#عجائب المخلوقات و غرائب الموجودات

[bassia-bassensis]

في شرح العجب. قالوا: العجب الحيرة تعرض للإنسان لقصوره عن معرفة سبب الشيء أو عن معرفة كيفية تأثيره فيه، مثاله أن الإنسان إذا رأى خلية النحل ولم يكن شاهده قبل لكثرت حيرته، لعدم معرفة فاعله، فلو علم أنه من عمل النحل لتحير أيضاً من حيث أن ذلك الحيوان الضعيف كيف أحدث هذه المسدسات المتساوية الأضلاع الذي عجز عن مثلها المهندس الحاذق مع الفرجات والمسطرة، ومن أين لها هذا الشمع الذي اتخذت منه بيوتها المتساوية التي لا تخالف بعضها بعضاً كأنها أفرغت في قالب واحد، ومن أين لها هذا العسل الذي أودعته فيها ذخيرة للشتاء، وكيف عرفت أن الشتاء يأتيها وأنها تفقد فيه الغذاء، وكيف اهتدت إلى تغطية خزانة العسل بغشاء رقيق ليكون الشمع محيطاً بالعسل من جميع جوانبه، فلا ينشفه الهواء ولا يصيبه الفأر، ويبقى كالبرنية المنضمة الرأس، فهذا معنى العجب، وكل ما في العالم بهذه المثابة.

عجائب المخلوقات و غرائب الموجودات

[uselessfish]

So I don't lose them:

[tanyushenka]

Pages taken from: “The Wonders of Creation” (1280) Author:  Zakarīyā Ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī (1203–83). Title in Original Language: عجائب المخلوقات و غرائب الموجودات   Zakarīyā Ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī  spent most of his life in present-day Iran and Iraq and served as a judge in Wasit and Hilla, Iraq.   Al-Qazwīnī was also a geographer and natural historian, and known for his encyclopedic knowledge. This work, Kitāb ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (The wonders of creation, or literally, Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of things existing), probably was written in the sixth decade of the 13th century and is considered the most famous Islamic cosmography. The many manuscript copies show that for centuries it was one of the most popular books in the Islamic world.  (source:  Bavarian State Library)

[seifee]

an ajayeb’s network making

The word dudman [دودمان] in Farsi, coming from the word dud [دود smoke, fume] proposes the word ‘smoke’ as the signifier of one’s ancestral entity. The inherited smoke, perhaps one’s recent grand-grand-grand-ma relates to the same word in Latin for ‘focus’ meaning both ‘fire-place’ and ‘the ancestral.’ Dud perhaps is suggesting, gesturing that the inheritance comes to us as a gas-form into our space and fills the organs that hold speech and thought. My project has been about coughing with that smoke. It is not exactly Cat’s Cradle. We get into the dud of the ancestor but not with the syntactical “focus” that it inclines to the assumed origin of the dud. That means, if dud was like lexis, we were obliged to finish the sentences we start in the same certain way that a “tracer” finds out what is causing the smoke. I suggest to pay attention to the cough that interrupts tracing—the accidental ancestral. The dud vanishes, reforms itself, enters the body, toxicates the box, and perishes without a trace. In a more materialist conscious way, dud comes up a self-organizing non-human, abiotic contingent form that asks for permeable bodies.

To cough with the dud is about the capacity of being affected in thinking and feeling the ghostly memory of something that is haunting, and at the same time, utterly fragile. This is a beginning of an engagement with what Haraway calls “the histories of body and mind” that one inherits, and a way to learn disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts. My caught-up particular dud is an ancient bestiary from the middle ages formed by many (for better or worse hybrid of canon and non-elite) cultural agents in the Middle-Far East: Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa ghara'ib al-mawjudat (عجائب المخلوقات و غرائب الموجودات sometimes translated as ‘Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing’ or ‘The Book of Wonders’). I call it ajayeb.

In the last year with a.pass, I have been trying to learn ways to sense the subjects and objects of ajayeb's pleasure in describing the animacy of forms, in gesturing into form, in sensing the incipiency of it in the streams of matter and afterthought, and in their efforts to draw the lines of its traces: to venture out in what Stewart craftily calls the “manner of” a described world. And like Doty, I like to share with you the pleasure of recognizing a described world—of Ajayeb: a capacious assemblage of stories of natural and dreamed-up things, a business of once making sense out of what happens, a once percepted thing on the threshold of sense in the prisma of collective poesis producing a cartography of what might be happening in a world as an object of composition. With ajayeb, I am circling through a dud, a heritage of (Indo-Iranian) romanticism and pragmatism to arrive at “the precision of a worldly composition.”

developed by Sina Seifee

exhibited at a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) part of the exhibition “No Communication Without Noise - five a.pass researches” Brussels October 2017

curated by Laura Herman

produced by a.pass

with the support of Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen

with the technical support of Steven Jouwersma

thanks to Leo Kay Huib Haye van der Werf Vinciane Despret Caroline Godart Foad Farahani

In ajayeb I am learning the ‘How’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts, to study the radical poetic force of the Persian texts, to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers, and to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought. (Not the ideological enterprise of “Islam,” which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West.) Ajayeb’s version of World are stories of historically nonhuman people in descriptive intra-actions with reality. In it humans and language are part of the configuration of the world. In my work on ajayeb I am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world I am in; give it density and texture.

Images gathered during the research, as well as excerpts from my research notes http://ajayeb.net

In my research I am asking which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed in my research practice. These notions are materialized in one copy of a pop-up book made of 8 pages http://ajayeb.net/book

The reading of ajayeb portraits a global (and therefore ethical) consciousness at the end of 12th century Middle-South Asia. It mobilizes descriptive practices of poetics and natural history in a Middle Persian corpus. When I say “Middle Persian corpus” I mean a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, filled with Indo-European inheritances traveling through ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations, transcreations and transliteration of stories, prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables and figures that aren’t always part of the canon in those contexts.

[magictransistor]

Zakariya Qazvini (1203–1283), ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt (عجائب المخلوقات و غرائب الموجودات), Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing (عجائب المخلوقات والجوانب الإعجازية الأشياء الموجودة), ca. 1280 C.E.

[bassia-bassensis]

زعموا أن تأثيراته بواسطة الرطوبة كما أن تأثيرات الشمس بواسطة الحرارة ويدل عليها اعتبار أهل التجارب ؛ ومنها أمر البحار، فإنّ القمر إذا صار في أفق من آفاق البحر أخذ ماؤه في المد مقبلاً مع القمر، ولا يزال كذلك إلى أن يصير القمر في وسط سماء ذلك الموضع، فإذا صار هناك انتهى المد منتهاه، فإذا انحط القمر من وسط سمائه جزر الماء ولا يزال كذلك راجعاً إلى أن يبلغ القمر مغربه، فعند ذلك ينتهي الجزر منتهاه، فإذا زال القمر من مغرب ذلك الموضع ابتدأ المد مرة ثانية إلا أنه أضعف من الأولى، ثم لا يزال كذلك إلى أن يصير القمر في وتد الأرض، فحينئذ ينتهي المد منتهاه في المرة الثانية في ذلك الموضع، ثم يبتدىء بالجزر والرجوع، ولا يزال كذلك حتى يبلغ القمر أفق مشرق ذلك الموضع فيعود المد إلى ما كان عليه أولاً فيكون في كل يوم وليلة بمقدار مسير القمر فيهما في ذلك البحر مدان وجزران.

- عجائب المخلوقات و غرائب الموجودات