Songs of the earth

Songs of the Earth

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Earthen Architecture Pouya Khazael

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First Song: Drunken Intuition.........................4 Second Song: Immortal Man.........................7 Third Song: Loneliness...................................9 Fourth Song: The Swamp..............................11 Fifth Song: Nostalgia.....................................12 Sixth Song: Embryo.......................................14 Seventh Song: New Outfit............................16 Eighth Song: Inheritance...............................18 Ninth Song: Earth’s Aroma...........................23 Tenth Song: In Anticipation..........................24 Eleventh Song: The Earth’s Refrain..............26 Twelfth Song: Preachers of Nature..............30 Thirteenth Song: Homeland.........................33 Fourteenth Song: The Way..........................35 Fifteenth Song: The Prophet’s Story............37 Sixteenth Song: Luminescence.....................41 2

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First Song: Drunken Intuition

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Presently you find yourself alone.

Except for those who believe in you.

So do not shrink from self-belief.

Proceed alone.

You will find truth with empty hands.

Then you find yourself joined by a throng of followers.

7. The product of your empty hands is your art.

8. You create it in isolation, 9. Amid your lonely existence; in forest, mountain or desert.

10. There you will venerate your connection with the earth.

11. Need for nothing: neither hearing nor seeing.

12. Whatever exists comes from within you.

13. Your story begins like this.

14. Where will your substance flow?

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15. On cold mountains, where the stones beneath you are platforms to permanence, where you can be closest to heaven? Certainly not.

16. You are from earth, not above it. Like grains of clay that, with the slightest wind, create form from formlessness, and fall to nothing.

17. In the forests the canopy of trees forms a prison, enclosing your momentary life in the lie of eternity.

18. How can you see human suffering from paradise?

19. This is why I set out for the desert.

20. Thirsty in that scorched horizon, I scorned myself.

21. Our ideas can lead us to ashes.

22. Had I rested in the forest, I would have been protected from this blaze.

23. I had sought independence. Was nature’s wrath condemning my arrogance?

24. Demanding my pleas for mercy?

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25. The mind’s beliefs are false without exception.

26. Happy is he whose drunken intuition precludes thought.

27. The gift of the mind is hell.

28. But buried in a hole in the desert, I was compelled to build a dome over myself.

29. Broken and alone, I at last tasted the joy of this drunken intuition.

30. Satisfaction rose from my dialogue with the earth and sun.

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Second Song: Immortal Man

1. People erected clay houses on tops of hills and blasted them as monuments to eternity.

2. These hardened casts shunned water and wind: rain could not lead them back into the earth.

3. They did this in search of the eternal.

4. So that the cycle of death and life would be crushed into eternity.

5. Black smog congealed over their burning domes.

6. Was The Devil conducting this scene?

7. The mania of immortality captured the essence of their humanity.

8. “I have beaten death. The earth will die before me, before my eyes.

9. “To this eternity I sacrifice all that came before, all that is now, and all that is to come.

10. “Our longevity mocks you and your ideas,” they said.

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11. “We have here on earth what we have been promised in paradise.

12. “All that remains is to spread our gift to our wretched brothers.

13. “We must make them identical with ourselves. Homogeneity will equal release.

14. “We have almost touched eternity, with no help from the gods.”

15. And man became eternally old.

16. Vainly he sought to alleviate human wretchedness by making humanity in his image.

17. Not knowing that his image was the source of all wretchedness.

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Third Song: Loneliness

1. He who in freedom listens only to himself will find himself alone. Unless he recognises that belief is vacuous and love is deep, his loneliness will be eternal.

2. He who chooses obligation and the law will rest in society’s embrace.

3. In the past I mistakenly believed I would not be alone by now.

4. Now that I am smashed into interminable fragments, I know 5. Death perpetually redirects me back to the source of life.

6. Such sadness shrouds this form of eternity.

7. How can mankind stand it?

8. Taking aim at society’s beliefs will ensure your exile.

9. Loneliness is the song of freedom.

10. Only a heart open to the world can bear this death knell.

11. Enlightened minds cannot hope to hear it.

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12. These great thinkers will proceed to demonstrate how your death is nothing, nowhere, naught.

13. As you head to the desert.

14. There you will heap blame on yourself for your failure among others.

15. Until you consider an open heart to be abject and defiled.

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Fourth Song: The Swamp

1. This heavy silence could be borne no longer.

2. The capacity to withstand the loneliness was lost to the sands.

3. But how can I now return to society’s laws?

4. Life there stems from the lies of prophets who promised perpetual paradise.

5. A rarefied realm that is now sought on earth.

6. I long to love the earth onanistically, and relish the moment of my petite mort.

7. But first I must love the people.

8. Bring wine! So that I may love those who shun me.

9. And take this lofty ideal from the swamp of life.

10. Thinking is the work of The Devil. Thought alone distinguished him from the angels.

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Fifth Song: Nostalgia

1. When they called me mad I left for a home on top of a hill: the home of my childhood.

2. But when I touched it, the wall no longer returned my embrace.

3. It had become a hard wall that no longer talked to the rain or washed into the earth, and lost its odour of damp straw.

4. There were no words, just the silence of a spirit scorched by fire.

5. I remembered the cool wind that rustled through the house when I was a child.

6. When my home interpreted the earth for me.

7. In a house that cannot speak with nature there is no fear of collapse, 8. Such that even a storm cannot talk through it.

9. I regret to learn that there’s more delight in death than in life without spirit.

10. The old city had become was arrested in eternity, and would not come alive again.

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11. Who can you talk to when everyone calls you mad, 12. And the spectre of love persecutes mankind?

13. What value freedom, when unwritten laws ensnare us all?

14. The raider astride the steed of intellect burns his essence along with his own home.

15. He replaces existence with its image, 16. Because he is afraid emotions will cloud his thinking.

17. The image of a swamp has no fragrance, 18. And decrepit old age can be offered as virgin youth.

19. Wandering, I recall the time before ideas, 20. When through labour I found independence and meaning, 21. And I could believe in God the Architect, 22. Before the day doubt was conceived in Him, 23. And He became a wanderer too.

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Sixth Song: Embryo

1. In former times hearts still beat.

2. In the old city there was still no word of smoke and fire.

3. I happened upon the path to the old city: why do they look upon me as a stranger 4. In my own city?

5. Living there breeds depression and malaise, as its inhabitants relentlessly beg The Devil to take them to the metropolis.

6. There is only resentment towards the houses they are inpatient to engulf in flames.

7. Where can you find peace? In the land of our forefathers they rush to the flame.

8. I sat on the ground with my satchel in the shadow of the metropolis.

9. In a world with no place for you, your only choice is to grasp for power.

10. The domination of the strong over the weak commands you to covet domination.

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11. They are ready to spend as much as it takes to prove the insignificance of what they are not. Their ultimate victory over this other is in appropriating it as decoration for their homes.

12. Thus with my satchel I circled the metropolis and flogged my wares.

13. My smallest idea, like an embryo, will grow unnoticed in their homes, until in revenge for nullification it will grow to devour them whole.

14. So the next generation will commune with the earth 15. And the spawn of these dead immortals will embrace mortality.

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Seventh Song: New Outfit

1. The past is rich but worn.

2. I tear off my old clothes and use the shredded rags to make a new guise.

3. The veils of our new world form an unfathomable wasteland.

4. There, all that is not youth is discarded.

5. But my cloth is both fulfilled and destructive.

6. It destroys values and replaces them with bliss.

7. Earth products form the substance of this happiness, 8. As death envelopes us back into this fold 9. And there is no longer any need to gaze longingly skywards.

10. Freedom on earth means unity.

11. I choose the desert over the festering cities. Creativity and loneliness will be the substance of my happiness.

12. All we can hope to learn is in our distance past.

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13. This knowledge is the only thing that you need from the past.

14. Only two cells are needed for fertilisation.

15. If what you learn covers all of history, what space is left on which to grow?

16. This is the secret of the new city’s success. Those cells will flourish in the novelty of their environment, 17. And with them will grow a new knowledge.

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Eighth Song: Inheritance

1. I had no place either in the old or new city.

2. I blame the blindness of the poor for their poverty.

3. A man with sight has no place in this world.

4. Old cities are cursed to darkness; new cities are constructs of stupidity.

5. No one hesitated to dive from the darkness to ignorance.

6. Something within the walls of the old city brought me to it; 7. Something belonging to an unfathomably distant past, before prophets promised salvation in the sky and dismissed the earth as worthless.

8. How they misguided humanity with their fallacies!

9. But buildings are more lasting in their fluency.

10. Their heresies outwit the censor’s blade.

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11. They belong to the age when earth was God. 12. Perhaps this is why all the old buildings are made from adobe.

13. They withstood the lies of the prophets for millennia, 14. And placed the truth in man’s substance.

15. Ah! Now I understand that you, East, are the same as West, and I regret my foolish anticipation of finding an alternative in you.

16. The fallacy of eternity transcends all divisions.

17. I was ignorant to think the West arrogant 18. Because it thinks man rules the earth.

And I wrongly placed my hope in you.

19. Now the only hope is to reverse the image of eternity, 20. The same promise liars have passed between east and west for two thousand years,

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21. By reaching out for the hands of the wise that went before these filthy helpers.

22. These liars forgot architecture, which clearly conflicts with the promise of life beyond the clouds.

23. Did you not concede that man was created from clay and earth returns to earth? So why talk of angelic realms?

24. The buildings of the old city tell another story, and we will rue forgoing the chance to listen to them.

25. In the old city they called me mad, and in this city they call me stranger.

26. Are there no ears to listen to these walls?

This is the last hope.

27. See how they drain the earth to reach the sky. The human is such a mad creature.

28. If there were no sooth-sayers, the free human would commune with the earth and all that comes from it.

29. Today freedom ruins people, but lack of freedom is worse.

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30. Man is a slave of the free mind that caused him to forget his source and seek enjoyment in distant distractions.

31. Education is the most effective means yet devised of furthering the distance between man and his source.

32. Simplicity in desire begets social harmony, while a population of personal aspiration breeds discord.

33. In the west proud people wrap themselves in concerns that are fallacious to the core. They call this shroud intellect.

34. They do not recognise that the obstacle of the mind is fuel for the heart.

35. In the east they seek the lost path of the west. So there is no land for me.

36. The primitive wise bequeathed a wonderful legacy from their hearts, 37. An inheritance that, like a trickster, eludes detection and follows its own path.

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38. Only architecture brought this truth that lightens your eyes.

39. The people in the east want to destroy your inheritance.

40. And there are few in the west who, without understanding the profundity of this gift, know it as a tranquilizer for commercial pain, a superficial corrective to a much deeper malaise.

41. How did I see through the curtain between our world and theirs?

42. It was a sensual feeling that like a lightning bolt of truth reduced me to ashes, 43. Commanding me to love what comes from the earth and in turn the pleasures of the flesh.

44. It is thus that I go to paradise and the sooth-sayers will go to hell.

45. There is no path along which science can reach the truth of primitive wisdom.

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Ninth Song: Earth’s Aroma

1. Man’s lust distances him from love because he lusts after something heavenly.

2. Wasn’t love close at hand? Did the architect have to search for it in the ground?

3. I remembered in my youth, when I was making love to a beautiful girl.

4. Unfortunately that all vanished. To keep a connection with the earth one can do worse than seeking love in bed.

5. For the man who with his intellect rules the earth the body is like a curse, as is a love that would return him to that body.

6. He chooses sight as his sense, to maintain his distance from love, 7. And does not touch the naked body or experience the perfume of his love.

8. This is why those who sell their body must first paint and fragrance it.

9. In the absence of love, what remains is a forlorn intellect.

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Tenth Song: In Anticipation

1. The day that man sucked iron from the earth was the day he declared his freedom from sooth-sayers, not recognising that he perpetuated their deception 2. By seeking refuge in the heavens 3. And making buildings with their doors firm shut, so the holy ether inside was unsullied by the earth’s dirt.

4. Beautiful architecture speaks from the highest summit, a truth that escapes its builder.

5. But primitive man continued on his path by teasing and trickery. He lives on in the lowliest squats and lost echoes.

6. Thus I found what I lost in the furthest unknown village, and from there I intend to forge a civilisation!

7. The anonymous and wise built this land.

8. I wait here. Is there any way to reach those primitive persons?

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9. No, only a catastrophe can save us at this late stage.

10. I wait in the last village of old civilisation for an earthquake to destroy whatever remains from the children of the prophets, 11. Or for the wave on which Noah will ride to rescue us.

12. The earth talks deafeningly yet few hear it, and then only faintly.

13. In fear they reach for the earth and so may learn to appreciate it.

14. They have long since forsaken love and are now driven by fear.

15. Courage is needed to drain the cup of death with delight.

16. Your flesh will become ambrosia for fleshhungry animals, and the grass of your soil will nourish those that graze.

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Eleventh Song: The Earth’s Refrain

1. I will make a home from earth to return to the earth with me.

2. And after my death to flow with me into the plants and animals.

3. I will not make a home for my children because they will make refuse out of an old house.

4. And I cannot stand to live beside this ruin after my death.

5. This execution maintains life.

6. Reversion to earth is full of joy. Witness the void of their immortal paradise.

7. Values enjoy this very progression.

8. Perpetual remodelling.

9. Each sustainable cycle contains smaller cycles within it, to demonstrate that the vast and the minute are equal.

10. When I walk along the path of the law of the earth, I am filled with joy.

11. Let cities remain standing as monuments to the stupidity of man, who denied death and discarded the earth.

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12. Bring wine so we may inspect the earth’s muck, 13. Until we sink into the joy of this understanding.

14. Thus sooth-sayers forbade wine and love in their effort to reach the sky, 15. And the grand imbecile appeared – the free human of today – 16. Who put his idiocy into the cities that the senseless rules of his mind were confirmed by society and thereby justified.

17. Thus the holiness of wine, which is the earth’s purest product, was defiled into a parody of itself.

18. So I leave for the desert where grape vines flourish on earthen walls and loneliness is my drinking partner.

19. There, through the walls of these buildings, I can sense the faint heartbeat of an ancient past.

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20. Embrace wine and the lover, for they both adore the roots of truth.

21. And if your mind rejects immortality you will join them in their adoration.

22. Just as the tender flesh of the sacrificial lamb has become processed meat, earthen buildings have given way to the permanence of steel skyscrapers.

23. Finding the truth is easy for children, and for adults with clean ears.

24. But still man is too proud to hear the earth’s refrain, 25. Because he is transfixed on atoms as sources of light.

26. In search of civilisation I emigrate to the furthest village where the night’s darkness still speaks of the depth of the world.

27. Farewell to the children of paradise, I learn nothing but folly from your cities.

28. I will beget a fresh civilisation from communion with my loneliness, 28

29. One that will not perish for lack of companions 30. Because in a world that lacks ideas there is desire to uncover truth. And all those superficial displays will want to turn this truth into their image.

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Twelfth Song: Preachers of Nature

1. There are eyes and ears that discern the tiniest existence 2. When the earth cries out and the flow of man’s distractions is interrupted.

3. They are now more dangerous because they are still embroiled in the unreal pleasure of the dominating mind.

4. The same is true of those who purport to embrace the earth.

5. You must be free, but at the time of death should forgo this freedom entirely.

6. Freedom only has meaning within the cycle of death.

7. Freedom of exchange can exist in a noninstrumental manner.

8. There is meaning in using less.

9. The thinking of the sky-bound human is the vantage point of earth’s destroyer.

10. Even using less amid universal false consciousness just leaves some for the others to destroy the world.

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11. Even when making buildings cheaply with earth 12. Because the meaning is not thrift, but a sense of happiness that comes out from the relationship between yourself and the earth.

13. They who have not fossil energy to defoul the earth and still want to be its master.

14. Frightened to lose their control of the earth, without finding love and without understanding it.

15. We have found that the solution is the same living just without fossil energy.

16. But you are my friend, you who have understood the earth and know they are all lying.

17. You laugh at them. How you would like to laugh aloud!

18. They call you an imbecile 19. If your words have roots in a primitive civilisation older than their ignorance.

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20. The earth is calling you, so run away to loneliness.

21. And do not forget your grape vines.

22. To understand the earth you do not split a grain.

23. You yourself are its reality and drink death as an elixir of life.

24. And you do not design for the wretched of earth.

25. Because everything is in its rightful place.

26. My friend, I leave you to the vultures.

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Thirteenth Song: Homeland

1. We desire an earthquake to unearth the past.

2. An earthquake that will make a ruin of our civilization.

3. A sustainable ruin.

4. After the end time the embryo of our primitive past will be reborn.

5. The human was not born for torment.

6. I dock myself in wait for a typhoon to take me to this ground.

7. The helpers wait beside, watching isolated and alone.

8. There is no sermon, no words.

9. Not for you who call yourself northern and have the world at your feet.

10. Not for those you call themselves southern and, wilder than you, fight the earth unaware of its rage.

11. Not for any weak human being, with a pitiful grasp on life and earth.

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12. One day our vessel will float on the water and our painful substance will understand.

13. Where is your place in this typhoon that flies from east to west?

14. You, who have in hand from the ancient east what makes an earthquake in the west.

15. Till the time that the world is overturned and fresh shoots appear.

16. Your homeland is in between a western wasteland and a dead eastern culture.

17. Your vision is neither forward nor backward, but towards a different birth.

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Fourteenth Song: The Way

1. Today’s immigrants are not of war or natural disaster.

2. Maybe natural disaster helps the old mind die.

3. My songs are like a beacon for the painful substance that can stand the world no more.

4. Thinking is always abstract and begins with a song.

5. It takes form as a garish decoration for your home, 6. Until by trickery it finds a way into society 7. And it will live among you in the buildings of your city.

8. There are many traps on the way 9. That will entangle those who do not understand.

10. It seems that the poison they inject with education into man’s substance is not enough.

11. Traps of biennials and exposés.

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12. In the murmuring crowd where everyone builds without pain or passion and pseudo-art abounds.

13. How will suffering man hear my song, this product of my self-love and only hope?

14. In this crowd of cheaters and clowns 15. Who talk of the equality of civilisations 16. And take the meaning of light from the furnace?

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Fifteenth Song: The Prophet’s Story

1. The prophet was an artist and in his seclusion in the desert made his own earthen sculptures that rapidly returned to the earth. They were not of the kind that finds favour in a democratic society, in which one must give the people what they want. Maybe that is why they do not develop. Who was prepared to pay for such short-lived constructions? In contrasts with previous prophets he had nothing to do with the people. He knew that the masses always behave like imbeciles, and the government that arises from a majority will be the very symbol of folly. The people looked upon the songs and sculptures of the prophet and called him mad. Yes, he was a lunatic building a lifeboat for the coming typhoon. At one moment he questioned his behaviour.

Was it not preferable for him to drown in the typhoon and with him the world?

Was it not a better idea to live like a 37

creature among the other beasts? Who ordered him, he who called himself the godless prophet? Was not the cheating of the major prophets the source of colour in this world? He was looking at his Persian cat. The creature seemed to him to be like a wind-up doll: living without thinking. Wasn’t he himself a wind-up human, looking for an excuse to live? Was it not that the whole world was wind-up and even if he died he would be a part of its clockwork cycle? Even in death he would be a cog in the mechanism. Such pain occurs when you see there is no escape even in death. He said to himself: “Prophet, continue on your way and overturn what exists until you prove you are not wound-up.” At that moment a strange sense awoke in him. He sensed he is not a prophet but a creative god, with death and life in his hands. He said to himself: “What you overturn is the lying image of immortality, and what you bring is the joy of being united with the earth and soil, a joy 38

that culminates on death. I will enjoy being wind-up and so sustainable. Thus I will have the power in truth; the power of that which exists in nature, and my destruction will be too vast for words. I will flood the earth. So choose to make your boat. This earth will give you the power of destruction. This is the appearance of the human being as god and the appearance of soil on the earth again.�

2. Strange that from the depth of hopelessness, where even death provides no solace, you can reach a new depth in life for you to flood with joy and happiness.

3. Oh wind-up doll, would that you proved your autonomy 4. By the turn of your immortal key!

5. Your will awaken dead hearts.

6. The prophet didn’t remain lonely, nor in poverty, because the power of earth nurtured him.

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7. Cleansing man from the earth was much simpler than he thought it would be.

8. The period of loneliness and poverty took a mere ten years.

9. And each person used an earthen and mortal sculpture to decorate his home 10. Because the philosophy of death overpowered that of life.

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Sixteenth Song: Luminescence 1. The new city will be made of adobe in the desert where your home is mortal.

2. The new city is heavy because it talks to the earth.

3. And light will sing in its spaces.

4. Our future architects will not only design the birth of buildings but also their death.

5. They will design the death of your home like its birth, because death is the most beautiful smile.

6. And the tools with which they communicate to the earth will help this process, 7. Like interpreters.

8. <POEM> 9. Now everything is illuminated.

10. A rarefied future that bears us to the summit with our earthen happiness, like domestic animals.

11. In a part of this earth cycle that has no autonomy.

12. Man will not lose this happiness when death is a smile 41

13. And birth is no delight.

14. Then the god of the sky will wage war on the god of the earth.

15. But we will not offer sacrifices to the god of the sky.

16. Because the god of the sky rained his fire on the earth.

17. He will burn in his blaze.

18. Bring wine.

19. The mind does not exist. Nothing exists.

20. Thus man will celebrate throughout the world 21. When he fills his glass from the clay jug, and with his most beautiful smile embraces death.

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