Shame and Wonder

by David Searcy

  Then on to the Blue Mosque. No ambivalence here. Maintained in its original serenity. One’s presence does not echo. There is carpet and a single hushed uncomplicated thought to fill the complicated, ornamental space the way time occupies the clockwork. Curiosity seems, here, beside the point, and so do we. I don’t even think to look, as earlier, for ancient names in Greek or runes carved into the marble. Here we simply take our shoes off, stand around, and get absorbed. A little later, at Topkapi, I’m still wearing the little gold-embroidered Turkish cap I had bought from one of the vendors outside Hagia Sophia. I refuse to remove it though I know it’s silly. At some point, at a famous photographic prospect with the Bosporus far below, I strike a pose and announce that I am David Pasha and that everyone’s to call me David Pasha, and they do and I am gratified and inexplicably happy to be wearing my silly cap of orange-red velvet embroidered with gold and set with pearls and bits of mirror. I sense I’ve got myself caught up in something. In this silly tourist business—in the seriousness of it, thinking after all this is quite serious, this is how one goes about becoming Chatwin, Burton, Thesiger, whoever I imagine in exotic circumstances. This is what a silly hat is all about: you must give in to it, cast your dignity aside, allow yourself to be ridiculous and take your pose at the wall above the Bosporus, but a pose—one must be careful here—constrained to a degree of self-awareness, to so subtle an adjustment of the gesture, of the foolishness, the obviousness of posing in a fancy hat above the sweep of history, so receptive to the simple invitation of the moment that the faintest sense of truth, dare I suggest, creeps in, to everyone’s amusement and surprise. Which I receive as confirmation (as a child puts on his costume to become whatever he wants, become the pretense which at that age he can sense is only slightly less believable than being here at all) that I am truly David Pasha, have become him in some barely meaningful way; that one can do this, find one’s place, as it were, in history, all this ornamental history, through such ornament and foolishness—just step right into what, in fact, seems hardly less believable than being here at all. As we are gathering to leave, a young, attractive Turkish couple I’d not noticed on our tour but who, I have to think, had been observing us, nod, smile, and call me David Pasha as they pass and I am overcome with joy.

  —

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WE take a high-speed ferry across the Sea of Marmara to Bursa. I love that. It seems a marvelous thing to say. The Sea of Marmara. This gives me an hour or so to catch up on my journal. Nancy moves to the windows. Then outside to the rail, where she remains for the rest of our passage.

  Three days later in the little Cappadocian town of Göreme, as I find myself surrendered (as I’d promised not to do) to childhood-Christmas-style intensity of longing toward the gorgeous village weavings you see hanging everywhere, I allow myself (like some poor old conventioneer alone at night on Bourbon Street) to pass beyond the threshold into regions of desire, into the ancient Silk Road carpet shop of the world presided over by a figure straight from Bourbon Street, to start the ancient, wary conversation:

  Any old ones? Sure. And quickly I can see that there are old ones, room after room. And this? This dandy little piece…draped over a chair? Nomadic. Gorgeous color. Bright surprizing [sic] pattern….300 dollars. Really? Okay, you have good eye—nice old piece 250. Shit. 250. Now I’m really lost and taken into back rooms. Holy moly. Some of these I’ve seen in books. This looks like Ghiordes. “Good”—he shakes my hand—“almost; it’s from that area.” Then a brilliant one way back there in the corner hanging up. A prayer rug…Beautiful red mihrab, green field, the borders clear, unfussy. “Good condition. From a mosque.” I catch his eye and smile; at this point I am reckless—“I suppose that’s what you say.” He lifts his head, goes stern—“I bought the mosque. Ten thousand for the mosque. This rug has never been on floor.”

  So, as all this transpires, and I emerge with my purchase, Nancy sees and understands, from her watchful distance, how I do, how I can lose peripheral vision, eyes locked into goofy spirals. And that night presents an antidote, a vision like a Pasolini long shot. (How did she know to wait to save it?) She tells how, as we were coming across on the ferry, as she stood there at the rail gazing over the gentle azure surface, she observed, some distance away, a little carpet all spread out, just floating along on the Sea of Marmara. Inexplicable, beautiful, vanishing thing out there all by itself. A little dream of a little Oriental carpet.

  We go shopping. We have lunch. We visit a mosque. Shoes off, shoes on. I get silly again at an ancient kebab house—the Bursakebapcisi—folding an airplane from a beautifully imprinted vellum place mat and releasing it from a second-story window into the courtyard among the diners. A satisfactory, slightly stalling, circling flight to the waiters’ great, and no doubt feigned, appreciation. There’s no story. There’s no novel. I can do whatever I want. I think the condition of the tourist must be pretty close to that of the hysteric. It’s the open-ended wideness of the world sensed as a fact unto itself that makes us crazy. Then more shopping. Then a rush of conversation between our guides, a couple of phone calls. We’re about to go off-schedule, slip beneath the subtle membrane that protects our presence here. Tonight, not far away although we’ll have to hurry, an unadvertised, unglamorized performance of the whirling Sufic ecstasies.

  …at the tiny “House of Saint Karabash”—Dervishes. It would put us very late on our long bus ride to Izmir, but a rare opportunity to see a simple unspectacularized performance at an ordinary place enjoyed by ordinary people. So, after supper, after dark, we make our way up narrow rough-stone streets to the mosque-like House of Karabash and outside under little lights [strung] here and there in the trees were families, children, neighborhood people probably, settled gently into the evening at picnic tables, children running around and everything quite easy as we file into the house, remove our shoes and take our places—women upstairs with the better view I think…[men] on the carpeted floor behind a balustrade. And after fifteen minutes or so, the Sufis—maybe a dozen—[appear] in their black robes and their tall felt caps (and two of them, the leaders, wearing caps with rolls of green cloth at the bottom…) and after the placing of a red-stained sheepskin to one side of the performance space, the chanters along the wall begin to chant, the drummers drum their tambourines, the fluters flute and the whirlers (five, I think) take off their black to reveal their pure white whirling gowns and so, at the sad descending groan of the older of the leaders, start to turn, to the flute and the chant, like an orrery out on the floor—a young one, maybe 10 or 12 I’d guess, with the face of an Italian Renaissance angel, among the five, a minor planet but in perfect, measured orbit circulating at a steady but, one senses, potent rate as if, Boléro-like, it had the capability of frenzy. At some point it all jacks up, but just a bit, speeds up a third, and they’re all circulating out there, eyes closed, each rotating on his axis as all circle about the center into which the portly, bearded older leader has now placed himself, his eyes closed too and turning but in black still, an invisible attractor (you remember how, at the start, each whirler came to sort of lean into him gently for a moment as if taking on his gravity), now he’s there as if to hold them in as things speed up and somewhere—I can’t find the source—a punctuating cry, a deep expulsion of breath, to each phrase of the chant and you think we’re in for it now—we, gathered here so easily to watch, those looking in from the open door, the ones outside in the summer evening hanging out beneath the trees and the little lights, we’re really in for it now. But suddenly they stop. All five at once. The little one too. Just as we’re made to understand it can, in principle, go on and on and faster and faster forever, they all stop without a shudder or a stumble, even the little angel-faced one. They are able to seem to have come to a perfect stop because, in principle, they haven’t stopped at all. Then back in the bus and on to Izmir through the night. I think about something Nancy said regarding that gasping Sufic cry and how she thought such cries were the name of Allah reduced to t
he act of breathing, to the sound of breath released and that she’d read somewhere that Yahweh (Jaweh?) as the name of God had come from breath, from such a gasping cry. We get into Izmir and check into the Marlight Hotel at 4am. I think of poor Professor Miller on Mt. Wilson back in the 20s with his giant interferometer hoping to catch the breath of the luminiferous ether on his perfectly polished mirrors like the breath of God—if not the word then maybe just the breath.

  Until the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887, it was generally thought that the “vacuum” of space was filled with an unimaginably subtle fluid called the luminiferous ether, which provided both a means for the otherwise inexplicable propagation of light across the void and for a certain level of comfort with the emptiness. So deeply, amniotically sustaining was this notion, some refused to let it go, to accept the negative results from the beams of light bounced back and forth within an arrangement of little mirrors in a basement room in Cleveland.

  Dayton Miller believed the experiment too earthbound. How could ether—were it present and of course it must be present—so imponderable, almost spiritual a substance, manage to penetrate that mundane situation, drift through dirt and brick to breathe upon the massive and, in any case, inconclusive apparatus? And though special relativity, in a few years, would reveal the ether itself to have been a mundane and unnecessary mechanism, Miller would pursue it into the twenties, finally assembling what was believed to be the most sensitive interferometer in the world atop Mount Wilson and installing it in an airy, tentlike structure way up there as near to heaven as he could get so that the ether might drift right through like a breeze or the Holy Spirit on a summer night at some old tent revival, and contriving, after something like five million separate measurements, to hear, to believe he heard, within the sighings and the creakings of it all, within the “noise” of human, thermal, and mechanical uncertainty, the reassuring whisper of earth’s passage through the dark. It was not audible to others, though. Experiments could not confirm his data, which, years later, were submitted to modern analytical methods and found to have been entirely consistent with a negative result—a kind of rigorous wishful thinking. Photographs show a strong, kind face. He was devoted to his family. Played the flute. And I imagine him up there with this great instrument physically, personally having to turn it through its stations all those months, like wetting a finger to find the wind but over and over through the seasons, turning and turning toward the longed-for absolute.

  —

  WE ARE AT EPHESUS AT NOON. It’s like I said. Like a mirror. It’s 100 degrees outside, someone will tell me later. Something’s happened to my camera; I’ve reset it accidentally or something, or it’s somehow overloaded. All the pictures overexposed, burned out—exactly how I feel. We’ve advanced beyond the black-construction-paper silhouette, beyond the Fanta-colored sunset into the light of history. Bleached-white, ruined-marble history, which is blinding. Look about you. All is glare. That tired old bleached-out dusty hound over there is fading as we watch. He’s part of history. Aren’t you, boy. He’s found a patch of shade among the scattered stones and fallen columns. He’s a sad old ruined marble dog. There’s hardly any shade. So history’s just a sort of overexposure, isn’t it, boy. He knows. He’s fine with that.

  Then off to a rug shop where they teach young girls to weave and I escape without a purchase. Then, as evening falls, a Gülen-inspired high school, where we get a demonstration of the art of paper marbling. Most impressive are the ink-on-water tulips. Ink on water has a physics that’s agreeable to tulips. And to tourists, I surmise. We get more marbled-paper tulips the following day at a Gülen— What to say? Gülen-inspired? Encouraged? It’s all good. I am encouraged. I love tulips. Anyway, a somehow Gülen-affiliated hospital, where we all receive, as well, hand-painted porcelain plates in dark blue velvet boxes and our names, if we wish, in calligraphic felt-tip-marker Arabic. My goodness, is that me? My name as beautiful as that? As easy as that? We don’t deserve this. We’ll only take it home and put it away, years later come across it, take it out again and think, Well, look at that. That’s something, isn’t it. All that stuff. That’s really something, I suppose.

  Did you know Gülen himself—Fethullah Gülen, the septuagenarian Muslim scholar and founder of the movement—lives in the Poconos? Pennsylvania. On a private estate in the Poconos. Well, he does. At such a strange remove, it seems, from his effect. Menachem Schneerson—known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe and, by many of his followers, believed to be the Messiah—lived in Brooklyn. Buried in Queens. The Messiah. All right here at home. So here again, you see, it’s the clear and empty wideness of the world that lets our longing fill it up, spread out to the edge like ink on water, makes us crazy.

  It’s an hour’s flight to Kayseri, whose exuberantly futuristic City Museum suggests to me some sort of interstellar conveyance and, to Nancy, one of those Transformer toys about to unfold into a giant robot. Or the fanciest imaginable 1980s boom box. Or an attempt to schematize the unearthly erosional shapes of the Cappadocian landscape, toward which we, in fact, depart the following day on a lurching bus ride west to Göreme and the tufa “fairy chimneys” and the ancient human-excavated villages and monasteries. Nearly there we pass a small encampment by the road—a battered car beneath a tree, three improvised tents. I joke that they’re Gypsies. But they are. They come through here a lot, we’re told. How about that. Gypsies. Periodically, like swallows.

  In this region frescoed angels tend to populate the caves instead of bats. There may be bats as well, and pigeons too, but mostly there are angels, saints, and Christs in full array. The whole developed kit of heaven has gone strangely underground. Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, all that radiant iconography seems to have percolated right back into the rock like geode crystals. Whence it came, I guess, if you go back far enough. The excavations by the British archaeologist James Mellaart in the early sixties at Çatalhöyük, only a hundred miles from here, revealed an urbanizing, Neolithic culture dating back eight thousand years, complete with shrines, including sculptural and painted iconography, within which, here and there, were bits of evidence suggesting even older, deeper gropings toward the sacred in the natural shapes of pebbles and concretions, broken pieces of stalagmite that presented to the clear and credulous mind dark hints of power and fecundity—rude subterranean forms sometimes improved by a quick and, one imagines, trepidatious hand (an especially “fearful” and perfunctory human head pecked out atop a blackened “knobbly limestone” lump), touched up to keep the terrible potency in focus and, perhaps, in check.

  Outside one of the subterranean churches filled with angels, in the lime-white glare of the afternoon, you can barely see, in the rock, outlines of hands. At first just two or three—left hands—scored into the tufa with a knife or a nail like a child might do with a crayon using his own hand, fingers spread into a template. Then you start to see them everywhere—all over the clear pale rock with the sun just bright enough to wash the natural texture out yet show the marks, the fainter and fainter outlines, older and older, even overlapping, merging into one another until the pressure of the hands against the rock becomes the texture and you can’t not see them—as if they were wanting to get into the church, wanting something, frantic almost, marking not so much where hands were placed as where they lost their grip and slipped away.

  I’m out of Band-Aids, having used them all to mask the inexplicably bright blue light that seems, in every hotel room so far, to call our attention, through closed eyelids all night long, to the fact that the TV is still powered up and waiting to be turned on. Perhaps it’s meant to reassure—a sort of penetrating night-light meant to tell us not to worry about bad dreams and let us know that there is always a means at hand to take our minds off things like that. But here at last in our little cave hotel in Göreme—it’s okay. The light is red. No need for a Band-Aid. Red is fine here in our humid semisubterranean room carved out of rock. It’s like an eye. A tiny, ancient, red interrogating eye.
Is Santa here? Nearby somewhere? ’Tis said he knows when we are sleeping or awake. It’s back to Istanbul tomorrow, where we’ll catch a flight to Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast. At which point Nancy and I part company with the others for the day and take a hired car south along the coast to Demre.

  We are told it’s best to hire a car. It is a coastal road but the mountains come right down to the ragged edge of the Mediterranean. There are tunnels, lots of turns and switchbacks, places where the eye will leave the road. Where all of a sudden there’s the water. There’s the blue you get in children’s paintings. Blue as that primordial blue you’ve had in mind since childhood.

  You approach the travel office from the sidewalk; there’s a little sliding window like a snow-cone stand. We wait as our guide for the day, who neither drives nor speaks much English, seeks to establish our requirements, general worthiness, or something. This takes time. We’re finally beckoned to a side door, down some stairs into a semibasement room, and given tea. A heavy man in a crisp white short-sleeved shirt sits at his desk and speaks for a moment with our guide, who also wears a crisp white short-sleeved shirt. He turns to us and tells us it will be three hundred lira. Or about two hundred dollars, which is fine. I place the cash in American dollars on the desk. The heavy man leans back. We’re waiting. For our driver, I presume—who must be summoned or retrieved. It takes a while. We have our tea. The oscillating fan across the room lifts Nancy’s hair. At last a clatter from the stairwell and a third white short-sleeved figure peeks in, smiles, holds open the door to admit another, smaller, darker, whose white short-sleeved shirt seems placed a little hastily upon him like a coat of fresh white paint to cover up some old graffito that persists in bleeding through. His eyes are bright. His ears are large. His skull is shallow as a begging bowl. Great scrawl of a nose to compensate, to keep him pointed straight into the wind across the steppe, across the ages. Now we’re set. The fan whirs back and forth. The heavy man can’t seem to find the keys.