Flowers for the Tomb of Hafiz II

In fact, all Persian literature speaks about women in the abstract and almost with a feeling of their absence, just as one speaks about someone who is not in the room.

Reza Baraheni

Is masculinity essentially a kind of intense sexual longing? I find myself full of hatred for the deep-seated passivity of women. It is self-indulgent and delusional for them to feel that they can control their destinies by selective withdrawal. I find myself projecting back to them their contempt and fear of masculine desire: the longing then becomes its opposite, the wish to take, to rape.

Paradoxically, it is Don Juan who is the masculine counterpart of Colette, a woman who is at bottom nothing more than a voyeur, and scientist of love. Like Don Juan, she collects lovers. Woman must allow herself to be desired until she can no longer resist her OWN desire. To flee this experience is the beginning of its perversion. It is to invite and even provoke rape.

The masculine will must create love and desire from this longing. We must fight the sickness of woman that demands that she be seduced, taken.

There was no need for sex. If I want that I can certainly get it. YET, sex and love are difficult to separate. Sending her roses gave me incredible sexual energy, as did the phone conversation. That is why Elsa Maxwell's friendship with Maria Callas was so satisfying to her. The old lesbian certainly obtained no sexual favors from Callas. But what is the sexual act? It can be accomplished by a nymph or a whore or a boy. Is that one of the secrets of homosexuality, of their admiration of the unattainable, loveless Divas and film stars: Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford...?

When a woman gets the man of her choice, and he is nothing but a means to financial security and family, then her unsatisfied desires torment the men that she has run from, even if she is ugly. She becomes a harpy or a femme fatal and tortures her husband and children and everybody around her with her insatiable desires.

There are times when all of this reminds me of those embarrassing storms in a teacup, the soap operas. They take themselves so seriously yet they are so embarrassingly simple, commonplace.

It is painful to look at myself, at my incredible weakness and stupidity. When a man is in the harness of his passions he can be beautiful, base, ugly, noble. We need to worship each other but we know how arbitrary it is, how essentially stupid it is. Our cynicism, our reductionism can't tolerate it. It opens us to ridicule, absurdity. Don Quixote is the great example. Modern man can't stand to lose control.

Man and woman create each other out of their own needs. One is transformed in the psychic environment of the other. It is similar to the way a foreign culture slowly and imperceptibly transforms a personality. I became her American lover. She allowed me to exist, she helped to create what she needed. Her virginity, her foreignness, and especially the fact that she is a Persian woman, all conspired together.

Iranian women are held responsible for virtually all sexual transgressions. "If they say I've done something then they must be right." But I am not just a figment of her imagination. She bad the genie appear. And I appeared, but once out of the bottle, well, every genie has a different manner of granting wishes.

I am amazed that in the heat of passion my analytical powers are so narrowed. The larger picture becomes entirely distorted. Perception is always in the service of some need or other but one must still assume that intelligence is possible. Psychoanalysis overemphasizes the power of automatisms, or to put it differently, underestimates man's capacity to neutralize and regulate the animal part of himself so that he can attain to this higher level of consciousness, which I would call clear thinking. The Indians reached this clarity too soon, and formalizing it in Yoga, they killed spontaneity: practicing Yoga, men step back in evolution, as it were, and assimilate themselves to the plant.

One must learn to dance. One must learn to "discharge" the instincts in rhythm, beauty, and the grace of form. There is speech, and there is poetry.

And then there is man's incessant dissatisfaction and fertile imagination. All of science and progress have issued from that Faustian Will. And yet Yoga, Zen, Taoism, even Santayana, teach man the vanity and futility of it all. But with our moon landings and microchips, our vitamins and drugs, our genetic engineering, our science fiction, the Faustian Will has unleashed itself in a frenzy of striving and dissatisfaction with what is. But in all of this man must keep balance, perspective, and intelligence.

Poetry, beauty and intelligence. "It was a beautiful thing to do, but not for me," she said.

I was aware that Mohammed took ten wives. I knew that he fell in love with a beautiful young woman, Ayishah, after just one glimpse of her through the door of her tent. And she became his favorite. I knew that his first wife was 40 when he married her and that he was 15 years younger than she was. Soheila must know these things. They must be a part of her. Am I her 20th century Mohammed? Why else would she ALLOW me to say, "To see you is to love you?" I said, "Your sisters don't have to wear veils," and I was really saying that SHE is so beautiful that she SHOULD wear a veil. Then I put the jewel in her crown, "To see you is to love you."

I don't regret what I did, but I am disappointed at her withdrawal and at my inability to forget her. I am angry that she encouraged me again at our last meeting, and either lied to me, or was too weak to carry out her promise. My lesson is that I should never love unintelligently. Soheila is right. It was a beautiful thing to do, but not for her. She is right because she is convinced against all of my love and my longing that she is right. So I am left with my impotence, my inability to obtain my heart's desire, decently, with style and love.

I can't inspire passion in women who love me, and the women in whom I inspire passion can't love me.

Ninety Seven

Female homosexuality in Iran is hushed up in such a way that no woman, in the whole of Iranian History, has been allowed to speak out for such tendencies. A lesbian is considered to be far worse than a prostitute. To attest to lesbian desires would be an unforgivable crime.

Something that I learned from Kate Millet's book, "Going to Iran": roses come originally from Persia. Soheila probably thought that I knew that! Well, I suppose it is poetic justice that I didn't. I also learned that Kate Millet is a fool, and as Norman Mailer has said, has no real mastery of the English language. She uses it in a way that irritates me, that sets my teeth on edge. She has a telegraphic, almost ungrammatical style. It is a kind of speak-write, which is just short of obnoxious. I think it irritates me so much because of its unconscious arrogance and militant, bull-like stupidity. It is the price she has paid for her notoriety.

It is brutally stupid and irresponsible to describe an Iranian lesbian relationship in a book, along with names and pictures. The two women, Federoseyn, a devastatingly beautiful Iranian woman and her passionate, but ugly friend, "Our Nasrin" form a kind of backdrop for this meddlesome, stupid, and prurient book.

Her face is so passionate and beautiful that I can scarcely bear to look at it. Yet it is carelessly offered up to the Iranian public for execution! It is a face that dares to offer itself to lesbianism in a country that has never allowed even a hint of it in its entire history, in a country that executes lesbians!

That act of courage makes me cry all the more bitterly at the cowardice of Soheila. Two years. But why do I allow(?) myself these passions? Or do I NEED them? Haven't they been a part of my life from my earliest infancy? Darlene, Joanna, Kathy, Manida.

I don't want her now. I know that it is possible to drive out one passion with another but….

Isn't it impossible to sustain passion for more than a few years? -- without the kind of artificial methods of a Havelock Ellis and his wife? The Brownings can't be more than an exception. Why did Santayana dislike Robert Browning so much? He said to Cory that love should be something that a mature man puts behind him as something belonging to his youth, and by youth he meant early twenties.

But I am driven by passion. I see it in the eyes of my Polish student, Zanna, in the sad, calm eyes of the Vietnamese woman -- the resigned passion that is common to the Far East. Yet I hate deception and hypocrisy. I feel a responsibility for Andy, and I don't want to create tension in our household, our foyer. But I need this passion. Is there no woman who can give this to me, with or without sex?

As usual, I must go towards beauty and life, and damn the consequences: all else is death.

It is obvious to me that I don't need Soheila, that no matter how much passion and even admiration I have for her, her personality is organized in far too primitive a manner to be compatible with me. Again, this isn't a repudiation of Judy.

I don't consider that to be obvious but it should at least be understandable: it is a kind of failed attempt to solve the mind-body problem! The mind and body aren't really just aspects of the same thing: a symbol of an inner state isn't always an adequate expression of that state.

It is very late, and I am sleepy. Suddenly a whole page of tires appears on the computer screen! What could THIS mean?? I am “tire”-d! Of course. But why not just a simple image of sleep? Why this poetry, this absurd image? One has a woman, a wife. Yet areas of incompatibility arise and the mind begins to poeticize!

Soheila SEEMED to have what Judy has, along with passion and youth. Yet it became clear, especially in retrospect, that her level of passion is purchased at the expense of a disorganized, "stupid" existence. Her excellent intelligence is simply dominated by her passion, and the appearance of serenity and nobility, and even saintliness, is for the most part, hypocrisy.

I was misled in part by my ignorance of Iranian culture. She is a typical Middle Eastern woman, a Selma. "Don't embarrass me," is her final passionate cry, and her parting word is, "Wish me luck." That is thoroughly Middle Eastern. Luck, contingency.... You can't control your life with reason and morality, you must submit to fate. "Nobody's happy Jim." "Yes that's right, I'm not a free woman."

It is the experience of being mistaken about love that hurts. I don't say that she doesn't love me. She does. And I'm half determined to make her suffer for her bad character. I don't want to take revenge for my suffering, because it was the price I had to pay for the ecstasy of my love. It is her bad character that must be punished. She has to learn that you can't be a saint and a liar at the same time.

I began once to ask her if she "did anything" - she knew what I was asking- it was on the telephone. She wouldn't even allow me to formulate the question. She interrupted me with: "You're insulting me!" I said, "All right, I'm sorry. I'll never ask again, you're absolutely pure." I said it without irony, with a kind of passionate admiration. She stole that from me with a despicable lie.

Now that Reza Baraheni has shown me the baseness of their "culture," I suspect that she is a perfect butt fucker. But that is prurient and too hostile. It is just that I know that it is possible. When I asked her if she had ever kissed anyone, she said she would rather not answer that question. And I assumed it meant that she hadn't. Zanna should be my revenge.

Why is it that Judy is incapable of coming to orgasm with me? Is it really a sign of a lack? My orgasm was so extremely intense last night. It seems that she is unable to explore "danger" or taboo - the areas which contain sexual passion, symbolically. If an example were needed: standing naked in public sends blood rapidly and effectively to the head! It isn't even danger or taboo that is the issue. Human beings are ruled by their imaginations. Again, if an example were needed, a man who can talk eloquently in a small group of friends is reduced to a stammering fool in front of a thousand people.

One of my students has fallen in love with me. She is scarred with acne. Is it simply vanity that drives me? Why do I need beauty?

After a summer in Iran and more ridiculous men, she will admit that she loves me, passionately, desperately, but without hope, and then she will admit everything to herself.

Vida Nazafarin said, exactly as Soheila said to me, "I don't use the word "love." Yet how clear it is that she loves the young American whose father is a Doctor. Is he a fabrication of her imagination? She said she has known him for one and a half years, just exactly as long as she's known me. Instead of saying, "I'll see you," when we parted, she said, "I see you." She is just as passionate as Soheila. But I have always known that it is impossible for us. Once she said, "I think about you." It was only a few days after I told Soheila that I think about her. She told me that she had six weeks with him last summer, and she looked in to my eyes with passion. She was in my class for exactly six weeks after I told Soheila that I love her.

I haven't completely forgotten about her, but I have analyzed myself sufficiently to understand that love exists apart from the object that inspires it.

She becomes a criminal because she inspires the highest, most noble feeling, and then uses the feeling to affirm her power in the world. She tells all of her friends, pretending that she has done nothing. That is, she uses her own tenderest feelings for the ends of self-esteem and power. As Pope says, "beauty is all their means, power all their ends."

I am not a frail reed. What I discover in myself is the very spring of love. The object fades into insignificance. Yet it is a great paradox. The object is absolutely necessary.

It isn't an "anima/animus" phenomenon. I don't believe that it is fundamentally a projection. Stendhal indicates that this is what happens in his process of crystallization. But I think Ortega's criticism is right. We CAN evaluate. Romeo and Juliet are not animus/anima, they are neither machines nor solipsistic worlds revolving around each other. Love IS real. It cuts across boundaries, boundaries that are arbitrary: Montague and Capulet.

I can only come to the conclusion that the Iranian soul is, at bottom, barbaric, even criminal. The light that burns in the eyes of the women is perverse. It is the light of sex seen as base, dirty, stolen. She transformed love into revenge. Her brother transforms it into "doing something" - sex.

I rarely think about her. Last night was the first time in weeks, then I stopped myself. Thinking about her has the effect of vitalizing my entire organism, of energizing me. Yet it is bought at the cost of relating to an animal: a bizarre woman who is, at bottom, completely unsocialized, whose personality is a thin guise, a set of automatisms that are nothing but hypocrisy. Her "true self" is a Moslem woman, an Iranian woman who is coarse, whom I can only suspect of the most hypocritical sex life: after all, aren't they given over to anal sex, almost as an entire nation? She is also a coward - a woman who is nothing more than a sexual servant to Moslem-Iranian men and who is afraid to even be seen with an American man.

So I am filled with nothing but contempt for this foolish, vain woman, this foolish woman who is so ashamed of the hair on her arms that she bleaches it blond, and lately, just months before her return to Iran!?, has a tan! Her skin is normally white, milky white. Her chest broke out in blisters because she was allergic to the sun. So she must be using a tanning cream! So she is a vain fool. And I am ashamed of myself for falling in love with her.

Yet I am left with the feeling. This exaltation in the face of beauty - inner beauty. It is unrelated to external beauty. Vida Nazafarin's Iranian friend has it, yet her nose is hooked, she is skinny, flat as a board, with a receding chin. It is a look in the eyes, the face. A communication between souls.

Soheila WANTS, wishes, RECOGNIZES. She is a criminal, a hypocrite, a fool. Yet she remains, for all of that, on a higher level. Because she is, at least, capable of rejecting. She is, however no less of a criminal. And that is why she interpreted the flowers and note as an act of revenge.

Exaggerated longing - Petra von Kant, Madam Bovary. The desire is too strong for civilization. It wants to cut across all boundaries, to rape, kill, plunder. It hates the rich, covets beautiful women and wants to kill the lowborn and obnoxious thugs of the underclass. The response is always the golden music of Mozart, the classical wisdom of La Fontaine, the laughter of the Gods. Meditation on hard won truths.

One must treat the most dangerous thing lightly. Skating on thin ice requires strong nerves and smooth, LIGHT movements. Climbing dangerous mountain peaks requires that one not look down. The abyss is always there, yawning, gaping, enticing us with despair, death, chaos and the cynical smile of decadence and decay. Woman must be recreation and not more war.