Tamám Shud: How the Somerton Man’s Last Dance for a Lasting Life Was Decoded -- Omar Khayyam Center Research Report
Об электронной книге
The mysterious code appearing on the back page of a first edition copy of Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -- found months following the death of The Somerton Man (TSM) in South Adelaide, Australia, on Dec. 1, 1948 -- was a suicide contemplation and planning note he was poetically drafting for himself in the form of a quatrain on the back of his copy of The Rubaiyat, giving a gist of why and how he planned to carry out a deliberately mystery-laden suicide as his last dance for a lasting life. The code was the creative DNA of his suicide plot.
It was written in the ‘Tamám Shud’ transliteration style -- in this case not from Persian, but from Arabic with which he must have been familiar, either natively due to coming ancestrally from the ethnically diverse and widely multilingual Russian Caucasus and/or by training and education. In other words, the ‘Tamám Shud’ torn-out piece found in TSM’s fob pocket not only served as a bread crumb lead to his suicide note, it also offered the key to the code’s deciphering.
DNA is a self-replicating matter that reproduces the basic structure of a substance. TSM’s ‘code’ offers the DNA of his last dance performance in public hoping of a lasting life, one that was sketched amid his medical suffering. He was reflecting on his life, terminal illness, and expected imminent death, while reading the meanings conveyed about life and death in FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat -- a work of art that offered TSM a practical and proven example of how one can physically die but endure in human memory and spirit forever.
This report mainly focuses on deciphering TSM’s code, but the findings are then used to shed brief new light on one and/or another alternative wider story of what took place in Adelaide in 1948, in the years leading to it, and in the decades thereafter. The report invites readers to rethink the relevance of Omar Khayyam’s poetry to the case, and also asks a pertinent question about another fold of the mystery, that is, why did it take so long to decipher a code that could have actually been decoded much earlier?
The Somerton Man or Tamám Shud case has important lessons for us beyond the confines of the personal troubles of a man and those he knew, inviting us to use our sociological imaginations to explore such troubles in relation to the public issues that concern us all beyond the shores of Australia, and beyond the national and disciplinary walls fragmenting our lives, universities, and scientific methods in favor of transcultural and transdisciplinary modes of inquiry.
The report ends with a dancing celebration for deciphering the code as a new window to learning the true story and possible identity of the Somerton Man.
CONTENTS
About OKCIR—i
About the Author—ii
Notes this Report—iv
Preface—1
1. Introduction: The Somerton Man Case—3
2. The Code: Preliminary Observations—6
3. Preliminary Interpretive Considerations—11
4. Using Online Resources to Illustrate the Decoding—12
5. ‘Tamám Shud’ Is Also the Decoding Key—13
6. The Language Environment of the Code—17
7. Strategies for Making the Code Difficult to Decipher—20
8. Starting with the Last Main Line of the Code—23
9. The Third Main Line of the Code—29
10. The Second Main Line of the Code—38
11. The Crossed-Out Line of the Code—45
12. The First Main Line of the Code—47
13. Interpreting the Code as a Whole—50
14. The Relevance of Omar Khayyam’s ‘Rubaiyat’—58
15. The Wider Story—62
16. An Alternative and/or Additional Wider Story?—68
17. Why Did It Take So Long to Solve the Puzzle?—71
18. Conclusion: The DNA of A Last Dance for A Lasting Life—78
19. A Dancing Celebration—82
Endnotes (Reference Links)— 83
Об авторе
Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Ph.D., is the founding director and editor of OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics) and its journal, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699), which have served since 2002 to frame his independent research, pedagogical, and publishing initiatives. Besides his currently in progress work published in the 12-book series Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (Okcir Press), he has previously authored Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma (Okcir Press), Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism(Routledge/Paradigm) and Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study (Palgrave Macmillan). Tamdgidi has published numerous peer reviewed articles and chapters and edited more than thirty journal issues. He is a former associate professor of sociology specializing in social theory at UMass Boston and has taught sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Oneonta.
Tamdgidi holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology in conjunction with a graduate certificate in Middle Eastern studies from Binghamton University (SUNY). He received his B.A. in architecture from U.C. Berkeley, following enrollment as an undergraduate student of civil engineering in the Technical College of the University of Tehran, Iran. His areas of scholarly and practical interest are the sociology of self-knowledge, human architecture, and utopystics—three fields of inquiry he invented in his doctoral studies and has since pursued as respectively intertwined theoretical, methodological and applied fields of inquiry altogether contributing to what he calls the quantum sociological imagination. His research, teaching, and publications have been framed by an interest in understanding how world-historical social structures and personal selves constitute one another. This line of inquiry has itself been a result of his longstanding interest in understanding the underlying causes of failures of the world's utopian, mystical, and scientific movements in bringing about a just global society.
