Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” is one of those works of witnessing that speaks to the reader as powerfully in the present, when the Archipelago is no more, as it must have done in the 1960-70s when the Soviets kicked him out of the Soviet Union for writing it. Two days ago I had finally managed to lay my hands on the third volume (Parts V-VII) of this monumental work, and since then it has become the reading material for my moments of reprieve (which, by the way, is also the title of one of Primo Levi’s powerful memoirs of witnessing, in his case, of the Nazi death camps).

In Chapter 5 of Part V, titled “Poetry Under a Tombstone, Truth Under a Stone”, Solzhenitsyn recalls the time from his sixth year of his imprisonment, when he was sent to a remote camp in the Kazakhstan steppe, when the desire to write became all consuming. But since he was forced to burn up the drafts of anything he wrote, as soon as it was put on paper (since a prisoner was not allowed to keep anything he wrote unless it is a poem in praise of Stalin), he describes the method that he came up with to keep the lines from vanishing in this fashion:

“In prisons the composition and polishing of verses had to be done in my head. Then I started breaking matches into little pieces and arranging them on my cigarette case in two rows (of ten each, one representing units and the others tens). As I recited the verses to myself, I displaced one bit of broken match from the units row for every line. When I shifted ten units I displaced one of the “tens.” (Even this work had to be done circumspectly: such innocent match games, accompanied by whispering movements of the lips or an unusual facial expression, would have aroused the suspicion of the stool pigeons. I tried to look as if I was switching the matches around quite absent mindedly.) Every fiftieth and every hundredth line I memorized with special care, to help me keep count. Once a month I recited all that I had written. If the wrong line came out in place of one of the hundreds and fifties, I went over it all again and again until I caught the slippery fugitives.

In the Kuibyshev Transit Prison I saw Catholics (Lithuanians) busy making themselves rosaries for prison use. They made them by soaking bread, kneading beads from it, coloring them (black ones with burnt rubber, white ones with tooh powder, red ones with red germicide), stringing them while still moist on several strands of thread twisted together and thoroughly soaped, and letting them dry on the window ledge. I joined them and said that I, too, wanted to say my prayers with a rosary but that in my particular religion I needed hundred beads in a ring (later, when I realized that twenty would suffice, and indeed more convenient, I made them myself out of cork), that every tenth bead must be cubic, not spherical, and that the fiftieth and the hundredth beads must be distinguishable at a touch. The Lithuanians were amazed at my religious zeal (the most devout among them had no more than forty beads), but with true brotherly love helped me put together a rosary such as I had described, making the hundredth bead in the form of a dark red heart. I never afterward parted with the marvelous present of theirs; I fingered and counted my beads inside my wide mittens – at work line-up, on the march to and fro from work, at all waiting times; I could do it standing up, and freezing cold was no hindrance. I carried it safely through the search points, in the padding of my mittens, where it could not be felt. The warders found it on various occasions, but supposed that it was for praying and let me keep it. Until the end of my sentence (by which time I had accumulated 12,000 lines) and after that in my places of banishment, this necklace helped me write and remember.”

I wish I can type this whole chapter up, but nevertheless this beautiful passage (and also a timely reminder to self) shows that if one wants to really write (or create, in general), one must come up with one’s own rosary.

Thee shall not buy any more books. Thee shall learn not be turned on by book sales. Thee shall not use books as psychotherapy. Thee shall not clutter thy bed with books. Thee shall not hide books under the bed. Thee shall not exceed twenty boxes of books. Thee shall not open more than five books the same night. Thee shall do whatever thy book-lovin' soul desires and demands.

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Various Specious Self Justifications:

Solzhenitsyn's Part III of "The Gulag Archipelago" because you have the first two parts, and you have actually read the some 2000 pages of them.

Six back volumes of "Best American Poetry" from 1988 to 1994, because you have the volumes from 1995 on, and you have to know the lay of the land, oh for the past ten or so, to become a "Best American" poet yourself.

Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into The Wreck" because how can you not pick up a book with such a title. Besides isn't it iconic already?

Elias Canetti's novel "Auto-de-Fé" because he is a Nobel Laureate whose work you haven't read, and besides this book is really really a gift for your book supplying friend, C.

Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" because you want to be enchanted again, as well as enchant others. Besides what a deal, you can get this book for only $1.50

....

Thee shall not come up with more self justifications to go back to the sale in the next few days.

Iran is one of my fetishes, which surely began in my childhood, (in Grade 5 more precisely I think) because of a casual conversation with a classmate, in which she revealed that she had spent her early years in snow covered Tehran. For a kid, who was given to Bruce Chatwin’s “What am I Doing Here?” like geographical escapism, the actual fact this girl had actually lived elsewhere soon proved to be irresistible point of departure into fantasy. Soon afterwards I was looking up Iran in an encyclopedia in one of the 'library periods' we had, instead of reading the usual dose of Hardy Boys adventures. Finally, I have had the chance to indulge even more this Iranian (or Persian as I prefer to refer it) fetish here in America, fueled in large part by the discovery of Rumi's and Hafiz's poetry.

Given this, my eyes perked up when Sepia Mutiny featured this article on the arrest of Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, a Iranian scholar recently in the Kafkaesque Mullah-Land. As the odds go, I had actually encountered Ramin Jahanbegloo in the Indian blogsphere before that, specifically through this post at Chandrahas Choudhury's literary blog "The Middle Stage", in which Chandrahas discusses a book of conversations titled "Talking India" that Ramin had collaborated on with Ashis Nandy. I would also recommend reading this exchange of letters in which Ramin discusses the relevance of 'The American Dream' to other countries of the world, and pray that he would soon be able to escape the Islamo-Kafkaesque situation he currently is trapped in, safe and sound.

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More coincidentally, it was only last week that I happened to pick up, for $1 in the trash racks of a second hand bookstore, Elaine Sciolino's excellent chronicle of her own Iran watching as a reporter for Newsweek and New York Times starting from the cusp of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, titled "Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran". While the book is a bit dated - it came out six years ago when it appeared that Iran was undergoing its own version of Perestroika under Khatami - it still provides thinking points to a lay observer in view of all the war of words going on between far out folks sitting there in Tehran, and here in Washington DC.

First point: yes, life in Iran can be a bitch if you are any kind of a free thinker, who is engaged in or want to engage in any kind of creative production. If you are a rock musician, you better kiss your electric guitar goodbye before your ass is transported to Evin prison (built by the American 'puppet'/ shah) for the crime of 'westoxcification'. But then didn't Alan Bloom, the godfather of many of the Washington Neocons, in his best selling polemic, "The Closing of American Mind" indicate that one reason behind the decline of thought and great souled longing for love vis-à-vis sexual promiscuity is the devil of rock music? I am sure Ayatollah Khamenei would have enjoyed parts of this book.

Second point: Even though dissent is suppressed in Iran, the conservative clerics are still far from attaining the Stalinist perfection of the Gulags. This is mainly because dissent and argumentation is inbuilt into Shia theological world that supplies many of the Iranian ruling clerics. As Sciolino details at length in her book, this has been on an ongoing low intensity jijuistu between those who think clerics should get out of the business of government and powerful clerics who would like to maintain status quo. So yes, while the Iranian regime is very well capable of sending out assassins on hit jobs to eliminate dissidents abroad, as well as prosecute horribly perceived opponents within Iran, it is still a far cry from Kim Jong-il’s supremely surreal totalitarian North Korea, another vertex of Small (everything is small except the bring-it-on swagger) B's Axis of Evil.