To live, one needs imagination and memory. Infrastructure, a home, light and electricity all have their place; but alongside them, and sometimes even before them, there must be imagination and memory that make it possible to endure the pain and weariness of living.
Living in that, living in this very moment, however much it may keep the tills ringing for the peddlers of pop psychology, is, without a yesterday or a tomorrow, a wasted life, and by no reckoning is it worth the suffering the world heaps upon us. At any given moment, a person is either preoccupied with yesterday and its memories or caught up in tomorrow and its imaginings. At night, when a person wants to lay their head on the pillow and close their eyes, they call their memories back once more and then, in a wistful courtship with them, whisper under their breath: “It was worth it.” Or in the morning, when they throw back the covers and open their eyes, the imaginings of a new day, the hopes waiting at the door, melt their heart and stir in them the desire to go outside. Without memory and without imagination, living is futile suffering.
Memory and imagination are to be sought in places more than in times. Time has little room for remembering and imagining. Details, which are the substance of memory and imagination, cannot fit between the seconds. And when details cannot find their place in the telling of memory and imagination, memory and imagination grow blurred. Vague and shapeless.
Recording and preserving memory and imagination in time gets us nowhere. They spill out of time’s inadequate vessel, and their details, the very things that give them life and color, are lost. Time falls short both in summoning memory and in recreating it. Memory needs repetition to stay alive, while time cannot be repeated. Time goes its own way, leaves us behind and carries on; its return and recurrence are merely crude conventions of our own making.
Places are different. brick by brick, they know how to devote themselves to the details of our memories, and because we can return to them, pass through them again and again, each visit lends those memories greater color and substance. Imagination, too, is tied more closely to place than to time. Imagination is simply memory not yet lived, and it is always less attached to the time when that life will come to pass than to the place that will spread itself beneath it. “Spring in Shiraz” and “Autumn in Tehran” are, at heart, romantic imaginings, longings for particular places, accompanied by countless small and precise details we have conjured from those places 1.
The targets of bombs that strike places are not only the lives of the people who happen to inhabit them at that moment. Their mission and purpose, especially in this geography, is to assassinate every memory and every imagined future attached to those places. Each place has been the setting for memories, dreams and imagined futures, built up through all its details and small features 2.
A missile that targets Gandhi Hospital and its fertility and IVF clinic ruins years of hope, waiting and imagined parenthood for men and women who dreamed of becoming mothers and fathers. The tilework of Masjed-e Jāmé of Isfahan and the mirrorwork of the Mirror Hall of Marble Palace that cannot withstand the blast wave leave the collective and individual memories of generations of us shattered and scattered across the ground.
When the timbers of a familiar café, renowned across the city, collapse into one another, they bury beneath them the imagined dates of thousands of tomorrow’s lovers—and the memories of thousands of yesterday’s. The philosophy of science classes and the GPU-filled rooms of Sharif University’s computing center, the laser laboratory at Shahid Beheshti University, the shops of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, even that fried chicken shop on Motahari Street; all of them have been inseparable and indispensable parts of the imaginations and memories that have made real life in this city possible.
All of these can be rebuilt. Better, bigger, roomier, more prosperous, and more modern ones. But imagination and memory cannot be rebuilt at the same speed. They need the passage of a lifetime, and repetition upon repetition, before they take root, come alive and grow.
Memory and imagination are identity, both for the individual and for society. And places are their principal ground. You cannot take a people and move them to a new place, surround them with new places and all the technological infrastructure necessary for life, and expect them truly to live; a life that for years has taken shape in and around and through other places, bound by memories and imaginings woven into the very brick and concrete of those places 3.
Some, of course, tried to do just that. Inevitably, they turned to constructing an imagined collective memory, so that life in a new land might become possible for an immigrant population. But so far, the result has been the assassination of the livability of the people who already live in that land and its surroundings, through the destruction and rubble left behind by bombs that fall day and night on places filled with other people’s memories and imaginings.
Their strategy and practice across all the lands of this geography goes beyond taking lives: it is the assassination of imagination, the assassination of memory, and the assassination of livability. Wherever that idea takes root, the possibility of living is plundered from everyone else 4.
Mohammad-Javad Shaker Arani was born in Aran and Bidgol, a city in Isfahan Province, and currently lives in Tehran. He is a physics graduate and works at a technology startup. In his free time, he occasionally writes and has collaborated with several publications, including Daqiqeh analytical magazine.