The View Ahead

Straightforward, simple and still. A gaze fixed ahead, toward the world lying before the eyes. Staring without even tilting your head to one side or the other. If I had known this was taken from the landscapes of the American West, following the style of the New Topographics, and the re-imagining of the undiscovered West of the nineteenth century in the late twentieth century, I would have looked at it without astonishment — and without the kind of horror I now feel — and simply enjoyed the photograph in my own way. But now it’s different. Just knowing that it’s not so shocks me. I begin to doubt. It’s as if the influence of millennia of imaginative and dreamlike imagery embedded in the veins of this plateau prevents me from accepting this image. I cannot see any place in Iran like this: so direct, without addition or subtraction, stripped of magic, so earthy, and exactly like this.

I look again and again. Imagination is released from between the branches. It swallows me whole. It’s as if I have awakened the delicate fear that was sleeping in the ether of the plants with the sudden jolt of seeing. It twists everywhere and never ends. It whispers to me a hidden secret of destruction, a secret of the captive dream of prosperity.

It makes me understand what the swollen brightness on the stones once was—the swollen surfaces of what had been.