Attending Bruce's carpet auctions has given me a thin grounding in the basics of Persian carpets. Nothing like Bruce's lifetime of immersion in the subject, but enough to know something about how to pick a good one, as opposed to some of the junk being mass-produced by computers nowadays.
Today he's leading us on a tour of the Carpet Museum, which just happens to be a stone's throw from our hotel. For me, this is a highlight of the tour. Bruce likes to talk about carpets, I like to listen, and here are some of the best Persian carpets in the world.
The Carpet Museum is the brainchild of the wife of the late Shah. She was concerned that some of the oldest and best carpets were being discarded or destroyed. A good carpet will last for many decades, but eventually, if enough people walk on it, it gets beaten clean enough, and enough sweet tea gets spilt on it, it wears out.
The museum has the external appearance of being supported by abstracted carpet frames, leaning up against the walls of notional mud brick village houses. Inside, tall walls allow carpets to be hung vertically, and some are laid on the floor, offering inspection from one or two floors above. The displays are constantly changing, and Bruce is keen to have a look at this year's crop.
As an aside, the image above shows the distinctive silhouette of the Laleh Hotel in the background. Although most Persian civic architecture is drab and boxy, some buildings are innovative in design, and some are of supreme excellence, intricate and elegant, impressing with their design. The museum is pretty good, an example of function dictating form, along with clever ornamentation.
The main hall has several huge carpets on display. There are decades of man-hours in some of them. Women-hours, to be accurate, for it is the women who weave here. Once upon a time, village women would spend their afternoons together, weaving, gossiping, drinking tea. Nowadays, "they all have televisions, and they watch the Iranian equivalent of 'Days of Our Lives'," Bruce lamented.
Whole cities, once fertile factories of exquisite carpets, are now barren, and Chinese junk is filling the gap. Made of inferior materials and woven with less attention to detail than the carpets of old, they curl and fade and fall apart long before the normal lifetime.
All Persian carpets have two main parts. A field, enclosed by a border. "There are really only five designs," Bruce tells us, "and every Persian carpet is based on one of these designs."
Detail and pattern differ, but it's readily apparent after a while. Some, especially prayer mats, resemble a
mihrab, the niche in a mosque wall indicating the direction of Mecca. There is a pointed arch, through which is seen the Tree of Life (in the garden of Eden) usually with birds and animals visible. A vase or fountain offers water for cleansing. Others echo a Koran's decorated cover. The dome of a mosque is imagined from below, with hanging lanterns or chandeliers abstracted along the long grain of the carpet.
Some are just fragments of an intricate, infinite pattern of which a portion has been enclosed by the border. Bruce points out examples, noting that they are not entirely regular or symmetrical. Design elements will be divided arbitrarily by the frame, leading the mind to imagine the pattern continuing on past the border, endlessly repeating.
I contemplate the philosophy of this. The universe is underpinned by the patterns - the design, if you will - of natural laws operating infinitely and endlessly. Two plus two equals four, no matter where. No part of the universe is exempt from gravity. Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom will form water. Here in a fountain, as ice on Mars, on an unseen planet in a distant galaxy. The same laws underpin our universe, and everything we see, from a rainbow to a mountain to a star, are created by those laws.
Put a border around a part of the universe and we have our individual perception. We only see a part of the whole. We cannot see all. What we see is not reality, which is immaterial, and known only to the Almighty.
Look at a Persian carpet, look closely at its intricate, complex, and beautiful design, and there is Creation in microcosm. A piece of the whole.
Some carpets mimic life in a more visible way. A rectangular design might represent a formal Persian garden, wavy patterns indicating water channels; paths and hedges and flower beds sketched in. Look at the carpet, look at tranquility and beauty. Or there might be figures shown. People, trees, birds. Look at the carpet above. Can you see the coughatoo?
Upstairs, usually the domain of the more angular tribal carpets, woven on portable looms in tents, is today given over to the work of the modern weaver Razam Arabzadeh. Three looms are set up, with works in progress, but on today's Sabbath no work progresses. Arabzadeh knows his craft, and he knows how to break the rules. Some of the carpets on display have their borders interrupted; the design flows to the very edge of the carpet, unbounded, flowing eternally outwards in the mind's eye.
The image above depicts a carpet with another woven into it. Two different weaving methods in one, perfect and complete. Bruce itches to flip the carpet over to see the underside, but here it is forbidden to touch the displays, and we can only peer at the edges, gaining an imperfect and oblique view of the carpet's base.
All of the carpets on this level are beautifully designed and woven. They are objects of art in their own right. And each one "breaks the rules", moves the art forwards, excites the imagination. They certainly excite me. I like my art semi-abstracted, the abstraction giving an insight into the mind of the artist.
One, in particular, leaves me gasping in delight:
The label beside this carpet reads, in Persian and English,
"Up to the edge of the sea
A bold design, mystical and modern at the same time, inspired by a couplet from Rumi:
There are footprints up to the edge of the sea.
Underthe sea there are no prints but N. O. T.
This rug is thoroughly innovative and uncoventional, typical of master Arabzadeh's lifelong endeavour to achieve a breakthrough in carpet design."
"I wonder what 'N O T' means," muses Bruce.
I have no idea either, but I photograph the text and later attempt to google it. I can find various translations of Rumi's couplet, but no explanation is apparent.
On the face of it, the carpet shows footprints leading up to the edge of a sea with a stylised ship sailing, its mast amongst the stars. Apparently the footprints represent the finite journey to God, the infinite sea and sky the journey with God. Looking at the sky, there are any number of threads leading up and away. Some are drawn towards a cosmic whirlpool in a corner, from which emerges Rumi's name in Persian. Segments of more traditional carpet represent more obvious pathways.
The combination of the two geniuses - Rumi and Arabzadeh - enthralls me. This is truth, beauty, wisdom made visible.
