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A Toast from the Sidelines

9th day of the war

When you’re privileged enough to be far from where the bombs fall, certain things begin to upset you more than the war itself. Today, insincerity and theater morality are taking up more space in my mind than America’s F-35 or Netanyahu’s attempts to hinder negotiations.

So I raise a toast today, to the people who are only loud about their opinions when they conform to everybody in the room with them. To the ones claiming a monopoly on morality. To virtue signalling. To the scope-creeping self-appointed lawyers. To the ones who offer you refuge, but only once they make sure you have another place to stay. To those who confuse post-crisis tourism with activism. The malapropists of “ash-watching” and “aid”. To the users of strong strong words, and the artificial intelligence war poets.

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Iran, Tomorrow (if there is one)

06/18/2025 (6th day of the war)

Iran, throughout my life, has been a series of surreal states. Each induces its own type of dream. In each of these episodes, I’ve had my own dreams. The Winter of 2022 induced particularly vivid ones. I dreamed of our martyrs Nika Shakarami and Khodanour Lojei, resurrecting in the form of murals, their faces taking the place of Khamenei and Khomeini’s portraits on the city infrastructures. Their names were sitting on street signs, taking the place of Sheikh Fazlollah Highway, and the like. Meydan Azadi’s name remained the same, but the word “Eslami” dropped from Enghelab Eslami Sq. I dreamed of an economy that wasn’t just oil-dependent. One in which we didn’t sell it for mere pennies to China. An Iran in which Afghan immigrants were no longer denied vaccines and basic human respect. I dreamed of the words Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz on foreigners’ travel lists. I saw musicians traveling to Iran, drawn to its traditional music and letting it shape their sound. Much the same way as the Spanish guitar today. I saw women wearing sundresses on a hot August afternoon, singing on Keshavarz Boulevard freely. In my dreams, there was no trace of theater-bearded, spot-foreheaded, buttoned-up-to-the-Adam’s-apple-shirted “politicians” stomping on our dignity in international forums, calling England “Inglis” and applauding when Tār is introduced as the national instrument of Azerbaijan. In my dreams, I saw our environment, historical sites, and many more.

Today’s surreal state was the paradoxical configuration of Tehran’s air: so clear one could see both Damavand and Azadi, yet it was laced with smoke. Amid this surreal state, many have been having dreams about the tomorrow of Iran. Some misguided, others hopeless, the remaining audacious. And I’ve been having mine too. By no means could I draw an even remotely detailed picture, but I already indicated that this is a dream, so it is okay… I dreamed of an Iran in which Iranians no longer so blindly followed the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” mindset. They had washed themselves of their reactive Israelism and didn't rejoice when Israel engaged in acts of assassination or sabotage on Iranian soil or international waters. They no longer said “Why do Palestinians make so many babies anyway?” or “LGBT for Palestine? Go to Palestine and see what happens.”. They no longer attacked pro-Palestine protests in the West. I saw an Iran in which Iranians recognized the glories of Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah, yet were over their arbitrary fetish with monarchism and didn’t toast to whatever Reza Pahlavi, the man with a podium and no job, said. Iranian-Americans who no longer worshipped Donald Trump. I dreamed of an Iran in which Iranians didn’t drop the words “Bloodshed is the only way to change.” So loosely.

There is no way to tell how far this could go and how much destruction Iran will face. The more days go on, the closer my dreams resemble nightmares. And how utterly weak I feel for all I could do is write.

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Not over a meter apart

Using that tiny window in which the internet is alive to post this. :) (06/18/2025 - Day 6)

Oh darling, we thought we would thrive 

There was a mythical beauty in our farm 

Golden and green fields, 

We thought we’d forever sing by the fire.

Until the day the insects swarmed over,

and killed all of our crops 

Oh darling, you took me to the town 

Where we got to know busy-ness

And all those new kinds of sounds.

Our room was much smaller,

But we were always dancing about. 

Until the day the troops marched over,

And took over our house.

It is not so different,

The ways in which the world is unkind. 

It’s a natural disaster either way,

But it’s fine as long as you’re around. 

It’s not so scary, 

As long as we’re not over a meter apart. 

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Why I will stay in Tehran

(Link to Persian version)

06/17/2025 (5th day of the war)

(Middle photo: Tehran oil refinery on fire.)

The flow in the veins of Tehran has only been outward in the last six days. A city that could barely sustain 80% of its 15 million residents is now exhaling them. The air is saturated with smoke, rumors of what this and that politician said, and vague notices of evacuation.

The geometry of the city is different. The military has replaced the IRGC at checkpoints, searching for traitors and Mossad forces, and Israeli missile parts instead of alcohol. The streets are empty, yet train stations and terminals are packed with people from all ethnicities and cultures. 

The formation of homes is different. Bath-tubs are filled to the brim but not to bathe in. The kitchen is stacked with canned food, a few six packs of water bottles, and more Coca-Cola ones. Family members try to stay in the same room in case anything happens. 

The configuration of the people shifted, too. Some are on edge, some are kinder than usual. Thirst feels slightly more unnerving as you now anticipate water outages.

As the smog grows and fills up whatever cavity it finds in the city, I become more determined to stay here. Relatives in Iran call, the ones abroad more so. Everybody has a house in a random corner of the country to offer refuge. I respond with my newly-found war humor: I will protect my family with the Iron Dome of my butt. 

Some left on the first night. Some stayed but left after the first window of their house crashed. Others are ready to evacuate. As long as you don’t step on other people to do this, the pursuit of survival, or the goal to share the same fate as your family in your hometown is sacred. But the rightfulness of what you do strongly depends on the thermodynamics of your mind. I saw a heroine in my friend as she placed her clothes, color pencils, notebooks, and makeup in her suitcase and looked on every website for a bus ticket home from her dorm in a targeted neighbourhood. When she made the sacrifice for her parents. 

And as I write this, during a nationalized internet and air strike noises, I would see a coward in myself if I stack my car with water, stay in the gas station queue for 4 hours for 30 litres of gas, and fill my bladder to the brim and drive for 5 hours merely to cross Tehran’s border, and then 10 more to get somewhere. Escaping to save my life to the point where I don’t even know why I’m trying so hard to stay alive.

This is the thermodynamics of my mind right now. My dignity feels in place when Trump says everybody should evacuate Tehran immediately, and I stay in my bed. I feel more worthy of my suffering when the Israeli Minister of Defense says Iranians will pay the price of their dictatorship with their blood, and yet I stay in my room and write. When I crack a joke and laugh as I film the air strikes every night. 

To be clear, this is not a tale of heros and I have read enough anti-war novels and watched enough remakes of All Quiet on the Western Front movie to feel the crippling absurdity of the situation. The absurdity of war in itself, along with the absurdity of the marriage of living in a dictatorship you have fought against for years, and holding the same side of the string with it in this war. The absurdity of how I could stay all of this and regret it all if I’m alive under the rubble. How I may go through something that will prevent me from feeling anything like this again. All I know is that I am in my element right now, and I am ready to leave if this changes.

It is curious how relevant this quote is by Alyosha from Karamazov Brothers. “You need not be afraid of life. Life is good as long as you do something good and just.”. Right now, I will be in this capacity only if I stay here.

Though I progressively lose my mind every night with the air raids, I feel normal still, at least most of the time. I rejoice when a foreign friend asks if I’m still alive and sends me pictures of the beaches of Vancouver, and I dance in my room to Espresso-Macchiato. And I’m having one hell of a time observing the shifting tides of my brain. 

See you in future war-related posts (hopefully).  

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Alam-Kūh (4850m) - 06/13/2025

I finally met you, and your formidable allure.

“They climbed the upward path, steep and obscure, Dark, silent, and impenetrable fog Encircled them. They neared the upper world. Then Orpheus, anxious, fearing she might fail him, Yearning to see her, turned his eyes — and lost her.” 

For me, the hardest part of the climb starts the moment your eyes can see the summit sign. From that point on, if you're tired enough, it seems as though you'll never reach it. So as I neared the end of my ascent, I decided that I must not look up again until I reached the peak. And I was thinking of Orpheus to the top. I looked up at last, and my Eurydice was standing there marking the end of the climb.

This was the most satisfying climb of my life so far, and the highest point I've ever stood. 

I was met with the news that Israel had attacked Tehran. (Some mountaineer had reception there.) I'm not here to talk about full-on war or the possibility of it. But this made me appreciate the mountains all the stronger.

This climb's theme song: Coming From the Mountains

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I’m so excited to meet you for the first time this Friday, darling. (#Alam-Kuh)

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The third-person pronoun in Armenian is not gender-specific. The title of this song, "Անոր" (Anor), can be interpreted as meaning "to him" as well as "to her". The poem is by T’elkatents’i (Թլկատենցի) (Telgadentsi), who was murdered during the genocide of 1915.

This poor heart of mine is all a-flutter, My body is all broken down with hopeless longing.

When the moon dares to shine, In this dark and endless night, I can see him, so divine, As the moon hangs on a cross.

If I were to see him face-to-face, I’d give him the rose in my hand, if he doesn’t want the rose, I’ll give him a golden apple.

If he doesn’t want the apple, I’ll tear out my hair to give him, And if he doesn’t want that either, I’ll tear out my soul to give him.

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Tochal (3963m) - 06/03/2025 (Link to previous Tochal)

It is not the ease with which the mountain child roams the mountains that gives her this title. It is her discomfort, the clash between her expectations and the heights she is able to reach. This is precisely what distinguishes the mountain child from a master of mountains.

6:20am-7:30 Sarband sq. to “Puppy Tower” 7:45-8:30 to Shirpala shelter  9:30-10:25 to “2nd Amiri view” (post #130) 10:35-11:05 to Amiri shelter (clock is fixed) 11:30-12:50 to the peak (with a 5 min break at the one hour mark)

Nothing blends as organically with the mountains as folk music. This is today’s theme song.

Some fun incidents: Dog guide: At some point, I wasn’t sure if I should go to the left or the right. A dog started staring at me and went to the right. He started going up. He would look back every few seconds to make sure I was following him. Naked druggie: I didn’t see this first-hand, but another mountaineer told me that he saw a naked drugged man close to the peak with zero equipment who was screaming for water.

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Тень Москвы

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I wrote to you in red Where the sailors dock And from here I have not left You’ve become my lock Still, the boatman never came Why I cannot guess Don’t you know it’s all the same? Every myth cheats death Just the same

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Текстура Санкт-Петербурга

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More Months

(A sequel to Four Months) 

The second greatest illusion in life is Catastrophism. This is the delusion that if you go to the Alps, every time you look into the mirror closely, you’d be able to make out a tiny Alp at the back of your eye. (The Bell Jar) It’s the thought that if you conquer enough mountains, you would trace the mountain ranges with your fingers on your left collarbone and all the profound wisdom you collected on your right. 

But wherever you go, you take yourself. When I was here counting the four months, I often pictured myself listening to forlorn Persian folk songs in my desolate North American room, and tear up. This did prove to be true: I cried a little every time I walked to the local cafe for my espresso playing Jane Maryam or listening to the words

به دامن این آسمان خدا، یک ستاره ندارم.

in harmonic minor. But I never made out why. Is there something special about the words revolution, bullets, persecution, liberty, honor and the like that stirs my inner aesthete? It is the poetry in them that causes me anger and bliss. Is there something special about me or the general texture of my experience that causes this reaction? If you trapped a man in a room and fed him works like Liberty Leading the People and Animal Farm, would he experience these motifs the same? Would he whiff the poetry in the tanks?

I’m back now. And nobody knows how utterly flawed and unspeakably lonely I am, because when I returned, it was I whom I took back and nobody else. The internal state looks the same, except maybe now the city’s geometry matches my outfit better. 

Now, I don’t feel the empathy I felt towards my novelesque experience when I was counting down the four months. I look at myself in the mirror too much to take myself seriously. I am aware of too many instances of embarrassingly doomed love not to find myself laughable. I’ve seen too many bare centimeters of skin, the ones no one has ever seen, to see myself as a serious prospective mathematician or artist. The Uncertainty is just as entertained as before with me, and sneers all the merrier. But today, it is accompanied by its polar opposite, Certainty. The absolute certainty that this is it. This is the absurdity of living in a single brain and frame, and only taking a break when you sleep.   

Yet I persist with the wanderlust. Maybe next week I will be able to feel the Patriarch Ponds on my waterline, and make out a mini Dostoyevsky resting on my cheekbone if I look closely enough into the mirror. All in the hopes that maybe those mountains will form on my collarbones the same way real mountains formed through millennia. 

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Kolakchal (3350m) - 05/08/2025

Though this dates before the previous two mountain reports, not having posted it was bothering me. There is not much to it that I want to discuss. (I’m still annoyed that this has to show up after the other reports on the blog.)

چو پا بر فراز کلک چال کرد  ز چنگ تهمتن رها یال کرد گریزان شده پور دیو سپید  تهمتن به ��خش اندر آمد چو شید

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Kholeno (4387m) 05/21/2025

I lost track of time, so I don’t have a precise report. It took around 2.5 hours to get from the falls to Jehanne Darc needles, with two 10-minute rests. The snow was deep and unreliable, so after a struggle to cross via the needles, we had to return after only conquering Borj peak (4310m).

The lack of enough oxygen made me sleepy at the top. I can’t help but imagine how beautiful a winter pre-mortem sleep at such a height would be.

Photo 1: Donkey missing Shrek Photo 2: Damavand peak Photo 5: Jehanne Darc needles

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Tochal (3963m) - 05/16/2025

6-9am Sarband Sq. - Shirpala shelter 10:05-11:45am Shirpala shelter - Amiri shelter 12:15 - 2:20 Amiri shelter - Tochal peak

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What I think about when I think about art 

This thought stream started when I was discussing the necessity of art in a person's life with a friend. This led to the question of what classifies as Art. Depending on how broad your definition is, you could include Minecraft architecture as an artistic endeavor or limit yourself to classical musical training and oil painting in specific styles. On the other hand, you could categorize some activities that conventionally fall under separate categories under the artistic umbrella: a mathematician obsessing over the elegance of proofs, or a soccer player gracefully strategizing the sequence and flow of his movements. This reminds me of a G. H. Hardy quote: 

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. 

My current stance is, there is art in everything. As the saying goes, life imitates art. In all honesty, one might see an artful Sisyphean flavor to a 9-5 office job. This is particularly resonant with the romantics. You can find the aesthetic value in everything. I am in the same state of mind when I view a minimal structure or a canonical morphism (mathematically loaded terms) as I am when I view a meticulously crafted sculpture of intricate details and yet no redundant appendages. I think the similarities in character between the obsessed artist and the isolated genius are testament to this. 

This philosophizing, however, is ineffective in solving my original problem of what the blueprint is to a life well-lived. That is a complicated question in its own right, and I don’t want to dissect it here. For my purposes, I will assume that this means setting finitely many canonical axioms and deriving every other rule from those, and I really mean this in the mathematical sense: I’m assuming there’s consensus (at least amongst non-Set-Theorists.) that the axioms of ZFC or the principles of Euclidean Geometry are selected naturally and canonically. (Fully ignore this bit if you’re not a mathematics pupil.) The only distinction I am willing to make here is that there is a psychological, hence relative flavor to the axioms you chose for your life, but you can still function axiomatically. So, shoving my romantic sentiments under the rug, my goal now is to treat the question of what Art is in the domain of pragmatism and personal development.

Let me digress a little. Plato believed in the existence of forms. As ChatGPT elaborated for me, this is: 

The abstract, non-material essences of things. According to him, every object we see in the material world is an imperfect copy of a perfect, eternal, and unchanging Form.

For example, all physical triangles are imperfect representations of the form of a triangle. There is no way one could categorize a circle as a triangle and vice versa. I don’t think Art can be studied this way. Categorizing art resembles the study of Biology more than it does conventional Mathematics: the holistic study of  “objects” and clustering them together based on similarities via a set of fixed attributes.  As it turns out, anybody with a vocation faces this complication. In theoretical sciences, for example, a problem might be in the domain of several academic fields, each unhappy with the methodologies through which the other parties approach the problem. (I dread the way cryptographers treat elliptic curves, and they find me utterly useless.)

So, what can be considered as Art? According to your mental algorithms, you cluster all human activities and label one of these clusters “Art”. I believe the only universal criterion for what classifies as Art is: undivided attention, deliberate stretching of the skill horizons, and an external projection of some form (sound, imagery, words, a new physical state of the world, etc.). In the end, I believe what we want out of Art is the internal state it simulates: The inclination towards observant understanding as opposed to judgement and practicality. So you are free to add extra criteria to emulate this state. I am not too prejudiced about the inclusion of the aforementioned criteria either. As I said before, this is a highly psychological matter. (Indeed, I am defining Art by the mental state it creates.)

There are still some problems that I can’t quite resolve. 

For example, do we need to include the Artist (at least implicitly) in the definition of Art as I did here? (Is AI-generated art, Art?) Additionally, with this definition, we may have to exclude some conventional artistic endeavors, such as the creation of music, from the Artistic category. As we advance in history, a lot of activities end up having a recipe: a formula that anyone could follow to synthesize a piece of craft. So the process of making music could be tantamount to an office job: choose 4 chords that are consistent with classical music theory, choose a prompt (you could pick one from a previously defined set like “heartbreak, falling in love, grief, nostalgia, ...”), write a few verses as you would do a report that’s on the more creative side. You have a song. (Again, Walter White considered himself the artist, and Victor the mere recipe-follower.) There are many more points of contention and unanswered questions. 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Goodbye.

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A Room of One’s Absolute Own

Blows the 9pm wind,  As I lean on the wooden fence near my home  There, where the smoke accumulates  The world expands infinitely in all vectors  Still I’m lone,  And I muse in this room of my own 

My neighbour walks out from the front door  My radius grows from two meters to four  I smile, he smiles back  He walks away, and my radius returns to what it was before  He raises his hands to his lips,  Contributes to the accumulation of evening smokes And sinks inward in that room of his own 

His back is facing me And all I can see,  are his black shoes, and his black pants  And a black coat with a silver stripe. I look at his graying hair  And then I look at my black braids   How many more years remain, Until they too, lose their colors and turn grey  And I reach the wooden 2 by 1 room of my absolute own