Hi Sohrab Jaan,

You asked me to write about our New Year or rather about the year that is coming to pass. You had also sent me pictures of Borna. In one, your newborn was in the hands of {Parvin Ardalan} and {Firuzeh Mohajer}. So, my New Year piece has to be in the shape of an epistolary, one addressed to you. We have often met at gatherings organized by those dear friends. Let their gentle hands bless the land for years to come!

It wasn’t such a good year, really. They didn’t let us advance our causes.

As I am writing this letter to you, Al Jazeera and BBC are reporting that an arrest warrant has been issued to {Omar al-Bashir}. My eyes became teary. Is it happiness or envy? It is the first time the International Criminal Court has sentenced an extant head of state. I remembered a friend from Oceania who is waiting for the trial of their Fuhrer. Poor thing has a friend whose father the then government of Oceania kidnapped, using another's car, and then strangled -- this was in 1984. He was confiding to me that for the past 10 years he has been seeing the owner of the owner of the car, whom he knew, in his dreams. He wrote a couple of days ago, saying that he had seen the owner in person. In these years he had promised himself that he would strangle his on sight. Well, he hadn’t been able to. He hadn’t the testosterone to do it. He didn’t know what had happened, he said, for he wasn’t feeling well in those days. It is possible that he had trusted someone and saw that trust vanish. He said that he had not only not been able to strangle him, but that he had actually passed out. He had instinctively turned his face away not to see him. Nor did he eventually find out why the car owner had narrowed his eyelids, slowly raising his hand to point my friend out, to show him to himself. He, my friend, had turned around to leave, but where to, he didn't know. His legs had given way and others had carried him to a chair. He said that they had asked him what had happened, but he had become just like the mute boy in that story. He had been unable to talk, poor thing, and had thought that he would never be able to talk again. Then, when someone had hugged him tight, and he had broken into sobs, as if to shed those memories violently, he had been able to say a few things.

I don't know why under such circumstances one either falls dead silent or cannot stop talking. The year that is coming to pass, dear Sohrab, was filled with hours in whose folds I can recall countless silent minutes. It is as such that I think there is an affinity between Ireneo Funes, the prodigy in Borges' short story, and myself. Of course, several months ago, I was spending a couple of days next to a fireplace in a house by the ocean and tried to remember every instant of the fire the night before. It hadn't happened, I couldn't. Still, I remembered those hours of silence well. Sometimes I even felt as if I could split the silent seconds in half and split those yet again. Each split prolonged the seconds further, it stretched them. Ms. Dalloway held parties to cover the silence (by the way, of the good things that happened last year one was this dear friend's -- for she is not only my mother -- finishing her translation of this novel). And, I am busy with showing my works in exhibitions and I am constantly creating works to escape being chocked by silence and ennui. Someone played Russian roulette to stave off boredom. I constantly make noises, fulminate my guts out to swallow my boredom, a noise that repeats:

"In the room the women come and go,
Talking of Michelangelo."

So, these are the noise I made last year:

I spoke at the colloquium of "Geopolitics and Religion: The Politics of Faith" [1] in Jeu de paume and also showed sketches of a work [2] that I had installed at ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) as part of "Medium Religion" [3] and is still on going. The same exhibit goes to Ireland in the next couple of months. [4] It took me a year to put this installation together. I also read a text couple of months ago at ZKM called "Hallowed Be Beems of Blue[lo1]". In Paris' Betonsalon [5] I had a performance. [6] The good thing about it was that I wasn't in the "performance" myself. People in the exhibition, blind or sighted, and the curators played the roles. They only spoke to each other, and that with handheld megaphones. There was no silence. It was also the first time that I enjoyed the final applause and started clapping for them myself. I also had an average exhibit in Paris. {Charles Saatchi} bought two of my pieces [7] right there, or, rather, his agents did it. There and then I saw how our destiny is tied to such seemingly innocuous events. For example, the curator of the Barbican program [8] asked me in an email if he could mention the Saatchi purchase in the program introduction. I asked him not to do it. He accepted, but when I went to London I saw that on top of the program brochure mention had been made, in fine letter, of Saatchi's acquisition. When I confronted the curator with it, he said that it was marketing, pure and simple. It still hurts, dear Sohrab. In Barbican I leveled my weary criticism of {Shirin Neshat} at her, this time directly. I think she took offense. [9]

There were several other exhibitions and a festival as well, but I have little to say about them. Some exhibitions, too, where canceled due to the worsening economic situation. By the way, the {Becket} book got published, without the censors fooling with it -- twelve plays and my "unwriting" introduction, which brought tears to my eyes in more ways than one. When I was writing "unwriting" I would periodically jump from sleep in the middle of night, thinking if it was possible that I had written a particular sentence. And you know, mice hollow out your entrails, for the old man is no longer around for me to read my stuff to him. Who did I write it for, then? Every time my year (our years) pass -- no, they don’t become new -- the anniversary of his death arrives, it hits me that he is still not around. Did you know that they broke his tombstone? I told myself, next time my dad dies, I will bury him at home, in the flowerpot. "Unwriting" is only forty-five pages long, but it took me three years to finish it. I started it when I was living in a far off place and had no access to reference or theoretical books. There was me, a wooden stove, and a roommate, who would either be offended or offend -- I made her suffer. So, I wrote the first draft almost entirely by myself, even citing quotations from memory. This year, I learned how to say goodbye to it, to wrap it up, to let it go, because I kept waking up in the middle of the night to add a sentence here and to scratch a sentence there. In fact, this year, I learned to say goodbye. Should we call it "farewell to knowledge"? Not to intimate that I was a sack full of knowledge before. I usually finish a work when the sight of it makes me vomit. I become so obsessive that I must give up or my madness will tear everything to pieces. I obsess so much that my presence frightens people around me, and I am left alone with my heavy presence. My latest work [10] -- for which I borrowed a Bacon painting for two months and incorporated it into my own work -- starts off with this sense of putrid existence. It starts where it should've ended and would you believe that the length of the video section alone was twenty-one thousand and some minutes! This is what I call devotion, to be consumed by something, love, perhaps. Near dawn, another sunset turns around to go east. I, too, mesmerized and somnambulistic, would run after it. I never learned to say goodbye, to go west to make the separation faster, easier. I never learned to let it go, when it was bound to. This year, I learned to let go, to let me go, let them go! So, let it go. I was standing on the sidewalk when a double-decker red bus rolled over my back. Instinctively, from the depth of my being, I let out a cry. Still, dear Sohrab, I ran after the bus. I waited an hour outside the National Gallery to see the Arnolfini Marriage. I am always early, for everything. So, this year, my dream of standing before that painting was realized. I looked at it for a few hours, then left, then came back to it, and then again, back and forth. I told you I am Fuenes. When must one say goodbye? When to let go? Didn't I tell myself, "You are living the life of a nomad, so be a nomad; learn from the ephemeral butterfly who lives only for a day. But my skills at letting go are not honed, except that this time, when someone went east, I went west, or at least I stayed where I was. This is farewell to knowledge, perhaps; it is not knowledge, but sleeping on a river of Lethe, the river of insurgence, which smells of anise. I want to forget that embers descended, that one can desire for fire or cinders. That I was thinking of a fox that tamed me -- I am talking about a literal fox -- that saw me and ran away. Do you see? I want to forget but I can't; I keep remembering. I have no knowledge and this time it is you how asked me to write. He who remembers everything must die. Borges killed Fuenes, saved him.

Forget everything. Go back to sleep, please.

Kisses,
Barbad

Footnotes