More recently, to take another example, it could not have been an accident that the scenes of protestors carrying green banners through the streets in the weeks following Iran’s contested presidential elections in 2009 bore such a striking resemblance to the scene near the beginning of the Shahnameh in which the blacksmith Kaveh marches through the streets carrying a banner and calling the Persian people to rise up against the evil Arab king Zahhak. Kaveh is an unapologetic revolutionary, intent on overthrowing the despot who has killed all but one of his eighteen sons, but he is also a Persian calling for the overthrow of his people’s Arab monarch, which makes it very tempting to read Ferdowsi as more seditious than he really was, as if his purpose in writing the Shahnameh had been to foment a revolution against Islam. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Just as the protestors in Iran sought to have their votes counted in the context of the government they already had, not to overthrow that government, Ferdowsi, who was a practicing Muslim, wanted to preserve and transmit Iran’s cultural heritage within an Islamic context, not present that cultural heritage as a replacement for Islam.

In this purpose, Ferdowsi was not alone. He may have been a practicing Muslim, but he was also a proud dehqan, a member of Iran’s landed gentry, a group Shahbazi calls “the backbone” of Iranian society, powerful enough that Arab commanders sometimes felt it necessary to negotiate peace treaties with them, and a group that saw itself as duty bound to preserve the “memories of the golden days of [the Persian] empire and the heroic traditions and cultural heritage of [their nation]” (20–21). After three hundred years of Muslim Arab rule, the dehqan had reason to be concerned. Not only had Arabic replaced Persian as the language of law, literature, philosophy and science, but there was also a growing acceptance among Muslim Iranians that it might be possible to rebuild Iran’s imperial structure within an Islamic context. Indeed, revisionist histories of Iran, such as Tabari’s Tarikh, which is contemporaneous with the Shahnameh, were written in support of this idea. In Tarikh, Tabari incorporates Iran’s origins into the creation story as told in the Koran. His goal is to demonstrate that the reigns of the Persian monarchs fit into Koranic chronology, placing Iran’s legendary kings and heros into the world inhabited by, and ultimately subordinating those kings and heros to, characters like Adam and Nuh (Noah), who are far more important to Islam’s overall narrative than Iran could ever be.

In the eyes of the dehqan, this was an unacceptable diminution of Iran’s cultural heritage, and so when Ferdowsi wrote of the beginning of the world in the Shahnameh, he placed Iran squarely at the center of the narrative, and when he told the stories of Iran’s mythical monarchs, he told the stories in their own terms, without trying to justify their existence within the dominant cultural, political and spiritual context of Islam (Davis 14). Yet it would be a mistake to understand the Shahnameh purely as a historical or political text, of interest primarily not for its literary worth, but for its role as a repository of ancient Iranian legends. To do so would be to ignore not only Ferdowsi’s literary intent–he was, very self-consciously, writing a poem–but also the fact that, as any of the apocryphal stories told about him illustrate, both in their content and by the fact of their existence, it was as a poet, not a historian, that Ferdowsi made his reputation. In one tale, that reputation was preordained. Ferdowsi’s father, this story goes, had a vision of his recently-born son climbing a roof and calling out loudly towards each of the four corners of the earth. Each time the child called out, a strong voice answered him. Najm-al-Din, who was a dream-interperter, explained to the boy’s father that the vision foretold Ferdowsi’s achievements. “Your son will be a genius, a poet whose name will be known to the four quarters of the world and whose songs will be learned and revered everywhere” (Shahbazi 39, n. 1).

In another story, Ferdowsi travels from his home in Nishapour to Ghazna, the capital city of Sultan Mahmoud, who was a great patron of the arts and about whom I will have more to say later. Upon entering the city, Ferdowsi encounters three of Mahmoud’s court poets, Ansari, Asjadi and Farrukhi, who did not want to be disturbed by someone whose manner of dress so clearly marked him as provincial. Thinking to have some fun at Ferdowsi’s expense, and to make sure he did not bother them again, they issued him a challenge. “We are the king’s poets,” Ansari, who was the most senior, said, “and only a true poet can keep company with us. So, to test your ability, each of us will compose one line of a quatrain using a single rhyme. If you can provide the fourth, we will allow you to join us.” Ferdowsi, confident in his skill as a poet, agreed.

The rhyming word Ansari chose was roshan (bright) and, at least according to Edward G. Browne, in whose Literary History of Persia I first read this tale (129–30), he chose that word because he was sure there were only two other words in Persian that would rhyme with it: golshan (rose garden), with which Asjadi ended his line, and joshan (cuirass), with which Farrukhi ended his. The difficulty of reproducing Persian rhymes in English forces Browne to offer two translations. The first, in the main body of Browne’s text, preserves the rhyming challenge–though the rhyme he chooses is hardly challenging in English–while losing both the meaning and, because he has to change the images and metaphors, the Persian character of the lines. The second translation, which he gives in a footnote, preserves the meaning of the quatrain but loses the rhyming challenge entirely. In each translation, though, his rendering preserves the sense of Ferdowsi’s completing line. Here is Browne’s mono-rhymed quatrain:

Ansari:      Thine eyes are clear and blue as a sunlit ocean
Asjadi:       Their glance bewitches like a magic potion
Farrukhi:   The wounds they cause no balm can heal, nor lotion
Ferdowsi:  Deadly as those Giv’s spear dealt out to Poshan.

And here is the quatrain that more accurately renders the sense of the quatrain:

Ansari:       The moon is not so radiant as thy brow
Asjadi:       No garden-rose can match thy cheek, I trow
Farrukhi:   Thy lashes through the hardest breastplate pierce
Ferdowsi:   Like spear of Giv in Poshan’s duel fierce.

The court poets were deeply impressed. Not only had Ferdowsi survived their poetic challenge; he had done so by referring to an obscure story from Persian lore, demonstrating not only that he was a fine poet, but also a man of some learning. Realizing that they had underestimated him, Ansari, Asjadi and Farrukhi decide to present Ferdowsi to Sultan Mahmoud as a poet worthy of completing the versification of the national epic begun two or three decades earlier by another poet, Daqiqi, whose murder had left the court with only a thousand or so completed verses. This the poets did and the rest, as the saying goes, except that the story I have just told you is almost entirely apocryphal, is history.

Works Cited

Davis, Dick. Epic & Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers 2006.

Mackey, Sandra. The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Dutton 1996

Shahbazi, A. Shapur. Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1991.

The greatest, and also the most disappointing, of these four is Jamshid, for it is Jamshid who establishes social classes, brings the science of medicine to humanity, teaches his people to make clothing and perfume, and in general orders the society if his time such that it is recognizable to us as the kind of social world in which we live. Jamshid, also, however is the first king to allow his pride to get the better of him, declaring himself a deity and losing the farr, which people often translate into English as aura, but is more accurately described as the visible quality in a king that signifies for his subjects the fact that God favors his rule. If you imagine the halos that were drawn around Christ’s head in medieval paintings, but picture them around the heads of kings and understand them to be visible proof of what the Europeans used to believe was the divine right of kings, you have something close to what the farr is.

Once Jamshid loses the farr, there is room for evil to enter the world, which it does in the form of Zahhak, part of whose story you can read in my translation on Ekleksographia. In addition to the word farr, you need to know that peris are supernatural creatures upon which are based the faeries of Victorian England; and you need to know as well that “Demon Binder” was the name given to Jamshid’s father, Tahmures, because he bound Ahriman–the source of evil–and rode him, more or less like a horse, around the world.

Here is my translation of Jamshid’s story, which is also the story of the first Norouz:

Filled with his father’s wisdom, when the world
was done mourning the Demon Binder,
Jamshid joined the line of men
to ascend the throne and wear the crown.
Peace spread across his kingdom,
and the birds and peris bowed to him too.
“I will,” he said, “keep evil from evil-doers’
hands, and I will guide souls to light.
The royal farr rests with me. I rule
as shah and priest.”

He turned first
to making weapons, paving for his warriors
a road to glory and renown. Iron,
beneath his farr, softened, became swords
and helmets, chain mail and horse armor,
and he gave fifty years to training
the men he charged with building his armory.

The next five decades, Jamshid devoted
to clothing, contriving different fabrics—
linen and silk, brocades and satin—
teaching people to spin and to weave,
to dye what they’d woven, and then sew a garment
for feasting or fighting. When he finished, he divided
men by their profession, sending
first to the mountains, to worship their Master
and live lives of devotion, the Katuzi.
Second, he summoned the Neysari,
lion-hearted fighters whose luster
lit the entire land, whose leadership
and courage kept the king secure,
and whose valor ensured the nation’s reputation.
Those who farmed the fields came next,
the Basudi, who sow and reap,
who receive no thanks, but whom none reproach
when there’s food to eat. Free people
who kneel to no one and seek no quarrel,
despite the rags they wear, their care
makes the earth flourish and nourishes peace.
A wise elder once said,
“If a free man finds himself a slave,
he has only his own laziness to blame.”

Jamshid gathered the craftsmen last,
the anxious and stubborn Ahtukhoshi.
Haughty and contrary, they work with their hands
to make the goods sold in the market,
and they are always anxious. Fifty years
marched by while Jamshid showed
each person breathing earth’s air
his proper place and path, teaching
the scope of the life he’d been given to live.

He ordered the demons to pour water
over earth, stirring it into clay
they filled molds with to form bricks.
With mortar and stone, they laid foundations
for public baths and beautiful palaces,
and castles to protect against attack.
From rocks, Jamshid’s magic extracted
the lustrous gems and precious metals
he found hidden there, filling his hands
with gold and silver, amber and jacinth.
He distilled perfumes for his people’s pleasure:
balsam and ambergris, rose water and camphor,
musk and aloe. He made medicines
to bring the sick back to health
and to help the healthy stay that way.

Jamshid revealed these secret things
as none before him had done. No one
discovered and ordered the world as he did.

Yet another fifty years
saw Jamshid building ships
he could sail quickly across the sea,
making port in each realm he reached;
and then, although he was already great,
Jamshid stepped past greatness.
He used his farr to fashion a jeweled
throne, decreeing the demons should raise it
high in the sky, where he sat shining
like the sun, and the world’s creatures gathered
around him, standing in awe, scattering
gems at his feet. It was the first of Farvadin,
and Jamshid set that day aside,
naming it Norooz, “new day,”
the day he rested, the first of the year.
His nobles declared a feast, a festival
of wine and song we still celebrate
in Jamshid’s memory.

For three centuries,
Jamshid ruled in peace. His people
knew neither death nor hardship; the demons
stood ready to serve; and all who heard
the king’s command obeyed it. The land,
filled with music, flourished. Jamshid,
however, gave himself to vanity.
Seeing he had no peer in the world,
he forgot the gratitude that is God’s due
and called the nobles of his court before him
to make this fateful proclamation:
“From this day forward, I know no lord
but me: my word brought beauty
and skilled men to adorn the earth!
My word! Sunshine and sleep, security
and comfort, the clothes you wear, your food—
all came to you through me!
Who else ended death’s desolation
and with medicine vanished illness from your lives?
Without me, neither mind nor soul
would inhabit your bodies. So who besides me
can claim, unchallenged, the crown and its power?
You understand this now. So now,
who else can you call Creator but me?!”

The elders bowed their heads and held
their tongues, silenced by what he’d said,
but when the last sound left his mouth,
the farr left him, and his realm fell
into discord. A sensible, pious man
once said, “A king must make himself
God’s slave. Ingratitude towards God
will fill your heart with innumerable fears.”
Jamshid’s men deserted; his destiny
darkened, and his light disappeared from the world.

Protesters in Ferdowsi Square after the June 09 elections in Iran

The connection between literature and politics is always a difficult one. Treating politics as if it were literature, politicizing literary texts, are strategies that people use to advance agendas that are fundamentally political, and often not progressive in nature. Especially in connection with what is going on in Iran right now, when people are really dying and when the Iranian government is doing everything it can to isolate the entire nation of Iran so that it (the government) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repressive) order of things, to talk about life imitating art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own literature, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gratuitous intellectual exercise. Yet literature, and in this case specifically poetry, also helps people give meaning to their lives; it can inspire, and it can connect us to something larger than ourselves in ways that political feelings, no matter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often cannot. And so, precisely because people are really dying in Iran–because I really do believe, along with William Carlos Williams, that people die every day for lack of what is found in poetry–and precisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a culture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write this. Perhaps connecting the unrest in Iran not only to the specific history of the Islamic Republic and the revolution out of which that republic was born–which most analysts, reasonably, are focusing on–but also to the Iranian culture that is larger and older than both the Republic and Islam, will make a difference. What that difference might be, and to whom, I have no way of knowing, but I just don’t think it is mere coincidence that the current unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for centuries: the tale of Kaveh and Zahhak from the poem commonly referred to as Iran’s national epic, Shahnameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of translating. I will include my translation at the end of this post.

Written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi in the 10th century, Shahnameh tells the story of the Iranian nation by telling the story of its kings, from the nation’s mythical beginnings right up to the moment of the Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. One of the themes that runs through the poem is the question of how to respond to an unjust ruler. The tale of Zahhak and Kaveh, which you will read below, is one of the narratives that explores this theme. First, though, you need some backstory: Zahhak is Shahnameh’s first evil king. Son of an Arab monarch named Merdas, Zahhak is seduced by Eblis (the devil in these stories) into killing his father to assume the throne, and he is eventually cursed by Eblis with a serpent growing out of each shoulder, to which he must feed one human brain per night. In other words, he must kill two people a day in order to keep the serpents fed. As you might imagine, then, Zahhak does not turn out to be a benevolent ruler, and when he conquers Iran–whose previous king, Jamshid, made himself vulnerable when he declared himself a god and so lost the true god’s favor–Zahhak’s cruelty kicks into high gear.

The statue of Ferdowsi in Ferdowsi Square, bedecked in green, during a rally, June 18

One night, Zahhak has a dream that disturbs him. When he asks his advisors to interpret it, they say that the dream foretells his destruction by a man named Feraydoun, who will kill him and assume the throne. Zahhak goes on a killing rampage trying to hunt Feraydoun down, and though he is unsuccessful, he does manage to kill Feraydoun’s father. Finally, out of a kind of desperation–and here is where, if you have not seen parallels to what is going on in Iran until now, the parallels start to get obvious–Zahhak summons the prince of each province in his kingdom and asks them to sign their names to a proclamation asserting that he, as their leader, has only ever been concerned with justice, righteousness and spoken only the truth. He wants this public acknowledgment so that he can raise an army with which to defeat the nemesis who is coming to challenge him. The heads of the provinces, knowing that their leader will kill them if they refuse to sign the proclamation, sign. It is at this point that Kaveh walks in, and from here I am going to let the poem speak for itself, because I think the parallels to today’s situation–a ruler afraid he will lose power, a rigged statement of approval, a (failed) attempt to appease the citizenry and opposition marches–while not exact, need no further explanation. (This selection from my translations of parts of the Shahnameh, I should add, has just been published in the really fine-looking journal The Dirty Goat Magazine.)

No One Knows the Secret Heaven Holds

Fear of Feraydoun fixed itself
firmly in Zahhak’s head, harrowing
his thoughts, bending his back beneath
its weight, wrenching his words from everything
but the fate foretold by Zirak. Zahhak
sat on his ivory throne, his turquoise
crown upon his royal brow,
and he called to his court, from throughout his kingdom,
the prince of each province to promise him loyalty.
“You are wise men,” he said to them,
“and you’ve heard the world hides from me
the enemy in whose hands my fate waits.
He may appear unworthy of fearing,
but I won’t assume he’s weak. I want,
therefore, to raise the fiercest army,
my demons marching beside your men,
for me to lead into battle against him.
Approve, therefore, this proclamation. Confirm
that as your commander I’ve sown nothing
but seeds of righteousness and spoken only truth.
Sign here so all can see
pursuit of justice is my sole concern.”

Trembling with fear, the assembled men,
knowing they could not say no and live,
signed their names to Zahhak’s lies,
when a man demanding justice marched
into the palace. The princes made a place
for him to sit. “At whose hands,”
the serpent king asked, “have you suffered
so much that you dare to seek me out?”
Stunned to be hearing the king himself,
hitting his head with his fists, the man
called out, “I am Kaveh! I have come,
your highness, to protest injustice thrust
to the hilt like a knife many times
into my heart. If what I’ve heard here
is true, if you pursue only justice,
grant me relief from this great grief
rooted in my soul. Show the righteousness
you claim as yours, and raise your good name
to the heavens! The hurt blackening
my days, your majesty, comes mostly
from you! You say you will not stand
for the smallest offense committed against me,
but you never hesitate to harm my sons.
Of my eighteen young ones only one
is left. Allow him to live, I beg you.
Keep my soul, my king, from the cruel
and endless torture I would endure
if you feed your serpents his flesh. Tell me,
what have I done to deserve his death?!

“And if I’m innocent, don’t build my guilt
from false accusations. This misfortune fills
my mind with misery, murders the hope
children should be when you reach old age!
Injustice has a middle and a limit,
and so it has logic. Charge me, and judge me,
if you have charges to bring, or don’t butcher my child!
I’m a simple blacksmith, innocent
of any wrong against you, yet you,
breathing fire, burn my life!
A dragon-king is still a king,
obliged to provide justice. Sire,
your kingdom stretches across the seven climes.
Why should this fate fall here to me?
Explain yourself! Plead your case
before us now. Bring some sense
to why my son, from among
all your subjects, must satisfy those serpents
with his brains. Submit your words to the world
and let the world judge your worth!”

Zahhak sat back, gasping,
wordless, eyes wide with wonder,
fearing Kaveh’s furious courage.
Scheming to win the blacksmith’s support,
he ordered the boy restored to his father,
lavished Kaveh with kindness,
and commanded him to commit his name
to the praise the declaration proclaimed.
The blacksmith read from beginning to end
and turned to the elders assembled there:
“You’ve made yourselves this Devil’s minions,
divorced in your hearts from heaven! It’s hell
you look to now, bowing to this beast.”

He rose, enraged, to his full height,
tore the proclamation to pieces
he stomped into the ground, then stormed
with his son out into the street.

The gathered nobles sought to soothe
what they assumed was Zahhak’s wounded
pride, “O great and powerful prince
of princes! King of kings! The cool
breeze dares not blow above you
on the day you muster your men for battle.
Yet this foul-mouthed Kaveh calls you out,
as if his status equaled to yours,
grinding our covenant into the ground,
rejecting your right as ruler
to his obedient submission. Swollen with scorn,
his head and heart fury-filled,
he’s gone to forge with Feraydoun
an alliance against you. We won’t accept this!”

“Listen to this,” Zahhak insisted.
“See how strange things sometimes are:
As soon as Kaveh spoke, there seemed
to rise between us a mountain of iron,
and when he hit his head with his hand,
the apparition shattered, foreshadowing
what only time will tell. No one
knows the secrets Heaven holds.”

The book is called Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, and it’s by A. Shapur Shahbazi. Ferdowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shahnameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 couplets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopoetic beginnings to the moment right before the Arab Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. Shahnameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good reason. Not only do the stories in the poem still resonate in Iranian culture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the German scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shahbazi uses as an epigraph to the book:

In the last analysis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity. [T]he importance of the poems of Ferdowsi (and subsequently of later poets) for the preservation of the Iranian character can in no way be overestimated. They provided the entire Iranian folk–nobles, townspeople, artisans and peasants–with that “Iranianness” which despite all social differences united them, perfectly mirrored their image, and allowed them to identify themselves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a critical biography,” at least in part because Shahbazi arrives at his understanding of Ferdowsi’s life through a critical reading of Shahnameh. The poet left no notebooks, no memoir and the information that we have about his life from outside the epic, as Shahbazi shows, is entirely apocryphal. Indeed, an interesting question raised by this book, though I doubt Shahbazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to prefer a truthful accounting of a great writer’s life to the myths and legends that grow up around him, especially when the work he is famous for is as important to a nation’s cultural identity as Shahnameh.

So, for example, the traditional story of the poem’s composition has the peasant Ferdowsi laboring for 25 years to write the poem, hoping to earn from it a dowry for his daughter. When, through the good offices of an intermediary, he presents the poem to Sultan Mahmud of Gazna, however, the intermediary’s enemies among the Sultan’s advisers convince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, especially since Ferdowsi is a Shiite and therefore a heretic. Taking his advisers’ advice, the Sultan pays Ferdowsi only 50,000 pieces of silver, not gold, an amount which Ferdowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of taking the payment for himself, he divides the money between two people who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sultan in a satire of which only a small number of lines survive. Eventually, he returns home, though he continues to live in constant fear of the Sultan.

One day, something happens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the greatness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his earlier to decision to underpay the man. So the Sultan sends along with a suitable apology, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Ferdowsi had originally expected. Just as the couriers arrive with the money, however, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being carried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daughter, according to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shahbazi shows that this story is completely false. It is now generally accepted, he points out, that Ferdowsi was not a peasant, was never in Sultan Mahmud’s court and never had a daughter. Yet which story is better, which one should be the story about Ferdowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Ferdowsi was a member of the landed gentry, that he composed the Shahnameh while living on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really matters is the truth, but the lessons in the apocryphal story are also truths that are important to tell and the way that Ferdowsi and his daughter behave when confronted with the different payments from the Sultan embody values it is worth emulating, or at least honoring. I’m not suggesting that we should accept falsehoods as history, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the falsehoods become part of the history, part of Ferdowsi’s biography, even as he (Shahbazi) claims to be arriving at as accurate a factual biography of Ferdowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shahnameh itself.

But I started writing about how painful it is to be not to be writing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writing this blog post, and I will admit that sitting here in my bed, half listening to the TV program my son is watching in the next room, pecking away at these keys is making me feel better. Except that my foot is starting to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the middle of one now for a couple of days, the result of having lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detoxification regimen my doctor put me on. The pain is starting to distract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actually reduce it, the way writing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am wondering about the connection between the pain I feel when I am not writing, the pain of my gout, and the way writing seems to alleviate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how people experience pain as something alien, something other, something not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The preposition is significant. Metaphorically, it suggests that pain is something physical we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is correct, and if I understand her–or my memory of what she wrote–correctly, we experience pain as something inside of us that we need to get out of us, something that cannot be integrated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in torture–and the first part of Scarry’s book is a discussion of torture–but it is not something that we can integrate, that we can make a part of ourselves, the way we make pleasurable sensations welcome within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Language (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain meaning–language, after all, is how we give everything meaning–but it is the only way we can make the reality of our pain comprehensible to someone else. Indeed, perhaps on some level we need to make our pain comprehensible in ways that we don’t need to do with our pleasures. After all, it is–at least for me–perfectly possible to keep one’s pleasures entirely private, not to name them, and still find them immensely satisfying. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, especially but not only emotional and psychological pain, I need community; I need to be able to tell someone, and while I sometimes may be the only one I tell by writing about it, that is never an entirely satisfactory solution. I need to know there is someone else who understands me or who has at least tried to understand me.

And so I wonder about the degree to which community, the human need for community and communication, is rooted in pain, and I wonder if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body reminding me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No matter how deeply internal and personal and interior the motivation to write may be, no matter how solitary the act of writing is, everything I write is also an invitation to community the goal of which is not so different from the way Spuler describes the Shahnameh as being “the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity.” Sometimes, especially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sadness, because I know I will keep writing anyway, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hopefulness, and that makes me happy.