The artist

About G. Zimmerman Farrell

In her own words —

I wanted to be Victor Hugo or nothing, as he had declared at the tender age of 14: je veux être Chateaubriand ou rien. I wanted to be Victor Hugo or nothing. I wanted to have his kind of influence on society, I wanted to create characters such as M. Myriel or Jean Valjean. Then I decided to be Leonardo DaVinci, as I had some modest talent for drawing and painting. And when later I read some poems by great Chagall and Michelangelo, I told myself why not be both.

But, as I was born in Iran (lovely, grand, ancient land with nice people and shitty government), and spoke Persian — (lovely language of Ferdowsi, Hafez, Sa’di, Omar Khayyam, Shahryar, Akhavan, Rumi, Lotfalian, Forough, Obeyd, Sepehri . . . ’Ââli Payam, Bahar, Vahshi, Khorsandi . . . .)

— and then as I learned English, French, German, Arabic, Turkish in addition to Persian, I started thinking with the words of Hamlet and Portia and Polonius, Macduff, with the words of Appolinaire, Prevert and of course dear Hugo, Victor de prenom, Samuel Beckett’s Pozzo and Lucky, Gogo and Didi, with a bit of Werther and Doctor Faust thrown in for good measure. And I started thinking thus . . .

I was always interested in politics, as “politics” is philosophy in action, philosophy having to do with here and now. But then of course shit happens — and it happened big time in my country of birth, in gargantuan dimensions; so the sadness and depression as a result of this newfangled shit hitting the fan . . . thus the shit hit the fan and spread all over, I mean aaalllll over . . .

Art and poetry being to some degree antidotes to fan/shit situations . . . I am trying to learn some web technology. It turns out, I am sorta not so tech-talented. I mean really hopeless, but I have 2 talented cats, very tech-talented, smart, who are putting this stuff up in a web-site, hopefully, hopefully . . . smart cat-technology . . . Architecture by Fluffy-tech-ture . . . voilà.

I feel closer to Voltaire and Oscar Wilde, Solzhenitsyn, Yevtushenko and Shaw, Hugo than to my next door neighbours. In fact I think with the mind of Voltaire or I try to put myself in his frame of mind (magnificently powerful mind) or look at the world with the eyes of Abraham Lincoln (borrow his love of all men and of humanity) and Albert Einstein’s preoccupation with finding out what God must have been thinking when God was creating this incredible universe. Of course we have to do grocery shopping while thinking of not leaving the laundry hanging outside when it starts to rain. Of course we hear the news of a terrible tsunami devastating the lives of thousands or worse still, a suicide bomber killing shoppers and innocent bystanders.

Against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I find art and literature to be the only shield.

I would stop dying if a good idea would occur to me, said Voltaire on his death bed: “Je m’areterais de mourire s’il me venait à l’esprit un bon mot.” Even against death he wanted to use the shield of a bon mot! And for 85 years it did work.