the human virtuality…

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

structure of the human eye and retina © http://www.sas.upenn.edu

structure of retinal cone and rod © http://www.sas.upenn.edu

The greatest danger facing the human race seems to me to be how our collective ‘idea’ of what the world is is progressively moving away from what the world actually is.

Without wanting to open up the whole can of worms that is the ‘mind-body problem‘, I think it is not too contentious to state: that the impression we have within each of us of the ‘world’ is only an approximation of that world. After all, beings perceive the world through their senses and it is from these perceptions that a model of the world is constructed within that being, a model that it uses to ‘understand’ the world in an attempt to survive. That model – even at its most sophisticated – is not ‘identical’ with the world, and is merely an approximation.

Further, the sensory inputs from which that model is constructed are themselves approximations of what is being perceived. Let us use an ‘eye’ as an example. An eye allows light to enter it. This light will be detected within the eye and send a signal to whatever sort of ‘brain’ it is attached to. Detection is by means of a finite number of discrete detectors, and so the brain will be presented with a ‘grid’ of frequency values. This grid is naturally ‘flat’ – so what is being looked at is projected onto it like a film on to a screen. Any depth present in what is being looked at thus has to be deduced. Having more than one eye will provide the brain visual information from different angles. Movement will produce a succession of images that can provide even more information. But none of this is going to actually provide a direct perception of what is being seen. Some kind of ‘software’ is required to deduce volume, to isolate objects in the field of view. We know that this system can be fooled – consider optical illusions, or the experiment of the ‘invisible gorilla’.

All in all, it seems to me obvious that what each being ‘sees’ is something that stands at the very apex of a pyramid of guesses and half truths, and if two people observing the same scene are seeing different things (because of the different angles they are seeing it from, and their different life experiences that affect ‘what they see’, etc), how much more is the difference between what a human sees as compared to a pigeon, say, who has 5 colour cones in its retinas to our 3 – with each of those 5 being considerably more discerning of frequencies than are our own. And who knows what kind of ‘software’ is operating in the pigeon’s brain. I feel it is safe to say that, whatever it is that it is seeing, this will be considerably different from what a human observing the same scene is seeing. If we then continue our process of aggregation to take in the other senses that a being might possess, then it becomes blindingly obvious that there are as many perceptual views of the world as there are beings – with a wildly varying variety among them.

So our direct perception of the world is unique, but there is more to our awareness of underlying reality; for do we not produce further levels of aggregation collectively? Surely we influence each other’s perceptions, as does our culture, our upbringing, what we read, what we watch on TV etc. If an average person from the West wanders about in the Amazon rainforest, she will see ‘trees’ and creepy crawlies, whereas a native to the area will, presumably, see this kind of tree and that kind of insect, and will, further, have cultural associations with that tree and that insect – stories, understanding of possible uses. (Before I had a garden, I would walk into one and notice that it was colourful, and see the flowers and the foliage forming a ‘pretty picture’ – now I see the individual plants, and notice details I never noticed before, and I’m aware of what is on an ‘upswing’, what on a ‘downswing’. Friends who don’t have gardens, or little interest in them, look at my garden and they simply don’t ‘see’ it – they are ‘blind to it’ in the way I used to be. A little bit of knowledge and some experience have entirely changed what it is I ‘see’.)

So, let me suggest that people getting lost in ‘virtual worlds’ (our current anxiety is those virtual worlds produced by computers and by our technology) is nothing new. Human beings, like all other beings, have always lived in a ‘virtual world’, one that they have created within themselves as the best attempt they can make towards achieving a direct awareness of underlying reality. It is how close those virtualities are to the underlying reality that is always in play. When we began abandoning our old hunter-gathering lifestyle, we set in motion a new process. Life within a human settlement is substantially different from a life outwith it. In a human settlement, for example, geometry begins to dominate – the simple geometry of straight lines, corners and circles – a geometry that is a product of our brains’ desire to simplify the ungraspable fractal complexities of the world. As settlements began increasing in complexity, undulations in the ground were flattened out, slopes were turned into steps, water began running in channels, or off roofs and into gutters. Even in ancient times, it was becoming possible in some places to live one’s life entirely within this human-made space. This process has accelerated for thousands of years so that, gradually we have spent more and more time in environments that are externalizations of the software that evolved to make sense of our perceptions of the world. For many of us this feedback loop has grown tighter and tighter. Always having lived in a virtual reality of our own individual making, we have slowly replaced the inputs from those parts of the underlying reality that were not human-made, with those that are. And since all things human-made are an externalisation of our interior virtualities, we are now increasingly in danger of living within a locked system entirely of our own making: we live not in the world at all, but within a collective ‘human virtuality’.

So, all beings are peering at reality through their own version of a keyhole, however, we humans seem to be intent on blocking up these keyholes. Of course, the reason that beings developed senses at all was because everything that determined their chances of survival was outside them. That need has not changed, but we humans have become so intoxicated with our own power that, showing ultimate hubris, our senses focus increasingly on the human virtuality. But, critically, that collective hallucination is increasingly diverging from reality, and so we motor on into the future driving ever more blindly…

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domestic katas, time and freedom…

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

(unsurprisingly) a snail…

Eastern martial arts – and other ‘physical motion disciplines’, Kabuki for example – are taught through forms, or katas. These are ways to train the subconscious so that it assimilates a particular linked pattern of motion – a pattern that is a distillation of a ‘system’. If we consider T’ai Chi, a martial art I studied for years, there are a fixed number of these katas that appear to be a complex dance, performed solo and in slow motion. At first the practitioner cannot even ‘see’ the kata, however many times it is performed in front of him. Asked to simply copy the poses and movements, a beginner is often convinced he is making a reasonable approximation, but, to the eye of the more practiced, the beginner’s attempts are bizarrely contorted. With long practice, the kata comes closer and closer to that of the master’s and, by this means, the system that the kata codes becomes part of the practitioners subconscious. Theoretically, the practitioner should be able to now fight in the ‘style’ of the system that devised the kata.

But we do not need to study a martial art to learn any number of similar forms, or katas. A human being will not only learn, but invent all manner of katas as he goes about his normal life. When we move into a new house, we are like the T’ai Chi beginner. We see the rooms, the placement of doors, of windows, of electrical sockets; we will quickly work out how to go to the bathroom, the bedroom, how to cook in the kitchen. We decide into which cupboard to put our plates, into which to put our cups and mugs. We decide where to store our food, where to put our clothes. As we settle into our new place, we begin to create and learn the katas for ‘operating’ it. Earlier I said we ‘see’ this new home, but I meant ‘see’ in the way the T’ai Chi beginner sees his master performing a kata – imperfectly. Of course, that first arrangement of our belongings in the new house, is only a first attempt, and, over time, we will move things about until it feels right (each of us refining this to a degree that suits our temperament). However, it is the patterns of movement that interest me here: the way that we carry out the daily tasks of living in a house. Each such task – be it washing ourselves, eating, cooking, entertaining, reading a book – is a form, or kata, that we constantly refine. Our bodies learn how many steps it takes to cross from one door to another; where to place our feet so that we can reach a switch without stretching; a switch whose position we come to know so well that our hand can find it easily in the dark. Our body counts the steps of a staircase, so that we can climb them or descend them without noticing we are doing so. We learn how to lounge on a sofa so that the light perfectly catches the page of the book we are reading. Eventually, our body gets the ‘measure of the place’ until we can perform any task without a single conscious thought intervening. No wonder it comes to feel so comfortable; now wonder that we call it home: within it, we are as perfectly attuned to it as snail to its shell.

Being a tad OCD, I have developed a kata for drying myself after my morning shower. My finger finds the hem of my towel and thus determines which is the front, which the back. Roughly speaking, I dry the upper half of my body with the front, the bottom half with the back. (Am I the only one who, on some level, sees himself as a satyr? *grin*) It’s a complex dance and I can’t really describe to you how I manipulate that towel, but my body does it in such a way that every part of me is dried only once, and that by a dry area of the towel. I say that ‘my body does this’, because I sometimes perform an exercise during which I remove my conscious mind entirely from the operation. It is strange to ‘observe’ my body going through this complex kata without ‘me’ having to be involved at all.

The reason I have let you in on this less than glamorous business is, at least on one level, to encourage you to try something of the same (perhaps you already do this all the time…). This is a way of demonstrating the distinct separation between the conscious and subconscious mind. It is also a way of demonstrating what so many scientific studies have shown: that, for many aspects of our lives, our conscious mind is merely a rider on the shadowy horse of our subconscious – a horse that only pretends to be guided by the reins our ego holds in its grip.

Thus, when at home, or in any other familiar place or activity, our mind is free to wander – our conscious mind, that is – our subconscious is always free – at least in the way a fox is. This is a freedom that increases as we grow from children – so that they, still being beginners in their katas, have to bend their minds to it far more than adults do. I believe this explains why time appears to move more slowly for children, than it does for adults. When we as adults are displaced to a strange location – a foreign holiday, for example – unfamiliarity causes us to revert to a more childlike state, and thus a week on holiday appears to last far longer, than one at home.

So, I would suggest that these katas are at the very root of being human, and are the means by which we are capable of the near miraculous acts of learning that allow us to master everything from driving cars to producing flowing calligraphy. Katas empower us and free us to live our lives with grace and ease. However, by freeing our conscious mind, our ego, from attending to the day-to-day, we are made prey to its endless judging, anxiety and confusion. Worse, it is this ‘freedom’ that enables most of us, most of the time, to not be ‘present’. We are often trapped in a past that no longer exists, or lost in a future that is nothing more than a mirage. We lose our connection with the pulse of life. Perhaps most dangerous of all, it allows us to disconnect from reality, and to live in, and help to create, the human virtuality, that is the make-believe world that most of us believe to actually be the world…

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vitruvian lobster…

Monday, November 19th, 2012

vitruvian lobster ©http://www.lobstart.com

Thank you Darwin for liberating us from the absurd notion that Man is God’s ultimate and most beautiful creation. When this notion was generally believed – at least in the West with its obsession with Ancient Greece’s perfect white marble nudes (that we now know were painted as gaudily as the carvings that smother Hindu temples) – did no one actually bother to look at other living things? Did no one see butterflies, birds, mammals, fish, cephalopods, jellyfish, the exquisite miniatures that are insects and the myriad other beasts with which we share our planet? In what did our purported supreme beauty consist? Surely it was not colour, nor pattern, nor iridescent plumage. Other species challenge us for beauty of eye, of limb, of skin. Or is it in another Ancient Greek conceit that our divinity lies: the supposed sublime beauty of Man in motion? At least Usain Bolt is doing something we were ‘designed’ to do – but are we also going to claim this triumph for Man in water; as if we somehow outdo the fish, the dolphins, with our splashing.

This attitude that Man is the very centre and the purpose, the crowning glory of Creation can surely only be held by people who live in fear and terror of their own insignificance. I have no doubt that early Man, close as he was – necessarily close – to Nature, did not dare these absurdities. For him animals were his brothers, sometimes even his gods. But then we started to move away from Nature, to get ‘above ourselves’… and, scaling the pinnacle of Creation, we attempted to enthrone ourselves upon its utmost summit. And from there, with imperious gaze, we fancied ourselves the Rulers of Creation, and who can doubt that we still do?

This mania started in fear, and with the thrusting out of our chests to impress each other, but it ends altogether more messily. We put this lie in the mouth of our gods. We use it to justify the way we wish to treat other living creatures as things, as resources. We insist on making Man the measure of Creation. Darwin confronted us with the truth, and it was devastating, and can we doubt the part that trauma played in the darker dramas of the 20th Century?

Still, if you ask anyone who has heard of Darwin, what it is his theory proves about us? many people will point to processions of apes and early humans slowly straightening, eventually becoming the paragon that is Man. We still persist in imagining some gulf between us and other animals. This belief, this thing we seem to need to believe, has become ingrained. No amount of evidence is going to change our minds. Why should it? Even before Darwin we surely saw that we bore the same basic shape as many other animals. We must have noticed how when we copulated it was not some grand act elevated beyond what we saw other animals doing. We must have noticed that this most perfect of God’s creation still needed to go to the toilet… and that if such wasn’t present, we squat to defecate as so many other animals do. No, I don’t believe that Victorians were really shocked to find out that they were descended from apes – I think it was just that it threatened to force them to admit what they must have already suspected, and that whatever trauma we suffered was merely our hysteria at no longer being able to peddle the delusion of our near-angelic status…

Why does this matter? Well, it certainly matters to the creatures who we harm all the time, often deliberately. It matters in that it allows us to decide that increasing the size of our economy is more important than preserving this species or that; each every bit as valuable a leaf on the tree of life as are we. And ultimately it matters – let’s get back to business as usual – because our need to believe that we are ‘special’ makes us blind to the reality that underpins our existence, and we are approaching a time when that reality is threatening to do to us what we have done to so many other species…

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into 2012…

Monday, January 23rd, 2012
walking on the beach new year 2012

walking on the beach new year's day 2012 © David Litteljohn

I came back from my adventure in Iran becalmed; no wind in my sails. It was foolish to expect to find those things I sought there; as if travelling were like going to a supermarket. Iran was a profound experience that I am still processing…

Soon after I returned, my dog, Ninja, died; at 15, a frail old lady by the end. Her kidneys failed. I cradled her in my arms as the vet injected her with an overdose.

Christmas came. I grumble every year and tell anyone who wants to listen (or who doesn’t) that I hate it. I abhor the way capitalism goes rampant. But this is only a layer thrown over the faded one the Christians, in turn, used to cover up the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Beneath all the layers, there lies the hope and expectation, in the depth of winter, of the sun’s rebirth; the hope there is in the year beginning to swing back towards the light, towards the resurgence of Nature. This is a deep yearning, particularly in the North of the world. At this time I am forced out of my hermitic existence into the company of people, into the embrace and drama of family. Perhaps there too I (we) seek a rebirth.

A rat dug its way into my house and took up residence in its walls and ceiling. The beast never actually got into my house proper – into those parts I live in. Well, my sister claims she saw it towards the end of its ‘visit’ scurrying across the floor, but I wonder if that might not have been a mouse. We often have mice, but a rat seems altogether more threatening. Is it the folk memory of the Black Death that makes us so afraid of them? Apparently they carry disease, though I wonder if this is true of a country rat. Out here what is it that makes a rat, among so many other wild creatures, particularly odious? Even in the city, I would think that any disease a rat brings into our houses comes from the filth that we spread around us; perhaps we hate rats because they remind us too much of ourselves.

In spite of my, no doubt, sentimental love of the country and its beasts, I tried to kill him. But he outwitted me. Several times I found the trap snapped closed, with the tahini bait (I had run out of peanut butter) stolen. A couple of times I found a poor field mouse mangled in the jaws of the trap. When I tried to block his entry tunnel with rocks, he dug under them and, as if to mock me, took to racing about in my ceiling. Eventually I closed his tunnel with chicken wire. I think he’s gone now. By the end of his visit, I had become quite used to him. In spite of my ancestral fears, I wonder why I should resent some creature seeking shelter within the no-man’s land of the hollows in my house?

A gale blew a tree down over the power cable to my house. For three days we had no electricity. The thin skin of the human virtuality tore. The cold of winter seeped into my home. We scurried about trying to get things done before the sun went down – for, afterwards, though we had candles, trying to find anything, or do anything, was far more difficult. There was also silence. A profound and absolute silence. The rarest, strangest phenomenon: the one thing that cannot exist in the human virtuality is silence.

In the end, desperate to reconnect to that virtuality, I dug out the generator the previous owner had left, and that I had not laid eyes on in the four years I have lived here. Miraculously (seemingly so, for one used to electricity appearing ‘magically’ from the sockets in my walls), pouring gasoline into it, we could run the central heating, have showers, even power the TV for an evening. Very strange this business of converting gasoline directly into TV programmes. Also strange was discovering how much energy each system consumes: boiling a kettle caused the roar of the 4.8KW generator to rise to a screech.

So, with the skin of ‘civilisation’ torn back to reveal the cold, unforgiving and relentless reality beneath, I was left casting nervous glances towards the finite amount of gasoline I had disappearing, anxious it might run out before I had finished watching my programme.

So many of us now live entirely cocooned in the human virtuality, that it is almost impossible to see the underlying reality upon which we build our lives. Living in a house in the middle of nowhere, I would seem in a better position than many to glimpse that reality, yet it takes a storm for me to ‘really’ experience it – and what was my reaction? – a determined bid to reconnect, to force my way back into the cocoon…

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perspectives…

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

me at Persepolis...

Persepolis terrace as seen from the tomb of Artaxerxes II...

vast spaces...


desiccated landscapes...

and more vast spaces...

industrial land use west of Tehran...

Bisotun...

leaving Kermanshah near sunset...

palm trees near Shush...

the very keen soldier whose name I can't remember...

one of the guys who claimed he was an Arab...

Choqa Zambil ziggurat...

I thought the arch was invented by the Romans!?...

gas flares near Ahvaz...

the Persian Gates...

breakfast with Karim and his mother...

the tomb of Hafiz...

Peyman and I, and old man Shapur having a Crystal Tips hair moment...

hooch and pomegranates...

Cyrus' tomb...

royal tombs at dusk...

clouds gather over Persepolis...

The bulk of this was written the day before yesterday, but I was unable to post it then. I have also added an extra paragraph just now, from my hotel in Yazd that happens to have wi-fi…

I have just returned from five hours at Persepolis. This ruined palace is probably the single most important reason I came to Iran. But now I have that feeling of exhaustion that I comes upon me (I’m pretty certain this is a common experience) whenever I spend a long time in a museum or gallery. No doubt it is my brain’s natural reaction against being stuffed like a haggis.

It’s probably too soon for me to be able to express anything very sensible about the experience – I have been dreaming about Persepolis since I was a child and what I have just done is to attempt to replace the complex mental ‘fantasy’ I have of the place with the visceral reality of having actually been there. To some extent this was a brutal process.

My core reason for coming to Iran was to recalibrate my conceptions of the place by access to direct experience. This is not without its perils – or perhaps, less dramatically, it is difficult. (Can I just state that, in the following, when I use “I” I really mean “we” – because I am confident that what I am describing here is a common experience – indeed, if it were not, I wouldn’t wish to be inflicting on you what would then seem to be merely ‘a tour of the mental processes of a madman’ *grin*) An effect of all this travelling is, for example, to ‘stretch space’. By this I mean that any book-derived knowledge of a place will reside within my mind in a peculiarly ‘compressed’ form. This form is not devoid of measurements nor awarenesses of scale, but this is true only in a peculiar mental sense, as if the thing is being seen through a prism. The book I am intending to write set in ancient Iran, has an almost complete ‘life’ of this kind already in my mind. I could have written the book entirely without coming to Iran, but then it could never hope to escape the prison of the prism and it would be a less ‘real’ thing than I would like it to be.

Seeking this link to ‘reality’ is necessarily a delicate business. First there is that ‘stretching of space’ malarkey that I have already mentioned. As I travel about, places, that were merely points on a map, pull apart and the true vastness of this land becomes apparent. As the landscapes stretch, there is a tendency for the characters I intend to people them with to shrink. I am reminded of how a Chinese painter, when first shown by an European the supposed aesthetic advance represented by perspective, is claimed to have said: that’s a nice trick, but is it art? Apocryphal or not, this seems to me to demonstrate the truth that we want our stories to have people firmly in the foreground and as large if not larger than life.

A second potential problem is that the Iran that ‘is’ exists raucously in the bustling modern life of its people and is constantly in my face (and very often up my nose in the guise of exhaust fumes). Though of course this constitutes the truest joy of being here, the Iran that I seek for literary purposes is the faintest impression on a page that has been constantly overwritten for more than 2000 years. A ruin, when you walk among its tumbled stones, actually works more against a reimagining of the building it was than if there were nothing there at all (assuming you have some description of it from some other source from which to imagine it into existence). I certainly find that the reality of what my senses are perceiving tends to overwhelm any imaginings I may have had – at least temporarily. Additionally, the land here has either suffered the general ecological degradation that all lands seem to suffer from long human occupation, as well, perhaps, some climate change on top (my impressions from what I’ve seen suggest that the dramatic drying of the landscape has been caused by deforestation). There is also the polution that I’ve already talked about that daily hazes out that famous ancient clear light.

So you can imagine my delight when I chartered a taxi to set off to see Darius’ inscription high on a cliff at Bisotun and found not the clutter of modern urbanity I expected to find, but a cliff rising craggily to the bluest sky and, at its foot, where anciently there had been a ‘paradise’ (a walled hunting park and garden), stood a shady gathering of trees through which streams ran glinting from a waterfall that tumbled from a pool. In truth this is all artificial, but no more so than had been Darius’ paradise, and no less delightful for that. I lingered there for hours and climbed the slope of the mountain so that I could gaze down upon the plain. Here at least it was easy to imagine Darius and his court on the migration from Babylon (not far from Bagdad), fleeing the coming of the brutal Iraqi summer, and marching along the road that led to the cool, breezy palace at Hamadan.

Later, to my great frustration, I could find no bus to take me, from Kermanshah down to Khouzistan, that didn’t travel at night. I thus made the descent from the Zagros mountains in darkness. It was after midnight when I decided to take the risk of bailing out at Andimeshk – rather than continuing on for another two hours to Ahvaz. I was the only person getting off there and, finding a taxi, I got in. There were two other guys in the car, and as they chatted to each other and the driver, and he made some strange changes of direction, I grew a tad concerned that this was some kind of setup – and so was much relieved when we stopped outside the hotel I had asked for. Paranoia, of course, and probably due to extreme tiredness. A cause for concern here is that, because of the sanctions imposed on Iran, their banks have no contact with ours. Consequently, all the money any traveller here has access to, he has to carry with him. But, as I have said – it was just paranoia – I have never actually had cause to feel in any way in danger.

The change in temperature from Kermanshah to Khouzistan was dramatic. When I woke the next morning, in my cheap and not so cheerful hotel room, I looked out and saw date palms rising from among the dusty, flat roofed houses. The fears of the previous night forgotten, I went out seeking breakfast – this was the first hotel I had come across that didn’t serve any. I found a tiny little place where the owner gave me tea and a hunk of baguette stuffed with falafels and salad. He was very welcoming and refused to take any payment. I found a minibus to take me to Shush – ancient Susa, and the second of the three Achaemenid capitals (the other being at Hamadan, where, alas, there was very little to see) I came to look at.

My experience of ancient Susa – where the remains are scanty, though enough for us to have a clear idea of the layout of the palace there, and its relationship to the ancient city – was somewhat ‘enlivened’ by a number of factors. The first was that, like a mad dog, I had decided to carry out my investigation of the ruins under the noonday sun – admittedly, I was on a schedule – but I hadn’t even had the sense to wear a long-sleeved shirt, nor to put on any sun cream – nor even to bring the umbrella that I had bought in Kermanshah (after having been royally soaked for two days on the trot, only for the clouds to part, so that I’ve not used it in anger, except to wander around another ruined city looking, no doubt, like some retired vicar out of some Merchant Ivory film). The next factor was the ever-so-keen young soldier who seemed intent on bounding around me wishing conversation. Eventually I had to send him away – as nicely as I could with the language difficulties (you try telling someone to buzz off, politely, when you barely have two words in common). Finally, there were some other tourists who decided to involve me in their moral crusade against the felonious attempts (over millenia, it should be understood) by the Persians to wrest Khouzistan from their rightful owners the Arabs – they claimed to be Arabs though they lived in Ahvaz and so were presumably Iranian citizens. They explained to me that ancient Susa had not, of course, been built by Darius, but by some Arab – who they were unable to name. I tried to disavow them of this nonsense to no avail. In truth, I often find myself being regarded with indulgent contempt as I try to explain, for example, that such and such an ancient monument has nothing whatever to do with Solomon’s mum.

The most important results for me in visiting Khouzistan (not withstanding later hiring a driver to take me to see the bizarrely modern looking remains of a ziggurat at Choqa Zambil, built from mudbricks – unfired, I think – still rising to a good height, and being more than 3000 years old) were the stretching of what used to be the land of ancient Elam, from something like a county in my mind, to a vast flat expanse. Also salient for me is Susa’s position beside one of its rivers and gazing down on this immense plain. Though temperatures here in summer can reach a deadly 60 degrees celsius, it was green – but not as green as when it was Elam and, apparently, marshy and with a plethora of exotic wildlife – including, and this may be a mental aberration on my part, elephants?! It looks considerably more like borderline desert today – as does neighbouring Iraq, of which Khouzistan would seem to form a natural extension, though the two regions have always been culturally distinct.

Anyway, my driver, another Majid, a cheerful soul given to singing traditional songs loudly, drove me away from the ziggurat and towards Ahvaz, an industrial city on whose approach many gas flares can be seen burning smokily – for this is one of the main sources of Iranian petroleum – and perhaps one of the reasons that my Arab friends earlier wanted to claim this province for themselves.

Ahvaz was surprisingly delightful. For one thing it was very warm, for another it had, from my arrival and well into the night, a carnival atmosphere. I suspect this vibrant nightlife is a consequence of, in the vicious heat of summer – where, famously, an ancient Greek, claimed that a lizard running across a road would be cooked in the process –  having to hide indoors during much of the day. My understanding is that traditional Khouzistani livingrooms were built underground. Of course, today, every window has an air conditioning carbuncle clinging to it.

Issuing forth from my hotel, I went to change some money and buy some fruit and nuts for a light evening mea, as well as taking in the bustling sights, when, alas, I lost my flat cap :O( – and, consequently, I have now had to resort to an even sillierhat *sigh*

Determined not to miss out on the crucial experience of making the ascent from ancient Elam back to the Iranian plateau in daylight – and having to organize the trip in a hurry the evening I arrived in Ahvaz – I decided to make the journey – of something like 600 kilometres – by taxi… As we motored along I began to get anxious about the princely sum of 90 pounds sterling it was costing me – by far the most I’ve spent on anything here. Perhaps this was a foolish extravagance, but it was somewhat rewarded by the glorious beauty of the wide golden valleys of Persia that are walled in by gorgeous amethystine mountain ranges. Slopes bristle with oaks. The road winds up precipices in hairpin bends. At one place it squeezes through a narrow cleft between two mountain walls; a place anciently called the Persian Gates and that was stoutly defended by a body of Persian soldiers against the ultimately successful attempts to break through by Alexander the Great.

Guiding us into Shiraz was Karim, the same who I met on the Trans-Asia Express and who had told me that, when I came to his city, that I should phone him. I have stayed with him now for a number of days. He has taken it upon himself to be my guide and, being native to Shiraz, he knows where the best of everything is. He lives in a lovely house with his mother in the north of the city, somewhat up into the foothills of the surrounding mountains and away from the car fumes and din. The first morning there I woke and came out onto a terrace and could see, over the loquat (nespera) and orange trees in his small garden, to the mountain walls rising nearby and the flawless blue sky.

We went down to the old heart of Shiraz to wander in the bazaars where Karim has many friends, and to walk in gardens and visit the tomb of Hafiz. In the evenings Karim has told me of his amazing life: travelling to and working in dozens of countries; arriving in Istanbul at the age of 17 without a penny. He has made his way since then, in spite of all the disadvantages of coming from a poor country. Thus is explained his facility with languages and his German citizenship. Karim turned out to be possessed of considerable wisdom and had many penetrating things to say about the world in general. What he told me about the poverty he had seen and experienced both in Iran and Europe I found challenging – casting me as it does as one of the ‘rich’ – an uncomfortable position, implying not only responsibility, but complicity in the world order that allows this poverty to be a decay at the heart of our societies.

He taught me much besides about his country. For example, he is a keen walker and camper and, pointing to a map of Iran, he poured out a mass of information about the country, its landscapes and its climate. It is quite remarkable that if you go east from here Shiraz some 100km you end up in a torid salt desert in which it sometimes snows. If you go south even less distance the plateau drops to the Persian Gulf along whose coast the temperatures, even now, are in the high 50s. West, you climb into the Zagros, with an alpine climate, and a dizzying profusion of flowers in spring, and soon it will be below metres of snow. This is a land of wide, flat bottomed valleys nestling among a complex system of mountain ridges. Each valley is a separate world, with its own climate. Some are dry some wet, and in some there lie the ruins of ancient cities.

We mounted an expedition to one of these, Bishapur, the capital of Shapur I, a king of the Sassanian dynasty that was one of the successors to the Achaemenids. A king, incidentally, who several times humbled Rome, even going as far as capturing the Roman emperor Valerian whom he is reputed to have used as a living stool for mounting his horse. Such the vainglory of kings – for only rather unstable looking ruins remains of his once great city.

Weary of the ruins, Karim, Peyman (our driver) and I decided we would go and find the colossal statue of Shapur (you may be getting an ever clearer impression of the man) in some cave up in the wall of a gorge that was once the entrance to the valley in which lies Bishapur. We rattled the car up through a village that sprawled up the hem of the mountain wall and soon were forced to get out and walk. We none of us realized it was going to be such an arduous climb: 800m up a steep boulder and scree strewn slope and eventually over humps of the mountain itself. But when we arrived, the old king did not disappoint us, nor the view from his eyrie. Though it must be said: who would be crazy enough to put a 7m high statue of himself concealed in a cave half a mile up a cliff…?

On the way down we ran into some guys feasting on pomegranates and drinking some rather potent homemade hooch. When they invited us to join them, it seemed to me impolite not to do so. I told them that the brew reminded me of sake, which it did. They wanted to know where I came from and I ended up playing them some Breabach, bagpipes and all.

Yesterday, the same adventurers, with the addition of Saraf, Peyman’s girlfriend, set off on another expedition, this time north to Pasagard – where, as far as we understand, Cyrus is buried in his mausoleum, beside the palaces he built within its garden. This was a  key experience for me because Pasagard seems to me to be what needs to be understood if you’re going to hope to grasp the ancient Persians and what it that allowed them to bring so much of the ancient world under their rule. Pasagard is filled with mysteries. We’re not really certain about what any of the buildings there are for. I meditated for a while before the enigmatic ‘genius’ (spirit, angel, what you will) that may or may not depict Cyrus and that feels to me a puzzle that I need to solve for my book – at least psychologically.

We rounded off the day by going to visit the massive tombs of Darius and some of his successors that were gouged into a cliff near Persepolis. We stood gazing up in a violet dusk as swallows swooped in an out of Xerxes’ tomb, now as empty as the others. As the sun was setting, we drove to Persepolis where I was left off at a hotel there while the others returned to Shiraz. Tomorrow I am heading for the great salt desert and Yazd…

Karim came to meet me at the cybercafe carrying my umbrella. As I had been driven back from Persepolis I had noticed leaden clouds gathering. We rushed to catch a bus as it began to bucket down. I imagined that everyone else shared my feelings of irritation and getting wet, and at how slippery everything was. Karim told me that I was getting it all wrong, everyone was joyous at the rain. He claimed that there have only been three days of rain in Shiraz in the past ten years. This was confirmed by a student who, in typical fashion, had struck up a conversation with me in English. I realised that this had been said to me many times, but I hadn’t really taken it on board. When I had shown them photos of Scotland the oohs and ahs at how beautiful it was – how green everything is. They see our plentiful rain as a blessing. As lightning lit up the room and thunder shook the house, I wondered at how cussed we humans are, always wanting what the other has and so rarely appreciating what we already have…

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