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(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

What makes a written essay just an essay is how it is subjective, reflective, debating, trying associatively or dissociatively – but first and foremost how the essay is rebellious heretical. If most of this is absent, you simply have a text in your hand – not an essay.

Sigurd Tenningen's The triumph of vegetation is total and Mazdak Shafieians The ancient material In his newly published books, a number of essayists deal with themselves. Several of Ignition's texts have previously been published in the journal Vagant, and have partly been taught in conversations with his friend Shafieian. His The triumph of vegetation is total starts almost with the claim that "art is the place where man becomes visible as nature". And if you look more closely that we might someday approach a state of nature
- one can imagine that the human cycle as learned academics may not be more than our temporary residence, with human auditoriums, theaters and libraries. There is also something liberating in Tenening's reference to Jan Kjærstad's reluctance to "psychological causation and 'the primacy of emotions' in fiction" – his discomfort with psychologicalizations, such as the family's lack of care behind Breivik's actions, or our focus on everyone's endless self-feeling Knausgård. The ignition also reminds us of Michel Houellebecq's pointing out of the return of the natural state – that everyone's war against everyone has removed the capacity for empathy and solidarity. The ignition, however, as he says in an interview in this newspaper (page 13), does not necessarily agree with Houellebecq that in the end it is all about "the individual's self-care".

The theme of the book revolves around our perception of what it is to be human – but is this human being "abolished"? The ignition refers to the vitalists Nietzsche and Deleuze who thought of themselves life as something man had locked up inside. In contrast to the critic of civilization Henry David Thoreau that man has tamed himself – "our lives have become tame inner life". The ignition continues to spin on Thoreau's critique of civilization by describing our domestic essayist Ole Robert Sunde: This essayist is described in the middle of the night in his apartment in Therese Street, where he glares out the window and up the street, before he – after a long day behind the desk – brushes teeth and goes barefoot into the bedroom. There, the wooden floor makes a small bang that makes him think of a gunshot – as if he is in the world of film. The ignition also connects what he calls Sundes world openness to the philosopher Heidegger meekness (Gelassenheit). The ignition also mentions boredom as the basic category of existence, but it is probably an indistinct interpretation of Heidegger. One can also ask how many – in a tamed Norwegian welfare society and today ram-in-media world – who can relate to this philosopher's existentials and being-to-death.

Mazdak Shafieian also pays attention to Ole Robert Sunde in his collection of essays. In the chapter "The author as a time machine" we hear about a Sunde who, in Proustian fashion, is on the trail of the past. Like the essayist Montaigne, Sunde enjoys an observational walk. His I-persons are "incurably schizophrenic [...] constantly receptive to sounds, voices and other sensory impressions [...] on the trail of other possible and impossible worlds." For example with Aleksanderbattle in the book Of course she had to call reads Sunde's words: "[…] the beatings, horse trampling, swords being crossed, the shouts of command, harnesses, horse whining, the roars […]." Healthy, according to Shafieian, should have “constant dialogues with the forerunners; thinkers and writers – but also with themselves in the form of endless monological questions and answers, as if the essay were the oracle in Delphi and the author one among many other obscure voices: alien. "

But as editor Audun Lindholm writes in the preface to Vagant this week – another champion of the essay – the literary neighborhood is important. Lindholm points out that Norway once drew strength from Denmark due to its short history as a cultural nation, but that this has now been reversed. He himself lives in Berlin. And if we read Norwegian-Iranian Shafieian correctly, he pulls all the way down to the Iranian neighborhood to learn from an ancient cultural nation. For example, Sadegh Hedajat, a troubled man who in his spiritual darkness created The blind owl (1937), which has become a modern classic. This dreamlike novel has "historical references, mythological threads and not least an intense social critique". Essay writing at its best, in other words. But the book is also provocative enough that someone called it a rotten cheese cats would pull back from. In the book's schizophrenic universe, the main character – like Sunde – looks out of his window, or into small air vents that give access to new worlds. And a corpse is to be hidden away when he meets the man who says: "I have coffins of all sizes, something that suits everyone." Hedajat's own life, or hans being-to-death, eventually led to his suicide.

More from Iran: Shafieian compares Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's three-volume work The old people lived lives (1990–2000) with Europe's greatest classics. This is a tragic three-generation story from twentieth-century Tehran. Here you should be able to read about syphilis, funerals, transfers, stoning, whipping, executions – the meeting between tradition and modernity, and a past that is incorporated into the present and vice versa. About the coup in 1953 and the fall of the shah in 1979. About intellectuals. Towards the end of the second volume we meet again the horse-drawn carriage, which we met in The blind owl. In Dowlatabadi's words: "The horse-drawn carriage moves on, everywhere, and brings us to where the graves only become more numerous." Remember you are going to die. Moreover, the critique of society from Dowlatabadi's third volume is called The owl's finally about intellectuals, about torture, about society, about families losing their children. Dowlatabadi tries, in an essayistic way, the forgotten, the unfit, the useless, the mysterious in the shadows, but also the disturbing from our international literary neighborhood, referred to by Shafieian as its "constant scream – 'owl scream' – on 'burial groves that only get bigger' ».

Shafieian calls the essay one hiking stake. But he also suggests that in this scriptural culture one nurtures and waters the flowers of others, so that one can flourish oneself. He refers to the essayist Gisle Selnes, to the essay as the study of "excrement and waste", the attempts to find "that which through tradition, the old soul, has been excluded". For the spirit, as Marx once said, is "burdened" by matter — that is, by the coordinates, by the inheritance of our fathers. Let me therefore conclude with a quote from this week's Vagant about the poet Mara Lee, who «seemed to be able to talk about writing from the 'position of the whore', to strike from below by avoiding the usual power structures, while emphasizing the political poem's need for aversion ».


truls lie

Truls Lie
Truls Liehttp: /www.moderntimes.review/truls-lie
Editor-in-chief in MODERN TIMES. See previous articles by Lie i Le Monde diplomatique (2003–2013) and Morgenbladet (1993-2003) See also part video work by Lie here.

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