The Gunpowder Factory Pamphlets

March 2015

C O N V E R ZHANG A T I O N S:

12 Hour Conversations with Arzhang

A Cognitive Experiment of Reciprocity

Abdulrahman El-Taliawi

Arzhang Marzban

This book is for the reader who will actively partake

in the authorship of this book

C O N V E R ZHANG A T I O N S:

12 Hour Conversations with Arzhang

Opening : Alarmed by the silence

Correspondence 1: Why write a book

Correspondence 2: To practice the

quintessential everyday act

Correspondence 3: Why write a book with Arzhang

Correspondence 4: To be written as a book

Epilogue : Where a better place to start

Opening 0A/29/03/2015

Alarmed by the silence

There was an old man who used to sleep peacefully in

the market, despite the loud noises that the

craftsmen produce as they hammer and weld, occupying

as they do the middle spine that cuts through the

marketplace. Until one day the municipal police

arrived to confront trespassing violations, leading

all craftsmen to withdraw their benches and tools in

tiny indoor spaces, halting their once incessant and

bustling activities. The old man then, alarmed by the

silence, woke up in sudden and apparent distress.

Correspondence 1T/29/03/2015

Why write a book

In order to write a book, the first question needed

to be asked is why, why write a book. If the book in

its entirety can attempt to offer an answer to this

question, it would be, itself, the answer to the

question; i.e. the reason why to write a book.

To write a book is to dwell in a continuous act of

writing that would be all the better nothing but a

condensed exercise of everyday consciousness flowing

in prose. To come together with such flow is an

experience that is itself revelatory and profound. It

has a degree of divinity in as much as it melts the

already hazy difference/similarity between what is

said and what is meant, what is known and what is

thought to be known. A coming together of seemingly

polar phenomena. This is a condition that incites us

to write, or one that writing incites. This condition

is thus a reason to why write a book.

Write a book that has a form that could be understood

as a moment of suspension –where the process of

writing/inquiring is suspended– to denote a

benchmark, or a still image of a flowing process. A

text that falls on the threshold between being a

process and a form.

But there can be no better furnished reason for why

to write a book, than Calvino's answer to why read

the classics citing Cioran: "While the hemlock was

being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the

flute. "What use will that be to you?", he was asked.

"At least i will learn this melody before i die."

Correspondence 2AT/29/03/2015

To practice the quintessential everyday act

(on the telephone)

T: Did you read the first correspondence?

A: No, to be honest, I haven’t read it yet.

T: You haven’t read the book that you should be

writing? Are you busy?

A: Not so much, no. I was making eggs.

T: You’re making eggs? The whole concept of the book

is that it is a compilation of 12 hours continuous

conversations, so instead of the conventional 12

hours that you spend daily, such a waste of time if

you think about it, how about replacing one 12 hour

set in exchange for writing a book, for a change?

This being the concept, you receive the first

correspondence and, instead of reading it in order to

reply, you take the time to make some eggs? To

practice the quintessential everyday act in the

crisis-ridden 12 hours where you should be writing?

A: One thing i will tell you in defense: the eggs

were very suitable for making omelettes!

Correspondence 3T/29/03/2015

Why write a book with Arzhang

As we have managed to flip past the first and second

correspondences -a success in itself- trying to

answer the question why write a book, then comes the

necessary sequel to the question: why write a book

with arzhang.

This is the interesting thing.

I met Arzhang. No. I discovered Arzhang. I shaped

Arzhang, and he shaped me. Me and Arzhang were a

battalion. Arzhang was my teacher, inasmuch as a

teacher learns from their student. Arzhang was my

friend and comrade in face of all the enemies.

Arzhang was the one and only enemy that we both had

to conquer in order for our battalion to prevail. I

never knew with whom exactly i was doing the

conversations inside my head; if it was with me or

with Arzhang. But i came to know that they also

passed inside his. We played chess on a board. We

played chess all the time. With Arzhang, every single

act amounted for a political discussion taking place

on a board of chess. I was never tired of repeating

to Arzhang that if the state doesn’t shape itself

after the ideal individual, how can it expect from

the individual to shape himself after the state?

I should start from the beginning.

In the beginning there was void. We hadn’t met. We

didn’t know each other. Until the magnificent event

took place, and god said “let there be encounter”.

I was sitting on the side walk in front of the

student’s dormitories in Piacenza waiting for my

friends to pick up their stuff so we can go. We were

always on the sidewalk back then. They were the times

we chose to be homeless, in order to give the

homeless company. And then here he was passing by

casually in the street before he noticed my chess

board and stopped to talk.

A: “Is this a chess board?” You moved your first

pawn.

T: “Yes.” I instantly moved mine.

A: “Hi, my name is Arzhang.”

T: Perplexed, i replied as my mind was suddenly

triggered to think. “My name is Taliawi.”

A: "Can i be your antagonist?"

This move seems like that of a bishop bursting

suddenly in a line of attack that, as confident as it

seems, often turns out to be empty. The bishop

doesn’t dare carry on because it is a conformist; it

draws its ranking from brainwashing the pawns into

sacrificing themselves for its sake. The thought of

having an antagonist, though, seemed appealing for a

fleeting moment. For the only meaning i can derive

from having one, is that i would at last get to be a

protagonist.

- “Sure, be my guest.”

Before that encounter, there was none. I cannot

recall a memory of any incident preceding that

encounter. I cannot determine whether it was a

coincidence or if it was an appointment. Bubbles.

What mattered was the flow of the conversation. You

make a move, and then it’s my turn. Move after move,

we became friends. We didn’t exchange numbers or

anything. We barely remembered each other’s names.

There was a light air of indifference that seemed to

envelop each of our utterances. By time, this

monotony of dialogue was captured by each of us. Your

turn, my turn, your turn. No surprises or

overreactions. It was not the exchange of sentences

or moves that made us friends. It was the mutual

sense of silence that we had established through the

monotony. I cannot recall what was being said in

those lines, but i recall that they had set a base

for meaningful conversations that would later take

place.

--

I came to know Arzhang very well since. I assumed a

certain sense of ownership over him as we implicitly

agreed to take part in shaping one another. I nearly

appropriated him to be one of my characters, as I

have done before with myself. This is very convenient

because, for one thing, he is a character that i own

and can control in fiction, and for another, he is a

person in reality, and hence viable for a vivid

depiction and offers enough material for resourceful

writing.

No one in Piacenza knew much about Arzhang then. They

could tell that he was busy or confused in thought.

They could tell that he was in his old steel hangar

at the periphery of the city working on something.

But they could never guess what it is. He didn’t

speak. And when he spoke they didn’t care to listen.

His hangar was always dim, dusty and didn’t look like

it was of any value. You would pass by after a long

time to find the same scraps of wood and metal

leaning on the fired brick wall in front of the door.

We were very excited about how they could be used. We

could cut them into pieces and weld them back in a

different form. They could be a bunker, a satellite

or a stair. They were charming because, as Arzhang’s

primary subject of obsession, they were leftovers. I

agreed with Arzhang. The scraps of wood and metal

told a manifesto of sorts. As the workers of the

world, they were oppressed. In the eyes of most

people, they were ugly and useless. In the eyes of

Arzhang, they were gold.

The chair that turned into a stair (2011)

Correspondence 4T/30/03/2015

To be written as a book

What is the attempt that is done in writing this

book?

As exercised in the epilogue, a chapter that usually

comes at the end of a work of writing, this book

begins from its end. Beginning from the end means

that every time you finish the text it will prompt

you to start again, igniting a playback loop. It is

also to give less importance to the notion of

"beginning" since all beginnings are merely loci on

which we agree to define a non-existent borderline

between before and after; i.e. aren't all beginnings

tied to prior conditions that bring them about?

Aren't beginnings, conceptually, tied to primal loci

of conception?

What we have, thus, is a continuum in both space and

time, a chaotic flow spreading in brownian motion

wherein we, like surgeons, insert our scalpel

skillfully to denote fallible Cartesian

constructions, such as beginning and end. And though

we acknowledge their reductionist nature, those

constructions remain to be our sole tool to

comprehending the universe, deconstructing, and

reconstructing it once again.

A synthesis among ideal forms and material relativity

would lead us to a fundamental description of nature

with point, line and Riemannian continuum membrane as

protagonists of its mathematical/geometrical model.

Point and line are not but Cartesian reciprocals that

represent both facets of the material Riemannian

membrane (continuum).

What, then, is the attempt that is done in writing

this book?

It is an attempt to delineate a route, presupposing a

map, of the everyday flow of consciousness. To

investigate cognitive relations of reciprocity. To

work within the minimal elements that comprise the

work. To dissolve contradictions, without

compromising meanings. To reconcile the poles to a

gradient continuum, delineating upon it a route,

presupposing a map. To write a book.

But most of all, an attempt to be written as a book.

Epilogue 0/29/03/2015

Where a better place to start

“ T: What do you say when i come, you and i

write a book?

A: I say there are things that shouldn’t be

said abruptly.

T: This you should have told me years ago.

A: I borrow ”abruptly” from you, that evening

when we were sitting on the stairs in the paessaggio

with V and J, you rose suddenly and said “let’s go!”,

entering into an alley that cuts the paessaggio

beside the fountain to the left before stopping once

again to ask whether your decision to leave was

abrupt and if it was bad.

T: …and was it?

A: It was abrupt but it was good.

T: So what do you say we write a book now? We

already have an epilogue.

A: We start from the end?

T: Where a better place to start? ”