We angstsy moderns wear our and everyone else’s anxieties on our sleeves. Mine jolted me out of bed this morning with a venom worthy of a jilted lover: it is not that my books will never see the light of the published day, but that they will be the ones that you see on display in IKEA showrooms.

This is what I wrote during my 12 days in Tehran; it should have been posted then. Now, in the lobby of the Surabaya Marriott , a mere 7970 km away, it no longer seems familiar, as if a lie, a memory deadened by distance. As if memory’s judgement is susceptible to the diktat of physical distance. Yet it is.

It’s been six years since I first set foot in the ex-Intercontinental Tehran, now re-christened the Esteghlal Grand Hotel. Not one iota has changed, except maybe they drained the Olympic-sized swimming pool. I know this because the pool is dry, though quite impossibly drained on account of some inherent need for maintenance. Its bottom is chiselled and brownish thru neglect and irrelevance - women are not allowed to swim, so what would it look like for a dozen male hotel guests to strut around exhibiting themselves?

So nothing’s changed, except they drained the pool. And maybe also they changed the sheets in the interim. Twice. Oh, and they laid a new layer of concrete on the mattresses.

At some point in its life the Inter-Continental stood adjacent - and proudly - next to the Tehran Internationa Conference Centre. That point stands in the bygone pre-revolutionary age, around some historical corner beyond our direct line of recollection. That point stood in light of a different vision, one unshrouded by the qualms of piety. Then uncloaked, it must have stood at the centre of Tehran’s high life. Now it’s more of an unsightly sibling, much as how the decrepit East tower of the Esteghlal stands in relation to the charming and new old-world warmth of the West tower.

What a world of difference! Here in the Marriott lobby, I catch a glimpse of a 40-something sitting less than gracefully and offering an unwelcome glimpse up her skirt; here, in the Marriott lobby, food and drink are plentiful, whereas in Tehran infidels are also subject to fastinglaws. Here, stewardesses professional flight attendants of various hues parade their wares as if it mattered, when, in truth, their plain sameness - of dolled up faces, bunned hair, trolley hand-carrys - would not be out of place in a 1950s Fascist-American fashion parade.

further reading:

Three roads open up in trying to understand modern Iran. Answering Only to God by Geneive Abdo & Jonathan Lyons, The Iranian Labyrinth by Dillip Hiro and Formations of the Secularby Talal Asad.

Three of the four are as far from academia as two of the authors are close to Oprah on “The Oprah Show”. Does that worry me?

I’ve been to Paradise but I’ve never been to me (Charlene)

Is this the lyrics of a “so-bad-its-good” 80s disco song, or does it question the incongruence between the Good Life and self-reflection, the non-identity of the Divine and subject?

This extended stay in the modern capital of Persia is lacking an appropriate, nay, deserving, reading companion. I wish my tattered copy of The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire is beside me (somehow, prejudices have rallied and ruled against the online substitute). It must only be this ragged copy, of course: survivor of dozens of countries and skirmishes with careless porters, an unwieldy, belittling object that has out-lived two passports. Literary stature may have contributed to this durability, but the enduring charm surrounding Gibbon’s work can only be handed down, passed on - never merely “acquired” - and nutured, more by the touch of its previous guardian; for this, much is owed to Howard Caygill, who casually, free of fanfare and compunction, gifted this on my very first day at Goldsmiths College.

A less than startling observation follows. Animals penned in enclosed spaces often develop repetitive behaviour patterns: in scientific jargon, this is called “stereotypic route-tracing”, or more generally “stereotypic behavior”.

A leopard at the world famous Night Safari circles in a never-ending figure 8. While the symbolism of the “Eight” in Feng Sui-riven Singapore might signal some sort of excessive Lillian Too presence, we should not be distracted from the ominous truth: this affliction is most assuredly a supra-national, cross-cultural and trans-species phenomenon.

Cast your eyes on the dead-end, brain-dead occupation that is “building security” and the uniformed guards who stand aimlessly while attempting to look purposeful. They, always and everywhere, tend to develop the same motion, a backward/forward swinging of arms as their eyes glaze into the netherworld comfort signalled by the end of their shift.

Hmmm, pehaps the Only One Solution guys (with their “WHY WE MUST ANNIHILATE THE HUMAN RACE” manifesto) aren’t so crazy after all.

First steps: (24th October 2004)

It started innocently enough with a Sunday shopping sojourn; it started entirely aimlessly and proceeded to spiral out of control, ending only when the plastic cried out.

One of the assorted nothings was a sleek coffee machine. The logic was quite simple: why let the 21st century equivalent of McDonald’s ruin my coffee experience and make obscene amounts of money from people like me? Why debase a tradition that was started millienia ago and cultivated as an art form by monks intent on the utmost concentration during their evenings’ chants?

For if a brew can be divinely savoured, if a brew can elavate thus, and if the telos of aforementioned beans is to inspire the flow of enchanted praise, surely the brew deserves machination befitting it. Caffeine made better with Krups: a modest haul.

From then on, the litany of expensively assembled nothings grew. An automobile here, an outrageously priced pair of Hugo Boss shoes there, an Asus there, a Cerruti suit over here, etcetera. One’s very environment fell into disrepute, a sense of self only salvaged upon signing on the dotted line for an address and a mortgage.

The author came to ask: amidst all this reality, what of my virtual home, the website? Something was amiss: the site had hardened into a mish-mash of rubble held together by an undeserving domain. Change beckoned.

Of course, change can take place negatively; for example, the growing relevance of (and identification with, perhaps?) The Business Times is a worrying sign of impending adulthood and the discarding of pre-adult ways. Somehow or other, all through the years of reading the Thatcher tinged Financial Times, one had always been able to disassociate “the rational kernel within the mystical shell”. One would waltz by the “Markets & funds data”, creep pass the “Jobs & classifieds” section to lay seige on its weekend section.

Indeed, the “Arts & weekend” section continues to be a highlight, less for the Robin Lane Fox penned Gardening column but for the excellent review section. And so it was, on that very day when my consumer streak ran wild, when rational thought and nausea exchanged functions, when the end of meaningful writing drew closer, that these lasik-ed eyes chanced upon an article which showcased Latin America’s literary scene.

What forced itself on what little was left of this wretched soul’s ability to imagine and comprehend was the concept of the cr?nica - “a hybrid genre, on the verge between the journalistic and the confessional …” The English “chronicle” fails to capture the wilderness and free reign implicit in the untranslated.

So it was that I took the opportunity to reconceptualise this site towards its intended direction: “Have life, not blog!”

“Aussentemperatur: 21 degrees” … who gives a shit? … “Höhe: 3700 m” … still?!…”Vitesse au sul: 100 km”… deep breaths, …”Durèe de vol: 11 mins”…has it only been 2 minutes?!…”Localzeit: 00:38″…hurry! fly faster, Mr. Pilot…”Time to destination: 10 mins”. The bright spark who introduced those information screens in front of each cabin has a lot answer for. I’m sure it’s a medieval contraption specifically designed to torture smokers, such is our addiction. So I end up playing silly, mildly amusing games “to distract myself” (granted, it’s a Kantian impossiblity). My brother is rarely against jest. His girlfriend is frequently irritating others; never appreciative! According to some evil people (I know who you are), I am terrified of mom, although deep down, I am a totally orgasmic, man. Yah!

The trouble with each “new” year is the enforced starting over. Twelve months into its maturation, and just as a certain fondness forms out of familiarity (but just before familiarity breeds contempt), the “reset” button is pressed. Therein lies the crux: objective time is demarcated rationally while subjective time - the time of Augustine - proceeds on an entirely different rhythm. This is precisely why we find displaced narratives, the rupturing of linear time - “Memento”, “Irreversible”, “Boomtown” - concurrently disconcerting and compelling.

Reading is terminally difficult; only the inanimate can withstand changes in the meaning-constructing subject. The good ones always come unexpectedly from odd places. Out of a deceptively simple book about Hegel and language emerges one of the better expositions of speculative philosophy - Hegel’s Speculative Good Friday: The Death of God in philosophical perspective. Deland Anderson, take a bow.

6 January:

Apparently Catholics simply don’t have enough fun, and in a fundamental sense, this can only be true. We are in need of saving of course, and stand a better chance of stepping out of a lifetime’s worth of lifelessness if we could but sample the other side - if not in its entirety, then little morsels such as Jancis Robinson’s Tasting Pleasure to nibble away at. There is much to say about the art of gift-giving: this one earths me.

I’ve given up smoking so many times it’s so easy now. The latest justification for continuing this slow suicide was thus: Not smoking does not make me a better person. Anyway, this is my last attempt to buy myself a few more days/weeks/months/years.

While on the subject of clocks and time, the dreaded tick-tock tick-tock of some women’s biological clocks seem to be accelerating as we edge close to “2003″: how else to explain the sudden, unwarranted attentions of rotten Halves?

“What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” - Othello, Act ii, Sc.3

Seek ye solace? Be gone with ye!

An encounter with Odette, a nice girlie en route from South Africa to happiness; an exchange over coffee seems a trifle affair in this context, but not when the outcome is a renewed appreciation of some choice reading matter.