“‘Be beautiful and do not speak’. Just a dream. Does the image of this dream reflect on your glass? No, nothing is spoiled… The vacuum of a diamond that cuts no glass, a presence that is absent, beauty… With these very eyes sometimes we see things that are not there.”*

This is my childhood’s game. Back then, I was born when the time came, but this time I will be waiting …

Hey! Is anybody going to open the door of this wardrobe? Anybody home? Is it a wedding, or are you mourning again? Why is the city vacant? Why all the illuminations?

I am being disciplined in a world of my own making. O repressive wardrobe! Under the pretext of preventing chaos and maintaining order, you entered my city and my house, but you just tend to forget whatever you put inside you. You have locked our dresses, perfumes, books, albums, shoes, bags, porcelain and our watches inside yourself! You have become a time hole. A black hole, inside of which is invisible. You devour whatever we have. It is a pity that I am your last morsel!

So now I begin my secret life with you and inside you, concealed from others. I become a “blind owl”, playing with colors in order to say, “There are wounds for playing the soul…”

Each wardrobe might be a window to the city. Each wardrobe might have an old history descending from a light that does not exist anymore. Inside each one there might lie a thought more profound than any old thought you could imagine. It does not mean an older wardrobe is necessarily better. No! By the way, can’t you hear the squeaking of colors on the canvas? The colors have become hinges to open up this barred window. And I am the only woman who wants to be born in the threshold of a cold season. I want to be born with the wardrobes and from the wardrobes. I want to discover the world in which my path to salvation lies, without even opening the wardrobes door; a butterfly over my cocoon.

Listen! Don’t you hear the wardrobes squeaking? Perhaps you too have come out of your cocoons?

The wardrobes speak to me and we can hear them: words to reveal secrets and signs of a finished and concealed life; they recount my world without having been opened; And the light represents chains of life until the end of the street of solitude
Hear them talking…

Squeak…

Now they are talking to me and this is the most human sound I hear these days. The voice of wardrobes protesting about negligence against them throughout human civilization! The wardrobes have now become a part of the secret life of each one of us and the light bulbs! Save us from these light bulbs! They have all become a representation of our outward life. My wardrobes are all closed and they will remain closed so they won’t tell our deepest secrets and lose their secretiveness and be heard by strangers. In real life too I haven’t opened any wardrobes, lest my fantasies be disturbed. I say it quietly now, “I’d rather be the only one who knew about the inside of my wardrobes!”

…And outside my inner cavity, people were like the light bulbs in my paintings, sometimes as threads swinging in the wind, sometimes as solitary lights and sometimes as decorative lights and colors.

Tania Pakzad
Fall 2015

*Susan Sontag