Istanbul and Bursa

Istanbul and Bursa

CRANE

This is the view from my hotel window, room #1501, brought closer by the zoom lens of my camera. Normally I cannot see the highrise buildings in the distance with the detail shown here. Normally I cannot see a second sun, a fugitive image of the camera’s projection. The sensor in the camera, with it correspondence to the processing in my own brain, has created a second sunset, imbedded on the endless apartment covered hillside of western Istanbul. The camera believes the projected sun to be true, just as I believe my own projections are real.

GATE

Yesterday I took a walk in the early evening. I walked out of Beyoğlu and across the Galata Bridge. I walked through the pedestrian underpass at Eminönü and into the thicket of streets that I have leaned instinctively to find my way through, the streets of Eminönü, Beyazit and Sultanahmet as they meet in the ancient center of Istanbul. The sights were my companions, as always. Random, disjointed, sudden encounters, each as distinct from the next as one book is from another. Many were bewildering, bludgeoning; incessant, commercial, covered with grime and advertising. Mosques were everywhere and this one offered a garish pink wall nearby and a courtyard of weeds. I allowed the camera to find a perspective I could not have. I let it peer like the periscope of a submarine through the iron linkage of a closed gate. The shutter opened and the camera saw. It saw my own epiphany.

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

I was in Russia three days ago. I spent two hours in SVO airport, the time between my Aeroflot flight #314 from JFK and the flight that took me on to Istanbul. The two hours I spent in Moscow may be the only two hours I’ll ever spend in the city, or in Russia, again. Without this single photograph I took in the airport I would have nothing tangible to remind of me of my stay. My own memory was blurred and numbed after nine hours in seat number 29-B, whereas the photograph is crammed with data, and iconic. In the distance, across the tarmac, is a forest, a fractional part of the tremendous forests of Russia. I saw them through the window of flight #314 and they reassured me, told me we still have an environment. On the ground, as I looked through the wall of glass that was the terminal, I wanted to inspect the forest across the tarmac. I grew up in evergreen forests and knew I could discern its health, how choked with overgrowth it was, which trees were spruce, which ones fir or pine. In truth, there will always be a forest at the end of the runway, not the other way around.

OLD HOUSE

This photograph above is about the rotting house in the background, the one the woman in the foreground appears to be looking at. A yellow dölmas (a mini-bus and essential Istanbul form of transportation) rushes to the right while a bus exits left. The house will remain as it has, miraculously, perched on a hillside and abandoned for years. It drew me to it - as such a building typically would - being there, a moment of the primordial. Istanbul once consisted of a sea of wooden buildings, from the modest tailor’s shop to the pasha’s villa. Over the centuries the buildings would periodically burn, sometimes hundreds or thousands at a time. In modernity the wood gave way to concrete, as one sees in the apartments nearby. Instead of planks and shutters we have exposed rebar and satellite dishes. This city, any city, is strangely painful without the old, without decay. Orham Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous living writer, admits that while decay is unpleasant to live in, it is poetically essential.

FISH BREAD

“Balik” mean fish and “ekmek” mean bread. To my ear this Turkish phrase means fish-bread, or a fishy form of bread. Which it is, a sandwich made of freshly grilled fish and served on a French roll, with lettuce and unions. Like the seagulls that follow the ferry boats, like the dölmas and the stray cats, balik ekmek is also iconic to Istanbul and everyone seems to know about it, and like it. There are other balik ekmek stands in other districts of Istanbul, but this one, at Eminönü, is the balik ekmek stand. The camera has allowed me to send this image to my son Devin, something I am keen to do, since he and I enjoyed many balik ekmeks here ten months ago, when we spent a month in Istanbul together. The camera is like a mind that can take the balik ekmek stand into my own mind and into Devin’s. Unfortunately, it cannot transport the taste of the sandwich. But I ate one last night, just before taking this photograph, and thought of Devin.

YELLOW LIGHT

This was the amber light that greeted me just before I crossed Atatürk Bridge, on my walk to Fatih Mosque and the district around it. The amber light is our relative truth expressed in a color, Caution. The amber light brings faint panic - if we are driving. Some speed up (some joke the yellow light means speed up), some brake. Each country, each city, has its own ways of driving (I would never drive in Istanbul). As a pedestrian I saw the amber light as a foil for the graying, cloudy and multi-hued blue sky, a contrasting globe too gorgeous not to stop for.

PIANO

I took my usual 7:00 AM breakfast on the second floor of the Istanbul hotel I have been living in for a week (and will continue living in for one more). I had had my usual three cups of Nescafe coffee, the awful coffee served for breakfast in all the hotels here (it seems) but that becomes good because it is still coffee. I had finished my scrambled eggs and fruit with yogurt and was reading Alone with the Alone (Henri Corbin’s work on Ibn ‘Arabi) when another guest of the hotel, who could have been Turkish, but just as easily Italian or Spanish – I never took a close look at him – walked over to the baby-grand piano and started playing it.

At first I wasn’t even aware of what had happened, the MTV that played on the two flat-screen televisions on either end of the restaurant had been bludgeoning us with mechanical sounds, and making it difficult for me to read. A waiter had turned off the MTV soon after the man began playing the piano. In the moment I became aware that the synthesized, and digital music had been replaced by something analog, indeed live, the entire experience of my body changed.

The pianist, with trimmed beard and perhaps thirty-five, had begun a classical piece (I have no idea of the composer) and as I listened memories of my son Devin, who also has played classical piano, arose, side by side with the music. I put down my book and became still, just letting myself listen without any social mask, gazing across the room into a view of the wall. I was filled with love for my son, for the pianist and the music, even for the salt I’d just spilled on table.

When I rose to leave the man was still playing. I looked over and clapped silently in appreciation. He smiled with complete brotherhood, as if he’d known all along that his music had reached me (and perhaps no one else in the room).

WAITERS

In this photograph my camera was taken from me and, at least initially, used to assault me. As I walked from the amber light on Atatürk Bridge into Fatih, it began to rain, so much so that I purchased an umbrella, but not before I was semi-soaked. I swerved into this restaurant not only because I was hungry but to dry off. Fatih is a more conservative district of Istanbul – I’ve been told some of it’s streets are like Tehran – and few in it are habituated to tourists, few of whom come this far. My waiter and the group of waiters, like an inner-city basketball team before the game begins, had me as their only customer and did not seem to know what to do with me, besides of course to take my order. Above me (to the right of the photograph) the television was tuned to a Turkish news station and the footage was of the recent riots and looting in Great Britain.

All the waiters had gathered around me and my own waiter pointed to the riots and then to me and said it was “good” or that I was “good” or that I thought the riots were “good” (all the waiters had few to no English words, just as I had few Turkish). I was being taunted by his mutable innuendoes, that maybe the riots were directed at me, or that I approved of such violence, or was responsible for it. I’m sure he had no exact idea what he meant but their was a low-grade menace around me, all the waiters standing above me - and our simple shared fear that comes from being confronted by the other who speaks essentially not a word of one’s own language. As I live abroad for months at time, I encountered this fear, in myself and others, so continuously I sometimes fail to notice it is even exists. It is kind of stress.

I didn’t posture out of my ludicrous dilemma through smiles or playful machismo but remained rather awkward, mostly just looked back at them or at my food. It seemed this non-response became the way through the no-man’s-land because the waiters dispersed and eventually became warm or else indifferent to me, especially my own waiter - but not before he rudely picked up my camera and tried to peel open the lens cover, as if that was how to turn it on. He wanted to take my picture and once he had we were fine, we were bonded.

SUN & CRANE

This is the sun and crane nine days later (after the arm of the crane had been assembled). The sun was setting as I took the photograph and now, as I am writing about it (moments later), the sun in the photograph and the “real” sun have (both) set. The buildings are there, the newer ones, as well as the minaret to the left, which might have been built six-hundred years ago (depending on which Istanbul mosque it belongs to) and resides in the collision of time and events and apparent objects that play upon the optic nerve. When the nerve is gone the memories scatter. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s experience of time, the most “all embracing of the Days of God is the Day of Essence,” which he described as not the longest of days (as we would have thought), but from our standpoint the shortest. As William C. Chittick writes: “Its length being one instant, which is the present moment, which is defined precisely as the instant that instant cannot be divided into parts. But, this shortest of the Divine Days last forever.”

Quote from Ibn ‘Arabi: Heir to the Prophets by William C. Chittick

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