Eastward Bound

Tomorrow Leon and I embark on our journey to the Northeastern corner of Turkey, a region bordered by Georgia, Armenia and Iran.  Less developed and with a bit of a reputation among Turks from the West, the East promises an indelible holiday.  The following is adapted from a correspondence between me and a good friend of mine:

Spain frightened you.
Spain.
Where I felt at home.
The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.
You did not know the language, your soul was empty
Of the signs, and the welding light
Made your blood shrivel.

from “You Hated Spain” by Ted Hughes

Words, black on white, are elusive when most evocative, fading out of focus as they conjure colors and emotions that drip onto the stark page.  Selim Dospatli, a student, my student, is blind.  I wonder what colors words bring to his clouded eyes.

Downtown engages in its frenetics, suburb pleases in its comforts, but I always seem to end up on the outskirts, those liminal landscapes of industrial sprawl and forgotten indigence, the margins whose overgrown lots are the vanguards of a wild reclamation.  To be sure, neon and prefab extend their mediocre sway, but somehow the glare is less garish swallowed in darkness and the monotony relieved by its feral inhabitants.  And when you catch that first whiff of pine or the first glimmer of a formerly-blotted star, you know you stand between civilization and the “lone and level sands.”  Keep walking.

Thank you for giving me a bit of blood-raw real, open in case of invigilation.  BUSEL’s Grey Kafka Castle versus saturated flesh and light sharp enough to slice sets and props out of reality.  I am excited to travel in the East of Turkey.  I no longer seek the pristine wilderness because it hurts too much to see its gradual humiliation.  I am intrigued by struggle, the poigancy of victory in defeat and defeat in victory.  Nothing of Andrea del Sarto’s silver-grey, placid perfect.  Spain and Turkey know much about the price of race hatred, wars won but decades and centuries lost, though Spain has soften the edges.  Turkey still fights the old fights, and I will skirt the battlefields.

I am going back to the mountains next year.  I am comforted by places where I know that I could leave and walk in a particular direction and not see another person for days.  Helps with claustrophobia, especially the claustrophobia that makes you forget how much bigger the mountains are than people.  Maybe I should embrace the childhood fantasy, explorer climber author, but there is no syllabus or program for that life.

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