“I stand willingly in the way of storms, that all my dead leaves may swirl away and be lost”—Ruth St. Denis
Istanbul notes, 2016
Birds on the Bosporous in Kabataş. Sage tea on the balcony. B is cracking hazelnuts & playing ragas under the jasmine. She tells me the valley where they’re harvested is near the Black Sea. It’s so steep that farmers invented a language made entirely of whistles to traverse the divides.
The other day, I learned that in Ottoman times one of the smaller of Princes’ Islands was used for dogs. They were rounded up from the city & left without food or water. Some say you can still hear their bones howl from Kadiköy.
In recent times, dogs are rounded up & killed. In the morning things are as usual— you go to buy cheese, but in a city with no dogs.
*
It’s been weeks since the coup attempt. So many questions, but there’s no one left to answer them. 47 witness songs put in cages. The morning chill when all the birds Twitter in unison & there’s no more gunfire in the street. Or journalists.
The shop where we go for milk is closed & there are protests at the American Embassy. The grocer says the owner might be dead. His grandson in his arms, laughing. & the Bosporous behind him still the most unbelievable blue.
Another vendor feeds me almonds & walnuts, whispering to my friend, we can’t have her leave, saying no one offered her anything.
*
Witness notes to anchor an inner coherence:
Smell of rhododendron & jasmine ragas./ Kapalıçarşı—Tea with an Armenian vendor who paints intricate, multilingual, words for peace on fragile leaves./ The rooftop past the lamp maker where adhans call from every direction, all echoing at once. / Walks with N & history lessons: Younger nations move more quickly toward fascism— passing the old opera building in Taksim Square she says should be refurbished but won’t be; passing processions of flags & sellers—mostly teenagers— playing a song she translates as guard the motherland. / Students in the 1980’s killing other students; citizen night patrols; / eerie song the Aye Gas truck plays, passing by like ice-cream; / an Italian friend stopped at night, & asked where her where her flag was;/ my body clenches in the street when the shadows start to lengthen toward night./ H taking me to the Blue Mosque'; You look Turkish, just don’t speak English in the street. He tells me the Bosporous is never the same; she keeps washing herself. She’s also not a river, but a tidal strait connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. Istanbul isn’t one continent, it’s two. To see her, you have to think & move like water; wash your eyes & shake the dust of the street.
*
I ferry to Üsküdar everyday for calligraphy lessons with one of Hassan Çelebi’s senior students—practicing for as long as my body can hold the same rabbi yessir prayer in the same manner scribes have done for centuries. Making tiny, incremental adjustments: Lord make it easy, please don’t make it difficult, may the end result in beauty. My teacher in NY telling me they give this prayer to beginners because most people quit. I try to stay in it’s meditative flow as long as possible. Arabic letter forms change depending on who their connected to. They have isolated, medial, & final forms. Pull one join to short or far & the whole thread unravels. Proportions are relational.
My teacher takes me to lunch with another calligrapher who translates. He tells me he knows what it’s like to be in a place where things are happening & you don’t speak the language. He was in Manhattan during 9/11, but he wasn’t offered almonds or sage tea. Or lunch with a translator.
*
Remember that you when you write you are on a path finer than a hair and sharper than a sword—Yesari Mehmet E’sad Efendi
Sometimes whistling is best.
To find a still place in any city can be an act of defiance. Not the calm of new age capitalists or the ease of liberal elites. Not ravaging certainty. No monovocal, fearless place between a flag & its shadows:
Just dead serious presence.
*
I met German author here who is writing 100,000 words on the variety of pomegranates, their historical, political, mythological contexts. I have my own 100,000 words but none so sweet. Questions, not maps: How to locate stillness in one’s body. Silence amidst so many competing orchestras, each vying for an inner allegiance.
How to locate one’s body.
*
When the F-16’s came on the 15th, the sonic boom shattered the neighbors windows. When we weren’t taking cover on the floor, you could see little green lights, shadows rising & diving over the other shore on the water. Explosions we couldn’t place (sound bombs), shouting, machine gun fire. The uncertainty of if (when) outside violence would find it’s way in.
Adhans echoed back & forth across the water at off times between announcements. These were not the calls to five daily prayers that pulsed like a heart in a city I love— they were all night salawats, prayers reserved for the dead, or in Ottoman times difficult periods of war.
*
N & I still share a bed away from the street windows. Light from the curtains falls on her silhouette. The pace of her breath under a slender sheet is an anchor that keeps my body from floating into darkness or air. I’ve been trying to finish this writing for days but keep stopping. Stillness stripped & shaking relived. Jets & the absence of dogs when I want to do is buy cheese. It slips under my shirt like a lover I don’t want.
To feel, is to feel its power over me; not to feel is still to feel that powerlessness. At the same time, some other interior settles into the deep, untangling puppets & strings: Open the windows before the next jet comes. Close the blinds. Make coffee, round up the cats. Decide to take cover in the hallway & not at the neighbor’s downstairs because if a bomb hits, it’s best not to be trapped under the debris. Small, chosen acts to ward off a shatter. The tile is cold, sweet, populated, but my body shakes against its will. Some other space—unbelievably still.
In the hallway, I couldn’t stop thinking of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish & his famous passage on the aroma of coffee— how he managed such visceral eloquence writing in (not after) the siege on Lebanon in 1982:
How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness. I measure the period between shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot… But one second is long enough for me to burn.
There was no shrapnel in Istanbul. Only what felt like a carefully articulated fear to which my body kept time.
For Darwish: What matters is that a wall be there to veil air fusing with metal, making a direct hit…. In such cases a mere dark curtain is enough to provide an imaginary shield of safety. For death is to see death.
*
Over 200,000 people have been rounded up & detained “in disclosed and undisclosed locations”— the stadium I walk by, in vacant office buildings. Some tortured. Some had signed petitions supporting the Kurds like folks I met who flew out of the county just days before. Two-thirds of academics have been detained (the equivalent of 70% of all US professors). & almost every journalist. Others were enlisted military, serving mandatory terms & carrying out what they believed to be just orders—pitted head to head with civilians called to the street who believed they were doing the same & who I sat with for tea. Many held are ordinary, with no just cause or cause at all— a woman I shared a secret cigarette with on the roof of a cafe. Women who took me to the hammam until every self-conscious shred was stripped by an exfoliating scrub & a slap on the ass, turning me on heated granite while others waited & watched with disinterest in line for their turn. Eucalyptus steaming out any kind of resistance to ease in my own skin.
Moments of profound welcome & practice blur with visible/ invisible brutality.
*
Before leaving NY, hugging O on a bench in Brooklyn:
Are you still going? She asked.
The airport in Istanbul had just been bombed.
Yes. I’m going.
Güle güle git, güle güle gel she said.
(Smiling may you leave, smiling may you come back again).
I learned later this proverb isn’t just a hospitable invitation for travelers; it’s often reserved for soldiers going to war.
*
Ragas & jasmine on the balcony.
City wide text invitations from the president to a rally in Taksim Square. B & I afraid of what will happen there, or to those caught not attending. We go back & forth, fueling each other’s anxiety. Her neighbor below is in her 90’s & out in her garden. She has seen governments come & go. Back & forth. B calls over the railing, asking about the rally.
Our neighbor leans on her hoe: I’m going to till my garden as I have always done.
Then she returns to work, pulling back & forth.
*
Writing in my notebook feels a victory. It’s also no small realization that I’ve known this feeling before. I find it on my American horizons: El Patron, a visiting Italian friend calls it, taking her bra off on the balcony.
*
Where is the map of the unoccupied, undivided body?
Word whose meaning I forget
because maybe I never actually knew: Free.