A love of words and sophisticated yet meaningful ideas expressed well has guided my frequent forays into creative writing and scholarly work. Weirdly, I was not aware of this impulse to write when I was a child in Iran, perhaps because I cannot understand Farsi the way I do English. In any case, as soon as I landed in Los Angeles and started high school as a ninth-grader, I began composing rhyming quatrains which are actually not that bad considering that I was essentially fresh off the boat and English was my second language.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, but my early professional years were focused on visual art, so I am a late-comer to the academic style of writing. I am, in any case, a devoted scholar and writer whose real opus is only just beginning to form. I relish the joy of this prospect and sing as one with Blake: My fingers Emit sparks of fire with Expectation of my future labours.

The writing profession is a good one to choose because one only gets better with age. More importantly, writing is a way to navigate the vicissitudes of inner experience. The written word and the visual image are not two separate categories of reality. They are two ways of pointing to the same thing: the inner world of the psyche, where all images come from. Yes, words and sentences and paragraphs are all technically images, because they form themselves into images when encountered by the reader. Incredibly, each reader forms a different image, so that no two people have quite the same experience when reading something.

This confirms Heraclitus’ claim: ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν· οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει. You could not discover the limits of soul, even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth of its meaning. In other words, the soul is fathomless; its logos is deep.

Like the soul, writing and its practice are fathomless.