created 2025-03-18, & modified, =this.modified
Why I’m reading
Referenced heavily in Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah. In the introduction of this book it is mentioned Blind Owl was originally a handwritten volume with original illustrations, in an edition of 50 copies.
After a number of false starts in different fields, in 1927, a disillusioned Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the river Marne. In 1930, he returned to Iran without having acquired a degree. Around this time, he started writing Blind Owl, which would become his most famous work.
I feel parallels to Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah in the construction here. There’s the idea of resonance through repetition, how different feelings of concepts can appear throughout a work. Perhaps this was partially the intent of Bae Suah, who does her own thing but also there is the feeling of this story, resonant in “Untold…”.
There are lots of negative emotions within, which is ever more grave considering the context of the author.
The book is highly regarded and is a pessimistic atmospheric work filled with dreams, visions and agonies. In particular the repeated statements enhance the sense of the surreal, the fantastical. Heydat was a translator of Kafka. He had one failed suicide attempt that we know of. He was twenty-four and studying in Paris. On his way home he found an old bridge in a secluded spot over the Seine and he threw himself into the water. Unbeknownst to him a couple were making love on a boat beneath the bridge. The man jumped in the water and saved Heydat from drowning.
In life there are wounds that like termites, slowly bore into and eat away at the isolated soul. You can’t tell anyone about these pains. People think of them as strange and unnatural, and if you try to talk or write about them, they fall back on their same worn beliefs and dismiss them with a mocking smile. That’s because man has not yet found any solution, any drug that can cure them.
It makes no difference to me if others believe me or not. The only thing that scares me is that I will die tomorrow without having known myself.
In life, I have encountered a dark abyss that separates me from others. I understand that as much as possible, I must remain extinguished and keep my thoughts to myself. And if I have decided to write them down now, it is only to introduce myself to my shadow— which is hunched over on the wall and swallows everything I write with a voracious appetite—it is for him that I want to conduct an experiment: maybe we can get to know each other better. Since I’ve cut off my ties with everyone else, I want to get to know myself better.
I only write for my own shadow who sits on the wall against the light. I have to introduce myself to him.
NOTE
This text so far is entirely depressive, except for some paragraphs on “a shooting ray that appeared to me in the form of a woman.” He seems to have had a three month dalliance, the failure of which has sent him into a reclusive, self-destructive descent.
My entire life has passed and passes within the four walls of my room. My entire life has passed within these four walls.
…after I saw her two eyes, after I saw her, all activity, all movement became meaningless
He always draws the same thing, a cypress tree with a hunched old man sitting underneath. In front of him, “a girl wearing a long black dress is bending down to offer him a water lily.”
Through the window he sees a similar scene.
In the field behind my place I saw a hunched old man sitting under a cypress tree with a young woman—no, a celestial angel—in front of him, bending down to offer him a purple water lily with her right hand. The old man was chewing the index finger of his left hand
There’s an extensive description of this girl, whom he is immediately enraptured by:
The girl was right in front of me but seemed completely unaware of her surroundings. She was looking without seeing. A frozen half smile curled her lip as if she were thinking of someone absent. That’s when I saw her frightening, hypnotic eyes. They seemed angry, scolding. They were anxious, curious, and threatening. I felt my life force dissolve in those radiant, defining globes and get sucked into their depths. As much as the human mind can conceive, this seductive mirror drew my entire being toward itself. Her slanted, Turkman eyes were intoxicating, unearthly. They were frightening and seductive at the same time, as if they had witnessed horrifying, supernatural scenes that others can’t see. She had prominent cheekbones, a long forehead, thin eyebrows that reached each other, and fleshy, half-open lips—lips that looked as if they had just separated from a long, passionate kiss but remained insatiate. Her black, disheveled hair fell casually around her moonlike face. One strand was glued to her temple. Her soft features, her ethereal figure, and carefree movement spoke of her fleeting, shadowy being. Only a dancer in an Indian temple could move with such elegance. Her gloomy demeanor, her melancholy happiness showed that she was not like ordinary people. Her beauty was unnatural. She struck me like a magical, drug-induced vision.
By this point I was beside myself. I felt like I had known her name before. The glow in her eyes, her smell, her complexion, her movement, it all seemed familiar to me. It was like getting a glimpse of a previous life where my soul neighbored hers. We were of the same origin, built from the same substance. We must have been united. And I must have been close to her in this life. I never wanted to touch her—the invisible ray that emanated from our bodies and drew us together was enough. It was incredible—she seemed familiar to me from first glance. Don’t lovers always feel they have known each other before, that a strange relationship has always existed between them?
Every night I knelt before the moon. Maybe she had also looked at the moon.
He cannot find her again. His realization that she was not of this world.
Her “black clad body” sits on his front stoop. “She got up and walked through the dark entrance like someone who knows the way. She opened the door and I walked in behind her.”
She’s rendered a corpse. He attempts to draw her, and she’s restored in the morning but in between life and death. She is “under his command.”
She is alive, I thought, she has come to life, my love has breathed a soul into her body. But from close, I could smell the dead body, the dead and decomposing body—little maggots wriggled on her corpse and two golden bee flies flew around her in the candlelight—she was completely dead. But how, why had her eyes opened? Had I imagined it? Was it real?
NOTE
Did not expect any of this from the outset.
Finally, I had an idea: if I chopped up her body and put her in a suitcase, my same old suitcase, I could take her out with me—far, very far away from people’s eyes and bury her.
The old man from the Cypress helps him bury the suitcase. He finds an earthen jug containing images with the same eyes of this woman. He finds solace that he shared this fate with a soul from years past.
I woke up in a new world but it all seemed very familiar to me, so familiar that I felt a stronger attachment to it than to my old life—as if it were a reflection of my real existence. It was a different world but seemed closer, more pertinent, as if I had returned to my original environment—I had been reborn into an ancient world but one closer and more natural.
He begins to write.
”I need more than ever to connect my thoughts to my own imaginary self, my shadow —this sinister shadow hunched on the wall by the light of the tallow- burning lamp, that appears to read carefully and consume whatever I write. This shadow must know better than me! I can speak freely only with my own shadow; he’s the one who makes me talk; he’s the only one who truly knows me; he must understand … I want to pour the extract, no, the bitter wine of my existence, drop by drop into the parched throat of my shadow and say, ‘This is my life!”
The test of the cobra
“The test was like this: my father and uncle would be locked inside a dark room, a room like a dungeon, with a cobra. Whoever was bitten would naturally scream, at which point the snake charmer would open the door and rescue the other one, and Bugam Dasi would belong to him.
“Before they were thrown into the dungeon, my father asked Bugam Dasi to dance for him one more time, to dance the sacred dance of the temple. Bugam Dasi agreed and danced in torchlight to the song of the snake charmer’s flute, with smooth, rhythmic movements that were full of meaning—with the twists and sways of a cobra. Then they locked my father and uncle into the room with the cobra. But instead of a scream of fear, there arose an odd moan mixed with a disturbing laugh—and then a hideous scream. When they opened the door, it was my uncle who came out—but his face had turned old and broken. My uncle emerged from the horror in that room—the sound of the slithering, hissing snake, its round, glowing eyes, its poisonous fangs and black body, its long neck and large head, wide like a ladle—with white hair. According to the deal, Bugam Dasi now belonged to my uncle—but the terrible thing was that it was not clear who had survived the trial, my father or my uncle. The trial had deranged the survivor, he completely forgot his old life and did not recognize the baby—that is why they thought he was my uncle. Is this story not pertinent to my life? Has the echo of this disturbing laugh, the horror of this trial, not left its mark on me? After that, I was nothing more than an extra mouth to feed. Finally, my uncle or my father and Bugam Dasi returned to Rey for business and entrusted me to his sister, my aunt.
I don’t want to conceal real emotions under the sheen of imaginary words like love, fondness, and faith—flowery language doesn’t leave a good taste in my mouth. I thought some kind of ray or halo—the kind of halo they draw around the heads of saints—was pulsing in my loins, and maybe my sick, tortured halo needed the halo around her loins and was drawing it toward itself.
I had heard that if anyone sees his own headless shadow, he will die before the year is out.
“I had thought about death and the decomposition of all the particles in my body many times—to the extent that it didn’t frighten me—in fact, my true wish was to be completely annihilated.
Two golden bee flies were flying around me and little white maggots wriggled on my body—and the weight of a dead body pressed down on my chest.