On the Treshold

It is not that heavens loathe people of Fearland and impedes rain. It fears to grow a wasteland on the land of anxiety, which, although blooming from seeds of death, it roots and grows and blooms nothing. In the wasteland, where every sapling resembles a dead child, wind is a useless cradle and sunlight is what submits horrifying shadows of the day to the continuity of horrible nights. Under the sunlight, nothing is new, for according to Fearlanders’ beliefs, what has been will be and what has happened is what will happen. Nothing is new: the new will result in new fears. Thus, every sound resembles a horrible cry: even if it is a breeze passing through wasteland meadows, it comes to ears as a howl. Every movement is threatening, is a shaking of the stature of the people of Fearland who have for long been standing on their motionlessness and silence. Although they have spoken out, their mouths were sealed; they recorded that others have burnt, that they have sown and others have garnered and raped their soil: on top of adobes of fright, with dull eyes and silent tongues, they have built such a tall barrier around themselves. It is inescapable that they are the barrier. People of Fearland who are afraid and weary of repeating their horrifying history, write the history of fear. Within these walls, fear is a writing style applied to writing of doubt and reading of anxiety. Thus fear robs the pen of fear against the paper of silence and hatred is born thereafter diluting it. It is as such that, fearing the enemy and his curses, they write in a difficult and incomprehensible language so as to render it a harmless sophistry. Thus they apply to themselves a procedure applied to words. They wrap themselves: faces covered with masks and bodies with sheepskin. In thousand different shapes: an executioner with a dagger in his hand resembles a surgeon while a patient announces cure and miracle with his cries. Any escape from this enclosure is in vain, even if there is a loophole and they can escape in every direction, still fear is an inescapable shadow, unless they head for their solitude where there is no other, no people, no sunlight and no shadow, no shadow such as that of fear. For, the shadow of man is the shadow of his flesh; hence they escape to the depths of time, to where the glow of day gives clarity only to nightmares while the darkness of night renders delirious the humilities of the day. There, sleep comes after wake and wake after sleep, over and over again; time transforms into a cyclic eternity without end and it is pointless to think of it and think in it, for if it is spoken out, since there is no audience, it will resemble a delirious monologue, a fearful reverberation of one’s own voice. Be it that solitude is the absence of the other as well as the denial of one’s presence. Such serenity in the absence of others turns into a fear of an inexistent being of one’s self, and baseless fear slides into melancholy. Thus, how difficultly one who has taken refuge in solitude from the harm of the other, recreates him in a different way and in the shape of a ghost resembling herself. Thus the house turns into the mirror of the house of ghosts, reflecting hatred and fear. People of Fearland embrace their ghosts and give birth to dead children , children calmed down by the sound of the lullaby of death, put to sleep by the aftershock poems of the childbirth of fear , who never die again for they have never stepped into the domain of life:
Infants of mothers deprived of singing…

Homayoon Askari Sirizi, Fearland, Oct. 2010
Translated by Bavand Behpoor

Notes: