A Photo To Remember

"A house where a picture of any living being is hung shall not be entered by angels." The Muslim God is strongly displeased with pictures of any kind, he actively hates them, the textbook explanation for this aniconic appraoch is that God fears that human beings might worship the picture.
If you enter any traditional Sunni Muslim house, you're likely to find all the pictures either simple calligraphy of holy verses or inanimate objects. Shia Muslims prefer to plaster all the walls with the Indo-Iranian depiction of Ali and/or his Superfamily.

the friendly Wahhabis, in their puritanical approach, carry this practice verbatim without bothering to expain, analyse, or study the matter further. I had a distant family relative who was a very pious Wahabi, and he would refuse to appear in any family picture for Allah's sake! Thus, in that context casual observers might be forgiven to believe that the Muslim God is very, very retro and/or highly skeptical of the ability of human mentality to develop and grow up over time.

But if one could look past the angry Wahhabi with his beard and scream, we might begin to discern the reasons behind this holy censorship.

to Painting, Photography was an asshole waiting to happen, Painting's position as a necessary and practical everyday application was suddenly delegated into a mere art-form for closeted twits to look at, I've never been an art buff and I will never understand what is so amazing about those depressing classics with chicks who are boring even with their tits all over the place, but I do not think it is ever at all possible to corner photography and render it obsolete in a similar fashion. Yes, moving pictures is a wonderful step forward and has provided much entertainment and fascination for the human race, but it still lacks the majesty of static. It is here that we come to understand the Muslim God's reasons for being so Saddam-Hussein on this particular issue. Because pictures are Man's defiance of Godhood, Art is his way to challenge God's creation ; more so than any other scientific breakthrough or development, it is in the sense of creating something that touches the soul with the same spiritual awe that God wants purely to be for Him, that divine touch God wants Muslims to believe only exists in the Quran but you really find it in many a place of Human creations, in a certain musical passage, or a book, or a picture that make you go: "How the hell did any human being ever manage to conceive this brilliance?" My grandfather, the wiseman of the family, and an officer in the army who really wanted to be a painter once said :"Pictures are much more beautiful than reality." and I found this to be true, there often comes a picture taken by a really good camera where everything just seems so fresh and exciting, and you really wonder how did boring unscripted reality manage to hold the seeds for such a beauty. This touch of God, this tingling magnificence you encounter in a frozen, static image of life, is what the Muslim God hates so much. He hates your bedroom posters for the same reason he hated Huball and al-Llatt and al-Uzza. That is why he hates music, pictures, and just about everything that could cultivate those sensations man has been inspired to have, It must be all for him. all of it.

I have recently seen a photo that had freaked me out with its Godly power, but this post is too long already, so i'll talk about it in the next post.
and i'm sorry for not continuing my Syria trip but it wasn't really that exciting and it was a bitch to write, I'll continue it if you want me to though.

Boredom

The best period about anything is the beginning.

This is one of the few things I am absolutely sure about. I still remember the barely stifled joy I had while my father was installing our new Satellite receiver a few months after the end of the war. It was an incredible feast of all sorts of pandemonium after spending years watching Saddam's plain-vanilla TV. For days I sat mesmerized by the new powers of the blessed Remote Controller, flicking channel after channel and watching full-episodes of programs I have previously only heard about or saw snippets of as our ministry of misinformation felt like showing us, and of course I enjoyed secretly switching to the European Hotbird at night to have a guilty glimpse at some naked epidermis of the elusive female species.

In a few weeks I was bored, of the 399 choices I had I only ended up watching sitcoms such as Friends, and soon it hit me that I missed Saddam's TV in an inexplicable fashion, at first I didn't know why, but soon I came to realize that I felt this way because the dream-fantasy had been shattered : when you're imprisoned, sick, poor, whatever, you would have your revenge reveling about the wonders of the world you don't have : freedom, the heaven in the afterlife, wealth, that there's something out there that's better than this crap - in my case some magical land where the television has 399 channels and everybody is happy, but now that I have that magical land in my living room it turns out that there's nothing really special about it, if anything, it throws you in the middle of an awful chaos of channels that is going to take you forever to sort out.

the same disappointment applies to any number of things, meeting someone new, discovering God, masturbation, drugs, sex, pool, music and the all-encompassing life itself: for many people, childhood is the period they feel most nostalgic for. You spend a lot of time absorbing this wondrous world everyday, oblivious to the more horrible things in life such as responsibility,character, and developing deep feelings. I think discovering God has a slightly higher boredom curve because the actual reward is only granted when you pass away, keeping you forever tantalized, but I'm sure that the afterlife is going to be one hell of a boring dud (just imagine Teletubbies having sex and drinking wine forever and you'll see what I mean. Is that what we all really want?)

Everything is best when you're just getting started, when the excitement of adventure still hasn't turned into the routine of habit. When you listen to CDs not because you have to cuz you're a prestigious Metalhead who's forever looking for the next best riff out of duty, but because it excites you and kicks you in the ass. Have you thought about why all the great musicians, bar none, eventually settle into decline after hitting their peak? Their desire fades, replaced by a new desire, the inertia of habit and money, but mostly it's the boredom that engulfs both the artist and his fanbase. Human beings are too easily bored, and as a rule human creativity is limited in reinventing itself. The greatest thing Cobain did was kill himself before expiring into mediocrity, I'm sure he did it willingly.

I don't think anyone can be perpetually in love with anything, in the end it all resolves into boredom, or normalcy if you want to call it that, and you either reminisce about your past selectively or, if you have the guts, begin planning new conquests.

I read that Sweden has some of the highest suicide rates in the world, I found that to be hilariously funny. Here we are, the miserable Iraqis, bribing, enduring great difficulties, begging, being hauled as six-packs or twelve-packs in carton boxes with little holes to breath from, all just to get into your never-land of milk and honey, O Swedes, and you dumbfucks have the nerve to deny yourself that heaven voluntarily, have you no respect for our feelings?!? this got me thinking: what is it all about? what are we trying hard so for? look at them, they have the 2nd highest development index in the world and they kill themselves, why are we toiling ourselves then, for what, to provide food for our family and then die of terminal normalcy?

Have you asked yourself, why are human beings so into killing and raping each other? Why can't we all just Heal The Worllllllld, Make it a better plaaaaace, for you and for me and the entire human race? Let me tell you, because it's boring and stupid that way. Life is too boring without rape, murder, crime, death, loud music, war. One can never have an action movie without the villain, satan, jews, muslims, shia, the enemy is important for ourselves to not collapse into total boredom. Human beings are greedy and unjust by nature, always searching for more, because they are never content with what they have ; a forever crusade to famish the hungry well that will never be extinguished.

for what drives mighty conquerors such as Alexander the Great, or Khalid bin al-Walid to conquer all these lands if anything but their hollow souls?

To Be Continued...if I'm not too bored.