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My music life is a triangle-shaped island. I’d sooner not have a name for it. But I can elaborate some more on its three corners so I can get a clearer view of what it is surrounded by.
Vertex 1: The Mountain
I’m sitting in a room located in my great aunt’s old two-story house in Ibn Sīnā street, Tehran. There’s a bookshelf left almost abandoned from her late husband — a senator in Shah’s era — with me being its only frequent customer. A worn-out light bulb dressing the room’s lackadaisical absence of weather. There’s a thick photo book. On one page, there’s a mirthless yet horrifying photo of an unbearably old woman with wrinkles as authentic as a three-year-old’s scrapbook. I usually avoid that page for it has become an unfavorable nightmare. But the brainfuck of a turn of a page that has still entangled me is not the old woman. It’s somewhere else in the book: A blue mountain. No Freudian theory can describe its persistent presence in my head. The mountain is vast as though a vague future is to be seen on its pink horizon. You can almost hear the breeze just by looking at the picture. For me, it has been a spacious vacuum ready to be filled with the ever-unknown to come. It’s quiescent and scary in a daydream-integrated manner, inescapable like the…
