Awakening of the Self

On the album “Bi-Vājeh Goft-o-Go” (Wordless Dialogue) by Sepideh MeshkiWritten by Mohammad-Reza Fayaz (researcher and musician)

For the moment, setting the music aside—even the very title of this collection, “Personal States,” sends one’s mind down distant paths. Where has the “I” been situated, and where does it stand, in the Iranian mental universe—from politics to art, from livelihood and home to music? The author of The History of the Awakening of Iranians, in describing the first conversation between Mozaffar al-Din Shah and the constitutionalist clerics, writes: “This was also the first gathering in which the Shah, while speaking, uttered the words ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Before this, he used to say ‘we’ and ‘us.’”

If, in the end, the waves of struggle brought Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s “I” onto the stage, transforming that “we”—which must have been the distilled essence of a people—into a frail and helpless “I,” still Nazem al-Islam Kermani himself, not only because of his important role in stirring up those waves but especially because of his documentation of them in The History of the Awakening of Iranians, remains a singular figure who, throughout that six-hundred-page history, mostly stays merely “the writer,” or more often even “this humble writer.”

“This weak, mortal servant, son of Ali Mohammad al-Sharif al-Kermani, known as Nazem al-Islam, thus writes.” Nazem al-Islam was one of those countless individuals who never found the opportunity to fully bring the “I” onto the stage—although he himself was always present at the heart of events. This is a long-standing tradition among our writers: to hide the self within the text—behind an anonymous “writer,” within passive constructions, or dissolved into a general “we.”

A personal confession in a text dealing with personal states may make this more tangible: it took me some twenty years of writing before I dared to use the first-person singular in an essay. The Iranian “I,” which until the beginning of this century appeared only in mystical utterances and poetry, gradually had to awaken. As far as I know, the first person in the field of music to explicitly speak in terms of “I” was Vaziri. Pay attention to the powerful “I” of his 1925 speeches:
“I insist, in the name of these principles, in an art in which I have suffered and labored from the very beginning of my life.”

From that time on, the Iranian musician’s “I” began to open its eyes—through Colonel Vaziri and his rival, and perhaps in some sense his companion, Aref: eyes sometimes half-closed, sometimes half-open, sometimes pretending to sleep, sometimes performing wakefulness; occasionally, in one or another, eyes suddenly fully open… In any case, The History of the Awakening of Iranians can also be read as the history of the awakening of the Iranian “I.”

In my estimation, however, over the past fifteen years an unprecedented event has begun in the several-thousand-year history of this plateau: the Big Bang of “I”s. Whatever the preconditions of this Big Bang may have been, its results are a dazzling expansion of selves at an unbelievable inflationary rate. Every day a new “I,” like a newborn star, is born in this atomized sky—sometimes with one or two planets orbiting it, sometimes entirely alone in a corner.

I pass quickly through streets and alleys, for perhaps they still do not fully allow the manifestation of the whole truth of this eventfulness; I do not attend parties where the “I” shouts itself without restraint; a lifetime would be required to visit all the exhibitions where the “I” seeks to eternalize itself on a screen; who has the time to visit the thousands upon thousands of blogs where the “I” wants to share a corner of its lonely ceiling with others—let alone read all the comments! … Let us, then, turn only to our music.

What adds to the fascination of the musical story of this period is that within it two opposing trends have simultaneously and forcefully continued their lives: one toward expanding the audience as much as possible and pushing music toward massification and, inevitably, the dissolution of the “I”; the other, conversely, toward an ever more determined search for a distinctive “I”—both in the selection of content and in the choice of audience. One seeks to turn music into music marketing in its global sense, using the same tools, albeit with a local coloring adapted to Iranian taste; the other works to transform music into a space for breathing and personal manifestation, without concern for the market and sometimes even in opposition to popular taste.

Ali Samedpour has been among those musicians who, in nearly all areas of his activity—whether as a composer and performer or as a kind of publisher—has steadfastly and vigorously committed himself to strengthening this latter trend. From Chahargāneh Goushehs in the early 2000s to Ahvālāt-e Shakhsi-ye Arba‘eh in the early 2010s, Samedpour’s concern has not changed: designing a field for the play of “I”s. In Samedpour’s perspective, being “I” precedes being a “type.” This is a one-rule game: just be yourself; speak of your personal states.

Can this game be evaluated, and can anything be said of its good or bad, its ugliness or beauty? Layer by layer, the becoming of years of experience—called a lifetime—shapes something from each of us. For some, growing old means a license to enter anywhere and dictate matters everywhere; for others, myself included, it means utmost caution—how little we can know, and therefore how much more limited we are than to predict the outcomes of a process, especially when the meaning of those outcomes can differ immeasurably from one period to another. Dr. Shariati leaves us astonished every day at what we pull from our bag! It is better to observe the course of events from our own corner and, with many ifs and buts, speak only of our own taste.

Predictability, in our time and place, has strangely diminished. We have reached a season of strangeness: one can be in Tehran and align one’s personal states with the Native Americans of Peru; one can sit in a wind-catcher house in Yazd and extend one’s personal states to Manhattan, New York; one can take one’s personal states from the new city of Hashtgerd, with Gregorian pop planeshan, to a celestial ascension; one can, amid the sweltering sweat of Abadan, attune one’s personal states to London’s Albert Hall… Who can—or has the right to—erect a barrier against the surging waves of this endless multiplicity of Iranian personal states at the end of a century that began with the dream of awakening?

Humility is born of caution; modesty is no longer merely a moral trait but a condition of wisdom. All these preliminaries were necessary for me to explain why Sepideh Meshki’s personal states in Bi-Vājeh Goft-o-Go were, for me, listenable and delightful. In agreement with—or in defiance of—the taste of the times in Tehran in 2014, she takes her setar in hand; in agreement with—or in defiance of—the taste of the times, she tunes it to Bayāt-e Tork; and again, in agreement with or opposition to prevailing taste, she plays the same dastgāh music—one can tell from the details of her performance—that she has learned with a rare patience in our era, investing deeply of herself.

It is from here that Sepideh Meshki’s setar becomes distinctive, proving that it is indeed her setar; she needs no additional medium. Meshki’s personal states were pleasing to me, above all, because they were the personal states of a historical being: a person born into a situation, who takes the setar in hand within a situation (or has it placed in her hands—at some point it no longer matters), and who, within that situation, is compelled to be herself—fully accepting responsibility for her own being.

Our world would be more orderly if each of us deeply understood that, whether good or bad, we are all beings confined within a historical framework. But when endless personal desires on one side and the simultaneously false-yet-real possibilities of the virtual world on the other fling each of us in a new direction every day, how can one ask anyone to submit to the limitation of historicity? This is neither a duty nor a recommendation; only on the basis of a personal choice can one live historically.

Does living historically, in this view, mean the total acceptance of history and the dissolution of the “I” into a presupposition? No. I believe living historically means, first, understanding oneself as a link in a chain of seemingly unrelated events; second, entering into dialogue with this very existing history—sometimes criticizing, sometimes praising; sometimes seeing epic, sometimes not forgetting farce; sometimes seeking to uncover mysteries, sometimes fault-finding with all this veiling of truth… but in any case, viewing those who have gone before with compassion. In the end, we are all travelers.

Meshki’s language of dialogue with her history is not archaic; she is not among those who view music as an archaeological subject. The words, sentences, and phrasing of Meshki’s music are the language of the contemporary setar, from Ebadi onward. While the resonance of the presence of all contemporary masters can, in some way, be rediscovered in her dialogue, this presence is not of a kind that traps Meshki as a bound disciple. What expands the scope of her freedom is that the course of her music, in not a few instances, moves somewhat away from the typical possibilities of a plucked instrument, adding to its lyrical character through a kind of vocal phrasing.

This achievement could only have been possible through great technical ability and masterful execution; Sepideh Meshki lacks nothing of a full-fledged virtuoso—perhaps she even has something extra. She is too perceptive to turn virtuosity into a means of self-display, and it is precisely from here that her music gains depth. If only the timing and the way the tracks of this dialogue are linked were not such as to pull us, even for a second, toward the surface of innovative special effects. Aside from this, even in the lively leaps of its rhythmic pieces and colors, there is not a single pluck that does not bear the mark of her empathetic inwardness in her unpretentious, complaint-free dialogue with anyone, anywhere in this history.