The following letters are taken from Daryush Shayegan’s autobiographical narrative, Land of Mirages. Through a correspondence between two lovers who have parted because of insidious cultural rifts, Shayegan offers a portrait of contemporary Iran. Kaveh is Iranian and lives in Tehran; Marianne, who is French, has returned to her home country after a long stay in Iran that proved beguiling at first, then all but intolerable. Kaveh is now torn between his tenderness for Marianne and the dim promise of a relationship with Afsaneh. But above all, he is gnawed by melancholia and a sense of resignation at the prospect of his own millennial yet regressive culture.
Paris, February 26, 1997
My darling Kaveh,
I received your letter dated February 23 on the very next day. No doubt a passenger from Tehran placed it in my box without introducing himself. I rush to respond straight away, but let me first ask you this: why do we need to cross paths without understanding one another? Are our respective worlds so incommensurable? Are we not inhabitants of the same lands, do we not even speak the same language? You perfectly master ours, and one might almost mistake you for a Frenchman, although you drag behind you a nimbus of misunderstandings. When you found yourself in my homeland, I saw you undertake a few performances here and there, with firmness and a certain brio. And yet, you always remained absent.
You obstinately refused to take part in collective life; the problems of the public sphere were surely of interest to you, but only from a distance. Your engagement had a provisional gleam, as though you were willing to lend yourself while never actually giving yourself. You witnessed everything through the amplifying prism of comparison. Almost perversely, you accentuated differences that were often insignificant in my eyes, whereas in yours they took on primordial importance. If someone made a disagreeable remark on a particular topic or behaved in an inelegant manner to your mind, if someone lacked availability for a particular meeting or remained indifferent to the solicitude of “the other,” you promptly got on your high horse: you immediately opposed your “humanity” to ours. You used to say: Europeans exchange ideas as though they are standing in some marketplace, but they know nothing of true friendship, which is a communion between beings. Europeans are intelligent, at times too intelligent, but they lack wisdom; they are tolerant but they do not know compassion; they are honest but they are not “lords.” I can enumerate a thousand other biting remarks, at times terribly right, which you emitted with regard to us. They irritated me, amused me, offended me, and often gave me food for thought! I told myself you certainly had reasons of your own. I tried to understand the meaning of your criticism; I applied myself to the task and finally gathered that what you reproached us with was not related to individuals so much as to the type of civilization to which we belong. I realized that the same defects that you vehemently denounced and against which you revolted emanated precisely from the depersonalized rule of law that we have constructed throughout the centuries: that these very “lacunas” were the salutary barriers behind which you had come to seek protection when you found yourself at the mercy of the most radical form of arbitrary governance. Here, my dear Kaveh, lies the great paradox of your life: you had fled what you loved to find refuge in a haven you defied at times in quite a cavalier fashion.
And yet, dear Kaveh, your discourse, just like your shifting temperament, was never one-dimensional. Sometimes you went into back gear, you directed your thunders against your own compatriots. “To be an autonomous subject, that is the great affair,” you said, “rather than wallow in the swamps of our own insane atavisms!” So I wondered if these two worlds did not, in fact, develop to the detriment of one another; and after all, you knew close to nothing about it. When I came to live in Iran, in your country, I soon grasped the inevitable irony: the usefulness of one model and the simultaneous fascination for the other. I also became conscious that, for the moment, their coexistence was nearly impossible. That one cannot be a citizen without being a bourgeois and that, to be a lord, one needs to possess slaves.
At present, dear friend, we entertain the same wounds; only our harbors are distinct. You have found your tribe and you keep cursing it for its gregarious instinct. As for me, I have found my civil security and I languish for the land of chimeras…
Farewell, my handsome friend.
Tehran, March 27, 1959
My dearest Marianne,
The year 1378 of the solar Hegira has just drawn to a close. At times it seems to me that we live, mentally, in the fourteenth century of the Christian era or even a century prior to the great upheaval of the Italian quattrocento.
The days go by with such extraordinary monotony that my head wavers every so often. I wonder if we could stop the incessant flow of this process—which, in reality, is not a process since it does nothing but repeat itself with painstaking stubbornness. Apart from the rare and brief moments of happiness that I am granted by the beloved presence of one person or another or by some captivating book, the rest of the hours are numbingly sterile. To which I should add the mediocrity of the political situation, which, in spite of the president’s dull speeches, remains superbly stilted. People say that what he performs is logotherapy, that mores are evolving indeed—pressure is dwindling on women, they wear the occasional makeup and feel free to flaunt brighter colors—but nothing actually changes. No sooner have you taken a few steps forward than you immediately have to turn back on your heels as though you had trespassed over some threshold; for any step forward is a possible threat to the natural inertia of things—stagnation, pure and simple. Yet I know that in the slits of this apparent quiet lies an intensely new and swarming world, so very different from the old one; and on the day that the forces of this underworld rise, we shall witness a complete reversal of our perspectives—secularism gloriously emerging from the womb of Iranian society.
I can tell you about the evolution of our ways because I know a thing or two about them. A few days ago, a meeting of sorts happened to be held at my place. A former employee of our company had come to see me for business; my faithful servant Hossein Agha was there too, and they both started talking about their children. They said young Iranians have dramatically changed their social attitudes: when they go out at night, they all wear ties and pochettes, drink alcohol without restraint, and dance to the rhythms of the latest Persian rap and techno music. Hossein Agha told me that when he asks his son why he adamantly insists on wearing a tie, while he himself never wore one, the young man replies: “When I wear a tie, I also need to wear a clean shirt and smoothly ironed pants—and I feel like a civilized man.”
Those bleak moments are brightened sometimes by the presence of Afsaneh, who looks like a shooting star strayed among us. She visits us more frequently as of late; there is a lovely connection between us, except that we are not really on the same wavelength. She wants us to go away on a trip, or to live somewhere else—no matter where, so long as it is far from here; I feel that wherever we go, the sky, as the proverb says, will be of the same color. I am suffering from an exhaustion that seems as old as the history of my country, as if my blood were inhabited with all the epic failures of its memory.
Once she insisted, as she is wont to, that we leave this place as soon as possible, and she showed me a remarkably elaborate travel plan, complete with stops, halts, and detours. I told her, offhandedly: “Do you know how we differ from each other on this matter?”
“No,” she answered, slightly taken aback.
“I am an old traveler, come home to the cradle after long trips around the world, while you are only starting your own odyssey; besides, I still bear the wounds of a vivid relationship, the outcome of which is far from conclusive.”
“You mean Marianne?”
“Yes; she is always there, and as long as her presence endures, I will not be entirely free.”
Well, there it is, dear Marianne; I leave it up to you to draw the conclusions, if any.
Tehran, April 21, 1999
Marianne, my dearest friend,
I went to the Caspian seaside with Afsaneh; my two friends Alireza and Jamchid also came along. We left by car, in these last days of April, driving on the old Chalous road. It’s a climbing and winding road, which cuts through dizzying and steep passes over the abyss, through one hairpin bend after another, until it finally reaches the Kandivan tunnel. From there on, it plunges toward the sea, and the weather, all of a sudden, is surprisingly different: after the moonlike dryness of the heights, nature becomes more lush, even somewhat tropical. I have fond memories of this old road—when I was a child, I used to be dazzled by its proud summits; I would marvel at its awe-inspiring mountains appearing and disappearing in the SNOW and fog. All these images are so powerfully engraved in my mind that they form, as it were, like some intensely present vision, the topography of my soul. Once we arrived at Afsaneh’s villa, we went for a walk by the seaside. The sky was cloudy and dull; the wind was blowing in gusts. I did not recognize the welcoming sea of my childhood; in its place, this sea has grown not only filthy and polluted but chillingly aggressive. It has reclaimed a dozen feet of land, ripping and carrying away everything in its wake. And no matter where we looked, we saw nothing but disemboweled houses, scattered junk, rubble torn off buildings. The old world that I had known was deeply disturbed—like the country itself—by the wrath of nature and men. As if, here, nature and men had lent one another a hand in destroying the inherent order of things.
We stayed for three days, doing nothing except chatting and making fun of everyone under the sky. This peculiar attitude we have adopted—which consists in deflating oppressive forms of seriousness that too often tyrannize us and looking at things the other way around so as to expose how grotesque they are—has become over time one of our very own specialties. With calculated complicity, we make use of all the weapons of deception: satire, irony, humor. People are taken aback, because they cannot tell whether we are in fact serious or facetious. Afsaneh fell right into the game. At first she was unsure; then she adjusted to the situation and proved so skillful at the art of sizing everything down to the absurd that we both rejoiced.
Afsaneh, who lived in America for many years, has a hard time adapting to the conditions of this country; she’s at odds with its mores. So much seems wearisome and exhausting to her: donning the veil, coping with schizophrenic behavior, the double talk. In spite of her sense of humor and her scoffing at the political situation, she remains deeply honest and forward, and very American in her naiveté, in the way she appraises people. She wants to go back to the United States for a while, and she insists that I travel with her, if only for a short period. The idea of leaving Iran is thrilling, I must confess, because I’ve been immensely bored here for quite some time. But America is far away and I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to undertake such a long trip, and above all, to throw myself once again into a world from which I feel so estranged. There was a time when the New Continent was a vigorous source of inspiration; I would draw from its arsenal of novelties, I would learn myriad enticing details, I would take, in a sense, the pulse of the world. Yet tired as I am, the mere thought of anything new frightens me, especially as I ponder that all new phenomena carry within themselves the seed of their own decay. How can I explain this to Afsaneh, who brims with the illusory wealth of the world? There I am, dear friend: in quite a predicament. From now on, I will be careful about dates. Why do I suddenly go back to the fifties in my previous letter? Because at that time, I still longed for the future.
Love.