Aša

Asham Vohu: There is one way and that is through Asha (truth); the truth is happiness, and happiness belongs to him who desires the truth only for the truth. (Avesta) “‘Behold this gateway, dwarf!’ Zarathustra said. ‘It has two faces. Two ways come together here: nobody has ever taken them to the end. This long lane back here: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane out there that is another eternity. They contradict themselves, these ways; they confront one another head on, and here, at this gateway, is where they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above it: Moment. But whoever should walk farther on one of them - on and on, farther and farther: do you believe, dwarf, that these ways contradict themselves eternally?’ — ‘All that is straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf contemptuously. ‘All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.’” (Nietzche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III)

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value.” (Nietzche, EH Pref., 3) “I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. … I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and live accordingly, without having first given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards.” (GS 2) “No, life has not disappointed me… ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment for the seeker for knowledge.” (Nietzche, GS 324) “A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors now clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer the question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.” (GS 110) Your own esthetical and sensuous nature can be a manifesto itself, to articulate creative schemes that possess virtue and grandeur, that are competent to reconstruct the ruptured rhizomes from within to establish a new nature, an alternative form that could rejoice in the charm of your origins. For Nietzsche, the value of art has always stood against the value of truth — he deemed art a saviour for us undertaking Asha.

Saman Samadi

Cambridge, England - June 2021

FULL RECORDING

Saman Samadi, Asha, performed and recorded by Mehrdad Gholami, in Pieces for the Flute (Tehran: Mahoor, 2021). www.mahoor.com/en/cd/20052-pieces-for-the-flute

VIDEO (Score Follower) excerpts

Saman Samadi, Asha, recorded by Mehrdad Gholami, Recording Session, Dallas, Texas, September 28th, 2020.