– Here you can admire a splendid ancient Iranian with the traditional medallion, Toranj.
– Very beautiful.
– Please touch it, don’t you find it very soft?
– Yes, very soft.
– You know, there are many kind of wool. This is refined. It is obtained with the spring cut, which ensures the best quality and what’s more: it’s kork.
– Kork?
– Yes, it’s the softer part, from the sheep’s neck.
– I see.
– Oh, You don’t look satisfied yet, maybe You were looking for something even more precious. Please follow me, I’ll show you something else … This Kashan rug contains silk threads. I do not offer you a pure silk one, because the silk on are usually used as tapestries. Unless …, I didn’t actually ask you what use you want to make of it, maybe I can help You choose.
– Actually, I don’t know, I … I’d like to see and get inspired …
– I understand.
– It is a gift for my wife.
– Oh, in that case isn’t it better for the Lady to see it too?
– She shown me one she liked very much, I see if I can find something similar.
– Very well, You could tell me, if You remember of course, the pattern, the colors. Even if You have a vague idea, I can understand. You see, carpets are many, but the more traditional motives are recognizable, I need only a couple of details for …
He was no longer listening to him. The salesman’s voice was echoing away in a rumble that distorted the words. It was the carmine red that emerged from a huge amber weave to distract him.
– Oh this is beautiful, I agree with you, you can’t avoid to contemplate it. I’m sorry, though, I can’t sell it, you know … it’s a collector’s item.
The seller spread in a monologue that started from the history of Ancient Persia. His words vaporized in the air as thoughts were lost forever in the network of amber and carmine. That red looked blocked. The decorations contained it, like pretty girls who, with a fake smile, try to hide and restrain a bull behind them. If only they untied their knots, if only they widened their plots, then that red would have overflowed bringing out all the energy of the center. The thrust, the cause, the origin, the explanation of everything was in that center, he felt it.
The answer was there, in a well-protected core, almost impossible to reach even with a glance.
Red was nothing but the emanation of that nucleus, a centrifugal force held back in its radiation. He felt overwhelmed by the colors. The red power pushed him back, but the amber caught him again dragging him into the nets of the girls, who seemed to agree to show him the hidden bull. The affected doodles turned into a golden path that invited him to go. Silk threads, swaying, caressed his shoulders, as if to reassure him: “Do not be afraid of the fire, it will not burn you”.
The incandescent rays, as they recognized him, opened a crack. Thence he saw a large rotating circle and an intense glow emanating from its depth. He felt himself advancing without recognizing himself a full will. He was now inside, the mind did not oppose any resistance or get excited with any curiosity. His thoughts were like liquefied, fused in the passage through the fire.
He was dissolving. He no longer felt the body, he no longer felt the mind, though he felt something.
A kind of magnetism was attracting him towards the center. Somehow, he felt he had found his way back: if everything that came from that source was diffused one way outwards, if everything flowed from that source, then he was dragged into the only opposite current. Without any effort, he was returning to the base.
Infiltrating in the inner glow of the glow, he found himself in a new conflict. The irradiation of the nucleus was so dense that no space was left for the singularity. The fullness of the source did not tolerate an area of individual consciousness. It was not enough to have abandoned body and thoughts, that “feeling” of himself, that being an “I” occupied too much surface to be able to penetrate that center. Rejected and attracted at the same time, he understood that he could do nothing but give in, on pain of a violent and sudden expulsion from that state of grace. Thus he sensed: it was a state of grace. It was not understandable or intelligible, but he felt it and lived it.
He had no way out: he had to give up that “feeling”, wanting he to give in and go back to ordinary currents or to give in completely and get lost in that glow.
He decided he had nothing to lose after all.
His conscience began shrinking, like someone who shrugs his shoulders to go through a bottleneck. The smaller he got, the more his speed increased. He must have been at the very heart of the glow when his conscience, now reduced to a vague and distant dot, felt a boundless expansion, a glimmer of spatial eternity, only to vanish completely.
– Sir…um, watch out… all right? – the salesman had put his hand on his shoulder, seeing that he was giving way in his posture by bending his knees. He didn’t seem to have noticed his dwindling attention at all. Only a few minutes had passed, perhaps seconds.
– Oh yes, yes, sorry, I had a cramp – he replied with the first thing that came to his mind.
– Ah ok, well, I was saying that compared to the myth of the Cosroe carpet, in which the patterns are more floral and faunistic, here we return to the geometric origins that evidently constituted the foundation of this art from Mongolia to Iran …