Sohrab Sepehri as a Mythical Character in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Blue Logos
Sohrab Sepehri as a Mythical Character in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Blue Logos
R. Ghanoonparvar
University of Texas Austin
Shahrnush Parsipur’s monumental novel ‘Aql-i Abi (translated into English as Blue Logos), published in 1994, can be described as a compendium of allusions in which the author utilizes and makes reference to the art, literature, philosophy, history, and mythology of Iran, as well as those of other cultures.[1] Among the major artistic and historical figures and sources that appear in this novel—from China and Mongolia to the Middle East, and from India to Europe and the New World—and amidst a variety of narrative strategies—from realism to surrealism and from the fantastic to the mythical and mythological— Sohrab Sepehri and his poetry and paintings play an important part. In this article, I briefly explore the mythological nature of the fictional role of Sepehri and his art in Parsipur’s Blue Logos.
Considered a groundbreaking work, Parsipur’s magnum opus, Blue Logos, which encompasses the spirit of all her previous works and fictional strategies, in addition to being most innovative in terms of its novelistic techniques and ideas, seems more appealing to a very select group of well-read intellectual Iranians rather than to the average reader. Completed in mid-1991, it was supposed to be published in Iran. However, Parsipur was arrested due to the theocratic government’s disapproval of her controversial earlier novel, Zanan bidan-i mardan (translated into English as Women Without Men),[2] and thus the publication of the original Persian of Blue Logos was impeded in Iran, and the novel was eventually published in English in the United States. To some extent, for this very reason, as well as for the complexity of its structure, allusions, and style, very little has been written about this important novel over the last three decades.[3]
For readers who have not read Blue Logos, a summary of the plot of this novel is useful in order to explain the role of Sepehri and his poetry in the story.[4] However, Blue Logos is extremely difficult to summarize. While the frame story has a simple plot, it is the stories within the frame that present us with rather complex and at times puzzling pictures that are challenging to summarize. The story takes place a few years after the Islamic Revolution, during the final years of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), when some 160 missiles struck Tehran and killed a large number of people. In the frame story, an unnamed woman visits a police captain on five different nights, discussing an assortment of topics. During those nocturnal visits, the woman tells a variety of stories, accounts of journeys in time and place, each beginning on a relatively realistic level and continuing more and more on surrealistic and even fantastical planes. Initially, this woman is realistic, but gradually she turns into a surrealistic figure. On each visit, she wears a different color of clothing, each of which we later learn is symbolically significant.[5]
On the first evening, she goes to the police precinct wearing a black chador, where the captain is on night duty. The woman claims that two people had been following her. The captain listens to what she has to say, initially thinking that she is a prostitute. As the woman is talking, a missile explodes. The woman says she wishes they had a King Kong that would grow big and neutralize the missiles. Immediately, the captain senses that a gorilla is living inside him. When the next missile is launched, the captain’s gorilla grows large and neutralizes the missile.
The woman then tells the captain that she has been fired from her job because of improper veiling. She explains that afterward, she wore a chador to comply with the current theocratic rules, and went to the department in which she had previously been employed. There she saw her former boss, Mr. Manbudi, kissing another employee, Ms. Rahrow. Later, it becomes clear that Mr. Manbudi has been blackmailing Ms.
Rahrow in order for her to acquiesce to having an affair with him. Obviously, Ms. Rahrow became extremely embarrassed and upset. Mr. Manbudi ordered the woman who is now telling the story to be physically kicked out of the department. The timeframe in the story was one in which many political groups were active, most of them leftist. In addition to her ordeal regarding her former boss, the woman tells the captain that her fifteen-year-old sister, who supported a leftist group, had decided to go to a rally on the following day, and her seventeen-year-old brother, who supported a different activist group, was against it. The two organizations despised each other intensely.
By this time in the telling of her story, it is dawn, and the woman leaves the police precinct.
On the following evening, after the captain has taken his wife and children outside the city to a secure place away from the missile attacks; and having returned to his apartment to sleep, he is awakened by the sound of a missile explosion that has broken the kitchen window. When he looks out of the broken window, he sees the woman on the street. He opens the door of his apartment and the woman enters. The woman continues telling the captain more of her story. She tells him that when she was following her sister to prevent her from joining the rally, she came across a young Kurdish man in whom her sister was interested. The young Kurdish man criticized the woman for trying to prevent her sister’s political activity. From then on, the woman’s sister and brother disappeared and did not return home again. Also, from then on, the woman’s grandfather regularly went to the medical examiner’s office to find out whether or not the missing brother and sister were still alive. The woman tells the captain that later on, the young Kurd called her at home. He sounded extremely depressed because of the death of the woman’s sister and wanted to apologize to her. Although exhausted from all the happenings and mishaps around her, she agreed to meet with him.
Parsipur uses the meeting between the woman and the young Kurd as one of the first occasions in her novel for evoking Sepehri and his poetic message. Parsipur’s protagonist, the nameless woman in Blue Logos, can perhaps be best described as some sort of a soothsayer or visionary who, often in different guises, imparts words of advice to, or provides guidance for, the captain as well as other characters she describes. It is within such contexts that Parsipur either quotes the poetry of Sepehri or conjures up Sepehri as a mythical character. Thus, references to Sepehri appear when she meets the young Kurd after the disappearance of her brother and sister. The young Kurd feels guilty about the disappearance or possible death of the woman’s sister and has come to meet her to ask for forgiveness. The woman tells him that he has done nothing to her to require forgiveness from her, and, simultaneously, the young Kurd asks her whether or not she would support his political activist group. The following is a part of the woman’s account of her response and advice to the young Kurd:
‘I said, ‘No, my dear friend, another task obligates me. You see that I am naked and in tatters. I resemble a shrew. I must enter a sea of slime. I know, I know, I know that the pearl is submersed in the depths of this slime. But, but, but know that I follow you from a distance. I see you, I see you a lot. I see you every night in my dreams. Remember:
Do not muddy the water
Downstream it seems, a pigeon is drinking water
Or in a distant grove, a thrush is washing its feathers
Or in a village, an earthen water jug is being filled…
The people upstream understand water
They did not muddy the water
Let us too not muddy the water[6]
‘I said, ‘Now, leave. You are in a dangerous situation.’[7]
With a pacifist reading of Sepehri’s poem, Parsipur bestows upon the woman protagonist/storyteller a unique power of foresight. Given the political context of Iran at the time, and the context of the scene itself, the protagonist can be seen to advise not only the young Kurdish political activist, but all those people in her country and elsewhere who want to make the world over in accordance with their own ideas and ideologies.
On another night when the woman visits the captain in his apartment, this time wearing a red dress, she tells him that one night while sleeping and having a nightmare, the smell of burned flesh awakened her. Terrified, she ran to the basement, where she saw her grandfather standing on a pile of his books, having set himself on fire. The woman jumped into the fire to save him. Everything went up in flames. As the woman grabbed a fascicle of a book in the air, she fell from the fire into a graveyard. In the graveyard, everyone limped, including the woman. In the graveyard, as the woman explains to the captain, she encountered a variety of men, each of whom tried to manipulate and control her life in some way. At the end of that scene, Sepehri appears as a painter and poet, and in a way rescues her from the walking dead men in the graveyard. The poet is described as a man going around and around in the middle of the graveyard, his feet moving with “the rhythm of dancing,” and carrying in his hand a basket with red and green colors. The man, however, has nothing to do with the graveyard. As though disgusted with his surroundings, and with feet that felt like dancing, he was almost flying among the graves. “Now,” the woman explains to the captain, “I had escaped to the depth of my heart, searching for the core of life, being the core, becoming the core, becoming the core of another, the core of burning in love, rising anew.” The woman adds that she approached the basket of the man and took some red and wore it.
Soon after, the prophet-like figure of Sepehri is identified, proclaiming: And bring baskets, take all this red, all this green.[8]
The woman continues by narrating that it was as though the man suddenly heard something. He raised his hand as a sign of silence, and after everyone had become silent, he said:
I hear the footsteps of water,
What are they washing in the river of loneliness? The clothing of moments is clean…[9]
Sepehri thus becomes a prophet and harbinger of good tidings. “For an instant,” the woman says, “we all sat on the graves. He had seen something. He had some good news. Now he had shut his eyes and was floating in such strange joy.” And then he recites:
Call me,
Your voice is good,
Your voice is the green of that strange plant
That grows at the end of the sincerity of sorrow.
In the dimensions of this silent afternoon I am lonelier from the taste of the song in the text of perception of an alleyway…[10]
Moments after reciting those lines, the poet leaves. The woman tells the captain: “This is why I wore red. Now, I needed to go to sleep and dream, or I needed to fall asleep, and they would come to my dream, or I would go to sleep and would go into their dream in [a] dream.”[11]
On the same night that she is describing the graveyard scene, the woman tells the captain that because of certain circumstances that she relates in detail, she started working as a prostitute, making money for an old drug addict and speaking foul language. At this point, upon hearing what the woman has said, the captain’s gorilla, who is most offended, moves toward the captain’s sword and, picking it up, chops the woman to pieces. The captain, who has been dozing off while listening to the woman’s story, wakes up terrified, and runs toward the gorilla, but it is already too late. Angered by the gorilla’s action, the captain kills the gorilla.
The mythical figure of Sepehri and his philosophical worldview in his poetry and painting appear in a number of episodes of Parsipur’s Blue Logos, most often when a character encounters or experiences psychological crises. For instance, in the episode in which the captain kills the gorilla, which he describes as “the ‘dog’ of his concupiscence,”[12] an episode in which he struggles with the crisis of trying to cope with his life (both in recalling his youth and foreseeing his old age), he can only come to terms with his existence when the mythical figure of Sepehri appears and functions as a savior of sorts — again, with a basket of red and green colors. During this crisis, the captain suddenly sees “a man going around in circles in the room with a basket in his hands,”[13] sparkles of red and green colors pouring out of the basket. The man/Sepehri seems “disgusted with his surroundings,”[14] and without looking at the captain, he sprinkles some red in the air: “The ice crystals around the ice flowers began to vibrate, as though they were wearing red. The captain knew that ‘red’ thinks, therefore it is. For this reason, he shivered with ecstasy.”[15]
This episode of the novel, in which the captain encounters his youth, a recurring scene takes place over and over again. In this example, the voice is no longer that of the woman, but the occasional voice of the narrator of the novel:
Then he saw his youth move his hand toward his forehead. Then, in order to better be able to think, he pushed his hat back a bit, and since he could not figure anything out, he shook his head several times. Then, to sober up from his drunkenness, he walked toward the reflecting pool, broke the ice on the surface, and stuck his head into the icy water. The captain saw that the hotness of his youth’s head was lessening. He saw that his youth was rising, making a hissing sound like a dragon to shake off the water from his nose, taking out a handkerchief from his pocket, and drying off his head and face. He then once again went toward the ice flower branches, and stared at them intently.[16]
Observing such a scene from his imagined past over and over again, “lamentable” is the word with which the narrator describes the captain’s state of mind. He is so frenzied that “involuntarily, while he was laughing, he was also crying.”[17] He suddenly seems to be frantically seeking the help of the mythical Sepehri. There are references to Sepehri and his poetry in almost every line:
Horrified, the captain looked around to make sure that the man with the basket in his hand was not gone. He saw that he had dug a stream in the middle of the room, planted several tree saplings, thinking that he was in the deserts near Kashan, where the weather had turned a bit cold, and he was thinking about going behind a rock to warm himself with the fire of the anemone. But at the same time, he could not give up the pleasure of the contact of his feet with the ice-cold water, in which his bare feet were, and at the same time, he was afraid that someone might steal his shoes, and he was about to call out and ask, ‘Where are my shoes?’[18]
Assured of the strength of the memory of readers who hold the poet Sepehri on a pedestal and his poetry as divine inspiration, Parsipur weaves paraphrased and quoted lines of his poems into a fantastical scene in her novel that would defy comprehension by the average unsuspecting reader. The basket of red and green colors (And bring baskets, take all this red, all this green),[19] the digging of the stream,[20] the planting of saplings,[21] the desert of Kashan where he warms himself with the fire of the anemone (and once in the desert of Kashan, it became cloudy / and a torrential rain began / and I got cold, then behind a rock / the fire of the anemone warmed me),[22] and of course, the directly quoted line, “Where are my shoes?”[23] are but a few of the references to the works of the “prophet of nature.”
The description of the poet by the omniscient narrator and the captain’s reflection about him make the fictional Sohrab Sepehri into an other-worldly being:
Then he picked up his basket to leave. The captain ran toward the man. He saw that he had forgotten both his shoes, and also his basket. The man was staring into the water and did not move. The captain thought that he was possibly the deity of water or his representative, since he moved the water so much with his hands and feet and stared into its transparency. The captain thought that he was possibly the deity of an element, although even when he occasionally put on his shoes, he was somehow in flight, as though he was flying in the ‘air.’ Nevertheless, he had red and green in his basket. Even though he had forgotten about pouring other colors into it, why fear?[24]
At this point, the captain picks up “some green” and spreads it about in the room. He then sees that green has poured over the head of his youth and has gone through his body. Then he sees that his youth is standing in the courtyard filled with ice blossoms and filled with red and green vibrations, looking at him, wondering: “Just how is it that you are there and I am here?”[25]
There are many more passages in this episode of Blue Logos with references to Sepehri’s work. In a later section of the novel, the woman recounts another of her harrowing experiences, this time on a sea journey.
Prior to the journey, she had been cut into pieces and tossed into the sea. “In the depths of the sea,” she tells the captain, “I suddenly realized that I was not torn to pieces; rather, I was a diver who had come to find pearls.”[26] Eventually, after being rescued by the old man of Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, she is brought back to the shore on a larger ship. Once on land, she again encounters Sepehri. She tells the captain:
‘I disembarked. When I reached the shore, once again I saw that the man with the basket in his hand was sitting by the sea. He had placed his feet in the water, enjoying it immensely. His basket, however, was behind him. I noticed that whenever he reached water, instinctively, he would sit and stare at it. For this reason, he would place his basket behind him, and he was constantly worried that someone would be muddying the water, since he knew that downstream, a pigeon was drinking water, and perhaps a thrush washing its feathers.’[27]
For readers even casually familiar with Sepehri’s poetry, it is clear that much of what the woman describes is a reference to the following lines from his poem, “Ab” (“Water”):
Do not muddy the water
Downstream it seems, a pigeon is drinking water
Or in a distant grove, a thrush is washing its feathers Or in a village, an earthen water jug is being filled[28]
As some sort of a mythical figure, then, Sohrab Sepehri makes appearances throughout Parsipur’s often enigmatic and surrealistic novel, which is a hauntingly realistic portrayal of Iranian society of the late twentieth century in the wake of not only a devastating social, political, and cultural revolution, but also a horrendously destructive war. While the Iraqi missile attacks on Tehran set the background of Blue Logos, the destruction is not merely the consequence of the war, but more profoundly, the outcome of a confused and confusing society in which humanity is crushed by the clash of half-baked ideologies and fanatical ideologues. Although Sepehri appears frequently in the fictional world that Parsipur creates based on the real world, he no longer belongs there. And no one seems to pay much attention to his words; everyone seems bent on trying to “muddy the water.”
[1] Shahrnush Parsipur, ‘Aql-i Abi (San Jose, CA: Zamaneh Publishers, 1994). For an English translation of this novel, see Shahrnush Parsipur, Blue Logos, trans. M. R. Ghanoonparvar (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2020). All quoted passages from this novel are from this translation.
R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at the University of Isfahan, the University of Virginia, and the University of Arizona, in addition to serving as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Teachers of Persian (2021) as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Encyclopædia Iranica Foundation (2009) for his contributions to presenting Persian culinary arts to the non-Iranian public. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian. His most recent books include Iranian Film and Persian Fiction (2016), Dining at the Safavid Court (2016), From Prophets of Doom to Chroniclers of Gloom (2021), and Iranian Cities in Persian Fiction (2022). His recent translations include Hushang Golshiri’s Book of Jinn, Moniro Ravanipour’s The Drowned and These Crazy Nights, Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s The Nights of Tehran, Ruhangiz Sharifian’s The Last Dream and Doran, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Blue Logos. He was the recipient of the 2008 Lois Roth Prize for Literary Translation.
mrghanoonparvar@utexas.edu
[2] There are two translations of this novel available in English. Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without
Men: A Novella, trans. Jocelyn Sharlet and Kamran Talattof (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); and Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men, trans. Faridoun Farrokh (New York: Feminist Press, 2011).
[3] This is also true regarding Hushang Golshiri’s last novel and magnum opus, Jinn’namah, which was published in Sweden by Baran Publishers in 1998 and translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar as Book of Jinn (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2019). Regarding critical studies of Blue Logos, see Abbas Milani’s foreword to ‘Aql-i Abi, which is the first enlightening, though necessarily brief, critical essay about this novel. See Abbas Milani, “Pishguftar,” in Shahrnush Parsipur, ‘Aql-i Abi, 13-40. Also see, Ameneh Shervin Emami’s PhD dissertation, “Persian Magical Realism and the Re-Appropriation of Mythical and Mystical Texts: Rereading Parsipur’s Magical Realism and Suhrawardi’s Allegories,” PhD diss., (UCLA, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, 2020). The dissertation is available online: https://escholarship.org/content/ qt79j555vq/qt79j555vq_noSplash_552e1e40da718c6a9d0e3bcf622f664e.pdf.
[4] Sohrab Sepehri is not alone among the writers and poets to whose work Parsipur makes reference. They also include, among others, Hafez, Sadeq Hedayat, Forugh Farrokhzad, and Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi. In an Epilogue to the novel, Parsipur humorously says that she has plagiarized all of them.
See Parsipur, Blue Logos, 391.
[5] For color symbolism in this novel, see Emami, “Persian Magical Realism,” 154-193.
[6] From Sohrab Sepehri’s poem, “Ab” (Water), in Hasht kitab (Isfahan: Guftiman), 218-219; quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 137.
[7] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 137.
[8] From a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, “Sada-yi pa-yi ab” (The Sound of the Footsteps of Water), in Hasht kitab, 169-189; quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 154.
[9] Sepehri, “Sada-yi pa-yi ab;” quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 154.
[10] From a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, “Bih bagh-i hamsafaran” (To the Garden of Fellow Travelers), in Hasht kitab, 243-245; quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 155.
[11] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 154-155.
[12] Parsipur, Blue Logos,175.
[13] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 177.
[14] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 177.
[15] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 177.
[16] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 178.
[17] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 177.
[18] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 178-179.
[19] From a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, “Sada-yi pa-yi ab;” quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 154.
[20] Streams are one of the common scenes in Sepehri’s paintings. For an example, see Sohrab Sepehri, Untitled, circa 1960s: www.christies.com/lot/sohrab-sepehri-iranian-1928-1980-untitled-6024943/?intObjectID=6024943&lid=1.
[21] Trees and tree saplings are a dominant theme in Sepehri’s art work. Many examples can be found on the Internet.
[22] Sepehri, “Bih bagh-i hamsafaran;” Parsipur, Blue Logos, 179.
[23] From a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, “Nida-yi Aghaz” (The Primal Call), in Hasht kitab, 241-242; quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 179.
[24] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 178-179.
[25] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 179.
[26] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 185.
[27] Parsipur, Blue Logos, 187-188.
[28] Sepehri, “Ab,” 218; quoted in Parsipur, Blue Logos, 137.
