By subjective, I do not mean the bourgeois idealism that one might have in mind and we all condemn. I have nothing to do with its philosophy. Rather, in the beginning, the human being was an absolute, non-conscious soul that penetrated the organisms of nature. Then the evolutionary process of that soul reached the human being. The human being is becoming conscious. The more conscious he becomes, the more he can sense the abstract which he himself represents. That is, as I see it, art brings consciousness to the unconscious soul of the human being because art, awakening the sense of the abstract, allows us to come to know God.

If you look at our own literature, the poetry of Manuchehri, Roudaki, Farrokhi, their wishes, their lives, their ideals and their needs are all objective, material and concrete. What are they longing fort They are longing for what there is but they do not possess, whereas Rumi is longing for that which does not exist.

 

                   It does not exist, we have found it.
                     That non-existent is my longing.


Art is searching for 'that' and industry is looking for 'this'. Industry is trying to find what there is in nature which is out of man's reach and reach it. This is exactly the opposite of what art is searching for. As we said, man seeks that which is not.

The more one struggles, the more one creates and the more one evolves, the more one will feel that one is becoming separated. As a principle, this is the motive for the evolution of man.

Manuchchri's love poems are at a very objective level and they do not have the least bit of human feelings in them. They are exactly paradise. Whereas when we reach Saadi and then Hafez and Rumi, there, in great abstraction, lies the story of feelings and expressions of the spirit. The world is imprisoned and paradoxically it is not there. One cannot even identify objectivity and materiality. Sometimes, when one wants to address this subject, the addressed feels him. He can well see that it has become a kind of consciousness. It has become exactly like the image of love and the breath of feeling. Sometimes it is not realized. Sometimes we cannot realize it.

                 What can I call It when I don 't know it?
    

This is not about the celestial lover, although it has reached the level of abstraction and transcendence. One can confuse them since limits belong to the sphere of objectivity. The difference of opinion as to what wine is made from and what it is, is all useless. The problem is to reach abstraction. In abstraction there is no boundary anymore and none of these categories and limitations exist in one's feelings. He is Manuchehri, as long as he uses words. It is the wine which he has received from his lover. After he becomes old and religious, it is obvious that his wine is something else and his lover of another sort. It is in this evolved feeling that he approaches abstraction. These arguments are appropriate in the study of life and works of Manu- chehri and Farrokhi.

The abstract feelings reach the point of saying,

                 What can I call it when I don 't know it?
           Why should I say I'm not, when I am in love with it ...


It is in the completely subjective, in the depths of the individual, far from the various natures and material objectives that this poetry reaches new poetry-modern poems.

My friend, Dr. Mokhtari, translated a book and gave it to me to read. This modern new novel was all about the description of objects. When you open a new novel, all you see is words about buses, buying tickets and cars and their honking. They are all describing common everyday life. It would seem as if-literature and art had escaped out of the interior essence of the human being. It has become objectivized and materialized. But in this novel, it says that, on the contrary, none of the external objects are the ones I am talking about. The tree I am talking about is not the tree that grows in the garden. It is the tree whose image is in my heart. I describe it. That man, of whom I am speaking, is different from the man that the biographer or the doctor talks about. He is a man who is in my mind. Therefore, I see him differently and it means something different to me.

Opposed to what Aristotle says, art has always been struggling to free itself from all that is objective, concrete and a subject of science based upon the humanism of ancient Greece, on the beauty of reality, on the beauty of the mountains and the valleys and, most of all, on the beauty of the human body. It tries to free man from these things as well.

But in the course of history, whenever art has been expressed freely and has not been the reflection of physiological needs, it has struggled to free itself from its bonds. All the artistic movements formed by artists, either with supernatural feelings or by ones without them, have tried to make art not so much a means to picture and describe reality or to define man, as his clear, existing model, but to use and recognize it as an inevitable challenge, a divine, creative becoming, the evolving of feelings and of the essential truth of man's being.

The most material of the arts is sculpture. Painting is more close to perfection. Why is it more perfect? Because it has one dimension less. It is two dimensional. As it has one dimension less of nature, it possesses one more potential to approach subjectivity. That is why we have in art today, great men such as Picasso. But in sculpture, such geniuses have not been able to develop, for they are bound in three dimensional forms.

Although dance is a classical art and a physical art, at the same time, that which it tries to embody is quite in accordance with the spirit, feeling and perception. Therefore, it can be the expression of an individual's inner feelings and an abstraction. Music has only one dimension which is time. Poetry is the absolute abstraction. This is why we see that in poetry we are able to express concepts in their highest form, whereas other fields do not lend themselves as readily.