Istanbul and Bursa II

Istanbul and Bursa

GRASS

I found this grass in the extra time I had before boarding the Istanbul to Bursa Ferry and just after I had walked down Gedik Pasa, a street of astonishing noise, irregular asphalt and disappearing sidewalks. It had been two weeks since I had sat on the ground or seen more than a tree or two at a time and this almost acre of unclaimed grass was suddenly, inexplicably there. I sat down into a lower octave, heard my breath and felt it slow. A magpie also occupied the grass, at the base of a tree. I had been moving since I left my hotel; part of the way by cab, then metro, then by foot, down Gedik Pasa. The magpie was moving. Hopping and then finding food, or something. It is impossible to stop this movement or get off. I felt that way for the magpie, but for a moment thought I was exempt.

FERRY

I took a passenger ferry from Istanbul to Bursa. I thought I purchased a window seat but what I ended up with was a seat against a wall, below a television monitor and facing the other passengers; the perspective from which I took this photograph (it seems a small point-and shoot-camera can be used almost anywhere now; no one notices, no one cares).

The woman in the center of the photograph was cloaked in a burqa; it was not just her dress but how she held herself that contrasted so greatly with the woman beside her, attired without elegance and slumped in her seat. Putting aside the complexities and furor of debate about the burqa (which exist everywhere, including or especially Muslim countries), and how difficult it is to confront from a feminist perspective (my own), in that moment, for that moment, I envied her.

What an experience to be invisible to others and thus take up no social mask, as well as be freed from having to engage in small talk (though traveling in Turkey has left me largely without either the mask or the talk). I studied her as best I could because she impressed me in other ways and my potential to judge or dismiss became instead to inquire: this woman was an individual human being and therefore, as we all are, a mystery comprised of complexities who ultimately thinks like no one else (not even herself).

Soon after the ferry embarked the woman opened her Quran and read it for the entire journey. To read something that demands contemplation is itself a form of contemplation, and potentially to be admired.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secularist founder of modern Turkey, dismissed Islam and once claimed the entire "Turkish nation resembled those who commit the Quran to memory without understanding the meaning of a single word and thus becoming senile." Atatürk's view was materialistic in the way Lenin's was (in the way modernity en mass is) and set one wave of history into motion.

Removed from historical-political generalizations, I sat in the anecdotal, seat 324 of the Yenikapi-Bursa ferry, and observed the other passengers. The woman in the burqa carried a potency, a high-frequency focus, quite ennobled. Her clothing extended to her hands, the black gloves she turned the pages of her book with.

Quote from Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography, by Sükrü Hanioglu. Pg. 132

SEED

Nearly two years I bought a book by Ibn 'Abrabi (Journey to the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat) that was illustrated with reproductions of the "monumental mural compositions" by Nineteenth Century calligrapher Mehmet Shefik. The racing freedom of Arabic calligraphy had always appealed to me, particularly in these highly stylized and energized works. The text explained the calligraphies were made for Ulu Camii (Grand Mosque) in Bursa, Turkey. And now, because of the book, I was standing in front of them, photographing them, experiencing the reality of Ulu Camii.

My "reality" of Ulu Camii consisted of the plastic bag I had wrapped my sandals in and now carried in my left hand, and of a rapidly decreasing sense of self-consciousness. My experience inside the mosques I've visited - including the prayer ceremony I once took part in - is one of solitude and fraternity, and that the mosque, in its greatest conceptions (as Chartres, say, is to Christianity), is a space of inwardness, extremely personal even. Allah, the divine or the unconditioned not expressed so much through a vaulted ceiling (though some domes are huge) but in an intimate nook, the wall in front of one, or simply the carpet below, and that an ideal (or enlightened) "society" would momentarily occur not only as people prayed together, but as they congregated somewhat informally and haphazardly in the various sections of the mosque's omnidirectional space (the mihrab not being the "front" so much as a direction) and in these "gatherings" the highest conversational prajna (understanding, cognitive acuity, or wisdom) might occur, a Socratic salon that would not argue dogma but open portals beyond it.

I had sensed all of this eleven years ago when I visited the Cathedral and former Great Mosque of Córdoba. In that astounding work, 856 columns and countless arches create a labyrinth of contemplative space and here, in Ulu Camii, though the arcitecture was different the potential was not only the same, but continues to be realized (the Mosque of Córdoba no longer functions as a mosque but as a Cathedral and museum).

Inside Ulu Camii is a large ablution fountain which one may both wash and drink from at length. Outside the mosque I'd washed and drank from the ablution fountain there, and inside I drank again, making my reality water (its consciousness), there was a tangibility to this, as if I "entered" the Camii through the water. The "real" murals didn't impress me as much as when I'd seen them in the book (that seeing was the kind of imaginative moment or "transmission" that seldom arrives again in the form of a now-met external expectation-destination). I was transfixed by the welcome of the atmosphere and I felt in no way an intruder, nor did I detect the slightest glance of disapproval. Muslims often speak of Islam as a religion of peace and I felt a tremendous, palpable peace in the Camii, also very strong and potent. When I left Ulu Camii I experienced an unmistakable sense of being "changed" though a kind of blessing or spiritual grace, the same thing I felt in a single moment of Lord Mukpo's presence, or other great teachers of the Tibetan lineages.

Water

I took this picture of the surface of the Bosphorus when I was still in Istanbul, from a viewing platform at the half-way point of the Galata Bridge. The photograph suspends the movement of the water into a simulacrum of the mountain ranges found on land (or below the sea). My experience of the drala principle and the drala has often (unexpectedly) corrolated with water (Boulder Creek, the River Arno, the Mekong) and so made me more devoted to water, its element, idea and necessity.

I came down with food poisoning the day after visiting Ulu Camii and lay in bed for thirty-two hours, for much of the time unable to drink water because it made me vomit again. I slept most of it, two nights and the entire day in between - though I also woke up dozens of times. Each time I woke, it was as if I'd just been taken to an earlier time of my life in order to feel its particular suffering, duration, or epiphany: a certain hike I took in southern Utah when I was nineteen; a desk I worked at doing accounting; the first time I took my son to Mexico.

I've been working with this process for some time: writing down, if I remember to, the thought I have when I first wake, even if just from a nap (sometimes especially a nap) as if this was one of the moments Lord Mukpo's dream-time could spill in; as he once said, "All the relative thoughts that happen in your mind in connection with cause and effect are the agents of the dralas." Yesterday I was too sick to write anything down, but the whole episode aligned with a memorable and poetic statement by Antonio Gramsci I had read the day before, that history "has deposited you in an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory" and as part of becoming conscious it is necessary "to compile such an inventory."

Quote from Orientalism, by Edward Said, pg 25.

CANDLE

votivecandle

I burned a votive candle on March third of this year, three and one-half months ago. The shorter days and long nights of winter were still in effect, though I continue to burn as many candles now, three days after the summer solstice. In the photograph, the votive candle illuminates the spine of a nearby book. I contain the memory of reading by candlelight as well as the memory of reading in desperate and apt excitement for what I was discovering, for what the book contained, for the world it represented. The Sierra Club Natural History of the Sierra Nevada was one such book. The Random House Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry another. Once, on a car camping trip with my son, I loaded the trunk with a box of at least twenty books, but for the next seven days and barely open a single one of them. A votive candle strikes at the symbolic heart of reading, the illumination cast by symbols, letters and words instantly translated into meaning upon the endless screen of mind. I carried the books I needed at the time. Books opened everything, changed everything, nurtured and shaped me, were as seminal as my own mother and father. Even as I write these sentences now I’m in amazement, how singular each sentence is, how a sentence may not necessarily become elegant but defies becoming counterfeit, how writing is of the intimacy of the votive candle, a personal offering, and though meager, still significant.

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