Notes

I have set aside this damp attic room to fill it with scattered fragments—fragments laden with the fading memories of the strange era I have left behind. Here lies a repository of the writings of a man who had been writing for years before he ever took up a brush and transformed the canvas of his life. It would not be far from the truth to say that the countless pages he has written far exceed the visual works for which he is known by most. Writing, for me, is precisely as Franz Kafka once whispered into my ear: an act of splitting apart the frozen ocean that surrounds and separates me from the world around me. My instrument is the pen I hold in my hand. And what has always mattered to me is that there is no clearly defined or discernible boundary between the pen and my imprisoned existence. It is impossible to say with certainty whether it is I who create, entirely of my own accord, or whether it is the pen that compels me toward a form of creation that is multifaceted, questioning, filled with sincerity, and driven by hope. What is certain is this: I was born to witness the gradual collapse of myself and of the world around me. To witness decline, and ultimately the emergence of new orders—such as the Post-human orders of the present, with which we are all struggling in these days. I was born to become, much like Hedayat's The Blind Owl, the storyteller of a world filled with shifting and unstable shadows.