“The Rashomon effect is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it. A useful demonstration of this principle in scientific understanding can be found in an article by that name authored by Karl G. Heider.
It is named for Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, in which a crime witnessed by four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways.” (1)

The Dark Horse took me to another world. In the beginning it was so overwhelming, I felt lost in my thoughts & feelings. There was a nostalgic flood, mixing memories and desires. Immersed, I heard the roars soften into a song: “come on baby light my fire…”. Fire and flood, the unlikely promise to unveil the clouds, so it did. And the fire inside me had to cool down.

Humming in the background was Kadkani (2), wishing the beauty and the beast Safe Journey ; in a tune that would mingle with the image, dance with it and move along with its rhythm:

“Where to,
so hurriedly?”
the branch asked the breeze..
“To anywhere but here.”

Breeze turned into a wind, whirling along was Forough (3) whispering, her voice melancholy: Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (4).

“And this is I
a woman alone
at the threshold of a cold season
at the beginning of understanding
the polluted existence of the earth
and the simple and sad pessimism of the sky
and the incapacity of these concrete hands.
.
I am cold,
I am cold, and it would appear
that I will never be warm again…
.
I am naked, naked, naked,
I am naked as silences between words of love,
and all my wounds come from love,
from love, love, love.
.
will I once again
comb my hair with wind?”

The wind calmed down, Forough moved forward, as if she was the one on the horse, galloping towards the ultimate: Critique of Pure Reason (5). This time she had more fire, more hope, maybe Another Birth (6), she said with a piercing strength:

“My whole being is a dark chant
which will carry you
perpetuating you
to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming
in this chant I sighed you sighed
in this chant
I grafted you to the tree to the water to the fire.
…
And it is in this way
that someone dies
and someone lives on.”

I thought Shamlu (7) was right to say: “These are strange times, my dear”. Feeling lonely in the forest of one thousand eyes? He walked towards me, feisty and passionate, claimed her as his Aida In The Mirror. His voice quivering:

“Your lips, delicate as poetry,
turn the most voluptuous kiss
into such a coyness
that the caveman uses it to become human.
And your cheeks, with two oblique lines,
that lead your pride
and my destiny
I who have endured the night
without being armed
in anticipation of the dawn
and have brought back
a proud virginity,
sealed
from the brothels of barter.
(Never did a man so ruinously rise
to kill himself
as I settled the task of living)”

I was somewhere else, by now, somewhere somehow defined. Then, as it is with any great work of art, there are endless possibilities. This time it was Eliot (8), gentle and firm, who reminded me of the Little Gidding, this could not possibly be the end:

“We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.”

Only then there was some clarity:
The immediate, the abstract imparted by the contradiction of the black and white (negative) and the intertwined dualism of the beauty and the beast entails a leap of the imagination to the concrete.
She is free, even free of daily and most basic necessities of life. Her naked body riding bareback transcends the bitter cold of winter.
RAHAA, free.

For my father, whose desk had a permanent corner for Kant & Hegel. He used to wake me up with a Rumi or Sa’adi verse in the morning. My father’s generation breathed poetry. In that part of the world a verse could reshape society and create historical narrative. G. T. H.

1- Wikipedia
2- Shafiei Kadkani (Safar Beh Khair)
3- Forough Farrokhzad
4- Michael Hillmann translation
5- Immanuel Kant, Crtiquie of Pure Reason
6- Karim Emami translation
7- Ahmad Shamlu
8- T.S. Eliot