Home | Art | Writing | Travel | Shop | Previous Month

July

July 1st, 2004
    Last night and much of today were spent in my favorite new-city occupation- that is, walking around for hours and getting totally lost, then trying to find my way back. This morning I explored some amazing warrens in the old city of Damascus. The “streets” were only about 4 feet wide, and the houses frequently joined above. All sorts of wires were strung up there. Many of the passways deadended into front doors. After walking around in this inextricable nexus for half an hour, I was gratified to discover that I knew exactly where North was, despite being totally lost. I’ve been carrying a compass to check. I also visited a palace called Azem, constructed in the 1750’s or something. I’m afraid to say that their aesthetic veered to kitsch, with totally excessive decorations decorating the decorations that decorated every surface. I also visited a beautiful khan, or trader’s place that had nine domes supported on four columns in a vast square space. The walls and vaults were black and white layered stonework, creating an unique effect. Next I visited a museum of Arab science, which displayed intricate astrolabes, quadrants and alchemical alembics. Also some beautifully illuminated astronomical manuals. I also paid visits to the national and military museums, the former of which featured cuneiform tablets and Koranic inscriptions. Next I just wandered around and got lost for a couple of hours. I ate at a restaurant with a balcony terrace. A vigorous stream of ants provided entertainment. I gave them larger and larger fragments of bread to see what they could carry. These tiny ants proved capable of moving fragments up to 1” square. Larger pieces were ignored.

July 2nd, 2004
    This day I bussed out to the desert oasis of Palmyra. Aside from its famous ruins, it has got to be one of the weirdest towns I’ve visited so far, largely because of the nature of its vehicular traffic. This can be divided into two equally astonishing types: 1) Beautifully maintained high-gothic American cars from the late 1950’s and early 60’s, complete with fins and chrome. There are apparently hundreds of these here. 2) Three wheeled micro-pickup trucks covered in plastic fruit, flowers, foliage and bits of mirrors. Some just have a rusted frame and appear to be handmade. There is something astonishing about three wheeled vehicles, like three dollar bills, and there are hundreds of them puttering around here, trailing clouds of burned oil.
    The bus dropped me off on the outskirts of town, and I had to walk through a few kilometers of dusty, sun-baked streets to get to my hotel. When I first saw one of these three wheelers speed by, covered in plastic fruit and doodads, I stopped to stare and laugh at it, but soon noticed that the long hot street was full of such vehicles. Were all cars three wheeled here? Next I noticed a few of these monstrous gothic American cars cruising by. The only pedestrians were old men in long white robes, carrying watermelons. At the end of the long streets I could see a yellow castle on a hill. This town is too weird even to belong to a dream. The Roman era ruins are quite extensive, and carved from a pink stone. They include a long street lined with columns and a few temples. The temple of Bel is stupendous, with huge blocks of perfectly fitted stone. Like all the other Roman remains I’ve seen in Jordan and Syria, all the elaborate stone ornamentation is perfectly intact- the abstract designs, the ornate Corinthian capitols, the foliated cornices, but each and every human face has been carefully obliterated by pious Muslims. I came across a few sarcophagi in a cave and saw how the carven heads had all been smashed off. Every other human image had likewise been destroyed. What an utterly contemptible, anti-human, un-creative attitude, like the Taliban dynamiting the Buddha’s face. They should have smashed their own faces first.
    Anyway, around evening I climbed a big hill behind some funeral towers they have here. I watched the sun set and the moon rise from up there, then descended in the dark. I walked in some spooky territory, through a moonlit vale of crumbling death-towers. I’m not sure why the ancients of these parts buried their dead in towers. Perhaps they were Zoroastrians? It felt so good to get out of the city, into a quiet place where the stars were visible. I think I’ll stay here another day and maybe explore those towers some more. When I came out of the desert, I found the edge of the town crowded with hundreds of picnicking Palmyrans and their three-wheeled cars.

July 3rd, 2004
    This morning I climbed up to the yellow castle on the hill, exploring several funeral towers along the way. Around three in the afternoon, I set out for my main walk. First I passed more towers and climbed up inside a few of them. They were filled with bones and rubble, but had generally stood up well over the past 1,750 years. I climbed up into the mountains South of town and got a good idea of the strategic location of Palmyra. To the East is about 150 miles of flat stony desert until the Euphrates and Mesopotamia. To the West are high hills covered in a light scrubbery. A ridge or spine of hills stretches away North and South, and Palmyra is a small oasis located in a gap in that ridge. I climbed and walked South along the crest of the ridge for a few hours until I came to another gap. Beyond that, a higher and more distant ridge beckoned. My heart strongly urged me to climb it, but I had reached the midpoint in my water supply, and and sunset neared. I turned back and watched the sunset from a fortified peak, then watched the stars come out while listening to the BBC on my walkman. I was waiting for the moonrise, a slow and mysterious event. I don’t think I’d ever observed the exact moment of its appearance before. It glowed orange in a distant cloudbank before becoming visible. Meanwhile, the most tremendous wind blew up, causing me to change my plans for how to get back. I didn’t know they made wind that strong. It was almost impossible to walk into it, and when I gave up and turned around, I could barely keep myself from involuntarily sprinting up the barren slope.

July 4th, 2004
    This day I returned to Damascus, where I bought some present for friends- a dress for Martha and a Damascus steel knife for Jesse. This required serious bargaining. I tried to get a special visa to enter Lebanon and return, but they told me I didn’t need one. The chaos at the passport office was fairly astonishing, although not up to Egyptian standards. Syria is a much more civilized place. There were even some rudiments of queue forming behavior in operation. The few tourists who come here tend to be pretty cool. They’re often real independent travelers who speak a little Arabic, rather than the sorts disgorged from towering busses swathed in digital apparatus, such as abound in Egypt.

July 5th, 2004
    This day I arose at the splendid Al Haramein Hotel, once an 18th century palace, now Damascus’ favorite budget hotel. I mailed my presents at the central Establishment of Posts, which was also a notably more civilized affair than its Cairene equivalent. Walking the streets of Damascus, I notice more women wearing niqab, but also more wearing comparatively skimpy clothing. The most popular form of niqab here is the total black one, without even a slit for the eyes. An opaque black gauze presumably permits vision of some kind. Seeing a crowd of these niqabbers walking down the street is quite a startling sight. On the other hand, of the women who reveal themselves to the eye, many are several stellar magnitudes too hot for their own good. They also favor the excellent practice of growing out their hair to luxuriant lengths. I’ve noticed some with fair skin, blue eyes, and jet-black hair. Quite a few blondies too.
    Anyway, after mailing my package, I set out for Lebanon. This involved a trip in an incredibly crowded bright yellow 1970’s Dodge Plymouth car. It looked a lot like the Dukes of Hazard car, in fact. These are called servees, and their departure lot looked a 1973 used car lot, except with hundreds of sock and chicklet vendors. When the servee was “full” we rolled out. However, there is apparently some sort of rule in Syria that all cars or taxis must give free rides to soldiers, because along the way various camouflaged persons continued to pile in, until there were seven people in there. The driver was unusually polite to these passengers, although he roundly cursed them when they were flagging us down. The Lebanese border guards displayed a physical type that I imagined to be the genetic result of centuries of combat. After a degree of passport hassle, we passed into Lebanon and proceeded to Baalbek, site of famous Roman ruins. I checked these out upon arrival, and found them notable for the enormity of the stone blocks, some of which were taller than a school bus, and almost as long. There was also a great richness of heavily ornamented Corinthian rubble, and the usual beheaded friezes and statuary. Most of the main temple had collapsed, except for six 20-meter high columns.
    I confess though, that at this point I would pay good, hard-earned cash never to see another ruin again. Now I’m sitting on the balcony of my hotel, watching the street scene. It’s weird to see girls wearing tank tops and skirts, mingling with the hejab crowd. In Egypt, any woman dressed like this would be followed by a clot of drooling goons, if she was not raped or stoned to death on the spot.

July 5th, 2004
    This day I came down to Beirut, another sprawling amusement park for cars. But what a strange one it is. It’s a huge glitzy plastic Disneyland with loads of stainless steel and etched glass. I walked around the city for hours today and couldn’t find an honest falafel stand, just endless super-stylish patisseries and cigar boutiques. Huge treeless avenues were filled with new Mercades and luxury SUVs. Well, why plant trees when everyone travels in glistening, air-conditioned pods? Not a hejab in sight, by the way. The famously beautiful Lebanese girls were definitely out in force. Beirut is like a top end shopping mall, and needless to say, it’s horrible. It does have a few redeeming features, though. Every once in a while, you’ll see an amazing bombed out ruin with artillery craters and trees growing out of it. Often the bottom floor will be a polished and perfectly maintained bank, while the upper stories will be bare concrete with bullet and artillery shell holes, with plants growing there and laundry drying, while the top floors will be a huge pile of concrete rubble and rebar. Most buildings though are glistening and new. Millions of cars and no pedestrians. Everything is super expensive. My hotel room, which is 6” wider than its bed, costs US $8 and has a TV with 100 stations bolted to the ceiling. Out the window I can see an awesome mortar crater in the next building. Give me the madness of Cairo any day over this sick plastic rip off of a Western shopping mall. I’m getting out of here as soon as I can.
    Some further observations of Beirut: People here drive like tripping schizophrenics on speed. In order to cover a fixed distance of say, 20 feet, the following maneuver is performed- throw the car into gear and floor the accelerator, attaining the maximal possible speed within the allotted space. Three feet before impact, slam on the brakes. Repeat. The result is a constant squealing of brakes all over the city, mixed with the noise of desperate acceleration. Also, you can buy hard alcohol at the gas stations here. You can’t even do that in most US states. It feels weird to be in a place where everyone is in cars. In Cairo, Damascus, even Amman, there were lots of cars, but also thousands of pedestrians and street vendors crowding every space. Here in Beirut, its just empty, pristine streets with glistening pods zooming by. Occasionally one will stop to disgorge a deadly beautiful lady, who quickly flits into the polished steel and etched glass entrance to some exclusive club.
    Also today I walked down Rue 17 (Damascus) to the excellent National Museum. There everything was perfectly labeled and elegantly displayed. Much of the roman statuary was brilliant, particularly one head of Dionysus.  Something about his gaze transfixed me for a long while. No one makes things like that anymore. Has the appreciation for spiritual beauty in the human face been totally lost? Also there was a goodly amount of Phonecian statuary, which was supposedly influenced by Egyptian art. At the end of the museum was a small glass case displaying artifacts damaged in the 1970-80’s civil war. Several small statues and glass vases had been fused into a charred mass. Another interesting thing about Beirut is its francophonicity. Signs are in French and Arabic, and people will speak French to foreigner before English. All the streets are called Rue so and so. Its always fun to bust out my high-school French, but it tends to get confused with my rudimentary Arabic in bizarre ways. People do understand me here, but it takes them a while to realize that I am a foreigner for some reason speaking crude Egyptian Arabic. Once they figure that out though, they can understand me quite well.

July 7th, 2004
    This day I voyaged to the pile of rubble known as Byblos, about 40km North of Beirut. It was a Neolithic and Phoenician city, but didn’t have much to show for itself today. The trip up there was through one of the ugliest and most degradd pieces of land I’d ever seen. It was an endless, grossly overbuilt strip mall of car dealerships, billboards, and unfinished concrete buildings. The amount of advertising here is really shocking, and I’m not sure even the states have this much. Every space is covered with some corporate noise. I came back to Beirut and read Plotinus in a park. I noticed that a lot of the more lascivious billboards had been blacked out by Islamists. Also, the climate here is oddly hot and sticky, making my clothes into a sweaty mess in about 17 minutes. Maybe that’s part of the reason the locals don’t wear much in the way of clothes.

July 8th, 2004
    This day I left Lebanon for the Syrians town of Hama. It feels great to be out of Beirut. I felt very uncomfortable there, with all the corporate psyops and glitzy trash. There is something so tawdry and sad about corporate luxury items. So much adoration is heaped upon a few paltry scraps of plastic, or the processed hides of beasts. I feel so much more at home in Syria, where we are encouraged to adore only the mighty ASSAD, whom the Syrians have exchanged for the ancient god HADAD. When contemplating his ubiquitous image, it odd how readily the word nitwit springs to mind. The poor chap’s eyes are just a tad too close together, and he doesn’t have much in the way of a chin. In fact, he’s one of those unfortunate individuals whose head seems merely to be an extraneous nubbin of flesh, a mere node terminating the spinal column. His face expresses dimness and confusion. Now as for his father, he looks like the sort of old man who lost his glasses for the 6th time this morning. Thus, the fact that these two gentlemen’s faces appear everywhere lends the country an unconsciously humorous feeling. Today as I was walking past a soldier guarding some institution, I only with gret difficulty stifled a guffaw at seeing a particularly lost and idiotic looking Assad presiding over the entrance.
    The town of Hama is a fairly large place on the Orontes river, famous for its giant waterwheels of Norias. It is centered around a great citadel in a bend of the river. These days, the citadelis a park, and I went up there to read Plotinus for a few hours this afternoon. Later, at night, I got totally lost in the city for over two hours. I was walking in circles and loops, passing the same places three, even four times, circling around the citadel. I don’t think I’d ever been more lost in any other city. Sometimes I seem to enter a state where its impossible to get anything done, and all efforts are futile. At last after great diligence and perseverance, I found my way back to my excellent hotel. It’s good to be back. Despite its dictatorial government, Syria is a much more relaxed and human place than Lebanon.


July 9th, 2004
    It being Friday, I could find no transport to the ruins of Apamea, so I decided to just walk north of the center of town. I was looking for a hill, a place to be alone. Eventually I reached the outskirts of town, where several monuments to Assad had been erected. There’s nothing like just walking out of a town. I walked a long ways, but couldn’t see any way to get off the highway. After a while, I stopped and rested under a tree before turning back. More people were up and about when the Friday service had ended. People really stare at me here, but in a way that seems totally friendly, open and curious. They often say “HellOH” of “Yes” many times to me.
    When I got back, it was getting on in the afternoon, so I decided to go up to the citadel park with Plotinus. It was very crowded with picnicking families, but I found one deserted glade. At lest I thought it was deserted, for when I sat down on a bench, I noticed a man sitting on the ground some distance away, gesturing repeatedly for me to come over. After a while I did, and we chatted in broken Arabic. Once it got through to him that I was speaking Egyptian flavor Arabic, we could communicate in a basic way. He was drinking whisky, which he generously shared with me. All his teeth on one side were gone, and the others were brown. We had a great view over the town, and talked about how Bush was evil, Saddam so-so, and Farid Al-Atrash excellent. About an hour before sunset, I took my leave, and went off with Plotinus to the Western part of the citadel.
    Some of the towns around here have really silly names, such as Slunfeh, sinjar, and Squealabilliya. Slunfeh, a major resort, is currently stuck in my mind. Despite all these wonderful things, I’ve been experiencing a great desire to return to Amreeka. The long string of hotels, bus stations, microbuses, felafel stands, and just being a foreigner is starting to wear me down. I especially miss the access to knowledge in Amreeka, such as libraries. Also bicycles, my guitar, live music, and talking with my Portland friends.

This day I traveled out to the ruins of Apamea, home to the Neoplatonist theurgist Iamblichus. The site consists of a very long paved street, flanked by a colonnade on either side. The street goes for something like 2 km, dead straight, of course. In sections the columns had a weird spiral fluting, making them look like giant drill bits. The setting was particularly dramatic and solitary, on a high moor overlooking a wide green valley, with a very high range of hills beyond that. In the whole enormous site, I only encountered a few other tourists in about three hours. Compared to Palmyra, Apamea had a very Hellenistic or even Roman feeling. The colonnade was straight, not bent like at Palmyra, and the inscriptions were in plain Greek or Latin, not the weird squiggly Palmyrene script. Apparently, all the Columns had fallen over, but were re-erected by archeologists in the last century. Aside from these columns, almost nothing remained.     Visiting all these ruins has made me speculate recurrently on the millennial fate of contemporary metropolises. Apparently, the two greatest causes of destruction are earthquakes and scavenging. Modern steel or concrete and rebar buildings are fairly resistant to earthquakes, and there’s not much to scavenge beyond the copper wire and fittings inside. Yet concrete seems to crumble over time, and I wonder if those giant steel girders will just rot away in a few hundred years. As a kid, I wondered what would happen to the world trade center over the centuries. I little expected to know its total fate. Will something like the Empire state building eventually become unsafe? Of course, if a structure is continually in use, it will be maintained, like the Pantheon, or the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. There are cottages in England that date back to the 14th century, still inhabited. Its curious how some cities are eternal, like Damascus, Aleppo, Rome, London, Mexico City, and others suffer total abandonment, like Apamea and Palmyra.   Most of the abandoned cities in this region had very similar histories: settled in the Neolithic, founded and expanded under the Seleucids, thrived under Roman rule, declined around 300 or 400 AD, destroyed by an earthquake, a few churches rebuilt from rubble, reduced to a small village, stormed by Arabs, abandoned, a few Bedouin pitch camp in the temple, tourists arrive. Most of the cities seem to have enjoyed a 200-250 year high period, followed by a fairly sudden decline. What I’m really curious about is if a modern city were suddenly abandoned. From what I’ve seen, Chernobyl is still quite intact, but with trees growing everywhere. In Portland, all the old houses would probably just rot gloriously into decay, and the concrete buildings downtown might eventually crumble after a few centuries of freezing and thawing. Who knows? If I was very rich, I would buy a block of suburbs, wall it off, and see what happened as plants took over again.

July 11th, 2004
    This day I came up to Aleppo. The city has a sort of wily, hard-edged feel to it. A lot of the signs are in Russian or Greek. I had a lot of trouble finding a room here. I visited a string of dingy, shady upper floor hotels, but none had a room. The management seemed unduly incompetent, and had to go around barging into rooms to see if anyone was there. Finally I found a place to stay on 5th floor called ASSIA HOTEL. I walked down to the old city, past lots of soap stores. I noticed that the people stared at me in a fierce, sizing you up kind of way, rather than the usual dull bovine staring. When I rolled into town, there was a power outage, and when I penetrated to the old covered souq, the atmosphere was particularly dark. A few brilliant shafts of sunlight supplemented the scattered flickering candles. There was almost no touristy stuff in the souq, and certainly no tourists, making this the most authentic souq I’ve visited yet. Apparently Aleppo still has no shopping malls, so everyone goes to the souq for their daily shopping. There was a truly horrifying amount of impaled eviscerated animal corpses, with lavish displays of livers and brains arrayed below. Also inflated intestines and vats of severed heads. I find it almost inconceivable that people ingest these things. I also visited the impressive Aleppo citadel, which successfully resisted several crusader sieges. It was situated atop an enormous conical mound sheathed in stone.  A narrow arched passway led to the well-fortified gatehouse. Any attackers would have had to have passed through a series of twisting passages, exposed to enemy fire from all sides, and boiling oil from above. It was built so that there was no room to operate a battering ram. The doors were made of solid iron, enforced with giant studs and horseshoes. Built all above these twisting entrance passageways were special galleries for assaulting those below. The interior of the citadel was being restored. The workers really stared at me with an especial fixed intensity, like I had just stepped off a UFO, or perhaps like I was the first crusader to ever make it in here. But when I said Salam Alekum to them, they replied with the whole long response. There is really nothing like this greeting in English. It is magically effective for pacifying bureaucrats and disarming hostile strangers. The usual response to salam alekum (peace be up you) is alekum salem (and also upon you), but there is also a very long formal response you can give too. There is actually a commandment in the Koran that your reply to a greeting should be more elaborate than the greeting itself.
    I’ve been walking around leppo at night, when its gritty nature really comes out. There are lots of theaters with enormous pornographic paintings displayed out front. At the restaurant I went to, people were getting seriously obliterated on arak. This one Crowley looking dude drank three bottles, which must be more than ten shots.
    I must say, living in a military dictatorship doesn’t seem like a big problem at first. Basically, if you leave the regime alone, it doesn’t mess with you. Most people probably live out their lives here without being too bothered by the government. But, if you’ve lived in a place with a serious tradition of independence and democracy, you can sense something lacking here, especially in terms of music and sub-culture. While in any society, wild and free random actions are repressed, in the West there is at least a strong tradition of doing them anyway. I’m talking about things like playing music in the street, having a good solid riot every so often, and new and unheard of trends starting now and then. Subcultures, the source of innovation, are essentially invisible here. Granted, there might be some I’m not aware of, but in downtown Portland I could easily point out ten or twenty different subcultures in half an hour, while in Cairo and Damascus, you can only see different social classes. It seems the East is home to civilization and despotism. What can you say about a place that’s got giant posters of the thug who seized power stuck up all over the place? That would be inconceivable in a place where people had read Orwell in school. This makes me think of the long series of rebels who combated despotism and orthodoxy in the West, -Socrates, Diogenes the cynic, Paracelsus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Milton, Shelly, Thoreau, Orwell, and thousands of others. Of course, we’ve probably suffered under far worse idiocy and despotism than anything seen in the East. The papacy’s millennial reign of blindness, the crusades, Hitler and Stalin all come to mind. Nevertheless, I think the lack of any sustained and pervasive anti-establishment vision in the East is sad. Not that I would ever support the poorly veiled efforts of the petro-imperialists to democratize the Middle East. My own country needs a revolution more than Iraq does.

July 12th, 2004
    This day I visited the monastery and basilica of Simeon the pillar saint. His pillar had been eroded by pious souvenir hunters into a blunted stub, but the large surrounding church and monasteries were quite intact. It displayed the latest styles of 490 AD – a mixture of round arches and square windows. Apparently, this fellow Simeon’s efforts to remove himself from people caused an enormous community to spring up around him. The countryside all around was littered with giant stone buildings overgrown with fig trees. I also observed an Alpha and Omega with a cross between the letters cut into many of the stones. Later I visited the museum, where I saw more examples of a funny Byzantine device, the special casket for producing holy oil. This is a small casket with a hole in the top and a drain on one side. You pour the oil in the top and it comes out holy. Inside, of course, is a dead saint. Such funny magical ideas of holiness.

July 13th, 2004
    This day I passed out of Syria and into Turkey. I’m staying at Antioch, famous as the most luxurious and depraved city in the ancient world. Depravity levels have sadly slumped since then, however. I visited a museum displaying superb mosaics from the posh villas. Many of the nymphs appered sporting insect wings, something I’d not seen in ancient iconography before. The orontes river, here a foul slew of trash and human shit, flows through the town. A wonderful steep forested mountain rises behind it. I climbed up there, through a steep, terraced plantation of pines. Coming out of the pine forest, I continued to a high pass, where I came across a ruined castle and fortifications. The view over Antioch was awesome. On the other side of the mountain I could see a village, some fields, and a quarry. The wind was very strong and refreshing up here, and the afternoon call to prayer sounded wonderful floating up though the forest. I came back down into the depraved monkeytown before sunset.
    There is something very weird about being in a place that uses Latin characters to represent a non-Indo-European language. In a way, it’s even more alienating than seeing Arabic everywhere. Turkish words are like OCAKABASI GLUPOT.

July 15th, 2004
    Yesterday I bussed for nine hours to the town of Anamur on the Mediterranean coast. The bus dropped me off around last light. It was about 3 or 4 miles to the pension I was trying to reach by the ruins of ancient Anamurium. A taxi wanted 24 million lira, so I started walking along the road out of town. As I walked, it got dark. The nearby clouds and mountains were beautiful in the gloaming. At last I reached the turnoff to the ruins, but I never found the pension I was looking for. I just kept walking down the road past the last house into the darkness. Soon ruinous shapes loomed on the hillside. The sea was nearby. I decided to pass the night at Pension Ground, so I headed up the hill into the ruins and found a relatively prickle-free place to unfurl my grossly stained sheet. I dined on a loaf of bread and a cheese, then watch the clouds float past the stars. A distant thunderstorm rumbled in the mountains to the North. A certain suspicion gre on me that the spot I had chosen to sleep was in the Anamurian’s necropolis, but I supplicated their spirits and reflected that all power rests with Allah, and so felt safe. I listened to the BBC for a while, and saw a few shooting stars. The milky way became visible. After a while, I fell asleep, and actually slept pretty well in that necropolis. I love waking up in the middle of the night and seeing all the millions of stars overhead. At dawn I arose and explored the ruins for a bit. Apparently, the demise of Anamurium was caused by Arab invaders and pirates. The tombs, houses, baths and walls were all built of loose, unshaped stone and mortar, meaning scavengers had generally left the place alone. I even spotted a few bits of mosaic in the corners here and there. Next I set off up the beach, back into town. I walked a long way through a maze of plastic greenhouses for bananas. The Turkish women were out tugging cows around, pulling weeds, milking, chopping wood, and doing all kinds of great self-reliant stuff an Arab woman would never do. I even saw a Turkish woman on a bike. You’d sooner see an elephant on a bike than an Arab woman. When I got on the bus, a Turkish girl even helped me find the right seat. Astonishing.
    Today I bussed out to a remote place called Olympos, a massive backpacker ghetto in a remote valley by the sea. Nearby are ruins and the chimaera, a natural inextinguishable flame coming from the ground. It’s about 70 km West of the horrible resort strip called Antalya. I plan to stay here for a few days to do some serious exploring and Plotinus reading. It seems like a great place, despite the clouds.

July 17th, 2004
    Yesterday I explored the Olympos area. The backpacker camps are in a deep valley emptying into the sea. I walked along the beach and up to the chimaera. In a bare, stony area by a pine-clad hillside, flames erupted spontaneously from the rock. A ruined temple of Hephaestus stood nearby. The flames were like those of a good-sized campfire burning well. In many places, gas leaked out of the ground, and I could evoke jets of flame with my lighter. According to the guide, flames start up again if put out by covering, but I didn’t observe this happening. Perhaps the gas leaking from the ground contains some hydrocarbon ignited by geothermal heat.
    Next I swam in the sea, then came back and had a few beers with some Turkish teachers on vacation. As soon as I got to Turkey, I could no longer tell who was a tourist or local. The Turkish youth dress in perfect Western fashion, with goatees and piercings- the girls with tanktops. The astonishing and aberrant shorts garment is widely to be seen. A lot of guys have long hair too. They’re totally polite and European in their attitudes as well.
    Later I climbed a high mountain that had lots of razor-sharp limestone formations which I think might be called karst or tzingy. At night I listened to John Peel on the beach. The sky was crammed with stars, and the milky way pegged out to the horizon.
    This morning I started walking up the road and hitched a lift with some very nice Turkish guys all the way to Antalya’s Otogar (bus station), where I’m now waiting for my bus to Izmir.

July 19th, 2004
    Yesterday I explored the ruins at Ephesus and environs. The ruins themselves weren’t especially notable-just a lot of highly ornamented rubble and brickwork arches. Much more interesting was the museum, which had three awesome and numinous statues of Artemis. I stared at a beautiful one for quite a while, and she seemed to be moving her head and arms, and swirling around somehow. These goddesses boast supernumerary breasts, and emerge from pillars carved with ranks of insect and animal life. Also at this museum was a truly excellent exhibit about gladiator combat. This was probably the coolest thing I’d seen in any museum. They had discovered a gladiator cemetery, and excavated the skeletons to determine exactly how they had died. The carven gravestones of the gladiators showed them decked out in full combat array. The skeletons clearly displayed the distinctive damage inflicted by the curious weapons used in gladiator combat. There were also steel replicas of all the gladiator weapons available to inspect. One of the weapons for the gladiator called SCISSORS was an arm tube with crescentular blade. Inside the tube was a bar to grip. Another curious weapon was a handle with four sharpened iron prongs, like giant nails. One of the skeletons clearly showed four giant nail holes in the knee from a brutal stab wound with this weapon. Intense.
    I also bought an image of Artemis. Despite St. Paul’s best efforts, they’re still being sold. I visited the site of her temple, the Artemesium, which was accounted one of the seven wonders of the world. It was now a big sloping hole in the ground filled with stagnant water, in which frogs luxuriated. Christians had pulled down every stone. Still, there was something Artemisian in the beasts present, such as frogs and storks. I burned the last of my incense in the primordial Artemis slime flats, and decided that she is my favorite goddess. She’s a wild virgin who lives in the woods. In her Ephesian form, she is also Cybele, Kubaba, or Kubebe, the Earth mother goddess.
    Next I walked out to the beach. This took more than two hours, despite the fact that in ancient times the sea had come right up to Ephesus. According to the guide, the river caused their harbor to silt up. I’d say it silted the fuck up. By the time I’d finally reached the sea, the water felt soooo good. The beach was crowded with picnicking Turks. (My favorite Turkish phrase so far: PICNIC YAPMAK –picnicking forbidden) I dried off in the sun and tried to read Plotinus, but he made me sleepy, so I walked back to town.
    Today was spent on busses. I made a series of lucky connections, and got into Istanbul just before sunset. I took a ferry across form the Harem Otogar. The Bosporus was covered with heavy shipping, beyond which I could see the rising domes and minarets of Istanbul. I found a hotel, and then inspected three ancient columns in the hippodrome. These presented an interesting contrast of three eras of civilization. First is a large obelisk from Byzantine times, c. 1000 AD. It’s made of rough blocks of stone cemented together, and looks about to topple over. Next is the spiral column I especially wanted to see. This was cast by the Greeks to commemorate their victory at Marathon, and was erected at Delphi. It is made of bronze, and takes the form of three tightly spiraled snakes. Constantine the Great stole it for his new city. For me it had a special meaning as representing freedom triumphing over tyranny. Last was an ancient Egyptian obelisk, which still looked as crisp and perfect as on the day it was carved from the granite as a single, razor-edged monolith. The oldest of the three columns looked newest, and the newest oldest.
    Istanbul seems to be a pleasant city, which feels very ancient, although not at all exotic or Eastern, at least compared to the Arab capitols. I’ve realized that I’ve reached the end of my journey, and tomorrow I intend to round it off with a visit to the Hagia Sophia.

July 20th, 2004
    This day I explored the sights around Istanbul. Most atmospheric and interesting was a massive underground cistern from Justinian’s day. It was a huge underground room, supported by more than a hundred massive columns, which had been scavenged from various more ancient monuments. Water dripped from the vaulted ceilings into the dark water, in which mysterious fish swam. Walkways had been built out into the cistern, and classical music was playing: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Walking around down there made me feel calm and abstracted.
    Next I visited the awesome Hagia Sophia, which although still impressive, was marred by an enormous cube of scaffolding inside its central dome. It was also one of those places where you couldn’t move without getting in the way of someone’s photograph. Hundreds of bloated tourists milled about, looking at their machines. I also visited Istanbul’s wholly unremarkable covered market, and a blue mosque. I hiked out to the city walls, which enclose an enormous area of land. Some of the old neighborhoods and wooden houses out there were quite picturesque. One little kid repeatedly called out to me “Hello money!” I walked back along the Golden Horn, past a cast iron church, and ate a Turkish pizza by the hippodrome. Also bought my ticket back to the states, leaving on the 22nd at 5:30 AM.

July 21st, 2004
    It’s 11:14 here at the Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul. I have a pleasant seven-hour wait before my flight departs. Waiting around this airport in the small hours of the morning reminds me of waiting in the George Bush International Airport in Texas for many hours at night when I was on my way out of the USA many months ago. That airport was carpeted though, while this one is floored in droid-polished granite. I’ve gotten lots of practice waiting in the past year, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I feel that my personality has changed somewhat during this time. An incipient misanthropy has been cemented. I’ve become much more assertive about what I want. In Egypt, they’ll always give you the very worst of anything unless you stick up for yourself. Like the most rotten produce, the worst hotel room, and so on. You just get screwed again and again unless you speak up and refuse to budge about what you want. Also, I’ve learned how not to let anyone divert me from my chosen path by even one millimeter. In fact, I’ve gotten in the habit of not speaking to anyone unless necessary. I used to make excuses to touts, now I simply ignore them. Basically, anyone who tries to talk to you is attempting to change your path for their own sordid fiduciary purposes. I’ve also become totally relaxed about dealing with any sort of unfamiliar environment. As long as you’ve got a passport, some money, and half a brain, you’re set anywhere. I’ve become expert at nosing out the cheapest hotels, and navigating on the myriad forms of transport. On another level, I think my purpose has been made more clear.



Home | Art | Writing | Travel | Shop