oh...just me: August 2006 Archives

Upon seeing the intuitive acupuncturist it fully hit me: "I've been on a long journey." If I'd been able to cut through the fog of jetlag and overcaffeination, I would have told her I felt stronger. Instead, I fumbled through a brief summary and asked, "How am I?" "Don't give me that crap!" she promptly admonished me. "You know I just reflect back to you what your body already knows." "Yeah, well, I want the confirmation." :-)

She checked my pulse. "Your life purpose is clearer! Congratulations!" :-) [I can't describe it very clearly, but it is true I do sense this, somehow, inside myself.]

[Context note: as I am composing Puru is reading the Ramayana outloud for a handful of Indians who keep cracking up with laughter. I surmise it has something to do with Ganesh Chaturthi but the timing may in fact be merely coincidental.]

[[This is almost as good as the Bush and Schwarzenegger clips being played last night while I was writing the first draft of my "Self in Contradiction" homework. "Gobble gobble."]]

"You need nurturance, of all kinds," the IA continued. "Especially food." "Really? I thought I might be overeating..." "I don't think so. Good wholesome food. Do you have a way to get that?" Yeah. The best Indian food in the area. :-)

She poked two needles into my lower right leg, one toward the inside of my foot nearer to my big toe, and the other most of the way up my shin. "I love working on you! Two needles and your body soaks it up!" I guess this is a good thing...

She leaves me to the treatment. My mind drifts. Life purpose. Dozing . . . memories . . . events from Istanbul . . . tasks in progress . . . things to do . . . what's upcoming . . . so much for drifting. Alert now, I observe my mind continue to float from task to memory to project, emotions wafting among peace, sorrow, hope, anxiety...

The IA returns; I've shifted around, hands crossed over my forehead. "You're cogitating." "I just started, I was drifting before." We discuss the drift for a bit. She announces me done for the day. I ask about the work of the needles. "Nurturance," she replies. "You're having a hard time coming home."

sigh

Puru's voice pierces my attention, reading aloud: "To lose heart is to lose everything." I like that! Turns out its monkeys talking to each other about courage. :-)

I order Turkish coffee before heading to the Arab-Israeli symphony last night.

I'm back at the World Istanbul Hostel, where people know my name. :-) Gunseli says she'll read my coffee grinds.

Of course I'm game! There are a few crucial steps, first, one must upend the cup into the saucer, and then wait. Eventually, the evidence is produced:

The sequence might matter. Gunseli read them before she showed them to me. (It felt so Harry Potter!) At any rate, she read me only positive signs:

- "there is a man with a beard...some thoughts" (am I in his? he in mine? unclear. I think first of Sam, then of The Man Who Would Be My Wife.)

- "there is a baby" which might indicate "something good . . . it's happiness"

- "there is a fairy, like a butterfly, it means luckiness"

- "there are big fishes; fishes mean money" (so far so good!)

- "there is a tree, branches, like a family, strict relationships" (hmmm . . .)

At this point Gunseli shows me the cup. I had just read an English translation of a Turkish poem, "I Thought I Could Be More", by Jennifer Highland:

I thought we were done but there was another step. I was told to keep a wish in my head while Gunseli poured off the excess liquid from the saucer:

(If only the reading is as blurry as the picture!) My wish will come true, she says, "it will be a little slow, but it will happen." One last examination and "a man with a mane like a lion," who is the same man as before (oops, definitely not TMWWBMW) will give me "a very big present or happiness."

I can't complain overmuch about my fortune, it brims with optimistism! Then Gunseli dashes the whole thing: "Only for fun!" she laughes, grinning.

Tonight the moon is a perfect pearl,
a seed floating in each eye as you gaze
up into earth’s softest sunbath,
photons fresh in from a lunar landing,
but weary of miles, ninety-two million out
to the iron-rich seas and glassy meadows
of a four-billion-year-old crater-pocked rock
and back to earth. Are you sleepy yet?

Tonight the moon is a snowfall,
light as particles drifting over your face,
your eyelids heavy, fine muscles letting go.
Can you feel the motes sifting down
through the stratosphere’s filmy clouds
and landing at last on your inner arms?
Tonight’s moon is a tarnished mirror,
a high whole note the coyotes call to,

their blind instinctual throatache unspooling.
It’s a waterfall tired of its rainbows,
turning everything earthly to smoke
and ashes, the day’s flock of angels
finding your body celestial enough to rest on.
Can you feel them alighting on long hairs
and fine ones like mist on grasses?
Breathe in, and each cell drinks

its drop of moondew, white fire gently
warming and cooling exactly as prayed for.
Tonight the moon is a birch leaf
afloat in the solar wind streaming past us
toward Pluto and thinning to nothing
like the song of joy (remember it?)
welling up in your limbs, as they sail out
into deep space now, buoyant with sleep.

~ Margaret Holley
Atlanta Review p. 1
Spring/Summer 2006

"The Man Who Would Be My Wife" treated me to a day lounging on the Bosphorus, nested into a bay with dozens of other boats with their precious cargoes of families and friends.

The spoils of lunch were followed by a light dinner, delicious dessert,and regional fruit.

The juxtaposition of leisure and pleasure with radical politics (“the extreme side of communication”) has been on my mind. How does an individual justify the personal exercise of privilege while people are being killed? I know I need the space and time to be thoughtful instead of reactionary. The danger, I guess, is in being lulled into aesthetic perception as a permanent desire.

Said and Ali have a brief discussion about “a Chinese wall” between art and politics (69-70). As I understand their use of the metaphor (the reference being new to me), it refers to the institutionalization of a separation between aesthetics and politics, such that art is (supposedly) produced for art’s sake alone, with no political content or possibility (?) of social commentary. Said argues that literature-for-literature’s sake is also false and a recent construction: false because “culture…is hopelessly involved in politics” (103) and a development (in the West, particularly English culture) only of the mid-19th century.

Said declaims to Ali: “I agitate against myself!” (105). Not only against orthodoxies but also against settling into a predictable pattern “governed by things like my own past work” (105). Said’s intellectual restlessness leads him to proclaim the possibility of transgression as a social fact:

“…there’s always an opportunity, no matter how one feels oneself up against the wall with no alternative but to submit – which is usually what it’s all about in the end – there’s always an opportunity to do something else. There’s always an opportunity to formulate an alternative, and not either to remain silent or to capitulate” (108).

Yes, and . . . formulating alternatives requires change, requires the enactment of a difference between who I was yesterday and who I am today. Tendrils of the past cling tightly. Reluctantly, I strive to extract myself from the enticements of their grip.

It is impossible to convey the sounds and images of Sufi ritual through words. The most I can attempt is to describe my experience. I am a sucker for mysticism. :-) [Sucker: (2b) "One that is indiscriminately attracted to something specified."]

[Painting by Ayten Mungen Polat.]

The visit to Mevlevihanesi began with a gift. (Later, as I checked into my hotel for the evening, I received a compliment: “That is a beautiful scarf. Very Turkish.”) Beautiful tiling and religious inscription adorn the entry, a long hallway with four windows opening onto several richly-embellished coffins: the lineage of teachers at this particular temple (architecturally it is not a mosque). Adherents pause at each window to offer greetings and respect.

The hall opens onto a small courtyard with trees and the obligatory public water spigots. Among the various decorative tiling is a symbol I have not seen before.

We remove our shoes and pass through two rooms before entering the place of worship. The singers have already begun. I am gestured to sit with a few women at the far end of the space. I settle down and observe the surroundings. The walls are dense with script.

Immediately in front of where I sit is a large open space. The man who welcomed me with his eyes, indicating where I should sit, is spreading small fuzzy carpets around the edges of the wooden floor. The singers are clustered at the other end, squeezed into another room separated from the dance space by pillars and a low wall. They face the same direction as I do, so their backs are toward the dance space. They sing in unison, striking the same notes but at various pitches: a melodic blend of tenor, bass, and baritone.

The sound is low and quiet yet it fills the space. It is pleasing, rhythmic, soothing. I continue to look around and realize there are onlookers in the balcony, women and children. They have the best seats in the house. :-)

More people enter. I am distracted by two women who sit in front of me (their male companion sits with them at first, then is directed to the men’s section). They talk. Is it instructional? Perhaps, but it interferes with the singing. The woman doing most of the talking checks her cell phone. I am annoyed by the disrespect to the service and the auditory interference. But people move continually in to and out of the worship space. Late arrivals filter in throughout the service: some join the singers, others the audience. Some people depart at irregular intervals. The annoyance is only mine. I let it go.

Suddenly the dancers enter. After the first three I am surprised when the fourth steps into the room, then realize I’ve seen many depictions of five…yet they keep coming. I count nine. The dance space seems small to me now: how will they manage? They line up in front of the audience space; I can’t see much. The singers are in their third or fourth song now. A very few times a single voice has deviated from the chorus, usually in a sharp or punctuated manner: obviously deliberate. Upon occasion a soloist would sing a prayer. These seem to have been short and subtle because I had not noticed when they began: my consciousness would gradually register their presence as “having been there for awhile.” I was oddly alert while simultaneously being lulled.

The dancers, individually, bow. There is no rhyme to it, no pattern. If there is a cue as to who should bow when, I cannot discern it. Are they being visually directed? My view is obscured. Some time passes. When will they begin? How will they start? The singing provides me no clue: the chants seem to vary yet the overall sound remains more or less the same. A dancer moves into view to my right. Ah, there has been a leader, someone whom (I assume) the dancers have been facing.

Now the line of dancers bow in unison and remove their black robes. Except the first one in line does not remove his. I count again, ten plus the leader, eleven in all. Two in black, nine in white. They kneel, prostrating themselves in the typical Muslim prayer position. Suddenly they strike the floor forcefully with their hands, startling a young woman near me. The volume of the singing also rises simultaneously, an accentuated coordination of the singers and dancers.

John Berger on time, imagination, and love.

“The modern transformation of time from a condition into a force began with Hegel” (38).

Summary: Berger argues there is a phenomenological problem with conceiving of time as a unilinear and uniform flow; this is an unchallenged residue of the 19th century. It is a phenomenological problem because only human consciousness can conceive of time in this way. Such “remorseless time” causes the past to be lost, to fall into nothingness (37). “It follows that one no longer counts what one has, but what one has not. Everything becomes loss” (38).

“That life may be seen as a Fall is intrinsic to the human faculty of imagination. To imagine is to conceive of that height from which the Fall becomes possible” (emphasis added, 39).

It was imagination that enabled the invention of linear time, and imagination that can reclaim a dimension of time that remains intractable to it. Berger explains:

“…hidden within the conceptual system that allows man to measure and conceive of such boundlessness [i.e., the distance which light will travel in one year] is the cyclic and local unit of the year, a unit which can be recognized because of its permanency, its repetition, and its local consistency. The calculation returns from the astronomic to the local, like a prodigal son” (37).

At the local level – of you and me experiencing the passing of time – are “two dynamic processes which are opposed to each other…The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the accumulation of experience. This is why the moment is lived as longer. The dissipation of the time flow is checked. The lived durée is not a question of length but of depth or density” (all emphases added, 35).

As a natural example (countering artificial limits of “culture” or “subjectivity”), Berger describes the accelerated growth of plants in spring and early summer: “These hours of spectacular growth and accumulation are incommensurate with the winter hours when the seed lies inert in the earth” (emphasis in original, 35).

“If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic, then prophecy and destiny can coexist with a freedom of choice” (34). Berger ties the exercise of choice to language:

When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time of a train
I look at your face.

The flower’s pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go.

The flower’s ovules
will be seeding still
When Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

John Berger

"These things happen for a reason," said the rekhat to Meryt-Re (126).

My host said much the same, when I finally contacted him three hours late: "It is fate."

Many hands - most of them Muslim - took care of me along the way, continuing a trend that had already filled my day.

Not only one sign! MANY! In Turkish sign language! Recep works for Information Technology at Sabanci University. He works with a team on the web design of about 50 webpages for the university. We had breakfast together, then he took me to his office to show me pictures on top of pictures, plus weblinks to information about Turkey in general and the Deaf Turkish community in particular. :-) I need many more pictures in my blog. Wow. I was not able to show him very much, and (thinking with Deaf eyes) I realized how text-heavy my site is. :-(

As usual, he (the deaf person) made all the accommodations for me, the less-flexible non-deaf person. Recep (the letter "c" is supposed to have the mark at the bottom that indicates the "ch" sound) knows some American Sign Language. I am thinking Turkish Sign Language is a relative of British Sign Language (which has no relation at all to ASL) and also some English. We began with gestures, then combined gesturing with writing, and at his computer had the most fluid conversation combining photos, websites, gestures, some written notes, and his Moonstar Turkish-English dictionary. Unfortunately, Moonstar only runs on PCs, not on Apples. :-( Although there is a website I can access for English-Turkish at www.sozluk.web.tr translation; I don’t know if it is as sophisticated as Moonstar – I was impressed with it. Working a phrase at a time we could communicate very well, supplemented with facial expression, gestures, and some signs.

I was teasing myself yesterday when I posted about “a sign” – thinking I had already been given one: time to move on! Gizem had pointed Recep out to me but I hadn’t been able to catch him that first time; I knew this might be my only chance to connect with the Deaf community here. Who knew he would turn out to be so generous and friendly?! I guess perhaps I am as much a "novelty" to him as he is is to me. :-) We certainly share a love for teasing (!) and much curiousity about how other people experience the world.

As has been happening for some time now, I feel myself blessed.

Two of three visits to the gym I heard this song by DMX. Last night, as I walked over, I heard the muzzein calling the faithful to prayer. It was comforting. (I hope it is not considered blasphemous for an unbeliever to feel so.) I had completed reading Brooks' sympathetic treatment of Islam just a few hours earlier; some of its sentiments were still on my mind.

“I have learned to live by the rhythm of other people’s prayers,” she writes (225). Among other things, she has provided me with the clearest definition of democracy I’ve yet come across: a system that tolerates competing ideologies (190). Tracing the growing strength of fundamentalist Islamic movements through the 1980s and early 1990s, she charts the narrowing of acceptable public behavior – particularly for women, but also media in general. Brooks recounts the jailing of a newspaper editor “because his English-language newspaper runs a cartoon strip, ‘BC’, that the Saudi government deems heretical. The offending cartoon was a two-frame piece in which a Stone Age man stands on a hill and asks, ‘God, if you’re up there, give me a sign.’ In the second frame, the man is deluged with a sudden rain shower. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘ we know two things: He’s up there, and He’s got a sense of humor’” (227).

I’d say! No sooner have I gotten rested than its time to hit the road again. :-)

“’Behold the turtle,’ [says] a caption under a whimsical drawing of the creature [on a bulletin board at a newspaper in Jeddah]. ‘He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out’” (167).

“What Berkeley was to the antiwar movement of the sixties, the Islamic University of Gaza is to the holy-war crowd of the nineties” (153).

“She was watching a small tortoise make its uncertain way through the furrows of plowed earth” (163).

“The king’s deftness lay in containing fundamentalist influence without excluding it from the political process and driving it underground, as had happened in Algeria” (195).

“An Iranian-born friend who lives in London, a gentle, middle-aged woman who practices family medicine, says the only war she would willingly fight would be one to stop Islamic fundamentalism telling her how to live her life. She is a Zoroastrian, a member of the ancient Persian faith in which dark and light, good and evil are forever locked in a struggle for supremacy” (286).

Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, 1995.