be taken by man. Her fantasies often revolve around rape, or dominance and submission. Naturally that is what I fear the most of Soheila.
To spiritualize sex, or, to be able to love, a woman must be able to see and feel her lover in her imagination. And she must be able to say "yes" to him when she is certain that he loves her desperately. That is his passion and his force. If she needs to be TAKEN by him, then she has missed love. She is an animal and she will descend to the cunt instead of ascending to love. If she descends, she becomes the possession of man, his whore. And I fear that Soheila is Dulcinea/whore and that I am the Don Quixote/Fool.
I feel the pull of money. Alberich rejected! No. The power of gold pulls, it excites. But a woman who submits to the force of gold delivers herself to the marriage bed of the beast and witnesses her own rape. And a man who submits to gold tramples over everything that is valuable and takes all of his women by force.
Yet my mother is already rich. Or almost. I could make her two million dollars into five, and then there would be no more financial worry. My investments should be sane, rational.
With money I could be independent of jobs and work. It is obvious that the stock market is undervalued. And High Technology stocks will multiply by a factor of ten in five years. Biotech, Computers.
I said, "do you remember when I called you a gem?" And without hesitation, she said, "yes." And she said it with a kind of affection and tenderness. I like to think that in her heart, when she was 25, she became an atheist as I said I did at that age. If she loves me, as I do her, then she will sacrifice even God for our love!
When I said musingly, "I could never live in Iran," and I was half asking, half making a statement, she answered, "No you couldn't. It would be impossible." There was great feeling in her voice. She had obviously thought about it.
When the sweetness of love subsides, lust resurfaces. Naked sex isn't evil or base, it is nothing: it is natural. Soheila is everything to me, and my sadness is that I am -- I almost said, "nothing to her." My sadness comes, really, from the fact that I am not EVERYTHING to her also.
Man cannot be a natural force. If he could then Soheila would be mine. I wouldn't have tolerated that the strongest desire in nature go unsatisfied. But when a man is left with his erect phallus, the rape that he refuses himself takes place on himself. Another symptom of chaos.
Soheila IS Iran: decay, dissolution, death. If only she had allowed herself to love me. But then Iran would not be Iran and I would not be facing life without her.
Was it when I asked, "If you don't pass your courses, then you might not graduate?" She said, "No, that's not it, that's not it at all!" And that was the expression I used, those were the words I used to answer her, when she said, "You just love me because I'm unattainable." But then later when she said, "You shouldn't love ME," I said, and I was hurting her just a little, as lovers do, "Maybe you were right, maybe I only fell in love with you because you were unattainable."
I suspect, but I can never know, I suspect that I live in her heart just as she lives in mine. I make love to her over and over, here in this secret place, and she is forced to keep me much more deeply and securely hidden from her Iranian "friends" and relatives in a much deeper and more inaccessible and unconquerable place.
I'm not .... I can't seem to formulate my idea. I began with an analysis of my problem, with women, society. I concluded that the only solution for a healthy young man was a friendly war on women, a kind of siege, with a strategy and a great deal of energy and application. Yet the result was that I fell in love with an impregnable fortress. It's as if I found the least available woman at State.... No, that isn't true. She ALLOWED my love. I found a woman who claimed not to know love, yet who allowed me to love her as no other woman could. A woman who loved more deeply than any American woman could.
I know that Don Juan is the only logical choice for American men, yet as Stendhal says, Werther's love gives the most pleasure. Because his MIND accompanies his love. Well, I am beginning to feel old. I feel as if this failure has made me old.
I don't want to send this letter. I don't want to see you, and I don't want to hurt you - Islam!
Anything is hurtful, so I can't send this letter. It finishes itself, like a chess game that ends in stalemate. And she hasn't even declared her love for me. The rest is just sentimentalism.
It feels like it's over. I don't know what it meant. She is probably Judy at 25. The possibility of children. The human being in his perfect physical form and harmony. 25-year-old virginity: the sweet smell of a 25-year-old virgin cunt. My stiff cock straining to deposit its seed in her aching matrix. But that is just sex, nature. I wanted her admission of love. I NEEDED her admission of love. And maybe that's all I needed.
There were times when her face looked like the earth itself and I was afraid because I wasn't ABSOLUTELY certain that she loved me. When it became inhuman, I lost my conviction. If I had only been certain that she loved me.
The earth is our mother, our first and last love, but it is also indifferent and hard.
Women are seldom seen with men, there are few couples, no lovers, and at dusk Teheran becomes a city of males, prowling in groups or loitering. The bars are exclusively male... there are no women, and the lugubrious alternatives to sex are apparent: the film posters showing fat Persian girls in shortie pajamas; nightclubs with belly dancers, strippers, kick lines... the Iranian is a stupid starved creature for whom woman is only meat... an ugly monomaniac with a diamond tiara, who calls himself "The King of Kings" is the answer to government, a firing squad their answer to law
Reza Baraheni
The Crowned Cannibals
Sitting alone, without Judy, after only two days absence, it seems clear that Soheila couldn't fill this space. She must see that.
Yet any woman can fill part of the space. And habit is some of it. But at all costs, I must be a man of thought, and she couldn't provide the stability for that. Whether my model is Montaigne or Rabelais. But there is no need for a model. I will break any previous mold.
I don't need marriage, certainly. The only reason it even enters my mind is that she might need it to become a citizen, to free herself from Iran. But I wouldn't want to be bound to a woman legally. I don't want the government in my life.
But my "idealism" has defeated me. It has been my hubris. But it has also plunged me into the heart of life, and birth and death, love, hate, blood, tears, pain. It is my destiny, and I can't leave it in the lurch.
Maybe mathematics and computer science are necessary for me after all, as a balance for the confusion of my emotions.
I need to create, to live passionately. Stendhal made his life into an Opera. I too need that.
I notice that she is tied to me even in her little gestures and uses of words. When Larry Andrews passed us in the hall, her hand went out the same way mine did when she and her sister passed by me, pretending not to see me. She uses certain expressions and words that only I use, which proves that I live in her as she does in me. She said, "I will drop a note in your box." I used exactly the same expression when I suggested to Hossein that she could do that as a next step in our relationship.
She said that she liked me very much. At least I have that. But that isn't enough.
This is a kind of passion of the imagination! I still don't understand it.
She pulled in her teeth with her lips in a sucking movement that I've never seen her do before. It was accompanied by a kind of giggling. I felt that it meant that she doesn't love me. That she was allowing herself to be ugly in my presence, thinking of her future lover. Was she straightening her teeth!? But it was a purely Iranian gesture. She turned her head to the side. It was the kind of expression one doesn't show in public. It must be the influence of the veil.
She said, "I THOUGHT I could take 4 courses this quarter." What did I say? "I THOUGHT you were dating," "I THOUGHT your weren't seeing your brother?" No, it was something more obvious.
Why has she repeatedly and clearly pushed me away? "I don't want you to make a special trip just to see ME." "Just because I want to talk to you, don't think it means I love you." What could be clearer? Why is she doing this? Why am I doing it? How can I love a woman who simply won’t return my love? Is it because I feel that she loves me and is restrained by Islam, Persia?
I think that her passionate declaration, "I like you very much," was her avowal of love. "I don't understand why you don't want to be my friend," I said as we were parting. "I could help you so much." A kind of awkward silence followed. I was reaching because I knew that I wouldn't have another chance. "You could help me too." I said it sweetly and with feeling. "I'm not the kind of man who would push you. I wouldn't press you to do anything, you know." I've said that so many times. Was it then that she said, "I like you very much?" I doubt it. Was it then that she said, "I handled it badly, I DO want to talk?" I don't know. Or was there simply an evasive silence?
She becomes the pale lover too when I see her for the last time, 70 yards away, in the gloom. And I can see that her body is limp and throbbing, passive to her heart.
Even Ali hates me, what better proof that she loves me?
As Santayana says: "If images were things, as the Idealists try to persuade themselves, we should but need to watch them grow in order to observe and understand the deepest secrets of nature: but images are signs, and happy the man who can interpret them!"
Somehow I can't shake the feeling that she can't love me because I'm 38!
Like many young women, Soheila doesn't know what's good for her. She doesn't love me if she thinks she loves Robert Redford.
Of course, she might simply be a Princess de Cleves who will NEVER tell the duc de Nemours that she loves him. Then the question of ..... Yet I can't believe that any....
I was fantasizing about how I would have left her in the hall, if I had known that I would never see her again!
Why is it that when one's deepest love is rejected it makes one feel suicidal? And why am I using the pronoun "one?" Because it is impersonal, and gives me distance. It describes what IS, without the beautiful form, the luxurious hair, the magnificent glance, the imperious eyes, all in that frail, human form, like a leaf in the wind, yet so strong. She faces so much pain, deprivation, separation, that her entire being has become ennobled; her spirit is rarefied, pure, a white flame. She is like a goddess of strength, yet weak in her glance into chaos, into the despair of her country, her Cross. Her weakness is real. It balances her greatness and drags her into the furnace of the common: whether it is her instinct to preserve the Iranian race - a purely sexual urge that tells her that she could never love me - or a memory of her family that rejects even the idea of an American mate.
I feel ennobled and greatly honored to have touched this suffering being, this avatar of woman: Eve, Laura, Beatrice. Yet I see, and suffer from her weakness. She is human, like Christ, yet she hasn't felt the message of Christianity: that even god-man can doubt, can be wretched.
You've caused me a great deal of pain by not allowing me to see you. I am mature enough to accept the inevitable but I resent the feeling that you are hiding yourself from me, as if that is the only solution. Please don't reject me for the embrace of Persia and Islam. Is it your brother who is behind your rejection and fear of me? Does your brother have an American girl friend but tell you that you can't love me? Please don't let this terrible injustice continue.
Well I don't think this means anything. Even if it is true. How can I hate them? What is my love if not a love of Iran, Persia? The wish to hold this noble Iranian creature in my arms isn't based on a hatred of Iran. It is based on my wish to give and to take the gift of life from her.
Yet she is my poetry and exists for love alone. No!! She is ONLY poetry because she doesn't love me -- AND because I refuse to rape her.
In Iran, the murder of love is obvious. The entire population has succumbed: love IS sex. Is it true then that Soheila can only see my love as sexual desire? Because Islam teaches that sex is lawful only in marriage? Yet she said once, in the French Conversation class, that she could understand a marriage without church or laws. I think I said, (no I never did), that Judy and I aren't married.
Love MUST simply be sex for her: Islam allows marriages of just a few days or weeks! The little green book of the Ayatollah Khomeini says that students certainly should be allowed these short marriages. So it must be true that she allows herself to be married for a few weeks to an Iranian man who wants her. The book says that if an Iranian woman has sex with an infidel it is a terrible sin but if an Iranian man has an American WIFE she is just considered to be a whore if she doesn't convert to Islam. And even if she does, the marriage isn't recognized by the Iranians. So how could Soheila possibly understand that love can be more than sex?
Well, for all I know, she is a disciple of De Rougement! I wanted that conversation. I should have known it wouldn't take place, that she would betray me. Vida Behnaz won’t even say hello anymore. She turns her back on me when her friends are with her! She is nothing more than a whore! It is such an insult to be treated as a forbidden object, someone to be denied in public, as Vida Nazafarin has done also. How will I react to Iranians in the future? But I couldn't possibly attack Mandy and Albert. They are Iranians but Jews. I might let them know about this and that I think that Iranian women must have the right to have American boyfriends and to marry American men without losing their families and becoming outcasts. Otherwise I won’t accept Iranians as ....
Money and power are the aphrodisiacs of women. The beast in woman needs to be taken by man. Her fantasies often revolve around rape, or dominance and submission. Naturally that is what I fear the most of Soheila.
To spiritualize sex, or, to be able to love, a woman must be able to see and feel her lover in her imagination. And she must be able to say "yes" to him when she is certain that he loves her desperately. That is his passion and his force. If she needs to be TAKEN by him, then she has missed love. She is an animal and she will descend to the cunt instead of ascending to love. If she descends, she becomes the possession of man, his whore. And I fear that Soheila is Dulcinea/whore and that I am the Don Quixote/Fool.
I feel the pull of money. Alberich rejected! No. The power of gold pulls, it excites. But a woman who submits to the force of gold delivers herself to the marriage bed of the beast and witnesses her own rape. And a man who submits to gold tramples over everything that is valuable and takes all of his women by force.
Yet my mother is already rich. Or almost. I could make her two million dollars into five, and then there would be no more financial worry. My investments should be sane, rational.
With money I could be independent of jobs and work. It is obvious that the stock market is undervalued. And High Technology stocks will multiply by a factor of ten in five years. Biotech, Computers.
I said, "do you remember when I called you a gem?" And without hesitation, she said, "yes." And she said it with a kind of affection and tenderness. I like to think that in her heart, when she was 25, she became an atheist as I said I did at that age. If she loves me, as I do her, then she will sacrifice even God for our love!
When I said musingly, "I could never live in Iran," and I was half asking, half making a statement, she answered, "No you couldn't. It would be impossible." There was great feeling in her voice. She had obviously thought about it.
When the sweetness of love subsides, lust resurfaces. Naked sex isn't evil or base, it is nothing: it is natural. Soheila is everything to me, and my sadness is that I am -- I almost said, "nothing to her." My sadness comes, really, from the fact that I am not EVERYTHING to her also.
Man cannot be a natural force. If he could then Soheila would be mine. I wouldn't have tolerated that the strongest desire in nature go unsatisfied. But when a man is left with his erect phallus, the rape that he refuses himself takes place on himself. Another symptom of chaos.
Soheila IS Iran: decay, dissolution, death. If only she had allowed herself to love me. But then Iran would not be Iran and I would not be facing life without her.
Was it when I asked, "If you don't pass your courses, then you might not graduate?" She said, "No, that's not it, that's not it at all!" And that was the expression I used, those were the words I used to answer her, when she said, "You just love me because I'm unattainable." But then later when she said, "You shouldn't love ME," I said, and I was hurting her just a little, as lovers do, "Maybe you were right, maybe I only fell in love with you because you were unattainable."
I suspect, but I can never know, I suspect that I live in her heart just as she lives in mine. I make love to her over and over, here in this secret place, and she is forced to keep me much more deeply and securely hidden from her Iranian "friends" and relatives in a much deeper and more inaccessible and unconquerable place.
I'm not .... I can't seem to formulate my idea. I began with an analysis of my problem, with women, society. I concluded that the only solution for a healthy young man was a friendly war on women, a kind of siege, with a strategy and a great deal of energy and application. Yet the result was that I fell in love with an impregnable fortress. It's as if I found the least available woman at State.... No, that isn't true. She ALLOWED my love. I found a woman who claimed not to know love, yet who allowed me to love her as no other woman could. A woman who loved more deeply than any American woman could.
I know that Don Juan is the only logical choice for American men, yet as Stendhal says, Werther's love gives the most pleasure. Because his MIND accompanies his love. Well, I am beginning to feel old. I feel as if this failure has made me old.
I don't want to send this letter. I don't want to see you, and I don't want to hurt you - Islam!
Anything is hurtful, so I can't send this letter. It finishes itself, like a chess game that ends in stalemate. And she hasn't even declared her love for me. The rest is just sentimentalism.
It feels like it's over. I don't know what it meant. She is probably Judy at 25. The possibility of children. The human being in his perfect physical form and harmony. 25-year-old virginity: the sweet smell of a 25-year-old virgin cunt. My stiff cock straining to deposit its seed in her aching matrix. But that is just sex, nature. I wanted her admission of love. I NEEDED her admission of love. And maybe that's all I needed.
There were times when her face looked like the earth itself and I was afraid because I wasn't ABSOLUTELY certain that she loved me. When it became inhuman, I lost my conviction. If I had only been certain that she loved me.
The earth is our mother, our first and last love, but it is also indifferent and hard.
She becomes a subdued, slavish subhuman sex object even in her own mind, and her body rises high on the buttocks to satisfy the homosexual whims of the man. She turns into the sodomized boy: she virtually changes her sex, surrendering herself to the vanities of her man and even taking pleasure form such dislocated intercourse, forgetting the natural function of her vagina. She is supposed to believe that rape is good for her, penetration of the anus is marvelous for her and submission to men is an ideal feminine quality because the virtue of a woman lies in her capacity to become a man's kaneez, which simply means a slave-girl.
Reza Bareheni
She said she would drop a note in my box to tell where and when we would meet. When I saw her that day in the hall, I should have called her a whore and turned my back. We were alone and she gave me a look that would have forced even the ancient and imperious Persian King Darius to look away in shame. And like the fool that I am, I stopped and stood there in the hall, shamelessly making love to her while she plotted her revenge. She does what she wants with me. I am contemptible. I have been deceived by a hypocrite and coquette. Should I take revenge? I could easily humiliate her.
I am left with feelings of hatred for her and yet I know that hatred is just the mirror image of love. Even hatred might be a danger for me because it might turn back into its opposite. My heart is now so close to Don Juan and so far from Werther and Stendhal. She was wearing a bright blue jogging suit today, with short sleeves. It was a magnificent day. She pretended not to see me on two different occasions, and I pretended, almost, not to see her. She looks very relaxed. She is certainly taking the quarter off, going to classes with her sister. She isn't a beautiful woman. She is MY creation. It is MY love that has given her whatever energy and beauty that she has. But she has used me and my feelings, almost cynically.
And how can I complain? I who have traveled the earth, throwing away every good thing that has been placed in front of me, even Judy. And probably Beverley too. Like the prodigal son, I've squandered all of my talents and laughed at fate. And how often I've rejected sweet love because its arms were too skinny or its breasts too small. How often I've pined after the fleshpots of this world -- while pretending to be a philosopher.
I suppose it is really just my ego that is crushed by Soheila's rejection. No, it is something deeper, something related to my mother and the rejections of infancy. As Connolly says:
"When we see a friend in the depth of despair because he has been left by someone whom we know to be insignificant, we must remember that there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving: of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back, and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay, and that this technique can be learned like a hold in jiu-jitsu. The person who has been left is always psychologically groggy: the ego is wounded in its most tender part and is forced back on separation and rejection phobias of infancy. Someone who knows how to prolong this state and to reproduce it at will can be quite insignificant, -so is the sand-wasp which stings a grub in the nerve center where it will be paralyzed, yet remain alive."
Are these women simply women who hate their fathers for taking their mothers from them and lack the courage to be lesbians? And then spend their lives taking revenge on men? And are Middle Eastern women simply women who can do nothing else but take revenge on men because their fathers transformed them into slaves? I thought I had learned to protect myself from that kind of gross feminine aggression.
It is clear that I can't be loved because it is that earliest experience of infancy that I will always repeat. No one is to blame. It is our tragedy that we transfer the disease, unknowingly, to each generation. We can't love those who need our love the most. It is a kind of determinism of the nervous system. If I fall in love it will always be with a woman who will despise me for the love itself. If it is friendship I want, then I will seek out whoever cannot give friendship. Like Oedipus, nothing I do will alter my fate. I can choose an Iranian woman, a black woman, an older woman, but nothing will fool the gods. It is written.
The beautiful half-Jewess with her flaming red hair and her white Rubenesque body, loved me. Her beauty was Rabelaisian, almost supernatural, yet she couldn't break the spell cast by Soheila. Soheila who can't love because of self-loathing based on centuries of subjugation: the veil, the walls all over Iran, two thousand years of slavery. it is her destiny to hate me.
It MUST be the gods who have confounded me: I was certain that Soheila loved me and that my Rabelaisian beauty didn't. We were together, there on a waterbed, I was in the arms of a goddess, convinced that she only wanted to use me. We are the playthings of the gods.
Should I try to punish her? Is that ignoble? I'm going to continue to think about it. I don't know. It would be a sweet pleasure. Would it purge me of all of this? I toyed with the idea this afternoon: I placed myself in various places where I thought she would be. And then I ran into them. They seemed so small, so CONTEMPTIBLE. She seems so hypocritical, so DIVIDED. She looked so falsely powerful and blase in her jogging suit. Her sister looked so Iranian: Puritanical, mean, centered nowhere. And Soheila, so "posing" with her jacket sleeves tied around her hips and her new white jogging shirt. She has lost weight. Yet she allows only her forearms to show, because her upper arms are still fat. How convenient. How demi-orthodox: Islam forbids a woman to show bare arms! She was so bright blue in her jogging suit! Her black bushy hair. No make-up, thick black eyebrows. She is only pretty because I love her. She is MY creation. Otherwise she is ugly. But now Hossein is in on this, because I have rhapsodized to him about her. Well, enough for now.
I must, of course, finish this. I must be more beautiful than she is. Certainly! I will be the fatal man for HER! Let her fall into her self-dug pit, the pit of hate, the pit of narcissism, rejection, lies and hypocrisy --- and coquetry. We shall see.
It was the inhuman glance
The scar on her naked neck
She staggering out of the bar
The very instant I saw
The lie of love itself.
Appolinaire
This isn't a midlife crisis. It was a great gamble that ended in loss. A disappointment, caused as much as anything by her immaturity and my lack of practical sense. I don't know if I would have even CONSIDERED leaving Judy. Hossein accuses me of only wanting to fuck her. And that is it. They are animals. They just reduce it all to fucking. She was so provocative in that jogging suit! It is as if she was saying, next time I will be wearing shorts, just have patience. She is playing with sex. She is a coquette. And that is the source of my anger.
I don't have time for this. I have so much work to do. Yet even when I took a quarter off, I didn't have time.
It's clear that a kind of sexual conservatism is the official stance of Iranian women, but as Jamal said, "We think they do things. We hear things." That is another source of a hatred that I feel for her. There was supposed to be a meeting, she lied. Then I see her in a jogging suit. It is the hypocrisy that I hate. The lying. To be rejected, to be passed over for any reason, really, is tolerable, if painful. But to hear a lot of Holy Water, THAT is really insulting.
Where does that leave me vis-a-vis Judy? I never really thought of leaving her because my love for Soheila was impotent. Why would I run from a woman who loves me and whom I love, for nothing?
I thought we might have a great passion. I was prepared to sacrifice everything for her. But she never took the step towards me that I waited for, for two years. And she certainly knew that I loved her.
I can hear them saying, "How could he leave this woman and her daughter whom he loves, and who love him, for an Iranian woman that he doesn't even know!" Yet they are the same people who meet and are married in three weeks. They too are hypocrites. And in Iran they have arranged marriages!
I'm angry that my love was simply cashed in as Ego gratification, as self-aggrandizement. Suddenly she is "A Beautiful Woman." That makes me want to hate her.
But still, where does that leave me with respect to Judy? I need something -- what is it? It seems that only Soheila can give it, but she is dead. So what does it mean? Is it youth, beauty? Objectively, she isn't even pretty. She has a large nose. Her eyes are close together, she has thick, dark eyebrows, virtually no breasts. She is short. She has high cheekbones and a narrow forehead. She isn't a classical beauty. Certainly. So why this furor? And why has she avoided me? What really does all this mean? IS this simply all in my imagination? Am I still curious ONLY because I haven't resolved this? I don't know her, really, and I am curious?
An obvious point is that if I had wanted to make a serious attempt, I would have made it then, when we met for the last time in the hall. Not only was Judy gone for two weeks, but it was almost quarter break. I could have concentrated all of my energy on her. I could have at least telephoned her. But I knew that SHE had to make the move. I don't want a captured woman. Kahlil Gibran has taught me about the Middle Eastern Woman. As he says of his beloved Selma:
"Unaware, she symbolized the oriental woman who never leaves her parents' home until she puts on her neck the heavy yoke of her husband, who never leaves her loving mother's arms until she must live as a slave, enduring the harshness of her husband's mother."
It was necessary for both of us that she make a move towards me.
I couldn't resist telephoning, but I got her sister: sweet, inquisitive, hopeful. Her ugly sister. I waited for a few seconds and then hung up. Once is enough. I wanted -- I NEEDED to hear her voice one more time. I'm afraid she has gone back to Iran for the summer and they won't LET her come back.
"In the middle of the street, a man suddenly takes off in full speed toward a woman walking a few yards ahead of him, thrusts his hands into her lower parts and, before anyone can raise any objections, disappears into the crowd. All women assert that at some time in their lives they have been assaulted, raped or nearly raped by men. In justifying this, with the most bestial judgement of women, men say: "You start to rape her, she joins you in the middle, and by God! What a pleasure"
Obviously she has to come to me. Obviously she won't be able to.
I want you to love me as a poet loves his sorrowful thoughts. I want you to remember me as a traveler remembers a calm pool in which his image was reflected as he drank its water. I want you to remember me as a mother remembers her child that dies before he saw the light, and I want you to remember me as a merciful king remembers a prisoner who died before his pardon reached him.
Broken Wings
Kahlil Gibran
ENOUGH!
All I can think of now is her words: "You shouldn't love ME", and my hurt and silence. If I had just read Baraheni's descriptions, I would have said "I SHOULD love you and WILL, forever; in my heart you are my wife, I will love you there forever." And it should be clear why I love her, why I HAVE to love her. But the Middle Eastern woman accepts her yoke. And that is difficult for ME to bear.
Yet I am certain that I don't love her! She is Judy at 25. It seems clear now that Soheila is simply Judy as a passionate 25-year-old woman. And this is all a kind of waking dream. Soheila is simply a dream created from my need.
My relationship with Judy began almost as an experiment: I was 28, and she 40. We both thought that it would be temporary. She couldn't have any more children. Then I fell in love with her and Andy. But now that she is fifty I want her to be younger, so I created Soheila. She is 14 years younger than me. Judy is 11 years older, a difference of 25 years. 25 years more of life and love.
She said that she had never heard of Kahlil Gibran. Yet, ironically, his novel Broken Wings describes her perfectly, at least she whom my imagination loves. But I regret that I didn't get to find out who she is really. That was the most fervent wish that I expressed to her when we last talked.
This is a kind of sickness, a kind of pain that is almost unbearable. Why should I, or anybody, write about such pain? Why did I allow myself to fall in love with such a woman? I have stretched the bounds of my sanity on this imaginary love and wasted two years of my existence dealing with a problem that is surely insoluble, dealing with a culture that is surely in its death throes.
I hate this feeling I get that I can't have privacy. It feels like someone, even Judy, will read this and I will be incriminated for terrible crimes against my family, or laughed at for indulging in a stupid and sentimental personal soap opera.
When she said, "You shouldn't love me," I felt very tired. I love her at least in part, because she so clearly loves me, yet thinks she is concealing her love. Like a little girl, she said, "YOU shouldn't love ME." All I could do is sadly feast my eyes on the young dervish, my sad smile mixed with hurt pride, my weariness showing through for her to REMEMBER, for the time when she can understand me, for the time when she will long for her Jim. Her "impossible" Jim. I looked at her with hurt, disappointment, amusement at myself and at her, and then to hurt her, I said, "Maybe you were right when you said that I only love you (I emphasized the present tense) because you are unattainable." The expression on her face became extraordinarily beautiful. It hurts me, saddens me, that this woman has to run from me. Because she gives herself to me, she gives me all of her love in her gestures.
"I like you VERY much," she said. Her face was flushed and her eyes were full of passion. She was devoid of pride, she was sincere. Yet it was obviously something a friend told her to say. Something to make me understand that she doesn't love me. She certainly wants me to believe that she doesn't love me.