Saturday 29th April, 1978, 17.30h London: Maguire ambled round his flat, fed his cat, picked up his post, and poured himself the first whiskey of the day. He dumped himself, unwashed, in the nearest chair. Pyjamas yawning, he organised his nest around him. The hessian curtains remained drawn. He shifted a pile of papers to the left-side of his dining table revealing the 12” portable Ferguson 3816 black and white television. He exhaled slightly, depressing the power switch, satisfying a habitual stimulus-response. The cool globe glowed, picking out the edges of his contemplation in the shadows. Adjusting the tuning knobs and circular antenna, he navigated the airwaves. He peered through the atmospherics, clicked another switch, and happened upon some alarming news: "The President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, has been assassinated in a Communist-led coup…..” The image and sound fizzed a little and blinked before regaining its strength. “…..In an attempt to calm the situation, US President Jimmy Ca…..[more fizzing and blinking]…..ding a new Ambassador to Kabul." The newscaster showed no emotion and moved directly on to the next story; Maguire stopped breathing for a second or two; lips opened; a momentary lapse in concentration.
This was significant. Afghanistan was a buffer state that had been "shared" between the Allies since the end of the WW2. Only a few years ago the absolute monarchy had given way to a fledgling democracy. The new president Daoud had aligned the country with the Russians at first, but they maintained a respectful distance. "A miscalculation" Maguire now thought. Daoud had been "turned" by the CIA operating out of Iran. Now partisans were accelerating the country back towards a full Soviet-block-satellite-state. This was a disaster for UK and US foreign policy. One form of corrupt coercive-controlling censorship being replaced by another. His hand pulled back over his greased, nicotine-stained, ginger-white hair. He groaned slightly holding some curls against his liver pate neck. He searched the table-top for his tin of ten short panatella Hamlet cigars, and settled in for a long morning. Wafting away the sulphurous essence of an extinguished match, he exhaled a plume of smoke into the stillness of his quiet life. The image of his solitary confinement returned. The Soviet's must have sensed a significant weakening in the Shah's position. The cat jumped onto his lap.
“Oh my God, it’s Sven!?” Shirin smiled. Seconds earlier she had opened a bottle of expensive French wine and placed a BASF LH 90 cassette into her Panasonic RQ-309AS desktop tape recorder. It was a peaceful 19 degrees with a light breeze, 20.12h, uptown Tehran. She had been hoping for a serenade by Googoosh or Kourosh Yaghmaei but this was Sven’s lecture on Dreams from 1976. She could hear rain in the background and the chatter of Farsi from students arriving in the foreground. But all she could remember was the snowy north-eastern peaks shining brightly through the lead laden clouds, as Sven had arrived that morning. She felt the same twinge of excitement, hearing his voice again, but felt intensely bored by his choice of subject. Steadily and confidently he set out the parameters of his speech: “….covering my position on the changing relationship between psychic structures during sleep….”. She giggled at her voyeuristic intentions, disrobing his intellectual sincerity with her cat-like superiority.
After some conventional pre-amble, and mutterings of approval from the floor, Sven structured his thoughts thus:
“1) During the day the autobiographical memory is able to collect data like a magnetic tape does in a tape recorder. As the mass of information builds upon a spool, it wraps together and gets condensed. This wrapping together, subtracts the temporal dimension, from the tape, so that patterns in the data, can be matched across time. In the brain, when time is collapsed in this way, the emotional encoding of the information becomes the primary means of matching data sequences. What remains of the data is a skeleton, of abstract, idealised, schema. This leads me to the idea that the irrational politics of identity, that consume all of our attention during our waking hours, is actually based on other people responding to their internalised schemas. We all do this. Overgeneralising our expectations. Of self and other. We deny each other an individuality, to give ourselves one, of our own. What I am trying to say is, as an individual, I deny you any recourse to be yourself, within the moments of our shared reality, one of us is always in charge. Relationships are condemned to be asymmetrical like that.”
She tilted her head to one side, warm and willing him to go on. She took another sip, and rested back on her chair.
“2) When we dream, the activated schema appear under different symbolic guises. Our identity is made up of an infinite number of interpersonal relationships. Relationships hold us within a lattice work of a social structures, shaped by the trajectory of a collective autobiography. This is all connected, through symbolic representations, which give our insignificant existence, some sort of meaning. Some of the relationships leave us with an emotional cost, as an outcome, and some with an emotional benefit. In terms of our self-other evaluations, as individuals or members of a group, we constantly calculate whether, and how, or why, we are winners or losers in this game, this game of survival. Those relationships that cannot be changed, within the games we play, are those that come to define our personalities, our personality traits. On this point, the individual personality, I believe the current evidence shows, indisputably, that we are all built the same, regardless of race, colour or creed. Regardless of the linguistic culture within which our social identity is constructed. There are five, universal, dimensions of personality. They are broad but still meaningful. On one of these dimensions the trauma schema embed emergency responses that can override rational thought process. On another, our sexual and social experiences become hard-wired, as preferences, after puberty. And on the remaining three dimensions the technologies of adaptation work to maintain us within our identity reference groups.”
Shirin was lulled into a hypnogogic trance, slowly becoming conscious, focussing her stare. The small cogs were turning within the white spools of the orange and black cassette. Each spoke seemed to represent a trajectory escaping to the edge of space, being bound by the sound of a voice, translated into on/off switches, passing the point of consciousness, and returning to the magnetic tape. An image of her mother returned to her, enveloped in her bosom, a hug and kiss. She had died when Shirin was five years old, due to complications from the birth of her younger brother. Her father was an Iranian aristocrat. He considered himself to be a European and a Moslem. Like the Shah he believed he was descended from the Aryan race, but he was opposed to communism and the Shah's land reforms. Shirin despised his duplicity. He had worked with the UN to help investigate Iran's human rights violations. Consequently, Shirin grew up in fear of the explosive temper of her coercive-controlling father and the covert surveillance of the Shah's secret police. In the end her father had reconciled himself with the Shah's regime. His cruel pragmatic authority had destroyed her young adult identity. He had received help from the Bank to make even more money, buying his land back from the peasants. The constant narrative within the family, was that she should be grateful. The family were richer than ever, and she was more painfully anxious. The tape continued, rocking slightly in its imperfect carriage:
“3) Political positions are found within the lattice work of social relationships. Our ultimate goal is to balance the opposing forces within our lives. Within the brain, this process is represented as an electro-chemical interaction between different regions, in a modular arrangement of neural tissue. It is an entirely unconscious biological process that: a) integrates the sensori-motor experience, into a specific and unique geographical location, grounded within the classical physics, the deterministic mechanics, of the material environment; and b) a semantic memory that maps the conceptual structures of a linguistic culture, the symbolic representations of thought, into social hierarchies, and a taxonomy of types. And then, by logical deduction, the brain can work out, the individual's position, within a socially constructed reality. A socially constructed reality that can only exist in the history of a linguistic culture. So with this basic understanding now in place, I can get to my thesis. To this relationship, between a socially constructed self and the physically immanent others, we can apply the principle, that where any trauma schema distorts the relationship, the process of figuring out the position, then a symptom of mental illness will arise. Insomnia, for instance, which many of you will have suffered from, and is just the inability to get to sleep or waking during sleep, I would say, is indicative of activated trauma schema that cannot be resolved within the existing social structures of the individual. So what is the individual supposed to do? Ask you as medical doctors, I suppose, to position yourselves, within the same reality, to interpret and categorise the patient’s insomnia, along with their many other psychiatric symptoms, as a diagnosis, as an ‘other’, that may or may not require treatment, by you, depending on the degree of intrusion/breach within the personality and/or between the interpersonal relationships involved [as a murmur of recognition echoed across the room] … between the ‘them and us’.”
From the age of eight, Shirin had been sent away to a private all girls' school in America. Returning every holiday from NewYork's La Guardia Airport until she had reached sixteen. She had gone on to study medicine at Tehran University and joined the Shah's Health Corp after graduation as part of the State-run education system. Politically, she was a liberal minded feminist. She was beautiful and neurotic. Sven thought she looked like Googoosh. Her dark soulful eyes and olive skin were frequently hidden by large bug-eyed thick rimmed sunglasses, and aromatic perfumes. Silky black floral dresses would hug her waist, hips and legs as she walked, but puff-out her shoulders and sleeves, as she stood and talked to the Faculty. During his visit in the autumn of 1976, Sven had recorded all this on his Canon Auto Zoom 518 SV. She had taken him to various sites in Tehran and visited her ex-colleagues among the rural peasants, he had never seen such poverty, but they loved her like she was the Queen of England. She had never seen the processed film. Sven would replay it on his Eumig 610-D when he was sure he was on his own at home in London: slipping the loaded spool onto its outstretched arm, threading the super 8 film through the projector clip. He would check the tension on the rear spool and flick the bulb on. The smell of Chanel would often return to him first, accompanied by an enduring empathy with her cheeky smile. She was smiling again now – unbeknownst to him:
“4) Understanding the reality where trauma intrudes on an interpersonal relationship involves identifying the triggers, the unifying emotional memory between the present and the past, how schemas from the past have repeated themselves throughout someone's life history. The medical profession, you as medical professionals, have to plan for how the crises that they have, and will continue to create if untreated, can be managed in order to change the emotional and relational outcomes. You are the managers of an emotional economy, accountants of a spiritual currency that has real outcomes, in terms of the quality and quantity of life, for Iran. Every next person that you can return to mental health, is a return on all our investments, in your social relationships, in your humanity.”
Maguire’s first drink had started to clear last night’s muggy-headedness. The Cold War had just got hotter. NATO would not accept this incursion without reprisals. US foreign policy would have to change. The CIA's support for the Shah's murderous regime in Iran was starting to look increasingly untenable. He slowly contemplated the alternatives. The CIA had trained the SAVAK in the violent suppression of Communism. But the terror had bled out, and infected other areas, all forms of popular dissent were now being repressed. Only the anti-communist Clergy had been allowed to proliferate, in the shadow of the Iranian monarchy. In return, they had legitimised the Shah's murderous regime. Together, the establishment spun a gilded lexicon, weaving incoherent and incongruent narratives, between what could and could not be said. They were never exposed to logical scrutiny, but words were only needed to reference things symbolically: extreme acts of violence created ripples of opinion that could not be silenced by any sort of religion. Once it reached the echo chamber of the international press, public outrage became pure oxygen for flaming left-wing intellectuals like Sven and Shirin.
Their outrage tickled him, but only fleetingly. There had already been sporadic uprisings against the Shah’s rule, but nothing organised as of yet. The international press feeding a populist fetish for human rights. They had already convicted the US of war crimes in Vietnam. Wrongly he felt. Now the political stability of the Middle-East was being put at risk. This was very bad for business. Middle-eastern petro-chemicals had fuelled the American dream since 1951. Colonial Empires had crumpled in its wake, the old moral order had been dismantled in favour of a radical individualism. The White Revolution, he felt, had generally been a good thing, no-one could argue with that. He sympathised with the ideology of Iranian Republicans, but they were now composed mainly of a rich and well-educated middle-class. The region could not be allowed to fall to the Soviets; the only other superpower. Shirin was keenly aware of the rising tensions, and tended to resolve her own internal conflicts by backing the Society of Iranian Socialists, especially in any arguments she had had with Sven. The tape continued to wrap its serpent tail around the opposing spool, tightening itself like a noose around the neck of its victim:
“5) Dreams are built on the same myths and cultural practices that terrorists and governments will exploit in the pursuit of power. The sophistry of propaganda, of the advertising media, thrives on the hope and optimism of people who are suffering. Foreign propaganda can infiltrate any culture through co-opting the schema and positional tropes of its host. The nature of government is that it denies people their instinctive emotional response to exploitation, while exploiting them [some uncomfortable coughs began to spread within the room. But Sven was not in a mood to self-censor]. Marx himself, exploits the dialectical reaction to over-exploitation. Terrorism is an attempt, by an oppressed minority, to force the wider population, to feel the fear and anger, that central government over-exploitation, has caused. [He mustered his energy for a volley of political rhetoric aimed directly at those who would smother free-speech in Iran. Shirin was thrilled and anxious at the same time]. The ideology of the guerrilla, is for small symbolic acts of defiance, political rhetoric, or military action, to engage a Nation's trauma history, of external threat and internal abandonment, so that the sympathies of the wider population are triggered, aligning the populous, with the terrorist, and generalising their cause, across all instances of a certain class, against the other actions, that central government has taken, to enforce its exploitation, of the whole population, against the interests of the people it is said to serve. This is the reality of modernism.”
Maguire was thinking that there was a possibility that the CIA might now start backing the pro-Pushtan Mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed regime. They were more conservative than the Marxist guerrillas of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq in Iran. Would the CIA support any jihadists? This might indeed require an act of duplicity towards the Shah and the Christian right in the US and the UK. It could put the whole position of the USA in the Middle East under threat. However, taking a lesson from the Rothschild’s during WW2, he reasoned it was better for the CIA to back all the opposing sides in the region. Spread betting could reduce the huge financial as well as human cost involved.
Sven loved Shirin, like Sartre loved Simone de Beauvoir. She was a radical individualist, he instinctively sided with the proletariat. Ultimately, they were both disillusioned with the intransigent hyperbole of the Cold War. Like most they were seeking a way out of the impasse. He felt called upon to resolve the crippling unconscious conflicts of modernity. He took natural selection to be his God, and narrative consensus to be ‘the Word’. Embodying the dominant ideology, embedding it within a unique geo-political position, surviving the socio-economic contingencies of the zeitgeist, and regulating the primordial emotions. Narratives evolved through generations, like technology of the industrial age. Within any culture, counter-narratives would always form, but this was an evolution according to the spirit of a dialectical hermeneutic, not a Class War.
Shirin was a well-educated medical doctor, and yet, because of her upbringing, she still attributed all her successes to God and all her failures to the devil. Although her dark hair played seductively around her shoulders and bare neckline, her neck muscles would ripple as she scanned the environment, constantly on the look-out for her friends, and her enemies. She often wore a silk scarf that could be neatly hoisted into place, should the circumstances require it. She considered her guilt to be an important part of a woman’s sexual repertoire. Her sexual partners teased her about it. The greatest depths of her backcombed hairspray-laden curls, permitted her fringe to descend in an oversized arc, accentuating the heaviness of her eyebrows, giving the hint of a not-so-innocent school-girl look.
“6) During sleep the structure and self-censorship of autobiographical memory is at its lowest ebb. Operating in correspondence with the sleep-wake cycle, new connections are made during daytime activity and consolidated at night. During the light sleep stage, the self-memory system and the social identity remain intact. However, during deeper stages of sleep, when the control of the CNS over the ANS is at its lowest, the dream state occurs. No army can defend itself against the phantoms that haunt the psyche. During sleep the brain becomes more organised around its biological needs, and interpersonal narratives become more fragmented as a result. The temporal dimension of daytime is absent, repressed emotions resurface, haunting the subjective state, with an incoherent narrative, whose only meaning is the emotion it releases. The dream is no different from a psychosis. Delusions weaving together the symbolic visual and auditory expressions of unfulfilled instincts. Make no mistake about it – dreams are the closest we get to pure sexual and violent impulses beyond the range of human tolerance for such experiences, they are – if you like - the definition of hell on earth. Heaven is freedom from this hell. A relaxed awake state. A sort of meditation. But, Heaven is ultimately an unobtainable faith that things can and will get better. So when you ask yourself: “Why do I spend my life balancing myself between other people's feelings about me, and my feelings about them?” you now know what the answer might be, or at least, where to find the answers, where the only true answers will ever be found, and that place is, in your dreams. Your dreams, your nightmares, and the living history of your collective autobiographies. [a smattering of respectful and appreciative applause followed, quickly accompanied by a rapid vacating of seats.]"
Sven awoke to a familiar sound: the ‘trrrrr’ of his rear projector spool spinning – double speed. His home movie, entitled ‘Iran 1976’, had finished. The front spool now empty, the super 8 film entirely wrapped round the back. The bright light of the projector beam remained on. He looked at his watch: ’18.33h’ he must have been asleep for about an hour and a half. He wasn’t sure. He rubbed his eyes, and tidied away his things in preparation for the evening meal.
