The world is divided into those who drive on the left, and those who drive on the right, apparently in a proportion of one third to two thirds. Although surely it would be more convenient if we all drove on the same side, the choice, made in the past, to go for one or the other, has now been carved into the landscape and could not easily be changed. Does this difference matter? Certainly it imposes costs on car manufacturers, and there are costs also in human effort and, perhaps, in accidents as people abroad, accustomed to driving on one side, have to adapt to driving on the other. These costs would almost certainly be exceeded by those resulting from changing the handedness of all the roads across a whole country – both in money, and in accidents as an entire population adapted to their new roads.
A contention that driving on the right or the left is equivalent presupposes that human beings function symmetrically; that we can as easily do something to the right as to the left – and we know that this is not true. Clearly, in a car in which the gears are changed manually, it cannot be irrelevant whether we are using our left hand or our right to do so. People are predominantly right handed, and thus it would seem that, for most of us, we should be able to change gears more ‘naturally’ in a left-hand drive car.
right traffic in France
Now this point may seem a tad trivial – after all, right and left handedness is a matter of statistics, even in the individual: studies have shown that there are many tasks in which a right/left choice has to be made – from writing by hand, to unscrewing the top off a jar – and that, across this range of tasks, a right hander will not always preferentially use his right hand; each individual thus having a more or less fixed pattern of right and left hand use across a range of tasks. No doubt, as left handers do manage to adapt to a right handed world, anyone is capable of learning to be proficient at changing gears with whatever hand he is required to use by dint of where he learns to drive.
However, a more profound aspect to this lies in the functional asymmetry in our brains: brain functions seem to be unevenly distributed between our left and right hemispheres with a specific distribution that is even found in most left handers. The preference we have, to use one hand or the other for this task or that, derives from this asymmetry, but is by no means its only consequence.
From my understanding of Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary, the right hemisphere perceives the world as a whole, is deeply attuned to the particular, the individual, the immediate; and has no problem with ambiguity and paradox, with complexity and unknowability. The left hemisphere, by contrast, is obsessed with abstraction, with wheedling out underlying geometries, with generalities; what it perceives it dissects and analyses. It focuses on what it knows and seeks certainty and single, definitive answers.
Now it seems that the left hemisphere is strictly aware only of the right half of our field of view, whereas the right hemisphere is aware of the entire field (even though it specifically controls the left eye). So, for example, if you are driving on the left it is the left hemisphere that is aware of oncoming traffic; if you are driving on the right, it is the right hemisphere that performs this role. This is only one implication, I’m sure you can think of others.
This all suggests to me some interesting questions. Could it be, for example, part of the explanation for the different way that people drive in right-traffic and left-traffic countries? Is driving on one side of the road inherently safer than driving on the other?
Disclaimer: I know that the photos prove nothing – I only wish I had found more amusing ones to, tongue in cheek, illustrate my thesis
A friend of mine sent me this article and asked me what I thought about it…
Well, I champion all kinds of advances in technology – not least the advent of the ebook – however there is the ever present temptation that because we can do something that we should do it. The creeping digitisation of everything – from music to video, and now books – makes all of these media infinitely malleable to anyone who can afford a computer; a device that is becoming an universal ‘solvent’. Digital objects together with the internet must surely eliminate traditional distribution systems (with their limitations of penetration of, and consequently of access to, that distribution). For good or ill, the marriage of computer and internet is bound to tear down not only the traditional gatekeepers of all the medias (publishers, record companies etc), but also the gates they guarded and must, ultimately (barring the intervention of political ideologies and/or corporate imperialisms – though these interventions, I believe, must ultimately fail), give everyone access to everything digital. Though this outcome forms a part of my creed, I have made the statements above because I believe that these freedoms are inherent in the structure of the internet – or, at least, in how that structure is likely to develop given human nature.
Evolution of the internet could lead to all kinds of blissful outcomes one of the greatest of which, surely, would be that an artist can freely create and give (how an artist is recompensed sufficiently to allow ongoing creation is another issue) his or her creation to whoever is interested in experiencing it. However, though the internet tends to thin the boundary between an artist and the experiencer of his or her art, much (all, even) could be lost if this boundary thins too much: the experiencer must not begin dictating the nature and content of the artist’s creations. I say this not because I believe this would be detrimental to the artist primarily, but because the real victim would be the experiencer – for surely any value that the art may have for that person is that it provides a unique expression of the artist’s psyche, and that it comes from the viewpoint that he or she occupies in the world.
The notion that we should use ebook technology as a way to enable readers to control what a writer actually writes is abhorrent to me. How could this not further increase the already overpowering commercial pressure on an author? How could it not end up with all books converging on the same book – a book effectively written by a vast committee?
It seems to me that the beauty of a flower is not likely to be best realized by attempts to force open its bud.
No doubt, wherever you may be, you have been experiencing anomalous weather conditions for several years. We are constantly being told that this winter is the coldest since records began; that this summer the driest, this quarter the wettest, this spring the earliest. Though many of us suspect that this must have something to do with global warming, we are told that there is not enough evidence at present to prove that.
As I understand it, the nature of complex systems is that they can be in one of several stable equilibria, and that the transition from one to another, can sometimes be instant, and at other times be accompanied by violent oscillations. A lightbulb, on the verge of failing, often flickers of and on repeatedly, until it finally goes dead.
Spring is an example of the complex system that is the weather, shifting from one steady state, to another. In my experience, winter does not shade gradually into warmer weather, but rather it ‘flickers’ between ‘winter’ and ‘summer’ weather, often several times during a single day.
I have been wondering if the anomalous weather we have been experiencing in recent times, is another example of this phenomenon – an analog to the ‘spring transition’ that is occurring on an extended time scale – and that we are living through the oscillations as our climate shifts out of the mode that we have experienced so far in our lives, into a new, man-induced mode; a new stable climate state that may be very different from what we know. No doubt there will be winners, but I suspect most of us are going to be losers – and whatever happens, it seems the roulette wheel is already spinning.
When I came back from Iran, towards the end of last year, it no longer felt the best time to dive in deep into something as challenging as my Persian book. Over the summer months I am far more sociable than at any other time of year, and thus more distracted. So, I decided it was best to set the Persian book aside and, instead, I threw myself into writing a sci-fi novel set in and around my home in East Lothian – a dark story somewhat in the John Wyndham manner. I was making good progress with this when a graphic novel project, that I had been working on in the background with my friend Adrian Smith, burst into life.
Writing, scripting and storyboarding graphic novels has turned out to be very natural for me – and, as I’ve written before, given how ‘visual’ my books have been thus far, this is hardly surprising. Adrian and I started off on a project called Malta in September 2010 – and, though I produced a complete design, and Adrian did perhaps half a dozen pages, somehow it lost impetus (though I am currently absorbing it into a new project that I am developing with Adrian). It was our first attempt to work together (after the work we did on Kryomek back in the 90s) and we both learned a lot from it.
Our current joint project, entitled War in Heaven, is the first of several books centred around our heroine Eve Ryman, and is our retelling of part of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is now complete and we seem to have found a publisher for it in a US startup called Madefire. Madefire has just launched an app for the iPad and publication would, initially, be exclusively on that platform.
It occurs to me that, rather than individualism leading to consumer culture, it is the other way round. Perhaps this is obvious, but it is only recently that I have become aware how – with each choice I make; for the clothing I wear, the furniture I have in my home, the kind of soap I use, the kind of food I choose to eat – I distance myself from my fellow man. I see him and cannot help noting the choices he has made and reflecting on – judging, even – what this says about him. When he looks at me, no doubt, he draws his own conclusions.
This process of ‘becoming by consuming’ has deepened as I have grown older and, concurrently, as the amount of ‘things’ I can purchase have become ever more diverse. It seems to be this very diversity that is one of the primary reasons that people everywhere crave the ‘consumer lifestyle’. Those who live in consumer cultures claim, and are claimed to be, individuals – this seems surely true, however I do wonder what exactly this ‘individuality’ consists of. How much is this ‘individuality’ merely a description or classification of the mass of objects and lifestyle choices that has a human being at its centre? If a consumer has the misfortune to lose all his possessions, by becoming a refugee for example, does he cease to be an individual; and, if he does so, does this come about because of how he sees himself, or how others see him – or both?
Is it possible for someone to become an ‘individual’ without the consumerist system that supplies him with the objects that he uses to define himself – to others and to himself? Is it possible that a person belonging to an isolated Amazonian tribe might not be able to become an ‘individual’ – at least in the sense that this self-identification transcends that of the group. In the Amazon everyone, presumably, would have access to the same materials with which to make artefacts and to adorn himself. The need for artefacts to be functional, and the limited repertoire of such functions and of the methods for creating such functions, must necessarily make most everything that he possesses indistinguishable from that that his fellows possess. Unable to sufficiently accentuate and differentiate his ‘individuality’, would the group naturally become his primary mode of identification?
It seems to me that an argument can be made that, the more consumerist a society is, the more atomised it becomes. When choice of clothing is essentially unlimited, even a random selection of clothing would leave you dressed differently from other people. Thus ‘individuality’ is forced on us more by the circumstances in which we live, rather than by being inherent in a person. Consumerism amplifies the small variations there are between you and others, until these become prominent both to other people and, crucially, to yourself. Seeing yourself as different from other people isolates you from them – they become ‘other’. By this means, surely, social cohesion is increasingly diminished. People end up isolated in their individuality. What part does this play in explaining how unhappy and unsatisfied we are in consumer societies?
Carl Jung compared a human life to a single day, in which we are the sun rising, reaching to the heights, then slipping down to night. Today I am 51, and this image strikes me again now, as it did the first time I read about it. Jung maintained that the first half of life, for all its confusion and dissonance, is relatively easy, as, like the sun, we rise ever higher, casting our light over ever greater reaches, seeing ever further. Eventually we reach our midday, the midpoint of life. When this occurs varies, it seems to me: I am not sure if someone who dies in their 20s achieves their midlife in their teens. I suspect not. I suspect that this is like the sun being snuffed out mid-morning – a powerful metaphor for the shock of early death: psychically, a wrenching insult against the ‘proper way of things’. What is more problematical is whether, in any place or time where most people die at 40 (say), midlife is reached at 20 – I suspect so – that we map our lives, subconsciously, to the time we think we have. This leads naturally to how this perception changes when considering lives, like many lived today, in which people expect to live longer than their parents. I wonder indeed if this indistinct, slipping end point may not be part of the reason for some of our confusion about death. Not that that seems to me likely to be the main reason for such confusion; this surely has to do with the obsession we have with the morning of our lives – with youth. For what is this other than an obsession with keeping our gaze fixed on where we came from, rather than on where we are going?
Jung said that the secret to life is not the morning, but rather the afternoon. For it is then that our sun begins to descend to its ultimate quenching. Jung talked about a process he terms ‘individuation’ – that is the setting right of those things within us that are in disorder. Analogous, perhaps, to the feeling people often have who know they are soon to die of wanting to put their affairs in order. Certainly, by the end, we lose everything: literally everything. But it is not as if we reach our sunset carrying everything we have accumulated in life. Much of what we have had we will have lost: family, friends, our vigour, our hair, our teeth. But also, if we are wise: our fear, our confusions, our lusts, our greed, our gluttonies. Perhaps also, admittedly, our hope is lost (for I have no belief in an afterlife). Looking back to youth, an ever harder thing to do with failing sight and memory, is surely to get it all wrong? When moving forwards, looking back must be wrong. Worse, like any threat, death is more terrifying if you turn your back on it.
So, I am 51 today, and very happy to be so, happy to be in the afternoon of my life. Happy to accept that I no longer can find the right words in conversation, and that I forget all kinds of things all the time. My hair is performing a disappearing trick and many of my appetites have diminished. But I am more present than I have ever been – and that makes me see reality a little more clearly, and the time I have left moves more slowly. I am more at peace with myself. I value silence more, solitude, but also other people. I am more tolerant of my faults and failings, and thus those of others. I worry for the world, but do not feel any longer it is somehow all my responsibility. I do what I can. Most of all I advance, a step at a time, enjoying the view, trying to face in the direction I’m going.
I am returning to flesh out my contention that we are living through a new Renaissance, because I feel it helps me make sense of what I see happening around me, and I hope it may be of use to others out there…
For most of human history, the number of ‘artists’ working at any given time were necessarily few – thus perhaps the excitement with which we unearth any artefact, however basic – and the further back we go, the greater the amazement with which we greet such finds. Rightly so. But how can we compare our time with any previous one? It seems to me obvious that today there are more artists living and working, not only than there have ever been but by several orders of magnitude. Further, these artists have access to more influences, and to vastly more powerful tools, than any of their forebears; so much so that I feel we are now living through a period of creativity unprecedented in human experience.
Consider first how much greater the population is than it has ever been: when I was born in 1961 there were less than 3 billion people on our planet; now there are more than 7 billion! Further, because of spreading education, an ever larger proportion of that population is reaching the threshold where artistic production is possible; because of increasing wealth, larger numbers are able to find the time to engage in creative endeavours; also because of these factors, the audience for such creations is constantly growing.
This New Renaissance is simultaneously fed and over-fed by the ever increasing speed and interconnectivity of our forms of communication. Fed by near-immediate access to all previous and current creative work: over-fed because the feast provided is so rich, that it is hard not to consume it gluttonously – to the point where the urge to create can be choked.
In the past, individual ‘geniuses’ arose as isolated spikes in a largely flat landscape. The rarity of such people was a natural consequence of how modest the population was, how close to the breadline, how ignorant. This ignorance meant that anyone lucky enough to receive an education, shone. Exceedingly slow communication, if not outright isolation, meant that each ‘genius’ fed on a unique diet of influences and so his productions were necessarily unlike those of any other.
The internet ensures that ever few artists are isolated in this sense. (Even those that are will most likely be, by the same token, deprived enough so as not to have the ‘entry fee’ to the creative community). Artists today, increasingly, feed on the same input as each other, and can, at all times, maintain a clear view on what their peers are doing. Thus there is a tendency for creative production to become homogeneous. Nevertheless, the sheer breadth and depth of the creative community (consider how only relatively recently women have been allowed and able to participate) means that, even along the crest of this perpetually breaking wave, peaks do appear, and those in huge numbers. Adding to this is the ever increasing speed with which the feedback loop of influence-creation-influence is spinning.
This seems to me an explanation for the explosion, the tsunami indeed, of creativity that we are experiencing sweeping us forward. In the first Renaissance, on top of the limitations I describe above, the ability to create was further limited by the patronage needed to provide an artist with the means to create. Today, everyone is a patron – the creative community is itself so vast it has perhaps become a source of patronage on its own. Once we find a new compensation model that will allow the universal publishing and distribution machine that is the internet to spread our creative products without restriction, then I expect the New Renaissance to flower brilliantly…
I came back from my adventure in Iran becalmed; no wind in my sails. It was foolish to expect to find those things I sought there; as if travelling were like going to a supermarket. Iran was a profound experience that I am still processing.
Soon after I returned, my dog, Ninja, died; at 15, a frail old lady by the end. Her kidneys failed. I cradled her in my arms as the vet injected her with an overdose.
Christmas came. I grumble every year and tell anyone who wants to listen (or who doesn’t) that I hate it. I abhor the way capitalism goes rampant. But this is only a layer thrown over the faded one the Christians, in turn, used to cover up the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Beneath all the layers, there lies the hope and expectation, in the depth of winter, of the sun’s rebirth; the hope there is in the year beginning to swing back towards the light, towards the resurgence of Nature. This is a deep yearning, particularly in the North of the world. At this time I am forced out of my hermitic existence into the company of people, into the embrace and drama of family. Perhaps there too I (we) seek a rebirth.
A rat dug its way into my house and took up residence in its walls and ceiling. The beast never actually got into my house proper – into those parts I live in. Well, my sister claims she saw it towards the end of its ‘visit’ scurrying across the floor, but I wonder if that might not have been a mouse. We often have mice, but a rat seems altogether more threatening. Is it the folk memory of the Black Death that makes us so afraid of them? Apparently they carry disease, though I wonder if this is true of a country rat. Out here what is it that makes a rat, among so many other wild creatures, particularly odious? Even in the city, I would think that any disease a rat brings into our houses comes from the filth that we spread around us; perhaps we hate rats because they remind us too much of ourselves.
In spite of my, no doubt, sentimental love of the country and its beasts, I tried to kill him. But he outwitted me. Several times I found the trap snapped closed, with the tahini bait (I had run out of peanut butter) stolen. A couple of times I found a poor field mouse mangled in the jaws of the trap. When I tried to block his entry tunnel with rocks, he dug under them and, as if to mock me, took to racing about in my ceiling. Eventually I closed his tunnel with chicken wire. I think he’s gone now. By the end of his visit, I had become quite used to him. In spite of my ancestral fears, I wonder why I should resent some creature seeking shelter within the no-man’s land of the hollows in my house?
A gale blew a tree down over the power cable to my house. For three days we had no electricity. The thin skin of the human virtuality tore. The cold of winter seeped into my home. We scurried about trying to get things done before the sun went down – for, afterwards, though we had candles, trying to find anything, or do anything, was far more difficult. There was also silence. A profound and absolute silence. The rarest, strangest phenomenon: the one thing that cannot exist in the human virtuality is silence.
In the end, desperate to reconnect to that virtuality, I dug out the generator the previous owner had left, and that I had not laid eyes on in the four years I have lived here. Miraculously (seemingly so, for one used to electricity appearing ‘magically’ from the sockets in my walls), pouring gasoline into it, we could run the central heating, have showers, even power the TV for an evening. Very strange this business of converting gasoline directly into TV programmes. Also strange was discovering how much energy each system consumes: boiling a kettle caused the roar of the 4.8KW generator to rise to a screech.
So, with the skin of ‘civilisation’ torn back to reveal the cold, unforgiving and relentless reality beneath, I was left casting nervous glances towards the finite amount of gasoline I had disappearing, anxious it might run out before I had finished watching my programme.
So many of us now live entirely cocooned in the human virtuality, that it is almost impossible to see the underlying reality upon which we build our lives. Living in a house in the middle of nowhere, I would seem in a better position than many to glimpse that reality, yet it takes a storm for me to ‘really’ experience it – and what was my reaction? – a determined bid to reconnect, to force my way back into the cocoon.
Just a quick post to comment on the ‘situation’ in Iran. Friends and family keep telling me that I’m “lucky” to have got out of Iran before this business with the British embassy in Tehran blew up. I cannot help but notice how the coverage on the TV here is very similar to that that I saw before I went to Iran. I cannot help further noticing that the comments people are making to me now – about how dangerous Iran is – are the same as they were before I went.
This seems to me curious on various levels. If I hadn’t actually been there I would have concluded – as everyone else seems to be doing – that yes, indeed, Iran is somehow ‘dangerous’… and yet when I was actually there I not only felt that it wasn’t dangerous, but I actually felt noticeably safer there than I would in many parts of the UK. In spite of having reported on this – acting almost as a live reporter for my friends and family – none of what I said seems to have softened people’s attitudes towards Iranians.
I don’t know if what is happening there indicates that something has changed – violently and for the worse – but, from my experiences, this seems to me unlikely. Instead I am left wondering why it is that the view of Iran from here is so completely different, so unrelentingly negative, than it is from over there…..
I wrote this on 19_11_11, but the internet went down at my hotel and, with the interminability of adding photos to this blog on a slow internet connection, I decided to finish this up at home.
I nearly cried when I walked into the main hall of the Imam Mosque in Esfahan – overwhelmed by the beauty of that vast space. Perhaps the effect would have been almost as powerful had it merely been a plain stone edifice, but the lovely blue tiles that cover its surfaces simply stun the senses. The proportions and the scale of the building, the way its volumes connect – some closed, some open to the sky – and how this space is further articulated by columns and vaults – these factors alone would have made it one of the most majestic buildings I have ever entered. But it is those tiles that raise the building to a sublime level; forming a surface of such complexity that you would imagine that the eye would become bewildered, but that doesn’t happen, instead the tiled surface emulates the fractal complexity of nature, but in a way that is supra-natural.
The face of the mosque, the massive gateway that overlooks Imam Square (until recently called Naqsh-e Jahan, ‘the pattern of the world’ – as I think was the mosque – as it is still is by most Esfahanis), is actually an immense ceramic mosaic, but Shah Abbas, the sovereign who had all of this built, was told by his architect that if they proceeded to sheath the entire building in that manner, that it would take decades and that, indeed, the shah would not live long enough to see it completed. Reluctantly, the Shah agreed to allow the work to be finished with tiles. An interesting story that speaks of ambition and of what it took to pull off an achievement of such grandeur and magnificence in a pre-industrial era.
There is something about the structures of this period (called Safavid after the dynasty, and roughly contemporary with James I in England – the sixth in Scotland) that seems to me to speak eloquently about the Persian soul. Beyond its almost ‘computer graphical’ decoration, this mosque displays a clarity of vision, a purity of form that seems almost Modernist. Apart from some rolled up and stacked carpets, there is no clutter of any kind. Both in it’s lean geometry and organic detailing, it could be the discarded shell of some cosmic crustacean.
Halfway down the side of the immense square (apparently, the second largest on Earth, after Tianamen – though it manages to maintain a human scale), there is the smaller Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque. My mouth literally fell open as I walked into it. Tiny in comparison to it’s bigger brother but, with it’s exquisite tiles, it seemed more a piece of porcelain than a building.
If I consider these two wonders along with the sublime, restrained Bagh-e Fin – a formal garden I later visited in Kashan – then I begin to sense the presence of a very particular way of appreciating the world. This garden, it’s division by water channels into balanced quadrants making it clearly a direct successor to Cyrus’ garden at Pasagard, seems modest in comparison with the baroque excesses of, say, Versaille. Not here the vast scale that deliberately attempts to cow the visitor before the glory of a sun king, nor the over-elaborate and deliberate geometries that attempt to display the dominion that man has over nature – but rather a reverie that a poet might experience while contemplating the mysteries of nature (admittedly a poet of a mathematical bent). Formality without oppression and – in the case of the mosques – scale that does not crush the spirit of the onlooker, but rather fills him with wonder; detail that does not weary his eye but suffuses it with delight.
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I met Akbar in the Great Bazaar at Esfahan. A charming, softly spoken gentleman with excellent, iodiomatic English. He took me down to see his carpet ‘warehouse’ – a large room beneath the bazaar; the place is an ancient warren. He talked to me about the nomads whom he visits regularly to purchase those pieces of their work that, having used them for years, they replace with something newly made. Labours of love, since a nomad woman weaves and embroiders each piece for her family following patterns that perhaps her mother has passed down to her, or merely indulging her own artistic vision. Akbar is sad that the lifestyle of these people, one that has thrived for millennia, is likely soon to disappear – because their children, educated (presumably by the state?) are choosing to move to the cities and, without them, the nomad way of life is bound to perish.
Esfahan has factories that make carpets by hand, carpets that are much more ‘perfect’ than those made by the nomad women. These are the carpets that Akbar says most Iranians prefer, though both he and I dislike them – for they look very much like those made by machine. He grumbled that his wife won’t let him have any of the nomad carpets that he loves in his own house. We had tea together in a tiny cafe in the bazaar and talked about the state of the world, and he took me to see the dyes being ground (no longer by a camel driving the grinding stone) for colouring the wool for carpets; to watch cotton being printed by hand from wooden blocks; and tiles being made for mosques and houses.
With his son, Kourosh (Cyrus), we talked about the difficulties that Iranian men have in getting married. Now this is something that I had already learned about from Karim on the train. He moaned that he did not have enough money to get married and told us that this was a common problem in Iran. Joachim and I quizzed him about this because it seemed so contrary to the preconceptions that we have about the relationship between the genders in Iran. It seems, at least according to these men I have talked to about it, that women are promised money as part of the marriage agreement. The minimum is, apparently, something in the region of $100,000 – though it can be a lot more (and bear in mind that the average wage in Iran is at best only a third of what it is in the UK). A wife can demand this money from her husband at any time and he has to pay it to her in gold coins. Downcast, Kourosh admitted that he is paying a large sum to his estranged wife at one gold coin ($600) a month. I’m not sure that this isn’t something akin to maintenance payments – though there were no children involved here.
What with this and other things I have been told, I was left believing that women in Iran are actually very much in charge – this is certainly what every Iranian man I have spoken to claims. However, I had only heard one side of the story – naturally, because women are less likely to open up to strangers, especially if they are men. Claudia, a German traveller I met in Kashan, told me a different story. She had talked to Iranian women and they had told her that a husband has the right to beat his wife – and that such beatings are not uncommon. Further, a wife cannot obtain a divorce unless her husband chooses to give it to her. So that, even if she leaves him, she will remain in the limbo of still being his wife unless he chooses to release her. She cannot marry another man, and is still under his control.
So, apparently, there is some kind of balance of power between the sexes, but not, it appears, equality; rather an asymmetric ability that each has to hurt the other.
Further, I have had it reported to me that the Iranian young are miserable. I suppose I could have quizzed those of them I have talked to, but when I may have had the opportunity to do so, we talked about other things. Nevertheless, I have observed, in Esfahan, teenage couples on park benches, or down by the river, seeming to be lost in each other much as young people anywhere. However, these sightings have been rare in other cities. Mostly, girls and boys seem to form separate societies. You often see young men walking around hand in hand. Two such asked me to take a photo of them against one of the beautiful ancient bridges that span the river at Esfahan. I regretted almost immediately not having asked them if I could take one of my own – because then I could have shown you. I’m sure they would have been more than happy to let me. They behaved just like a ‘couple’, though I am certain they were not gay. It is just that the injunction here against touching women is very strong and so it seems to me that men end up – women too, no doubt – forming perhaps more intense bonds with those of their own gender than they might otherwise do.
Several women have expressed to me irritation at having to cover themselves. They vary in the way they choose to do this: from looking like ‘nuns’, to wearing their hijab so far back on their piled up hair that it looks like it is just about to slip off. Even those who look like nuns can often wear considerable amounts of makeup, not to mention stilettos.
Finally, a couple more pieces of data for you to mull over. First, a woman taxi driver, entirely shrouded in a chador, playing heavy techno as she drove and nodding along with it. Second, a woman nearly 40, very capable, who has chosen to remain single, because – she said – the Iranian men she had come across, however liberal, have all had a ‘foundational layer’ of traditional attitudes, that meant she was not allowed to be herself, and so she is not only, potentially, risking having no children – an ambition that everyone here, male and female, seems to hold – but also she is attempting to emigrate to North America.
I don’t pretend to any knowledge of this issue other than my observations and what people have told me, but it does seem to me that the notions we have in the West about gender relations here are probably uninformed, simplistic and bordering on prejudice.
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The visa that I obtained in the UK, with quite a bit of hassle, allowed me precisely 30 days in Iran. Alas, this and the stamp put on my passport when I entered the country – while half-asleep passing my passport from my bunk on the train down to an Iranian border guard – are all in Persian script and dated according to the Persian calendar. Now I can read the first, but never made the attempt to come to terms with the second. I merely asked a few Iranians and they told me that it ran out the day before I left. This was what I expected. I had bought the return flight on the basis that it was the shortest and cheapest, and did not leave at an unholy hour and, according to my guide book, getting a visa extrension is a simple matter….
Early on my first morning in Esfahan, I got a taxi across town to the government office that dealt with visas. I was scanned, and my body and bag were meticulously searched. I hung about and was eventually taken into the chief police officer’s office and made to wait as he strutted about speaking loudly. When he deigned to notice my passport being waved in his face (by the police officer who had accompanied me) he glanced at it, said it was too early for me to seek an extension, and told me to go and extend my visa in Kashan. I was told that would be very easy. I was left feeling a tad nervous – my guidebook didn’t even mention Kashan as one of the places where visas could be extended… besides, it says that the process can sometimes take up to a week and, if I did not wish to miss my flight, I could only stay 2 days in Kashan.
So, when I got to Kashan, I asked the receptionist at my hotel what I should do. The impression he gave me was that this was an unheard of notion. He made some phone calls and could find out little, except that there was a building I should go to somewhere near a faraway roundabout. Off I went. A taxi dropped me at said roundabout and then I asked for directions and was sent to a building that was flying Iranian flags and to whose railings were attached many quotes from the Quran that -and the pictures of Khomeini often ringed with flowers, and his successor Ayatollah Khamenei (who looks remarkably like Alec Guiness!? – Kind Hearts and Coronets comes to mind) – often indicate government buildings.
Eventually I managed to find a guard tower with a soldier in it, and he responded to my comments of: “passport, visa” by pointing in a vague direction. A rather keen man standing nearby took it upon himself to get me there. We jumped into his car – the engine of which kept cutting out at the most inopportune times – and proceeded to drive around, stopping to ask anyone he saw for directions. Back and forth, this way and that, while all the time he grinned insanely and we exchanged various English and Persian words in a conversation Alice in Wonderland would have found exasperating. At last, his enthusiasm exhausted, my driver pointed me up an alleyway, and drove off.
Rather unconvinced, I wandered up it and found an open door in what looked like a block of flats and, climbing several floors, found, to my surprise and delight, that it led to some kind of government office. After being redirected several times, at last a man behind a desk drew a map for me, and even took me back down to the alleyway and pointed in which direction I should go.
Off I slogged, eventually reaching the roundabout I had started off at. The drawn map was less than clear. I wandered along behind a park, past any number of buildings that looked decidedly residential. Finding at last another guardhouse, I asked the soldiers in it for help. Eventually, one of them came out and walked along behind the bars, and got some old man, on my side of the bars, to take me to a nondescript steel door set into a wall and left me standing there. I knocked. Nothing. I looked around me and there was no sign of life. I knocked again. Nothing. I would have walked away except that an old woman came to stand beside me, looking at the door expectantly. She knocked. Nothing. Then, after perhaps 20 minutes, a tiny porthole opened in the wall at which we saw a woman’s face. Soon after the door opened and let us into a tiny waiting room.
I showed my passport and tried to indicate what I wanted, with dodgy Persian and much hand waving. A police officer joined the woman and they both looked at me with puzzled expressions. I was saved by a man called Ismail who happened to come in wanting something and turned out to speak English. He acted as interpreter. I explained what I wanted, and the police officer said that he might be able to do something, but first I had to fill in several forms. Ismail kindly drove me to a bank that was about to close, where he filled in more forms for me, and bullied his way to the front of the queue. He deposited the money I gave him in the appropriate government account and then drove off. I returned to the steel door, handed over forms, my passport, photocopies Ismail had also got for me, mugshots (that I had had to have taken earlier) and was told to return the next day.
Back at my hotel, the receptionist laughed when I told him I was hoping to get the extension the next day. Not very encouraging that. Nevertheless I returned at the appointed time and, using another receptionist on my phone as an interpreter, the policeman told me that I didn’t need an extension because my visa was still valid for the day I was flying home….. Hmmmm…. Having paid my money, and feeling that it was better to be safe than sorry, I asked for and got, an hour later, my extension.
Incidentally, there and back, I managed finally to perfect my ‘I’m a Persian’ act – by mumbling my destination and staying quiet so that, instead of paying 20,000 rials, I only paid something less than 4,000. A triumph at last in my covert war with the taxi drivers!! Not that I’m suggesting that I’m an advocate of ‘stealth tourism’ – I’m as happy as the next man to be ripped off (in countries where I know what I lose is relatively little to me, and relatively much to them). I can’t very well see the point of a (relatively) poor country inviting tourists merely to have them spend just as much as one of its citizens. However, the feeling of continually being hung out to dry can become a little wearing…
So, from the gloom of thinking that I might end up having to somehow delay my flight, I found myself feeling rather chuffed that, in several ways, I had managed to buck the system.
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At the Ehsan House Hotel in Kashan – probably the most delightful and relaxing hotel I’ve stayed in Iran – I met other European travellers for the first time. If this appears strange it is partially because many of my destinations have been off the tourist trail, and that apparently Iran only manages to attract 56,000 tourists annually, and that this is, besides, low season.
I met Claudia as I was checking in, and as she was just about to leave, but we decided to have tea together, and ended up talking for so long, that it grew dark, and she decided to stay another night. Claudia is German and has been travelling around Asia for 3 years! We mostly discussed personal issues. Later, we were joined by Erwann, a Frenchman who lives in London and who has jacked in his job to cycle to Singapore from Istanbul. (As one does – remember Tom?) It seems that Asia is criss-crossed by European youths on bicycles. Of course the locals think these people are mad – for they know they’re ‘rich’ – and why would a rich man choose to cycle along dusty roads, breathing in diesel fumes for hundreds of miles? Of course, Erwann has been finding kind Iranians who had been putting him up – when he hasn’t been sleeping in the corner of some mosque.
The third member of this august group was an Austrian, Gernot. For some 20 years, he has been travelling as often as he can. His current job means that he is restricted to three two week holidays per year. He has been to some unlikely places: Ethiopia, for example. I would love to tell you everything he told me, it was all fascinating, however this is neither the time nor the place. What I will tell you is that we compared notes on places that we had both visited. Antigua in Guatemala, for one. When I was there in 2001, it was an isolated and crumbling colonial Spanish city and was much as it had been for centuries. He visited it 10 years later and reported that it’s old houses had been converted into shops and hotels; one even into the poshest Kentucky Fried Chicken he’d ever seen. The Mayan women who I had seen laying out their wares along the side of the street, were no longer permitted to do so. The textiles they had sold then had now been consigned to a sort of crafts supermarket. Similarly, Atitlan, a gorgeous blue lake high in the mountains, and ringed by volcanoes and native villages and that, when I was there, had a single, gently commercialised settlement that was filled with European hippies, now has every village full of hotels and tourists and international fast food joints. This in barely 10 years. When I was there everything seemed to be as it had always been.
Gernot told me of villages in remote parts of Laos, where he had witnessed a market in which he had been the only foreigner. Then, there had been only a couple of rooms that could be rented. On a second visit he found the place filled with hotels, and tour buses daily deposited more tourists than there were local people to wander around this once remote and working market.
As we mused sadly on how we tourists destroy what we travel to see and experience, it became obvious to me that I have been extremely lucky to come to Iran at this time. The problems that this lovely country currently is experiencing with some of the outside world have protected it from this tourist influx. That hardly anyone speaks English is a sign of this. Perhaps even the overhwelming warmth and friendliness the people here show to strangers is due to this: for, currently, we tourists are exotic creatures and, because the Iranians are precluded from travelling for financial and political reasons, we are the nearest most of them can ever hope to get to actually ‘touching’ the world outside Iran.
I have talked about the signs I have seen, the many signs, of how ‘progress’ is already causing much that was wonderful here to be lost. Akbar looked sad when he said that Esfahan had, when he was young, still looked much like Yazd – but the ancient houses and alleys had been bulldozed to be replaced with the characterless concrete buildings that, Gernot pointed out, make the suburbs of all the cities here look like those similarly spoiled across southern Europe, or all manner of other places across the globe, as we slowly rip up what was once a varied cultural tapestry and replace it with a monotonous, machine-made mediocrity. What is left here has shown me a glimpse of the amazing beauty that was once Iran.
Iran’s isolation will not last long. I have been told that there are already plans to increase annual tourist numbers into the millions. These will descend on those places I have visited and change them. The people will no longer see tourists as emissaries from foreign lands, but as an ever increasing part of their income. Can the hospitality they now give so freely survive being thus commercialised? Even if it does, tourists, locked away in their restored traditional house hotels – hotels too expensive for ordinary Iranians – will become isolated from the real people. Visitors will no longer have the incentive to struggle to understand and to be understood, for they will be hemmed in by Iranians who will speak perfect English, and so this incredible land will become just another ‘resort’ – another series of boxes to be ticked by tourists who can claim that they have ‘been there’.
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But let me not sign off on this sour note. I am writing this in a hotel in Tehran and tomorrow I fly back to Scotland and my normal life. I came here seeking to confront the Persia, that has lived and grown in my imagination since I was a child, with the reality of what it is and of the remains of what it once was. These aims have been more than met, though the deepest of these will take a while to assimilate: for example, I have not yet been able to describe my experience at Persepolis even to myself. I also came to see the landscapes and to look into Persian faces. This too I have achieved, and it is these experiences that have been the most powerful in my daily life here.
I came to Iran seeking ancient Persia, but Iran is a modern country, and Iranians are a modern people. Both seem to me almost like a lost part of Europe. I have felt profoundly at home here. The warmth of the welcome the Iranians have extended to me has touched me deeply and I am humbly thankful to them for that.
But Persia still lives in this land and in these people, and Persia is something deeper than Iran. The Iranians are a people in which greatness sleeps and I look forward to when they resume their proper place in the world, for theirs is a voice that I believe we all need to hear.
