The Message of Fishes, Perception of Landscape

Document Type : Viewpoint/ Editorial

Author

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, University of Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Should you see God in the Heartbeats of the Garden,
Hasten to say: The fish pond is without water.
The wind was visiting the plane tree.
I was on my way to God.
Man has two ways in confronting with the book of Nature: science or immersion. The man's quest to discover the truth is originating from his ambition. The desire for power, knowledge and domination of the world around him does not calm him down. The mystics have considered this desire as the source of existence from the desire for absolute perfection; and power, knowledge and domination are those of its manifestations. The scientists attribute it to self-preservation, which seeks to dominate nature in order to survive. In both directions, the Nature plays an irreplaceable role. It is a book that has been opened to man to respond to his desire.
The man of the age of tradition, who had little experience in performing the scientific method, may have taken the path of immersion in the Nature, algebraically. He met the Nature with affection and learned to talk to it. He lived with the "sense" of Nature and passed through its object. He saw the Nature as a verse that has a message; Like the speech of a person who, in addition to quoting content, informs about the existence of the speaker presenter; and he tried to understand his message. The modern Western man, who had less of a lack of experience of in the traditional era, bravely embarked on the path of science. He freed the intellect from the domination of the senses. Every new discovery doubled his ability to know the matter of Nature and to know the secrets of its power. The modern man saw the Nature as an object and learned from it the secrets of the prosperity of matter; But however, it did not show represent him an extraterrestrial world.
Man, both traditional and modern, has abilities in his creation that are not sealed. "Sense" is the most important of them that understands existence. The existence may be a pure matter, an immaterial, or either a combination of both. the two. Science can also know comprehend the material existence, but not the other two types. Sense has the ability to understand those kind of beings that are not pure matter. As a result, the concept of Nature will be something that the means of cognition determine. If reason is a tool, then the result is will be a meaningless Nature with material complexity and perfection. If it is a tool of the senses, the Nature is will be a book that connects man directly to perfection. The Quran, which mentions the Nature as a verse, addresses the human senses and invites them to this path of cognition. The modern Iranian poet, ‘Sohrab Sepehri’, following this recommendation also showed Tasi the way of immersion in the Nature:
Our task is not to identify the secret of the rose; our work may be floating in the charm of the rose
 He considered the encounter and presence, which means touching the matter of Nature, as a condition for perceiving the "fish messages".  The fish in Sohrab fish poetry is pointing to the language of Nature that shows the path of perfection to the wise and loving beloved man. In the life of the garden, which is called pulsation, God can be seen. God is the ultimate being and then you can see the pulse of the garden. The energy of this feeling is arising from the wind that goes to the ‘plane-tree’ to bring it to dance. The confrontation, face to face with the wind, leads man to the perfection and to God. The narration of the scene that made Sohrab so unconscious is has been mentioned on the painting screen, representing his inner sense while he was walking next to the fish pond. From a such an ordinary scenes and so on, he was able to see the garden.
The image of this painting, which is currently kept in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kerman, was provided to the journal by Mr. Meysam Samarrokhi. In this way, we are grateful to him.

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