One Night. One thousand tellers. And I. #yekshab1

1. The Tale of Talemakings

Always, it was meant to be the story of #yekshab1 itself. #yekshab1… One night… We would construct one tale. Only one tale… in one night: told by a thousand tellers… Yes: one tale told by a thousand tellers… The reversal of The Thousand and One Nights would be obvious. The grand reversal. We tell that one tale. Only one. One thousand tellers… and I.

In a desert landscape, with sand-dunes scattered across, there are a thousand beds… A thousand comfortable beds or seats, next to one thousand chairs or small rugs on the desert sand. On them sit tellers. A thousand tellers. And they all tell the story. The same story. Over and over. Over and over… Ghost-like wanderers sift through this landscape. I can see them with their flowing robes, their flowing loose clothes. They wander among these tellers who sit idly by when no one has come to hear their tales. The landscape: a desert landscape, as far as the eye can see. Scattered throughout this desert landscape, there are one thousand tellers who sit by a bed or a mattress or a comfortable divan, ready to tell the tale, the same as all the other tellers will tell. Over and over. Silently they stare into the desert landscape when no one is there. When a listener has come upon them, they launch again into the tale, the one tale, repeated by all the others, of one night.

Across a landscape, across a grand landscape, these tellers would be scattered. Telling the tale. The same tale, the same long tale… I will tell of #yekshab1, you kept writing, I will tell of the construction of the story of one night. #yekshab1: the story of the telling of one night. The story of the construction of the tale of—or is it in—one night. That is #yekshab1.

And so… I conceived and worked on #yekshab1 for more than six years. There was always a conflict between two possible paths: a/the extremely brief book (yes, it needed to be a book): a few lines, or, at most, a paragraph or a page; b/a less extreme piece through which a range of possibilities opened up. For a long time, I opted for the second, and a plethora of variations and iterations emerged. The work done in Bologna with a group I ended up calling the Bologna Players of the Elastic Circus of the Revolution, for example. There, the piece turned out to be a fascinating multi-fragmental poetic ethnography involving the city of Ravenna. For various reasons, I felt like the piece wasn’t quite what I imagined for #yekshab1. (It turned out that our work there, a performative jaunt into Ravenna, became a different canto of ÉPÏKÂNÕVÀ, titled Fuga Ravenna.) There was the brief night-walk in uptown Manhattan: conjuring the spirit of urban walks in literature, the work was redirected again, not because it was an unappealing piece in and of itself (no, it was quite good and would end up being placed in another work), but it just wasn’t what I imagined for #yekshab1. Another iteration consisted of an actual dialogue between two entities that would remain nameless and ambiguous throughout. I was imagining a script, with a particular format: two columns on each page, one describing the scenario (the stage/ film directions), the other the actual dialogue: an interesting piece but, again, not quite #yekshab1. All of this, after also considering purely performative iterations that had me all enamored, with some that were almost mystical… Ultimately, even though all seemed relatively interesting, perhaps even suitable, there was always the nagging, overdriving, seductive option I could not overcome: the extremely brief text that would also be the necessary counter to the main intertext, founded on the deliberate gesture whereby the piece would be as short as possible, generating the radical overturning of one canonical text by another. Here, instead of one person telling a story to another for an imagined thousand nights, there would be a thousand (figurative but maybe literal too!) tellers, telling a story to countless others in one night. A story of one night, in one night.

What it

must be!

This is what you keep repeating: this is what it must be! As if the perfect solution is found to a given problem. The elegant, incredible solution to an incredibly complex equation. And yes, that it is… Indeed, it is. The Solution! To an Equation. The only way. And so it goes. One small fragment. All of #yekshab1 is about the attempt at writing #yekshab1. All about creating the framework. All about generating the process of writing the tale of one night, told by thousands of tellers. Not a chronicle of the process of the creation of something no—it’s that the work itself is the creation of the frame that makes it all about the attempt at writing this one night with lots of tellers. #yekshab1 is an elaborate systemic framing, a setting-up of the programme for writing #yekshab1. Elaborate and systemic but also extremely brief. The programme for the construction of the tale is #yekshab1. The articulation of the programme for the fluid construction of the work. And then: it carries on… Or, not. The grand failure. Or rather: not failure, but… a delirious delusion. Quiescent: that’s the word. Always possible, never done. (Why do you gather in the most common of places? Maybe to feel like strangers among friends. To feel again the strangeness of the banal. To feel the wondrousness of the everyday. To, as Alessandro one day wrote, speak ‘like strangers in a place for us common.’ That is #yekshab1.) And so: #yekshab1 will come to represent the performance of writing itself. The performance of the attempt at constructing the tale of one night told by a thousand tellers. This is what #yekshab1 will be. And the hashtag? More symbolic than literal, it points to the conjuring of multiple voices, across time and space, into the one figurative locus; to the crucial imagined participatory dimension of the piece; to the assembly of fragments into the one text—a text unfolding in many directions, through many threads and networks, on different platforms and in different modalities: a grand, multimodal, multithreaded, abstract, quiescent scroll.

2. Of the Inexorable Lure of the Intertext

They ask you always and for good reasons, they ask: What is this intertext you speak of so oft, what is the point of speaking so much of intertexts man?! Why such insistence—?! Well, I say, the intertext is a well-known canonized literary work, a classic perhaps, that has an unclear and not quite obvious relationship with the current text. The intertextual phenomenon is not one of reference or referral. It is not even necessary for the reader to know the connection to the intertext— just that the intertext allows the solution to certain unconventional, perhaps unexpected, characteristics/problematics of the text being read. The intertext provides a solution to the ungrammaticalities through which the current text is constructed. Through structural connections that may not be obvious, the intertextual phenomenon allows the reader of the text at hand to understand some of its operations and directions. The intertextual phenomenon is a way to connect to previous texts, and traditions, and visions, and go beyond them, in different directions! Critique and contemporanize and call for the new!

The intertextual engagement, the intertextual poetics, the intertextual imperative: they allow a re-imagining and creative weaving and reconstitution of the canons—and by extension the particular ideas within them. The intertextual approach allows for an interweaving of myths to fashion new ones, the intertwining of genres and traditions to create new ones. Allows the creation of a new type of text. A new type of unfolding. A new type of experience. A new way of relating to and understanding the world. Through the intertext, connections are immediately generated and reversed. To fashion new relationships to the world! This is what is so fundamentally at play in #yekshab1! This is what is at play the whole time! The concept of intertextuality and, more importantly, the performance and unveiling of the intertext! (And this is where a certain type of cultural interaction takes place. Cultural fusion at the level of structural intertextuality, and also intermediality. The creation of a new world through the fusion of intertexts at the structural and thematic levels.)

Now then, the intertext of #yekshab1: The Thousand and One Nights that great, universally recognized compilation of tales from across what is now roughly Western Asia, with the Persian king and storyteller at its center. The frame: the king, Shahryâr, kills every morning a young virgin he has married the night before, but Shahrzâd (the last of these wives) figures out a way to stay alive: by starting each night a story that she does not finish. The king lets her live, because he wants to hear the end of the tale… And Shahrzâd continues and finishes the story the next night but then starts another tale that she stops again as dawn is about to break…

The very story frame of The Thousand and One Nights points to the necessity of telling in order to survive. Literally. The young storyteller delays her own execution by enchanting the king with the stories she tells, and with the cliffhangers she concocts. The violence of the frame points directly to the main function of storytelling: survive, by never finishing the tale! #yekshab1 also fashions a similar trope: in order to survive, in order to literally make it through life, the tellers must mold the material of the world into stories, must fashion out of reality stories they construct and tell. You turn reality into material for stories. And thus: you live to tell! And then, you tell to live, in order to be able to continue living! Shahrzâd showing us the way by the very performance of telling, and how salvation resides in the act of molding reality into stories that then allow us to survive! That is the essence of #yekshab1. That is the heart of #yekshab1! Make a new world! #yekshab1 through the constructions and integrations of stories, through the mechanisms I have concocted, along an unending staggered timeline, brings to the surface the performance of the creation of tales and texts: fiction-making itself. #yekshab1 performs story-telling, much like Shahrzâd herself! And this creation of the framework, the creation of the system for the construction of the tale: is the performance of writing itself! My only way to survive! Our only way to make it through! Yes: making it through the darkness… This entire venture—what #yekshab1 truly is: the articulation of the programme to construct the tale of one night: that is my path into the light: our way of surviving by telling! Whether it ever comes to pass, or not… The conceptualization of the piece, the articulation of the framework, the creation of the possible ongoing participatory performance of writing by all, even if never actualized, is the piece! It is the ultimate way to survive…

Thus and so: The Thousand and One Nights is the deep structural intertext for #yekshab1, where the reversals of some of the most important components of the classic are activated. What is retained: the principle of turning the material of the world into stories to survive. But what is most interesting of course, what is at the heart of the literary endeavor proper, and at the heart of the fashioning of an overcoming of canonical texts and ways of seeing the world, is how the adopted intertext is present and reversed. The reversals are key. Necessary reversals of components that point to the espoused aesthetic, the espoused poetics, the espoused politics of the new work. Here, then, a brief (and non-exhaustive) catalogue, of what I imagine could be reversed in #yekshab1, relative to its main intertext, The Thousand and One Nights:

• In #yekshab1, the story of one figurative-cumulative night is fashioned by thousands of imagined tellers—instead of stories over a thousand nights being told by one teller.

• In #yekshab1, there are multiple people and entities contributing to the story, rather than one fictional creature fashioning many tales.

• In #yekshab1, this one tale is told to unknown thousands—instead of the one all-powerful king

• In #yekshab1: words and strings of words are enough. Texts of various kinds. Stacked words. Stacked blocks with words scribbled on them. Not just stories. Not just. I use the word ‘tell’ throughout yes, but it’s really all about wordstringings, with all the texts fusing together. Not a whole story but fragments. Pieces. Like us, like our lives. Like: our times…

• A story IN one night, and a story OF one night, indeed. So, a thousand tellers telling a story that takes place in one night and tells the story of one night!

• In #yekshab1, the process of constructing #yekshab1 is visible— in fact, the story of the construction of #yekshab1 is front and center.

• In #yekshab1, there are multiple platforms for the telling— from ancient traditions (like oral transmission), to the newest of our digital offerings and online scrolls and screeds!

• In #yekshab1, an imagined multi-directional unfolding takes shape. Not only must each tell to survive but for #yekshab1 itself to survive, the participatory dimension in different venues and mediums and modalities is key. (Or: is this articulation, and the imagined participatory dimension: enough…)

• By generating participatory modalities, interventionist modalities, fictionalizing mechanisms, by asking others to be involved, by setting up conditions where people automatically contribute, we are molding material and performing the construction of #yekshab1. Performing becoming Shahrzâd. Not just telling but: performing telling. Performing becoming tellers.

• In #yekshab1, the actual piece is of extreme brevity. But it also has a few components that generate new types of objects, new experiences: from the hashtag littéraire to projections, objects, stacked word sculptures (that can even be repurposed), confabs and gatherings where various threads of the overall grand text unfold.

• In #yekshab1, there are multiple modalities of telling and creating, instead of the one grand narrative strategy assembled in the final volume.

• In #yekshab1, a new type of compendium is built, one very much attuned to our times and our ways of interacting and sharing and reading: a fragmented compendium, fluid yet with fixed elements, changing yet forever the one work: a multidirectional multimodal epic (un)scroll: an abeyant, abstract scroll: #yekshab1…

3. Discreet Strolls Along Uncharted Borders

I yearn to think and to imagine that the participatory modality at the heart of this enterprise is a key dimension of #yekshab1. The lone narrator replaced with thousands of narrators. All the connected stories of the tellers. The call: the construction of a tale! And the construction of a group. A troupe. A brigade. Indeed it is! It is The Brigade de Shahrzâd. The Brigade of Shahrzâd! Yes: THE BRIGÂD OF SHAHRZÂD!! (All used interchangeably, as we see fit!) Brigade: with the call to a most important battle, a most relevant, ongoing, struggle: to fashion narratives that allow survival, liberation, emancipation! They are part of The Brigâd of Shahrzâd, all those who contribute and intervene…

All contributing pieces become parafrags: #yekshab1 could one day be built on parallel fragments that allow it to unfold. Parallel fragments… Distributed across spaces and places, across geographies and times, across modalities of telling, across objects and quiddities. Again, although we could set up a number of actual hashtags (probably more than one across various platforms), the ‘#’ is more poignantly symbolic: a sign that points to the participatory potentiality that includes many voices and gathers the many experiences and realities… Oral and written. Onpage, offpage, online, and not. Texts and tales. Commentary and reactions. Words strung together. Words and sentences stacked on top of each other (figuratively, visually, literally). Screams and howls and whispers. Constant reaction and reaction to reaction. Interpretations and debates: all within the grand distributed unfolding! Translations can appear right there, along with modifications and variations. Letters. Archival material. Reflections. Notes. The theory too: it will unfold and be visible, simultaneous to the creation of the text. The theory of the writing will accompany the actual writing. Unfolding theory/practice! Footnotes, addenda, supplements, and a horde of other textual paraphernalia. The very fact that they can be juxtaposed, that they are brought together, fashions a connection. A frame that creates the form. There, in that unfolding text generated by the parafrags and the interactions fashioned between the parafrags themselves, a grand tale is created. #yekshab1. The concept and materiality and symbolic import of the hashtag. The process of the attempt at writing the story of the construction of the tale of one night. The texts will be gathered and some will not be gathered and in so many corners and ways, thousands of tellers will weave the tale of one night. The contributing artists of the tale of one night. Not an illusion! It could happen! It could…

The whole enterprise: a fiction machine. The Machine à Fiction. The MàF could generate untold numbers of tales, all coalescing to make one. Untold series of interventions. This, #yekshab1, a machine after all. A fiction machine. The framing fashions a machine! A feeder. A generator. Everything exists to be turned into material for the world. And within #yekshab1, everything turns into those parafrags of the tale of one night. Performing writing. Making chronicles and theory. A weird human/technical collaboration. With no end in sight. The MàF will allow everyone to survive. The Brigade and the MàF will inspire all to thrive. Lonesome riders in all these strange towns. Always and forever reaching out: the machine and the brigade, through their parafrags across platforms and landscapes and tellscapes, making the tale of one night. The tale in one night. In these uncharted territories. Along these uncharted frontiers and borders. Pieces that allow all to make it through another day—and another night. Always and forever there. Survivors and conquerors of their darkness and their fears. At the margins with the MàF and the Brigade, making it through the world. We will make it happen. We must make it happen. We can make it happen…

4. Open Villa: The Strange Case of the Happenings at the Villa at the Top of the Hill

I see a villa at the top of the hill. A real villa with galleries and rooms. Bodies flowing in and out of these rooms. The works from #yekshab1 projected onto walls and on the ceilings and on the floors. To this villa all players can go. Mechanisms of participation and fictionalization I will concoct and all can play and tell. Play and tell! Citizen-tellers of the world! In each of the rooms, in each of the galleries at the villa at the top of the hill, the audiences through their haunting passages from one room to another, experience the tale. But they will also turn into players and authors, members of the Brigade, involved in the construction of the tale. One night and a thousand people constructing it. A haunting cognition of being in the presence of the construction of a tale—and inside the tale. Inside the tale that one is building. The one story. One space, one world. In this villa and all the others: watching and reading and sitting and standing and lying down, chatting, posting, writing. There they are, the figures wandering the grounds, posting and reading and posting and laughing and crying and sleeping and dreaming and telling, and up again posting and telling and screaming and laughing, again, and again, and again… Endlessly in these galleries of the villa at the top of the hill…

I imagine the first villa expanding into others. Nights of gatherings. Parties and special occasions and openings and concerts. And also, soon enough, #yekshab1-specific gatherings: the #yekshab1 parties: the #yekshab1 confabs! Groovy confabs! Who knows what they could turn into… Homes turned into havens for the performance of the writing of the tale. A grand stage. All the homes and the villas on top of one hill or another: play out the performance of the writing of a tale. Activating #yekshab1. #yekshab1 performed in the villas and the houses and the galleries and the spaces of the world with projective performations. With stacked wordstring blockscrolls. With the paper scraps in the suitcase, the suitcasecraps. They will sing and dance and tell. In one night, one majestic night, always seemingly the last night of #yekshab1 but never the last night. Always just one night when a thousand new tellers in the villas scattered across the hills of the world tell of the construction of that one night, the story in one night, the story of one night. All over the world, inviting wandering bards into galleries, the wandering bards who have at last found the light.

The world awaits. And when the world again needs the story of storytelling, I will call upon us to occupy another villa, another set of villas scattered across the hills, to generate again the telling, a marathon #yekshab1 session, a collective #yekshab1 session, generating the retelling, the retelling that will be a new telling, the story of the construction of one tale: another #yekshab1 confab. Endlessly across the world, across time: that is the story of #yekshab1. Ever-expanding and forever more. Now, and now again. Like the universe. #yekshab1. Just like the universe. Expanding. Like life, making possible: life. Sustaining. Like Water. Expansion. Story. Life.

5. A Trickster this Poet. A Prankster. A Provocateur. A Player, After All.

I see #yekshab1, the grand unfolding! I see #yekshab1 as an ongoing, participatory, cumulative, part-public, part-performative literary work. Epic, maybe—with multiple threads/components: the actual four-line work itself, along with the epilogue; the postscript—which also gets detached and functions as a one-sheet directorial synopsis; the projective performations that happen in certain quarters at various times; and the other (possible) panoply of works such as artists’ books, installations, public and sound pieces and other adventures that conjure the spirit of contribution, all embodied in the hashtag as symbol of such participatory assembly; various actual hashtags generating a digital distributed thread. Remember this also: #yekshab1, spelled as such and in this alphabet, is the name of the work and should not be translated into any language, not written out in a different script. The ambiguity, the slight alienating effect for those who do not know the ‘meaning’ in Farsi, the uncertain references generated by this name/title are all part of the universe of desired effects on the reader. A title, true, but that should be treated like a name, and not translated.

The parameters and the components of the literary experience are operated upon to generate a new type of work. Overcomings of conceptual frameworks and literary practices. Where the innovations entice new ways of understanding and experiencing the world. #yekshab1 resting on the main intertext is crucial in the imagining and reimagining of possibilities: the reversals with The Thousand and One Nights are crucial, but they also generate innovations in the literary realm proper. That, in a way, is the whole point. Below then, a small (and yet again non-exhaustive) list of such innovations occurring within #yekshab1, the abeyant #yekshab1…

• The size and the scale: a few lines, a page maybe (along with an epilogue) generating a long multi-fragmented text. An epic multidirectional piece… And simultaneously the shortest of literary works.

• A new form—and a new quiddity: the participatory, cumulative, ongoing, multimodal multithreaded abstract scroll. That is the name of this type of piece. A quiescent one, a possible one, an abeyant one. Stacked, in multiple ways. Along with a slew of new components: the projective performations, wordstring blockscrolls, the hashtag littéraire…

• The concept of the author: the ‘author’, here, is the author of the framework, the generator of the framework and the generator of the process. A different sense of authorhood, which generates partner-authors through the participatory process.

• The Grand Guru of #yekshab1: yes, I am The Supreme Guide of the Brigâd de Shahrzâd! Curator of wordings and parafrags! Curator of the content of the supplemental lists and cells that can be revised at any point! An Architect of Fictionalizations! A Literary Construction Foreman for a System of Participation and for the MàF!—O #yekshab1, what have I wrought!

• A new troupe, The Brigâd de Shahrzâd—a most worthy name frankly! Bringing on board a host of collaborators. I can even imagine different levels of ‘participatory authorship’, a whole taxonomy! With various nuances, such as the participating author; the participatory contributor; the participatory interpreter etc. And more down the line, as the unfolding is sure to generate more subtle differentiations and funky new concepts.

• The performative spectrum: #yekshab1 performs writing, and is sustained by the constant meta-performative operations at play through the participation and the exchanges and the curation. It continues to explore the spectrum of performance through the confabs, the projections, conventional readings and actual movement-centric pieces.

• The participatory dimension: the multimodal scroll invites participation through a host of mechanisms and on multiple platforms. It is multivectorial participation, distributed participation, (dis)connected participation. And sure, one digitally distributed thread, built on multiple actual hashtags, is a most utilized form of participation, a most common one in our times—and that is the point: all parts are crucial and directed towards the creation of a unique literary piece connected to a crucial intertext in the history of literature.

• The printing considerations: part of the adventure! The work allows a reflection on the relationships between printed matter and digital matter and the concept of the literary artifact. What kind of relationships do we want… A limited number of prints of these texts? A book nevertheless? An artist’s book? Mass editions? Maybe just a detached sheet… Or perhaps, a miniature book—a Miniature Poet’s Book, containing only the lone paragraph that is the central text of #yekshab1… Or: a plethora, an ensemble, of such MPBs, scattered around and about…

• The dissemination dimension: with the possibilities along this spectrum of participatory and public and relational and collaborative practice, I end up integrating various forms of disseminatory practice. Distribution and diffusion: the mechanisms and the politics associated with them are not taken for granted, but taken into consideration in the conceptualiza- tion of the work, with a real effect on the form and content. Distribution and dissemination practices seriously woven into the fabric of a work!

• Value and exchange: with the interplay of the digital and the physical and the performative, concepts of valuation and pricing, along with the schemas related to commercial circulation and exchange are all put into question. A beautiful type of question. Not sure how to deal with it. Do we sell, not sell, make it free, not, what do those things even mean? The conceptual framework and the bureaucracy that we have normalized are frazzled and undermined, happily.

• Public actions and public exhibitions: the work turns into a fusion: an exhibition, a relational piece, a game, a play: with, at all times, new actors and interpreters of a public piece and an existing score—: one that blooms, over time: a durational work: carrying on, unperturbed…

• Durational dimension: ongoing, #yekshab1 could carry on for years and decades. Becoming larger and larger, and taking place in endless spaces and environments. A cumulative expansion that is in tune with its major intertext, saluting it while overcoming it: The Thousand and One Nights… Or: it remains, forever, quiescent…

• The equation: I’d written hundreds of pages, and there were hundreds more on the way. And yet, I opt for the most seminal brevity! What would be the smallest possible work that is a real, legit, piece? That one could argue is a book? What a défi that is! That question, that equation, doesn’t get solved on its own: it must match and align with the ‘perfect’ intertext: and that perfect intertext is found in concert with the ambition. The alignment. The solution. The work: a great solution to a grand equation, created and presented. And then solved.

6. In the Shadow of the Crystalline Delirium

An important query. A troubling thought. #yekshab1, all of this: is it nothing other than the mad concoction of a poet? #yekshab1: about the madness of doing #yekshab1? About the madness of the construction of #yekshab1? About the madness of the concept and the possibility of doing it—and yet never actually making it happen? Perhaps all just a hallucination. All just delirium. The story of the mad poet who concocts to tell the story of the construction of the tale of one night. I repeat: a mere shell of a story of the mad poet who concocts to tell the story of the construction of the tale of one night. And yet: the insistence...

(It was madness. It is madness. And it is perhaps best served and retained as madness. Not a real programme or an actual attempt at creating the work—but an exposition of madness. The representation of a mad proposal. Make it impossible to actually do it. There will be no villa at the top of a hill… There will be no readings and no actual sites and no actual creation of possibilities of participation and fictionalization… Only the fragile articulation of the attempt at constructing a frame… Only this… Along with abandoned artists’ books. Abandoned poets’ books. Unperformed projections. Abandoned hashtags… Only: this! And printed matter scattered in empty lofts and galleries and villas… This is #yekshab1! This, is: #yekshab1.)

7. Go, Wanderers, Tell Us the Story of One Night...

> Just tell. A night. That night. Tell it. #yekshab1 exists as a (dis)connected depository of fragments, so, go… You can contribute however you want. String along words, images, impressions. Short or long. At a #yekshab1 confab. At a projection party. Online with actual hashtags (keep an eye out because we might use various tags on different platforms). Across all possible modalities… Post… Participate…

> No need for full sentences or stories, really. Just texts. Fragments. Thoughts. Observations. Visions. Or just add and intervene. All the parafrags. Supplements, images—any type of extra-textual paraphernalia. And marginalia: the sounds and sights and movements of the night. Of, the night, that’s right. Into the text the rendition of sounds and images, a panoramic vision, of the night…

> You can do it in your everyday circulations, whenever you want. Lone wolf members of the Brigâd de Shahrzâd! On the bus and the train as you carry on with your daily lives. When you are at the local bar or restaurant. During the live performances too… In our fluid cities and open villas, we will generate more and more pieces and tales and micro-tales for #yekshab1! With different groups, in different situations: words, sentences, images. See the night. Remember it. Imagine it. That night. And then: words, words strung along…

> And: propose new frames (like the desert dunes described at the beginning) for the one night/one thousand tellers’ idea to occur; propose new ways of participating in the construction of the story of one night. I invite you not only to participate in the development of the content of the tale, but to participate by proposing new frameworks, and/or new modalities of participation. Tell. Post. Tell. Write. Tell. Participate. #yekshab1. #yekshab1.

No! No… It is madness. It is madness after all. There will be no #yekshab1. There will be no expanded #yekshab1. This is #yekshab1. This is all of #yekshab1. All it can be… All it must be… The concoctions of a mad poet… The delirious imaginings of a mad poet… The possible light, and yet, only a figment of the imagination… There will be no #yekshab1, this is #yekshab1. There will be no #yekshab1, this is all of #yekshab1. This: is: #yekshab1…

One night.

A thousand tellers.

#yekshab1

One night. That Night. Tell me. Tell us.

#yekshab1

One night. Story of. Story in. One night. One thousand tellers. And I!

#yekshab1

How you must tell, in order to survive. How you must mold the material of the world into stories, in order to survive.

(I thought about not doing it, I really did, but: it’s too good. Too right. Really. Must be done. Just, must. The reversal and the intertext. The grand reversal. And this radical and extreme brevity: #yekshab1.)

The Thousand and One Nights: the classic compendium performs the central tenet of storytelling through its framing device: Shahryâr, the Persian king who marries virgins only to execute them the next morning, spares the life of Shahrzâd, the last of his wife-storytellers, because she is clever enough, astute enough, to not end the story she starts—and because… he wants to hear the rest! And from there, every night the same. The king does not go through with the execution because each night, upon finishing the previous tale, Shahrzâd starts another tale that she stops as dawn is about to break… The execution of the morning is postponed, for the king—the nasty, violent, king—wants to hear the end of the tale… And on and on for a thousand and one nights… The essence of story-telling: the necessity of turning the material of the world into stories, and the necessity of telling stories in order to survive.

#yekshab1 points to the same fundamental need to mold the material of the world into stories, while radically overturning key elements of a classic intertext: instead of one person telling a story to another for a figurative (and imagined) thousand nights, there would be a thousand (figurative) tellers, telling a story to untold thousands in one (figurative) night. Story of one night. Story in one night. Told by thousands. All accumulating, all fusing. In one space and in… ethereal space. All becoming one. All: becoming our tale. #yekshab1. And yet, ultimately, really about the creation of the frame: only about the creation of this frame: imagining a brand new world with #yekshab1…

The hashtag: a sign that points to the crucial cumulative and participatory dimension of the endeavor—and not a literal hashtag. A symbolic one that performs the multidirectional and (dis)connected assembly of fragments. SuitcaseScraps. Textsheets. Encantations. Wordclouds. Shoutouts. Roundrugs. Zoomtells. Wordstring Blockscrolls. Stories Around an Actual Fire. Soundstrings. Confabs and Projective Performations… And sure: various hashtags to generate a distributed digital thread—multiple hashtags in different venues, given how fluid and nimble one must be on the web and on social media platforms. So, go… Just tell. Post. Participate. A night. That night. However you want. Whatever length. Whatever genre. Whatever scale. Whichever language. Words even. Maybe Just words. Not sentences. Just words. String along words. String along images. String along impressions. Sensations. Words for that night… Of: that night… The long walk. That strange encounter. The sudden fleeing. The shots. The passing of cars, the flickering of lights. The descent of fog into the alleys. Secret getaways. Passages in strange towns or wanderings in familiar towns. The old man at the curb. The dog, the leaves. The lamps, the sky. The doubts. The dreams. The thoughts. The howls.

#yekshab1 will be an ongoing, cumulative, part-public, part-performative literary work. #yekshab1 stands for a type of openness. It stands for fluidity and multivectorial participation. A regeneration of our relationship with the world. And in the process, it reinvents and fashions newness in a range of literary realms. A literary work. A literary epic, maybe. An epic scroll.

(Or… (Or: is it all just a hallucination… All just poetic delirium… The fragile articulation of the attempt at constructing a tale… Maybe only this… A printed page… Ghosted digital hashtags… Empty and unpopulated spaces… Madness after all. No expanded #yekshab1. The concoctions of a mad poet, that is all it is… The delirious imaginings of a mad poet… Only this. Only: this. And nothing else, really. And nothing else… There will be no #yekshab1, this is #yekshab1. There will be no #yekshab1; this: is #yekshab1. This: is: #yekshab1… ))

A distributed abstract scroll. A crazy yet necessary—necessary!—multimodal, multithreaded, quiescent, abstract scroll. #yekshab1. A forever abeyant scroll: #yekshab1.

The following images were taken at one of #yekshab1 participatory installations. The images of contributions are all from the same event.

Addendum

One night. A thousand tellers. #yekshab1. One night. That night. Tell me. Tell us. #yekshab1. One night. Story of. Story in. One night...

#yekshab1 points to the fundamental need to mold the material of the world into stories, while radically overturning key elements of a classic intertext, The Thousand and One Nights: instead of one person telling a story to another for a figurative (and imagined) thousand nights, there would be a thousand (figurative) tellers, telling a story to untold thousands in one (figurative) night. Story of one night. Story in one night. Told by thousands. All accumulating, all fusing. All becoming one. All: becoming our tale. #yekshab1.

#yekshab1 is an ongoing, cumulative, part-public, part-performative participatory literary work. #yekshab1 stands for a type of openness. It stands for fluidity and multivectorial participation. A multimodal, multithreaded, quiescent, abstract scroll. A forever abeyant scroll...

All accumulating, all fusing. In one space and in… ethereal space. All becoming one. All: becoming our tale. #yekshab1. And yet, ultimately, really about the creation of the frame: only about the creation of this frame: imagining a brand new world with #yekshab1…

The hashtag: a sign that points to the crucial cumulative and participatory dimension of the endeavor—and not a literal hashtag. A symbolic one that performs the multidirectional and (dis)connected assembly of fragments. SuitcaseScraps. Textsheets. Encantations. Wordclouds. Shoutouts. Roundrugs. Zoomtells. Wordstring Blockscrolls. Stories Around an Actual Fire. Soundstrings. Confabs and Projective Performations… And sure: various hashtags to generate a distributed digital thread—multiple hashtags in different venues, given how fluid and nimble one must be on the web and on social media platforms. So, go… Just tell. Post. Participate. A night. That night. However you want. Whatever length. Whatever genre. Whatever scale. Whichever language. Words even. Maybe Just words. Not sentences. Just words. String along words. String along images. String along impressions. Sensations. Words for that night… Of: that night… The long walk. That strange encounter. The sudden fleeing. The shots. The passing of cars, the flickering of lights. The descent of fog into the alleys. Secret getaways. Passages in strange towns or wanderings in familiar towns. The old man at the curb. The dog, the leaves. The lamps, the sky. The doubts. The dreams. The thoughts. The howls.

One night. Tell us. Sentences. Or not.

Just words, if you want. Images. Sensations. Fragments. #yekshab1.

One night.

Tell me. Tell us.

#yekshab1 was first public-ed in October 2021 at Hot Wood Arts, during the Red Hook Open Studios. It has since been enlivened at several other spots.

Amir Parsa

Amir Parsa was born in Tehran and currently lives and works in New York.

An internationally acclaimed writer, poet, translator, prose stylist and new formist, Amir Parsa is the author of more than twenty literary works, including Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition, Feu l’encre/Fable, Erre, and The Complete NothingDoings. An uncategorizable body of work, his literary oeuvre–written in English, French, Farsi, Spanish and various hybrids–constitutes a radical polyphonic enterprise that puts into question national, cultural and aesthetic attachments while fashioning innovative genres, discursive endeavors and types of literary artifacts.

Parsa’s curatorial interjections, performances, conceptual pieces and subversions, along with photographic, participatory, and exhibition-based projects have taken place in a host of galleries, public spaces, and environments. Overall and through the years, his books, transgressive literary works, artistic fusions and transdisciplinary interventions have dazzled and bedeviled, enchanted and pissed off, and drawn all kinds of praise and scorn.

Born in Tehran, Parsa attended French international schools in Iran and the U.S., studied at Princeton and Columbia, and currently lives in New York. He is the Founding Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Pratt institute, as well as Curator, Individualized Learning, and Associate Provost for Interdisciplinary and Integrative Learning. He coordinates cross-departmental minors, directs the Pratt Integrative Courses, teaches in both the PIC and Writing programs, and regularly launches neo-disciplinary initiatives.