Which reminded me of the fondness for those films that struck my mother toward the end of her life. It was the strangest thing, hearing about aspects of my parents’ lives together, their habits and their preferences, that took hold after their children were grown and gone. During those conversations with my mother I had to remind myself that I was one of those children, grown and gone, and that she and her husband – my father – had embarked on an adventure or two that did not include me. One of their habits made me think my parents were … dating: They liked to go to the movies, and their favorite movies, my mother told me, were Iranian. In fact, she kept close tabs on the papers to find out when a new one was scheduled to come to town. One time I asked her some questions. Was it the location of production or the subject matter that drew her in? Both, she said. And what, I asked, is it that you like about those movies? Well, she said, they’re gorgeous.
I spoke with a friend of mine on Thanksgiving whose wife died earlier this year. As it happens, her wife and my mother carried through their lives the same, understatedly beautiful name. And as it also happens, her wife and my mother shared a fondness for the Iranian cinema.
So I was out and about the day after Thanksgiving, which was beautiful here, and I found myself at the book store – the big one – and I thought, certainly there must be …
Mirrors of the Unseen, which is not only a good title for a book but could also be a good title for the lives of both my mother and my friend’s beloved, is 400 pages of Jason Elliot’s ruminations on the Iran of then and the Iran of now. The focus, though, is much more on the then, and the then, on Iran’s calendar, is so vastly endless that centuries I’ve never even heard of are referenced so casually you’d swear they’d unfolded last summer and, at the same time, last summer is discussed as if that is what we mean when we say ancient history. The whole book was wonderfully upside-down that way.
I loved the book, personally. Jason Elliot’s main obsession – and you could watch it move in and take over, as if it were a disease, and perhaps it was – is the alignment of mosques to the spaces that surround them. As seen by the naked eye, many buildings seem to be out of synch with one another but are, in fact, “singing in a chorus of geometries.” [pg. 281]. That was interesting, I thought, as were his observations on how truly ancient Persian culture is and the prevalence of its influence on the world, much of which is credited to Europeans. Here’s a good one, specific to the U.S.: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Although quite a bit of that is carved into the main post office in New York, it’s straight out of the fifth century (B.C.), when those words were used to describe Persia’s Achaemenid mail couriers.
The geometry is a springboard to the country’s love – and I mean love – of adornments that could be dismissed as mere decorations but that are, in fact, more riddles of geometry. Calligraphy, tile, textiles, beadwork and, my personal favorite, the architecture. The architects of many mosques and other public buildings spent at least a decade per structure, a decade during which one of their main priorities was the incorporation of lighting, which, according to the author, they regarded as sacred and as or more critical to a building as its physical elements. All of this, of course, without computers.
What really lodged in my mind from the book, though, is this: Way, way long ago, a Persian ceramicist was accused of stealing another artist’s design. His reply: Imitation is the sincerest form of pottery. I’m not sure why that occurred to me as hysterical, but it did, and so I laughed and laughed and laughed some more.
