C O N V E R ZHANG A T I O N S

The Gunpowder Factory Pamphlets March 2015

C O N V E R ZHANG A T I O N S: 12 Hour Conversations with Arzhang

A Cognitive Experiment of Reciprocity

Abdulrahman El-Taliawi Arzhang Marzban

This book is for the reader who will actively partake in the authorship of this book

C O N V E R ZHANG A T I O N S: 12 Hour Conversations with Arzhang

Opening : Alarmed by the silence Correspondence 1: Why write a book Correspondence 2: To practice the quintessential everyday act Correspondence 3: Why write a book with Arzhang Correspondence 4: To be written as a book Epilogue : Where a better place to start

Opening 0A/29/03/2015 Alarmed by the silence

There was an old man who used to sleep peacefully in the market, despite the loud noises that the craftsmen produce as they hammer and weld, occupying as they do the middle spine that cuts through the marketplace. Until one day the municipal police arrived to confront trespassing violations, leading all craftsmen to withdraw their benches and tools in tiny indoor spaces, halting their once incessant and bustling activities. The old man then, alarmed by the silence, woke up in sudden and apparent distress.

Correspondence 1T/29/03/2015 Why write a book

In order to write a book, the first question needed to be asked is why, why write a book. If the book in its entirety can attempt to offer an answer to this question, it would be, itself, the answer to the question; i.e. the reason why to write a book.

To write a book is to dwell in a continuous act of writing that would be all the better nothing but a condensed exercise of everyday consciousness flowing in prose. To come together with such flow is an experience that is itself revelatory and profound. It has a degree of divinity in as much as it melts the already hazy difference/similarity between what is said and what is meant, what is known and what is thought to be known. A coming together of seemingly polar phenomena. This is a condition that incites us to write, or one that writing incites. This condition is thus a reason to why write a book.

Write a book that has a form that could be understood as a moment of suspension –where the process of writing/inquiring is suspended– to denote a benchmark, or a still image of a flowing process. A text that falls on the threshold between being a process and a form.

But there can be no better furnished reason for why to write a book, than Calvino's answer to why read the classics citing Cioran: "While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. "What use will that be to you?", he was asked.

"At least i will learn this melody before i die."

Correspondence 2AT/29/03/2015 To practice the quintessential everyday act

(on the telephone) T: Did you read the first correspondence?

A: No, to be honest, I haven’t read it yet.

T: You haven’t read the book that you should be writing? Are you busy?

A: Not so much, no. I was making eggs.

T: You’re making eggs? The whole concept of the book is that it is a compilation of 12 hours continuous conversations, so instead of the conventional 12 hours that you spend daily, such a waste of time if you think about it, how about replacing one 12 hour set in exchange for writing a book, for a change?

This being the concept, you receive the first correspondence and, instead of reading it in order to reply, you take the time to make some eggs? To practice the quintessential everyday act in the crisis-ridden 12 hours where you should be writing?

A: One thing i will tell you in defense: the eggs were very suitable for making omelettes!

Correspondence 3T/29/03/2015 Why write a book with Arzhang

As we have managed to flip past the first and second correspondences -a success in itself- trying to answer the question why write a book, then comes the necessary sequel to the question: why write a book with arzhang.

This is the interesting thing.

I met Arzhang. No. I discovered Arzhang. I shaped Arzhang, and he shaped me. Me and Arzhang were a battalion. Arzhang was my teacher, inasmuch as a teacher learns from their student. Arzhang was my friend and comrade in face of all the enemies.

Arzhang was the one and only enemy that we both had to conquer in order for our battalion to prevail. I never knew with whom exactly i was doing the conversations inside my head; if it was with me or with Arzhang. But i came to know that they also passed inside his. We played chess on a board. We played chess all the time. With Arzhang, every single act amounted for a political discussion taking place on a board of chess. I was never tired of repeating to Arzhang that if the state doesn’t shape itself after the ideal individual, how can it expect from the individual to shape himself after the state?

I should start from the beginning.

In the beginning there was void. We hadn’t met. We didn’t know each other. Until the magnificent event took place, and god said “let there be encounter”.

I was sitting on the side walk in front of the student’s dormitories in Piacenza waiting for my friends to pick up their stuff so we can go. We were

always on the sidewalk back then. They were the times we chose to be homeless, in order to give the homeless company. And then here he was passing by casually in the street before he noticed my chess board and stopped to talk.

A: “Is this a chess board?” You moved your first pawn.

T: “Yes.” I instantly moved mine.

A: “Hi, my name is Arzhang.”

T: Perplexed, i replied as my mind was suddenly triggered to think. “My name is Taliawi.”

A: "Can i be your antagonist?"

This move seems like that of a bishop bursting suddenly in a line of attack that, as confident as it seems, often turns out to be empty. The bishop doesn’t dare carry on because it is a conformist; it draws its ranking from brainwashing the pawns into sacrificing themselves for its sake. The thought of having an antagonist, though, seemed appealing for a fleeting moment. For the only meaning i can derive from having one, is that i would at last get to be a protagonist.

- “Sure, be my guest.”

Before that encounter, there was none. I cannot recall a memory of any incident preceding that encounter. I cannot determine whether it was a coincidence or if it was an appointment. Bubbles.

What mattered was the flow of the conversation. You make a move, and then it’s my turn. Move after move, we became friends. We didn’t exchange numbers or anything. We barely remembered each other’s names.

There was a light air of indifference that seemed to envelop each of our utterances. By time, this

monotony of dialogue was captured by each of us. Your turn, my turn, your turn. No surprises or overreactions. It was not the exchange of sentences or moves that made us friends. It was the mutual sense of silence that we had established through the monotony. I cannot recall what was being said in those lines, but i recall that they had set a base for meaningful conversations that would later take place.

--

I came to know Arzhang very well since. I assumed a certain sense of ownership over him as we implicitly agreed to take part in shaping one another. I nearly appropriated him to be one of my characters, as I have done before with myself. This is very convenient because, for one thing, he is a character that i own and can control in fiction, and for another, he is a person in reality, and hence viable for a vivid depiction and offers enough material for resourceful writing.

No one in Piacenza knew much about Arzhang then. They could tell that he was busy or confused in thought.

They could tell that he was in his old steel hangar at the periphery of the city working on something.

But they could never guess what it is. He didn’t speak. And when he spoke they didn’t care to listen.

His hangar was always dim, dusty and didn’t look like it was of any value. You would pass by after a long time to find the same scraps of wood and metal

leaning on the fired brick wall in front of the door.

We were very excited about how they could be used. We could cut them into pieces and weld them back in a different form. They could be a bunker, a satellite or a stair. They were charming because, as Arzhang’s primary subject of obsession, they were leftovers. I agreed with Arzhang. The scraps of wood and metal told a manifesto of sorts. As the workers of the world, they were oppressed. In the eyes of most people, they were ugly and useless. In the eyes of Arzhang, they were gold.

The chair that turned into a stair (2011)

Correspondence 4T/30/03/2015 To be written as a book

What is the attempt that is done in writing this book?

As exercised in the epilogue, a chapter that usually comes at the end of a work of writing, this book begins from its end. Beginning from the end means that every time you finish the text it will prompt you to start again, igniting a playback loop. It is also to give less importance to the notion of "beginning" since all beginnings are merely loci on which we agree to define a non-existent borderline between before and after; i.e. aren't all beginnings tied to prior conditions that bring them about?

Aren't beginnings, conceptually, tied to primal loci of conception?

What we have, thus, is a continuum in both space and time, a chaotic flow spreading in brownian motion wherein we, like surgeons, insert our scalpel skillfully to denote fallible Cartesian constructions, such as beginning and end. And though we acknowledge their reductionist nature, those constructions remain to be our sole tool to comprehending the universe, deconstructing, and reconstructing it once again.

A synthesis among ideal forms and material relativity would lead us to a fundamental description of nature with point, line and Riemannian continuum membrane as protagonists of its mathematical/geometrical model.

Point and line are not but Cartesian reciprocals that represent both facets of the material Riemannian membrane (continuum).

What, then, is the attempt that is done in writing this book?

It is an attempt to delineate a route, presupposing a map, of the everyday flow of consciousness. To investigate cognitive relations of reciprocity. To work within the minimal elements that comprise the work. To dissolve contradictions, without compromising meanings. To reconcile the poles to a gradient continuum, delineating upon it a route, presupposing a map. To write a book.

But most of all, an attempt to be written as a book.

Epilogue 0/29/03/2015 Where a better place to start

“

T: What do you say when i come, you and i

write a book?

A: I say there are things that shouldn’t be said abruptly.

T: This you should have told me years ago.

A: I borrow ”abruptly” from you, that evening when we were sitting on the stairs in the paessaggio with V and J, you rose suddenly and said “let’s go!”, entering into an alley that cuts the paessaggio beside the fountain to the left before stopping once again to ask whether your decision to leave was abrupt and if it was bad.

T: …and was it?

A: It was abrupt but it was good.

T: So what do you say we write a book now? We already have an epilogue.

A: We start from the end?

T: Where a better place to start?

”