Letter IV

My dear son 🍃

Yesterday a friend sent me the link to a website whose introduction spoke of publishing letters "far from the clamor." The introduction held that what is scarce these days is "a place to whisper... quietly, with reflection, and with thought... without... the need to convince... without... shouting... without... labels... and without necessarily offering" solutions. The writer, of course, made no mention of the importance of "listening" as a precondition for "speaking" (be it in the form of a "whisper" or a "shout"). It's likely that all those people who are shouting, instead of speaking, at some point felt no one was listening and were so forced to raise their voices. And, in any case, every speaker presupposes a listener, and in this logical order the listener comes before the speaker.

But the sending of this link coincides with a period when I am in America to be with you for a short while and to renew our emotional bond. We live apart and our means of communication during this time has been brief phone calls. When the 39-day war broke, as with the 12-day one, the internet went with it. It has been about two years now since you came to the States to live with the parents of your late mother. Your not being in Tehran with me carries a feeling of incompleteness. I don't want to say more because you may take it personally; that is, you may feel that I am trying to blame someone for the situation; I will say more if you ask me, though.

You're starting your senior year of high school in the autumn and, if all goes according to plan, the following year you should become independent and begin university. Which means sooner or later you would go your own way. This having-to-go-your-own-way is one of the requisites of our life as members of the middle class. We are somewhat bound and respond to the prevailing culture we find ourselves in, which, in the case of the modern middle class, sees the individual and the fulfillment of her/his desires as paramount. In this culture the individual is far more important than the society to which he or she belongs, and individual success is the most important thing a father or mother can hope for in their child. And for this reason, your being in America, away from your life in Iran with me, and "choosing" the path you want to take is seen as gospel.

When you came to Tehran for two weeks in December, I promised that I would come to for the run of Anastasia, the musical, in which you play the Bolshevik officer, torn between revolutionary proclivities and the mandates of his heart. With the ceasing of fire and after the start of peace negotiations in April, an opportunity to travel to the US came up. Your successes in music and theater have been a source of pride, and at the same time they speak to the distance between the different lives that we lead. Every parting cuts many emotional strings. For someone whose personal and collective identity cannot be easily separated, it is hard to sever these strings without inflicting a wound. Perhaps human life itself is the story of severing and being severed of ties, and the tragedy that arises from these.

Your being in America continues to cast me as someone who "belong" to two places, two cultures, two orientations. Because of this I have to some extent lost the grace of belonging to one place (this is and will be your fate too). I can't render judgment on it, because it is part of the fabric of my life. I grew up in a family (and within a dominant culture) where individuality was the measure. I mentioned that when I was seven my parents sent me to a boarding school in Switzerland. I was supposed to become "modern" there, to learn civility, which the Swiss were emblematic of. They were the ones who knew what it meant to be civilized, representing all the good things Western Civ. has granted us. I know my father sent me with that intention, and my mother went along with it. When I fled Iran, ten years later, with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, this experience repeated itself and I landed in the laps of civilized people again, this time in an America that after the Iranian revolution of 1979 was regarded as the Great Satan and had little affection for the likes of me. I still carried the revolutionary spirit within me. The revolution had shaped itself first and foremost against global oppression. The slogans I remember of those early revolutionary days all spoke of imperialism and traced the source of all our ills to American interventions. When I arrived in America, I felt small and unsure of my identity but certainly defiant of the country to which I had migrated.

The Negah.com website has provided a platform on which I can speak with you in this way (everything comes down to medium). Proper conversation has been and is necessary to sustain our connection. How to say something so that it isn't misunderstood, so that it lands, so that it doesn't leave too much unsaid, and so that it lays bare what is within us, is only a part of what we call communication.

I believe that language inherently carries the seeds of misunderstanding to the same degree that it can lend support and bring certainty to our intuitive understanding of the world. We learn to speak to one another through words, and we often think speaking is the only means of communication, even if we've heard that words are only a small part of how messages reach their destination. Shorter writings, like those social media are built on, often lead to greater misunderstanding because they are brief and give the writer no chance to lay groundwork, and the recipient may take away something else. The advantage of this mode of communication is its consonance with the spirit of the culture that governs human beings in this age of speed in communication. Being in tune with the spirit of the age is not necessarily good, because (aside from conformity) it leads to the reinforcement of dominant behavioral patterns. At least with email we have more time to work on our conceptual building blocks, and there may be times we think we've managed to bring everything we wanted to say onto the page. This capacity for laying groundwork we can extend back to "snail mail," in which time played a decisive role. When you wrote a letter, you may have let harsh emotions come through, but you had to reckon that this letter would reach its recipient long afterward. So you inevitably took account of when it might be read in a more distant future.

In communication one must, before anything else, set one's intention right. Intention brings awareness and orders the discursiveness of the imagination. Keeping the flame of affection and love alive begins to make sense. To preserve a meaningful and deep relationship, capacity is needed, the capacity to face the forces (inner or outer) that move in the direction of disorder. I was reminded of this: "We may think love is a kind of feeling, but we can also consider it an ability." If we accept this proposition, that is, if we assume love is not only a "feeling" but an "ability," then "responsibility" enters the picture of its own accord:

🔅 If love is not only a feeling but an ability,
🔅 and every ability brings responsibility with it,
🔅 then love is a responsibility.

Responsibility in turn brings continuity and maturity, and maturity shows itself as love in the relationship between two people. I remember the late Kavous, who was constantly quarreling with Maryam. None of our nature expeditions ever ended without some pungent and unkind exchange between those two. Once we understood this feature of their relationship, it no longer took us by surprise, no longer caused embarrassment, we no longer wanted to fix anything, and it often even brought a smile to our lips. Perhaps we also came to see that these two had themselves reached such an understanding of their differences that they could live together. It seems to me that from a certain point on the pair had moved past the myths surrounding a romantic relationship – the idea that lovers must be kind to each other. They no longer felt the need to soften the sharp edges of their communication, to sand down the snags and catches, to be aligned, to be perfectly matched, in order for affection to flow between them.

To love, we don't need to present an ideal image of love, we don't need to first heal our wounds and sores, we don't need to like everything about each other to be, or to become, worthy of it. Love is the outcome and result of a valiant deed that compels the person to set him or herself aside and to marshal his/her best qualities to take on the project of love, not the responsibility of another person, but the responsibility of love. That is, I am granting love an existence independent of the duality of lover and beloved.

I overheard a conversation between two people:

- For a person to truly love another, they must first love themselves.
- But can you really wait around, holding off, until you love yourself before you can love someone else?
- Of course. When you haven't accepted yourself the ground beneath you is unsteady, and you lose the capacity to love.
- The ground beneath us is always unsteady, and moments accompanied by faith are rare.
- Love requires responsibility, and for that reason it needs a right-setting of intention, honesty along the way, and courage to sustain it.
- I agree with you that it needs these three, but love cannot wait for self-love to consummate.

The nature of our relationship suffers from a structural indeterminacy ("suffers" here in the common sense of "being subject to," since there is a kind of indeterminacy that can be creative, that can give you freedom of action, that can venture into experiment and risk). You have your own life, and so do I. Right now, you're thinking about university, and this alone has put a great deal of psychological pressure on you. You want to enter the world of musicals. You want to make a name for yourself. It's a hard road. You grew up in a culture where, however independent an individual may be, he or she remain attached to those around them and to their family. That fear of being alone, which is the driving force of an American to strive for betterment and success, is nowhere present. Now you must summon within yourself a strength to compete with your peers, all of whom have an unbridled drive for success.

On the other hand, I have my connections with many individuals and groups toward whom I have to be committed. When I say "have to," it isn't a determinism; it's what continuing and sustaining any relationship requires (in truth it is a necessity). That's why my life in Iran is important and meaningful to me.

One more point: what about those times when we can't or don't want to say something, when we do not feel like or are incapable of communicating? I very much like a literary critic's view on this. He gives us an analogy: when you pick up a book to read, there are many pages that for some reason (distraction, mental preoccupation, traumatic experience) you don't read carefully. This very not-reading-carefully causes each reader to have a different take on the text (because her or his blindnesses and insights differ from another's). It seems to me this is true not only of reading but with communication itself. In other words, the reason we have different takes is because misunderstanding is a part of communication.

I am writing this letter to be published on the Negah.com, but, to be sure, it helped me share what lies hidden in my thoughts, or at least a small part of it. If I can't remove the communicative gap between us, which we owe to our age difference, social setting, and generational distance, at least I can speak with you about its nature and lessen the possibility of misunderstanding. Human beings, while entirely dependent on one another and on the relations around them, are also independent of one another.

With lasting and warm feelings for you,
Sohrab,
July 2026

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