The Threshold
Better questions, not final answers.
H.R. Torkaman writes fiction, philosophy and research about how the identity of a person is made: by the body, memories, other people, and the stories inherited without being chosen. Six books and six papers, each an attempt to ask the question more precisely.
— which is a polite way of saying I haven’t finished.
Rooms
Six, so farSix books, in stories, novels and philosophy, each circling a similar question from different angles! Each room keeps its own weather. Enter in any order; they are designed to answer one another.
- Materials
- skin, paper, a centre that was never there
- Dimensions
- variable; grows when peeled
- Condition
- unfinished, by design
- Materials
- masks, muscle, delay, social weather
- Provenance
- everyone you have ever imitated
- Note
- please do not touch your own face
- Materials
- a house of smoke, inherited pressure systems
- Forecast
- unchanged since childhood; subject to revision
- Materials
- stone, one red dot, every question returned slightly changed
- Behaviour
- answers; does not obey
- Materials
- a reaching hand, a red wing, a ledger, a cup, a boat, sleep that will not stay still
- Duration
- one hour, recurring
- Materials
- notes and poems gathered over years, torn paper, a red thread
- Edition
- the only copy lives here
شاید آنچه «معنی» مینامیم فقط لحظهای باشد که ذهن، از ترسِ گمشدن، دورِ چیزی ناشناخته خط میکشد.
Perhaps what we call meaning is only the moment the mind, afraid of getting lost, draws a line around something unknown.
Cartographies
Six maps · free to takeThe research behind the books: six papers on the self, belief, perception and collective reality, each grading its claims by the strength of the evidence. Each one names what it wanted, what it did, what it found, and what would prove it wrong. All are free to read, download and cite.
A map is also a way of admitting where you got lost.
To know what answers when someone says “I”.
Replaced “who am I really?” with “which relations are active in my becoming?”
The self is an evolving pattern of relations, neither a hidden object nor a freely chosen story.
a self could be found intact, before anything had touched it.
To know whether a life is a body or a story.
Put Merleau-Ponty and Schechtman in one room and let them argue.
The stories we tell about ourselves are made possible, and limited, by the body.
a story could be told with no body to carry it.
To know whether believing can reach into the body.
Followed belief through prediction, attention, regulation, placebo and trauma.
Belief can become a biological cause, but conviction alone cannot command neurotransmitters, erase trauma or move events.
conviction alone could command an event.
To test the promise that thought shapes matter.
Asked physics, yoga and psychology the same question, separately.
No reliable evidence shows that thought selects physical outcomes. Intention works when it becomes attention, action and skill.
a wish were ever seen choosing a measurement.
To know whether humanity is becoming one mind.
Traced the coupling from neurons to platforms to civilisations.
Humanity is becoming a more tightly coupled cognitive ecology, not one mind. Synchronisation is not unity.
a crowd could think well without its differences.
To know how much of the world a person makes.
Carried one intuition through physics, biology, belief and time, removing its overreach at each step.
We participate in the actualization of a resistant world.
wishing alone moved anything — or nothing we did moved anything at all.
The thread
Every room stands on a map. Pull the thread and see which.
The papers argue it, the books stage it, the images show it.
Who is talking?
He is interested in qualities and identities that were never chosen.
We build our reality — or, to be more precise, we choose a lens to view it with — from pieces that arrived before we could ever examine them. Then we wake up inside it and call it a life.
H.R. Torkaman is an artist, graphic designer, writer and independent researcher, currently based in Dubai. He has lived, studied and worked across Iran, Australia and the United Arab Emirates, and writes in English and in Persian, his native language. In 2025 he founded HERT, a studio named after the Persian ‘Shahr-e Hert’, a city without conventional rules — chaotic, but open to endless possibilities.
Research tells me what can honestly be claimed. Fiction takes over where evidence stops. Images hold what neither can say: a surface, and the one thread beneath it all.
Everything answers. Nothing obeys.
Between those two sentences is where I would like to keep working.